Hey, howdy, hey, campers. Grab those carpet squares. Get down on the ground. Grab a little bit of popcorn and a paper towel there because we're going to munch some snacks, and we're going to munch on some little news nuggets and views and other things you can't afford to lose, right, when we get to the pinball ether sphere. Okay, well, it's finally happened, okay? Venom has been released, and now we're starting to get the mods hitting the market from the mod makers out there. So in the mail, I just received my bundle from Tilt Graphics. I'm in anticipation of opening up a Venom Premium. And so I just have a routine bunch of things that I like to get for a new in-box game, particularly the Sterns. I want some Art Blades. I want a Shooter Rod if I can find it. You know, Shaker Motor, Knocker, those sorts of things. So I went looking around shopping for, you know, some side blades. I know that, I believe it's Tilt Topper that does the mirror blades. Now, they said they're working on them still for Venom. The limited edition one that's being put together right now comes with those graphic mirror blades, which look straight fire, yo. But Tilt Graphics is doing something interesting. So they actually have a bundle, like a graphics bundle that you can buy. It's about $150. And with that, you get not only art blades, of which they have a couple of different kinds, some with venom, some without, but all loaded with that drippy, drippy goo that we're super into. But you also get things like a shooter plate. You get a pin gulp with some graphics on it. You get interior apron graphics that go in facing the gameplay area. You get like a dog tag, flipper top covers, flipper back covers, stickers, sticker toppers, flipper toppers, stick toppers, top things. So things you go on your flippers. You get some of those like all included in this little package for 150. You know, normally they're on like 80, 90 bucks for just plain mirror blades. If you want to go fancy, they go up from there. Um, but it was a whole lot of things that, you know, I'm probably even forgetting some of them that came in there. Um, you know, but a plate for your shooter rod and things. So all of that was bundled together for about 150 bucks. It just showed up. So I can't wait to throw those in there and get my graphics on yo. Also like it just happened today, checking out Facebook and, uh, my boys over there at flip mods have released the first bell tower mod uh for venom right so you've got that pretty prominent bell tower with a little dinghy bell in it you know gives a dong when you hit the uh stand-up target so i'm all over that it looks like heavily inspired to me from like taco bell is what i think every time i hit that target that should be the stand-up cheesy gordita crunch target nevertheless it comes as a you know kind of flat uh metal with some graphics on it from stern with that little dinghy bell up at the top. But he's got a three- and four-sided reinforced three-dimensional structure you can add onto there. And it's the first of the Venom Bell Tower mods that I've seen. I'm sure we're going to see a lot of these. I'm sure, like, Diddy's currently cooking up something. But Flip Mods, you were first, and so we are celebrating you today. So these have come out for anywhere between $60 and $90, depending on when you buy it, because it's an introductory price right now. also if you're getting the pro version it comes four-sided and the premium comes three-side and I think that's because of either where a wire form is in the way or you know that that bookcase tippy toppy you know convertible mechanism that's in there or whatever so it's actually a slightly more for the pro because you do get four sides and the other one comes with three plus there's the option to pay what is right now 12 bucks for some leds to get that guy to light up so I don't know. I didn't jump on this right away. I kind of want to wait and see what comes to market. But man, if there's something cool that comes out for that bell tower, I may be tempted. We'll have to see. It'll definitely depend on if Venom, once it does get here, if it's a keeper. If it's a keeper, I'll deck it out. You know, if it's just going to be here temporarily before it finds its forever home, then I may hold back on that. But go check it out at flipmods.com. I also came across, man, people are quick with the mods, man. There's already shooter rods out for Venom. You can get a venom head, you can get a carnage head, you could pay around $140, you could pay around $75, shop around, see what fits your budget. I think I picked up one of the $75 venoms without the tongue, because it looks like it'll fit good in the hand, you know. When I see things like, you know, the severed horse head with Godzilla, or like the Groot shooter rod, like it just doesn't look like something I really want to touch in my hand. But the venom head being all nice and smooth and evil looking with them sharp teeth, oh yeah, oh yeah, I think I can get my hand on that. So that'll be fun. So I've got that coming. And yeah, I think we're this is just the beginning, we're going to be seeing a lot more coming out. I hope that they do follow through and come out with some mirror blades with graphics overlaid onto them. Because I think that I mean, that looks great on the le. I guess we'll segue into the Friday video from Stern that came out a few days ago. And we saw that the le are on schedule and they being put together right now or at least were as of Friday maybe they been building them all week and that was just the Friday video But it looks like you know they are on schedule for last week this week coming up for the Venom L because the premiums are supposed to start the first week of October. At least that's what I heard last time I checked with my distributor, Matt Pinball. He's going to hook it up. Jeff's going to get that thing out to me and hopefully a nice preserved box so I can take it out of the box and then, you know, go make a, you know, a playhouse fort out of my pinball boxes, you know, create my own little habit trail, my own little maze. Maybe I'll use it and decorate it and the trick-or-treaters can come walk through there and, you know, wander through some old pinball boxes or something. What else dropped this week? It's been kind of like slow there for news for a while, you know, I'm like, I'm waiting to jump on there. I did some live streams, so thanks everybody that joined. Congratulations to those of you that won t-shirts, that won stickers. They're all out in the mail now. we're all caught up on orders. Thanks to everybody on the Patreon for that little episode I did from the road. But this will be the first one since my last official podcast. We're finally getting out there. So we got some little nuggets to cover. Foo Fighters just got a huge new code update. So just out of nowhere, Daddy Stern blesses us. Bless you, you players of Foo Fighters. Here is some new code for you. And there's new callouts in there. I still don't understand the integration and the gameplay with this, but there's those little lightning bolt inserts that light up and I'm sure they signify that, you know, standup targets are worth extra points. I'm sure if I dug around, I could probably find out what activates those. But now there's this like voice out of nowhere that I'm not used to that's talking about being supercharged or whatever, whenever those light up. So that's interesting. Also the call out guy from New Orleans, they must've remastered or remixed the recordings because it sounds a bit muffled now, whereas before it was a little, little, little, not as, not quite as clean, not quite as engineered. I did hear that little change there. It doesn't change the gameplay or anything much, but it was like a subtle difference I heard. Playing through the cities now, I didn't notice any new call-outs from the cities themselves. Maybe I need to spend more time with them. But there's new little things in there, and I probably haven't even discovered them all. And, you know, I didn't read through the release notes to see exactly what was released in there. But I'm sure it was loaded with bug fixes and probably some more things to find. Oh, also of note, and this doesn't really concern me, there's a wizard mode a final wizard mode in the game now i don't think i'm ever going to get to it but it's in there so that's cool so the code is still not quite at 1.0 so there is more to come before it's considered feature complete so i think we'll still you know look forward to some more coming out there oh also uh they added a lot of the other songs available now from the get-go so before you had about eight different cassette tapes you could flip through to pick a song uh now there's if you just keep going it scrolls into two full other pages so there's now uh what Was that like 21 or 24 or something? Different songs now that you can pick just flipping through the tape. So, I mean, that's cool. And the fact that there's still just a little bit more to come, I'm happy hanging on to Foo Fighters for a little bit more. I'm still having fun with the game. You know, I dig the gameplay. It's not so much, you know, I mean, technically it's a mode-based game, but really you're just playing through different cities. And the cities are essentially, you know, hit the lit shots. And, you know, they change a little bit. Some of them have, you know, roaming shots or whatever. but there doesn't seem to be like a like a markedly different you know set of rules for each different city and i think we've all seen that now compared to something like godzilla where you know for the four main monsters i mean each one is really a different approach to that mode um and they all kind of you know coalesce together you know you can go through and play all the monsters just like you can go through and play all the cities but the cities all end up being kind of the same shots you know it's just uh the colors disappear when you shoot them whereas something like godzilla it was really like, you know, let's focus on the spinners and spin them up so many times and hit the pop bumper to finish and kill Eberra, you know, or hit the moving shots or hit the stand-up targets or, you know, hit the ramps eight times or something. Like, you don't see that functionality with Foo Fighters. So I guess that's where I'm coming on the code. I think Godzilla is still going to be big daddy, number one. But Foo is fun and there's more code to come. And at some point here, I should be closing up into six or seven weeks since I ordered the competition that pin stadium is released for the expression lightings from stern so essentially they're the i don't know neo lithium super um express orion belt galaxy edition or whatever silly thing they call their uh top end line um of led light strips but these are formulated to actually go into the slots uh for the that the expression lights go into which will kind of uh counteract like the biggest problem i have with pin stadiums and that's when i need to pop the play field taking these things off, not bumping the magnetic strips off and, you know, trying to juggle these things as I lift a play field without getting them totally mangled in the process. So it'll be nice if they can really get tucked into those recesses. And plus, you know, they're available. We still don't have Foo Fighter lights. You know, Rush lights came and went. I don't even think you can get Zeppelin ones anymore. I've got a set that I'll probably be selling, but I was lucky to get that. They just popped up on Pinside one day. So it would, you know, to introduce some competition, I think is a good thing. Even if the Stern expression lights seem to be more, uh, you know, theme integrated as far as into the code. I like that another company is bringing out something else. So maybe Stern will say, you know, instead of putting them off for another six months, maybe they'll do another run just so they can, you know, uh, appease the masses. So always good to have some competition in the market. Uh, speaking about the market, uh, have you guys seen this wacky pro uh James Bond pro that is currently sitting on Penn side that is being sold So this mad lad here this guy what he did right This is nuts This this reminds me so much of like something I would do This guy happened to cross an LE cabinet for James Bond Like just like the full cabinet with the LE graphics and everything. And he took that and then took his pro play field, which is fairly heavily modded and dropped it right into the limited edition cabinet. And so he made this like Franken hybrid game. He also powder-coated the thing with light blue sparkly powder-coat armor. And then just about every mod that you could purchase for the pro playfield is in there. Plus, this guy went another step. He removed the insert in the playfield over that left-sided area above the upward-shooting Vuk. And he put in some mirror glass or one-way glass and then installed the action figure battle under the playfield. And even put some graphics there on the side so you can see it and it lights up. So this dude took his pro play field, modded it up to be almost exactly like the premium LE, dropped it in an LE cabinet. He took premium back box sticker graphics and put them on the back box, but left the LE graphics on the base cabinet, and then threw, for good measure, the Bond topper on top of it. This thing was completely redone top to bottom. It looks absolutely nuts. It's essentially an LE at this point, missing only the Bond on the wand, right? and the little corkscrew wire form around the rocket. Other than that, it's got everything in there. It looks fantastic. And this guy has this thing listed for $87.50 or best offer right now. It's Pin Bowls, P-I-N-B-O-L-L-S. Hit him up or go check out the pictures on Pin's side of this thing. It's nuts. So I saw this and the first thing I thought of was, dude, this guy found somebody to replicate LE graphics. That's like my holy grail I'm looking for right now. I had to go hire an artist, do original art, find somebody that could print glossy decals. We had to size them up so they would fit, and then I had to trim them. I had to take everything off the cabinet. It was all this work just to upgrade Elvira to something kind of like matching the vision I had. And here's this dude with, like, no joke, LE graphics on a Pro. What in the ever-loving crap? So I reached out right away to this dude, Mr. Pinballs, and then found out that this was actually some LE cabinet he just happened to come across. Maybe it fell off a truck. I didn't push him too much to find out where he got the dang thing, but he didn't find somebody to reprint the graphics. This is actually an LE cabinet. So that is nuts. Check out the pictures. Pin Bowles is his name. He's on pin side. $87.50 or best offer if you're looking for a Bond, which, you know, I'm not currently, but I still was tempted. Like, you couldn't really go wrong with this one. Yes, it's priced more than a Pro, but the Pro shoots well. You don't have to worry about the Bond on the wall, but the thing looks amazing. It's already modded out and everything. and so it's sitting over there in Virginia, kind of in the Fredericksburg, Spotsylvania area. So if you're on the East Coast or don't mind a road trip, I mean, it's out there, yo. So I told the guy I'd give him a shout out because the thing looks nuts. What else do we got? Do we just switch in topics left and right?