Day Thirty: Where a Kid Can Be a Kid

7/13/14, 11:59 PM PDT

My bad, I fell asleep late last night writing and I forgot to write this. But hey, here I am now, better late than never, right?

Speaking of better late than never, I went to Chuck E. Cheese's today because my sister's friend had a birthday party. Which was great because a few months ago when we used to go to Chuck E. Cheese's practically on a weekly basis, I discovered this wonderful game:

Sorry that the quality is awful, this was literally the only video of the machine I could find on the Internet. But basically, the game involves a spinning wheel with a ton of holes on it. You roll coins down this ramp and depending on which hole the coin enters, you get a certain amount of tickets, with the jackpot being a hole on the outer edge of the wheel, accessible only through a tiny slit barely wider than the width of a coin.

Sounds hard, right? Except the wheel spins at a constant rate. So with a little work, you could figure out the exact timing you need to get the jackpot every time.

And that's what I did. I figured out that if you use a certain colored ramp (the ramps were all at different elevations compared to the wheel) and put the coin at a specific time, you could reliably get the 50 ticket jackpot every time, with occasional slip-ups resulting in a still decent 12 ticket gain. Here's a picture of one of my peak days. We had to use multiple receipts since the ticket counter kept breaking when we tried to put them all in that day.

Pokémon trainers call me "Drizzle." Because I make it raiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiin.

But when I went today, I'm pretty sure they installed a new randomizing element in the machines since one, the new jackpot was one hundred tickets and two, my normal timing (which used to be perfect) was now netting me one or two tickets per coin instead of the usual 12.

Oh well. Still managed to get 175 tickets with the handful of coins that I got from the party, enough for my sister to get this massive goddamn dinosaur skeleton.

Nature has an order.

Just kidding, it's pretty tiny.

Rawr.

Speaking of a handful of coins, my sister had upwards of 30 coins when she went to the party. And you know what happened? Some guy that looked like an old angry biker went up to my sister and effing took 20 coins.

"I need them so I can win the 7,000 ticket Barbie Summer Dream House."
(via tout-bon.com)

Okay, I might be exaggerating a little. He asked for 20 coins politely and we willingly handed them over, he didn't exactly snatch them from her hands. But STILL, who the hell asks for coins from an eight year old girl instead of buying them themselves? The nerve.

"I could've ridden more rollercoaster simulators with those coins..."
(via familyfriendpoems.com)

RFotD: Chuck E. Cheese's used to be called "Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theater" and first opened its doors to screaming kids and parents looking for a mini vacation in 1977.

SGAT: Finished my half of the duet poem. Awwww yeah.