itch.io

Holy shit, yeah. One of my good friends collects vintage electronic handheld games, I'll ask them if they've seen this before. God, I can't imagine the noises this thing makes

Couldn't tell ya for sure. We weren't friends, really, and he never looped into the social media wave that hit while my cohort was in college.

After I found these threads last week, I reached out to a friend from back then, someone who hadn't left for school like I did.

He said he saw Mike around the community college a lot. Our town's community college has a reputation for solid vocational training, it's like half college/half trade school - HVAC, culinary, auto repair. My friend was on the HVAC track. He told me he always saw Mike hanging around the electricians' apprentices. My friend also told me he used to cross paths with Mike at raves. Said the dude always played in the grossest, armpit-of-the-venue corners, had a little folding table and plugged a bunch of guitar pedals into one other until horribles noises came out of a single speaker. A small but dedicated crew of people apparently came out to see him. Eventually Mike stopped playing shows. My friend always assumed he wasn't getting booked on account of his music. Maybe Mike  moved instead

I loved doing that one. Mine is on the top, seventh from the left. Mike (of course) tried to make his look like the machine but he didn’t really nail the execution so the teacher didn’t let him put it up. Honestly it’s too bad he didn’t do it very well, imho that format shouldve been the best match for his obsession

This is so unsettling, jesus. My town’s arcade was called Family Fun Center and thank god the most addictive machine in there was the original Dance Dance Revolution

Edit: I can’t stop thinking about this. I’m sorry if this is a sensitive question, but do you think Ava would still be alive if you’d stayed that night?

Yooo this “twisted man” silhouette guy is one of the things that always showed up in my high school classmate’s creepy pinball machine art. So far I’ve only been able to find one photo of it - the teacher didn’t like most of his assignments but we did a printmaking one that he actually pulled off 

You can’t see much else (damn you early 2000s scanners) but you can totally see the guy!!!

Shit, I don't. He transferred in the winter, February or March. Like he just needed a spot to finish out his senior year. I think he had a Japanese last name, though? Maybe his first name was Japanese too but he just went by Mike? I remember thinking it was strange because he looked white but he could speak Japanese and he said he went to Japan all the time (hey, I get it now, but this was the midwestern suburbs in the early 2000s, not a lot of opportunities for even my Asian-self to encounter mixed-race families)

I dug around on an old hard drive last night bc I swore I had at least one photo of this - the wall outside my art class, senior year 2003. Sometime after I left for college, my dad got a scanner and went on a family photo archiving spree so I asked him to do all the pictures in my albums too. 

I haven't thought about Pinball Mike in forever, he was just a weird dude who was obsessed with drawing a thing he called "The Junji Ito Pinball Machine." We all called him Pinball Mike (behind his back of course) because every project, he managed to make it about this fucked-up pinball machine. Our teacher hated it. We all just assumed it was an insufferable goth kid bit (I, too, was an insufferable goth kid, just about a bigger variety of shit). Eventually - like, right at the end of the year - he managed to make something with enough artistic merit she let him put it up on the wall.

When in doubt, trust IRL niche nerds. Related, there's a used pinball/arcade game refurbishing place I drive by all the time. Maybe I should stop in!

Honestly so do I, and I say this with an enormous eyeroll toward Mike and his insufferable teen obsession

HA I can't believe that friggin machine exists. When I was a senior in hs (circa 2003) a dude in my art class was constantly drawing this thing. He worked it into every project, labeled it like that, too. "Junji Ito Pinball Machine." I always assumed it was a band. Or a bit. He had that "edgy for the sake of being edgy" kinda thing going on. Now that I think about it, he did tell me his parents took him to Tokyo all the time. I think he had family there. To be clear, Pinball Mike and I were not friends but I think he assumed we were because I wore a lot of black and had a Nine Inch Nails patch on my messenger bag. Love how that works. High school in the midwest suburbs, baby!

I guess Pinball Mike is excused (a little) now that I know this machine inspires such, uhh devotion

It's funny, the overall association with his weird shit was a lot of what kept me from getting into Junji Ito later, in college. And yes, he did eventually get in trouble with the teacher for "not adhering to the spirit" of the assignments

Heck yes!! More APs on AO3!!!

Hell yeah!

APs On AO3 2023, baby!

Where better to leave an AP than a website literally designed to archive niche writing??