Ladies! I know we are few and far between, so hoping that we can start this little club to have a place to chat pinball, life, and whatever else we want to talk about. If you're a pinball happy female, join on in and tell us about yourself.

*If you think of a better name for this club, by all means let me know. I was trying to think of something sassy, but it's too early in the morning and my brain isn't working.

Men- I know you are going to lurk around here anyway, but please be nice and respectful. We don't want to run off any actual females that love pinball. Chick pic posts, rude comments, etc will be deleted.

(waving) Hi Julie. Glad you're getting things started. I'll post more about me when I'm not busy at work. For the record, you have the most awesome home arcade ever and I'm totally jealous.

I'm Melinda, Mel for short, and also answer to "Hey you, the tall blonde " and "evil moderator chick."

My husband is Wahchintonka, and he mostly lurks but shows up in the Predator threads occasionally. We've been married 11 years, together 15, and just moved to our "bigger house" 2 years ago where I finally had room for pins. There are literally no pins in this entire town except for the local retail shop where I'm afraid to touch things after looking at the prices, so we bought JP off eBay as our wedding anniversary present to ourselves in June 2012. Now we're up to 8 pins (and a Zizzle) at our house and 3 pins at my mom's house, and waiting on our Predator. My parents are enablers and have paid for the majority of the pins, because they have been helping my sister quite a bit financially between relocating to town and having a baby (and being pregnant again now)... and since they like to keep things equal between the kids, I got pinball machines instead.

We have no kids, but I used to run a dog rescue so we've got 8 "unadoptable" dogs with tons of health/physical/mental issues, 3 pharoah quail, 2 parakeets, a peach front conure, and an ancient guinea pig. The conure was our first child and brought back from our Florida honeymoon, and the rest are all rescues. We never go anywhere because we have to literally move in a registered nurse friend to be able to keep the 'zoo' running if we're gone more than a day, so we mostly stay home and play pinball or watch movies/play games in our home theater. (Husband used to install home theaters for a living, so we're all set.) We're pretty boring since we don't party or drink, but we've got some geek friends that come over and have little pinball play dates occasionally, and my side of the family has tournaments at our house almost every holiday. The upstairs of the house is decently normal, and the downstairs looks like a Think Geek catalog and a sci fi convention ran into each other and exploded everywhere.

I was a complete newbie when we got JP and it had a few issues after being shipped in from California, so I quickly put together a little pinball kit and started learning. Husband and I got a "blackened" Spiderman from the local retail store after they had a Christmas warehouse fire, and together we restored it to 100% except for the cabinet being scorched on one side, but that just gives it character. I am getting better at some of the tech stuff and knowing how to properly LED a machine, but still have a ton to learn.

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Holy crap Quiddity. I thought everything was bigger in Texas, but you're doing better with your space allocation than I ever was. lol We lived in a 1,000 sq ft house for 9 years, but the critters took over the entire garage and second bedroom. Now the "big house" is 3200 sq ft total under roof, so the downstairs theater/den/bedroom that make up "Area 42 Arcade" is about 800 sq ft. Also, if that's your definition of pretty boring, then my husband and I are downright boring. Our idea of going to the movies is going downstairs in sweatpants with a bucket of popcorn and possibly a dog footwarmer.

It's a decal, I think they're like $10 or less on sale at ThinkGeek right now. Most of the stuff on the top shelf that is Portal came from ThinkGeek, but the portal gun case was a Hobby Lobby 90% off deal that looked like it came from the set of Indiana Jones originally. I took off a ton of fake leather corners and straps, distressed the heck out of it (which is really really fun,) then hit it with a few different kinds of spray paint so it looks like it's been hit with acid. Plus some orange and blue splatter. I've still got to make a custom "In case of GLaDOS, break glass" decal to put on it though.

Now I just need a Portal pinball. I've got the middle shelf representing the JP, LAH, Predator machines, and the far left shelf is Rocky Horror, because to me Frank N Furter is preferable to Frankenstein. (And easier to find decor for.)

Husband's idea of playing co-op Portal 2 with me is usually him saying "OK, now go stand over there..." (me standing, him doing tons of cool stuff...) "OK, now we're done, go out the door. No, stop looking up. You're going to fall off that. Yup, you fell down and died, now we have to start over. Stand there..."

The awesomeness of your gameroom is just a fact. I have learned it is tricky to compliment women, especially concerning their men. It will somehow get twisted up and sound like criticism. Actually, women are talented enough to do this with anything. Example:

Mary: Hey Jane, your hair looks nice today.
Jane: Oh, so you're saying it looks like crap every other day?!?

Mary: Wow Jane, your new boyfriend is super cute.
Jane: Keep your eyes and hands off him, you slut!

This is because women are also masters of the backhanded compliment. And are evil. I am southern, so my favorite phrase is "Bless your heart" which ranges in true meaning from "you are insane" to "eff you."

For the record, I think any husband who builds an arcade like that and is a geek through and through is pretty awesome. Now just don't let Julie beat me up.

Only if you'll yell her name 3 times to snap her out of it then whisper "danger zone."

Thanks! Weirdly people dont even notice the green now with the pins everywhere, especially with the LED strip on at the top border for some reason. When we bought the house the upstairs had been renovated, but downstairs was still 1971. So we tore down the navy paneling, removed fake wood trim, painted the 'dirt beige' walls and border a more modern stark white, and put 3 coats of high gloss Electric Lime paint on the fireplace wall. Then because I had some left over, I did the opposite wall behind the other 2 pins.
Here's a few before/during remodel shots and a better lit 'after.'

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Thanks! I'm pretty proud of it since we basically had to rebuild the walls and start over with it. If anyone is ever in the Chattanooga area, let me know and you can come visit and play!

My other pin room pictured in the first set of pics above is right off this main room (behind the sci fi posters) and the theater is behind RFM and the recliners. There's also a Doctor Who themed bathroom down there, so it's a nice little party space for when we actually have people over. The other room was a guest bedroom until I took it over for pins, and was dark green almost like your avatar pic. (Pic attached before it was totally taken over by pins, but green.) It's below ground level with no windows and no natural lighting, so we brightened it up to white and modernized it a little. Oh, and added the hot pink 6' T Rex decal for a splash of color.

Husband decorated the theater in silver, black, white, and neon blue. One wall is Sucker Punch decor and a double bookcase of video game collectibles, and the opposite wall is decorated in Alien stuff to contrast with our Predator in the adjoining room if/when we get it. I'll post pics if I can ever get back in there. He had knee surgery on Monday and has been on 'bedrest,' so he moved one of the recliners in there and barely comes out now. Just eats, sleeps, and plays video games. lol Meanwhile I'm living upstairs by myself and wouldn't know he was even there if not for the house shaking from the 7.2 surround system he's got in there.

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Hi Allison! Thanks for the compliments. I feel like I am taking over the thread with pics, but nobody else except my husband seems to know what I am talking about and/or thinks I am crazy, so at least you guys/girls get it. ("Why do you have a pink dino skeleton on your wall?" Um, because it is awesome.)

The funny thing is that I had already started turning the door under the stairs into a Tardis. Then after husband remodeled his theater for Aliens, he put the Dr Who stuff in the bathroom. So now you pass the Tardis on the way to the bathroom instead of the bathroom door being it, but whatever. It is a full bath with laundry, so the shower curtain hides the washer/dryer. We havent updated this room yet as far as repainting, changing trim to white, or fully painting the door, but for a quick re-theme I like it.

Since we call our downstairs Area 42 Arcade ("Like Area 51, but geekier!") I made an alien bathroom sign. Also included a pic of the Tardis in progress and the custom Portal room sign that I had made for the second pin room which is directly across from the Tardis door. We call that Room 23, which is also a LOST reference. If you look at the stuff on the wall beside RFM and the bookcase in the fireplace corner, that is all original props and hand drawn artwork from LOST.

(Actually, if you look closely throughout the downstairs area, you'll see the LOST numbers of 4,8,15,16,23,42 show up everywhere.)

Zizzlemeplease- That is awesome! I almost got an inflatable one to put up, but never did. I want a GLaDOS coming out of the ceiling someday though.

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Hi Pam! Welcome! I have been working on the LEDs on my JP yet again today and still cant decide what I want to do, so if/when you do yours please post pics. Neither the warm or cool looks 'just right' to me with all the blue/red/green/yellow mix going on. I played a SS for the first time at a local expo last month and would love to have one. Sadly I am out of money and room, and refuse to sell any of my pin 'kids.'

Not me.

To all the girls at Expo this week... have tons of fun and please post pictures for the rest of us stuck at home. I'm hopefully planning to be there next year, as hopefully my husband doesn't need any more surgeries around then. lol

Speaking of husbands, he shared this article with me this morning and I thought I'd share with you all. I don't know how many of you are gamers also, but I can see some of this in the pinball world as well.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/15/living/gamergate-explainer/index.html?hpt=hp_c2+

Julie, did you get any pics of the new lighting system in Predator by chance?

Where's the picture of Julie standing next to Todd?

But could you even hear him talk all the way down there?

(Sorry, as someone who has been 5'10" since age 12 and asked "how is the weather up there" too many times, I try not to make height jokes at all. But thats one big dude and quite a big difference.)

I think there's an average of 1.2 females on here a day, with me being the 1. lol Or if they are here, they're just lurking and not posting anything.

Welcome to the club!

That actually might scare them off.

Edit: Is that a Van Gogh shirt??

I recently did a list of females on Pinside as part of a project we're working on, to see what percent there may be total and active. I used this thread to get names, it hadn't been active in 2 months, and there were 20 separate accounts claiming to be female not including myself. Of those... 1 deactivated, 5 haven't posted in 4+ months, 1 only had 1 post ever, 3 hadn't been logged in within 2 months, 4 hadn't posted but had at least logged in within that week, and only 6 had posted at least once within a week of my research.

I agree, it's not the normal, but it's way more fun. I was the one that turned my husband "crazy," and he loves telling people that we've got a pinball arcade and home theater in our basement, and that it's all my fault.

Tell her to speak up!

Also, we'll need to see pics of that restoration.

Welcome. Humanfemale is probably the closest to you in Michigan, but she's a bit busy working on popping out a baby any day now. Her husband is pmWolf, also on here somewhere, with a nice thread about their awesome basement arcade.

Nope, sitting here at work watching Pinside while I think half the mod team is out playing at the fest. Anyone that goes to TPF be sure to stop by the Pinside booth as Robin should be there.