I still live with my mom in a flat made of three and a half rooms, in Berlin (Germany), near the city center. I say three and a half rooms because it is supposed to be a four-room flat, but in reality it looks like three rooms of which one was large enough to put a wall in between. Well, I've got my own room and it's the largest room of the flat, about four by four and a half meters in size, meaning I've got sufficient space to live in. Since I am not one to visit clubs and discos every second night, I do spend quite some time in my living space and this has led me to make it as comfortable as possible. For one, I wanted the walls malve (a colour tone mixed of gray, blue and purple, very light and similar to this website's background colour, just brighter) instead of plain white after we had tried to apply cheap wallpaper for hours and it came down all the time. This was actually in the old flat which basically was a mirrored version of the one we live in now with three (large) rooms - we changed flats by moving to the opposite flat in the same house on the same floor (base floor)! So it's not a wonder this flat looks very similar, and my room is practically 50% mirrored (windows and walls are the same, but the door, the outlets and the outward edge for the chimney are different). I've got no photos of my room before the first pinball game moved in, but I do have a few photos of my old room without any games, and I'll show one photo from those so you can see where the TV was located (in the old and the new room) before my F-14 moved in.

Date? Must have been before May 2004...
But that quickly changed once I started wondering where to put F-14. I knew it would come a few days after I had won the auction. I came to the con-clusion that the only good idea was laying cables a bit and move my TV in front of my bed where it ultimately fit better as well. So saying, I moved around a few things and after all was done, the TV was in a much nicer location and the space was clear for the pinball game to move in. The rest of my room didn't change so much except for the fact that I threw out a com-plete part of a furniture stack because it was broken anyway, and I put the second (intact) part between the other parts I had next to my bed with the shelf on top. This greatly added space for the TV in front of the bed and was the first of two times I actually removed furniture from my room. The next two machines fit in without throwing things out, well, unless you count a CD rack as furniture. It had to go with the third machine because I absolutely had no idea where to put it and I wanted to sort out my CDs anyway, so I put them in one of the drawers of the big three-drawer set that was moved next to my door before (second machine). When my last (fourth) machine would move into the room, I planned and executed a rather large move including the three existing games, my computer desk and my TV rack. It was removed, the second time I spared furniture in favour of a pinball machine. Scroll farther down to see how it was done.

May 2004

Okay, the red light looks a little extreme on those photos. In reality it does not look like in a brothel here; it's more of a smooth light where you can still see bright colours of every shade, just that the light is dampened (my room lights up like a nuclear explosion if I turn on the normal lights) and, well, reddish. It's perfect for working on the PC as it's bright enough to see everything on the desk, but it does not disturb the monitor view. And playing pinball in this red light is almost like playing in the dark: the GI is emphasized a great deal and you can clearly see what the game really looks like when lit by itself. The red light is the perfect compromise between visibility and atmosphere.

In June I replaced F-14 with The Machine: Bride of Pin*Bot. You can find more info about the how and why in the list of my pinball machines. She was put into the same edge F-14 used to reside in. However, only a few weeks later followed Arena, the first second (lol) machine that I had in my room. It didn't stay for all that long and was replaced by Space Station which I had for a while, but unfortuna-tely the gameplay factor convinced me to exchange it for a Pin*Bot later. Again, more info is in the list of my machines.

June/July 2004

Yes, the pics are ugly, but I didn't have a better cam at hand. The panorama room shot is of course two pictures cheaply mixed together.

In August I got Space Station and put it where Arena was before. And later, Space Station was traded for a Pin*Bot which stood at the same spot, but there are no photos of this, so you will only see Pin*Bot in the new (current) room order. This room order was created in an effort to fit the machines to their themes as best as possible: we moved Pin*Bot into the edge where The Machine was and carried her more into the room, moving my TV and the attaching cupboard even farther to my door. Now the TV is perfectly centered in front of my bed. Amazingly, I threw out absolutely nothing to fit two machines next to each other! So the spot where Arena, Station and the Bot had been located was cleared for my third (and final) game, Terminator 2, which arrived in October. The current room order is the same that you see on the October photos, but it will change by the start of December because Pin*Bot will move out (actually before Decem-ber) and be replaced by a shiny rare Black Knight 2000! And this will be the final of my collector's journey for now because those three games are perfect for my taste, the long-term entertainment factor, and coolness factor. Yes, I wished I had more space to get a Space Shuttle or another DMD pin, but that'll have to wait... of course I might get tempted to buy another machine in a few months, namely after I finished my current job and got 700 Euros for the final plus my usual 400 Euros of payment - now that would make for a nice Stargate, Johnny Mnemonic, or something in that category. Which pin would go for it? Terminator 2 since The Machine will *never* go and Black Knight 2000... might not go ever as well, seeing how fucking cool it is and how rare it is to get. But does that mean I would sell my T2 which I got for such a good price and which is such a nice pin? Not necessarily; you can always uninstall a game and keep it on hold in a disassembled form (maybe upright with the legs removed and the backbox folded). If I laid it down without the legs, it might even fit under my currently used machines... before selling this nice game, if I have the money to get another one, I would rather spend some more space to store T2 instead of missing it later on when I move into my own flat.

Here are the shots, first Space Station and then the current situation:

August/October 2004

January 2005

The grand Silverball Magic tournament took place this Friday and I took some shots so you can actually see what it's like when people are playing. Coincidentally, most of the photos feature the talented "pinball girl" Janine playing while her co-players watch. The tournament was quite short and the player groups were a little advantaged against each other, but for a first time with only three machines, it was a good night.

February 2005

And here I am, not even one year has passed since I started pinball and already have I cluttered up my room with FOUR machines! On the big day when Xenon arrived (read more about it in "My Pinball Machines"), I invited my friend Patrick who had helped with room change earlier, and together we moved the machines and furniture in my room so that Xenon would fit in. As long as I tried to not have more than three machines because more than this was practically impossible, my heart just wants more and thus I decided that there had to be some way to fit a fourth machine in. Sitting down on my desk and looking at my room, I drew these two sketches to check whether a change would free enough space for pin #4, and indeed it worked out - on the paper. The question now was, would it all fit in reality?!

Well, it did fit, but it took a lot of hours - we started on Friday at 17:30 and had Xenon set up and running at 23:30! And the last power cable I reconnected to my PC at 6:00 AM the same night. You can tell I was exhausted, but it was very refreshing to see the task accom-plished. Remember how I talked about missing pinball atmosphere in my room? Well, it hasn't changed that much, but looking at three machines standing in one row in reverse order is very refreshing since it feels different to play them now, and the more machines are next to one another, the greater the arcade feeling gets. Now that I have a real "pinball edge" in my room, I can also take the liberty of decorating the wall and edges so that the machines gain atmosphere again. I'm not sure yet what it will be, but I can imagine a nice row of spotlights for a start.

As you can see, it paid off. Welcome to my mini arcade!