the year is 2024 we just watched giant mnemonic set in 2021 place three years ago maybe the most realistic uh hacker movie and also a great pinball game of all time yeah of all time. Yeah, well, the net might have been more realistic or swordfish possibly, but... Well, the good news is we have someone that can actually help us figure that out. Yeah, I mean, we've had so many moments on this podcast where we've like, man, we need a hacker's perspective. If only we knew a hacker that could help us figure things out. And we do. We have my brother, who we will refer to as Jay, to protect his identity. Well, we're legally obligated to protect his identity. Well, I don't know. I don't know if it's legally, but we should protect his identity because of his activities. We'll do our best. From what I've heard, it sounds like he lives a pretty dangerous life. Yeah. No fear. I mean, we're having to do this on a secure line and through a VPN and be extra, extra, extra careful. So actually, Jay manages our website, bashpinball.com. Jay has dozens of servers that he operates, and so our podcast lives on one of his servers and is protected by his hacking skills, I guess. Last time I checked, the website was pretty happy there, too. So, yeah, we're ready to have him on. Yes. Mr. JM. That's his initials. Same initials. Coincidence? I don't know. Oh, interesting. So let's welcome Mr. JM onto the episode. Hello, Jay. Hey, Matt and Don. How's it going? Hey, are you all right? Your voice sounds pretty weird. Usually your voice is a lot lower. Oh, yeah. Sorry. I've had a cold. Your voice gets higher when you have a cold? Like a lot higher. What? Is that like a COVID thing or something? Yeah, don't worry about it. I'll be okay. I'm feeling a lot better. By the way, are we recording yet? I was trying to fix something in bashpinball.com, but I forgot the password. Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. It's easy to remember. Hang on. Yeah, it's Thirsty4T. Capital T. Yeah, capital T. Thursday, number four, Gomez. Capital G. Eight, zero, zero, eight, eight, five. Wait, wait, wait. Don't finish that password. That wasn't me. It was an imposter. What is happening? Oh, wait. An imposter? An imposter. Yeah, I think it's the Yakuza. They've been after me for years. I stole some data. It's for a good cause. What? What? You stole... How much data? 320 gigs. It was a lot at the time. That was back when I was a data courier. Right. Okay. Cool, I guess. There was this dolphin, actually. Anyways, we were going to talk about the film, Ginamonic. Which we all watched together last night, sort of, for the first time. Sort of. I mean, and maybe it bears mentioning that just the premise of the movie in general, he has to transmit a large amount of data. because he has an implant in his brain that allows him to store data wet-wired so basically the premise of this movie is that it's somehow better to make a human thumb drive than just a normal thumb drive well you can steal a thumb drive you can't steal Johnny Mnemonic but I'm pretty sure you can they did try and they did steal him on at least one occasion he got away but it seems kind of like he puts up a better fight than the thumb drive but couldn't she just make like i mean how many how many floppy disks is that that's like what at least 400 floppies or something crazy maybe that's why it seems so ridiculous right because like the amount of data couldn't possibly be stored on anything like now when you watch you're like oh i have a thumb drive bigger than 320 gigabytes like why didn't they just put on a thumb drive exactly but in the movie they have a disc like they transfer it from like a little disc that looks like a cd like a little mini cd onto his brain so clearly they can store that amount of data right on a small device the safe the safest way is through uh you know keanu reeves i guess this i mean as proven by the film yeah yeah um okay i i dare you to try to steal that data from him i i dare jay because i mean jay is a real hacker i mean because like the whole thing is like oh he's a data courier. It doesn't sound like a badass profession. It's not like he's a hitman or something. He's just a data courier. Data courier. I think it's a hitman, dude, with not hitting people. Just absorbing data and then delivering. And then hiding and escaping and delivering data. It's a stretch. I mean, think about it. If you had the entirety of the future of civilization yeah would you entrust it to a thumb drive or keanu reeves i don't know they kept talking about how easy it was for the daily to get corrupted and there's only one copy of it because they burned the original i know who i would pick keanu keanu yeah okay well keanu is the best human thumb drive hands down yeah so jay yeah you got into pinball kind of not long after me because you were coming over and playing in the shedcade yeah yeah and so we we went in together like and split johnny because we found one locally and uh jay you ended up with it for about a year yeah yeah it was about a year i wasn't expecting to yeah keep it that long but yeah it kind of worked out that way but i was definitely happy to have that game that's it was a really fun game to learn on yeah and don don was the only one who had ever even played it before we bought it Yeah, I mean, yeah, and I think that's totally right. Like, it is a fun game to learn on, and I think had it been a different game, I don't think I would have, I don't think I would be here. I don't think I would have gotten into pinball the way that I did. I think that game has, like, a nice, perfect combo of things. Yeah Yeah and it a very like the rules are simple but there is a more complex way I don know complex but deeper way to get a high score which is kind of fun And you being you figured this game out more than, like, me or Don might have if we had had it. Yeah, I mean, despite the rules being simple, my strategy did gradually evolve. Even after a year, it changed a little bit. So, Johnny Mnemonic, what's special about this game? What's special about the play field or different about it? I think the shots are really satisfying. You have to do the left ramp, right ramp, or left ramp, right loop repeatedly. And that just feels great. It's a fun flow because the left and right ramps both return the ball to the flipper. if you can keep hitting those shots, you can kind of keep doing that. Yeah, and you can loop it all the way around. The full orbit loop it through Jones. Which feels great when you do that several times. I agree. I think that game, just the way that the shots feed off of each other, feels a lot like modern games today in terms of how fast it goes and if you kind of get the feel and flow of it, you can kind of have a lot of fun just hitting those shots back to back. It's just very natural flows from one shot to the next. It's like you become the ball. Yeah, I mean, I think this is one of George Gomez flowiest games, and maybe one of the flowiest 90s games, because you can really play it on the fly. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, the Data Glove breaks it up, but apart from that, like, it's got a really good flow. Compared to other 90s Williams games, it does feel a little cost-cutty to me. there's not a lot of toys other than that data glove or anything there's no dolphin yeah there's no pink hand grenade there's just a play field so two ramps spinner and the data glove well you've got video mode and you've got a video mode that has the least amount of effort put into it that i have ever seen in my life i love it i love it that also has nothing to do with the movie i don't even yeah i don't know how that relates to the movie at all snarf i don't get how that relates to the movie at all yeah maybe i missed it i don't know but it's really fun because it's just a fast flowy layout it's it's for me man i think it's perfectly fine yeah and i don't think it's missing anything maybe it's my heart telling me that you know but um yeah man i think it's got it all yeah i love it i don't i really don't have any complaints yeah other than the hand not being or the glove not being super reliable yeah i think it could have more stuff in it but then i think you would lose some of the simplicity that makes it also more accessible yeah i mean i don't think it suffers too much from not having too much stuff it's just kind of notable in that era of games this one doesn't seem like they blew out the budget compared to like adam's family or something sure sure yeah i mean i i love the game i think it's a really fun game and very challenging yeah i really enjoyed trying to come up with a strategy on the game. Kind of hack the scoring a little bit. Yeah, because you guys are much better pinball players than me. No, I disagree. I saw you playing yesterday and today. I'm not consistent. None of us are. To be able to keep up, I have to figure out the strategy. Yeah. That's my... Yeah, me and Don are more wing it type of players. Yeah, I'm kind of a messy player. I just go. But then I get in trouble because I don't know what I'm doing. right so anyways anyways and now for an important message did i hear you right did i hear you saying that you're gonna make a copy of a game without paying come on guys i thought you knew better don't copy that floppy no common san diego no more oregon trail tetris and the other they're all gonna fail not because we want it but because you're just taking it disrespecting all the folks who are making it. May you see a game you like and you really want to try it. Don't copy that floppy. Just go to the store and buy it. Don't copy that floppy. See ya. I'm outta here. And now, back to the show. Yeah, so Jay, growing up, as long as I can remember, as long as we had computers you were figuring them out and learning the ins and outs of these futuristic machines so yeah i remember dad got a mac plus because you could do word processing and he got a i think it had two megabytes of internal memory it had two megs of ram the salesman told him that he didn't need a hard drive right the built-in floppy drive was all he needed yeah and he's More than that. He splurged and got the 20 megabyte hard drive. Which was like almost as big as like a shoe box or something. And it was a 20 megabyte hard drive. And I think I remember he had something like 20,000 files on that. Yeah. And then so the hacker story that I remember from an early stage was in middle school, my friend Ben had hacked into the school's computers to change his grades, which you were in eighth grade. Now, I had previously spent some time playing with the security on those computers, and the administration was aware. But they knew that I was the – Preeminent expert. I consider myself a good hacker. Yeah, hacking for good. So I recall them asking me to come clean up after the mess that Ben made. What year was that? How old were you in sixth grade? Twelve. It was probably around 95. 95? No, it would have been like 93, 94. 93, 93. Yeah, so that would have been around 93, 94. Yeah. Well, the reason I asked was because I was going to ask you how you made your services known. how did you get how did you become known as one of the three guys in the state that could unhack the school system I don remember Did you make any money doing this Not in eighth grade, I didn't. I think a couple years later, I started an IT business. In tenth grade? Yeah. Around there, yeah. Did you get paid? Yeah, I started fixing computers for people. So you became a professional at that point? Yeah, it made it hard to want to go get a job anywhere else because I was making so much per hour. You're making hacker money. Yeah. But, you know, minimum wage at CompUSA was not appealing. How much does a hacker make? As much as they want to make. It's kind of just like however much money you want, you can get it. How much would you charge to unhag a school system? To unhag a school system? unfortunately schools go for the the cheapest possible option which ends up being eighth graders sometime once we got to college the game that we played constantly was counter-strike we started when I was either 1-0 or 1-1 yeah I think it was yeah I don't think we played the beta yeah yeah we might have but we got heavily into counter-strike and we had some servers set up what was the uh the tournaments and stuff that we would yeah cow yeah the cow leagues but cheating was a big issue with counter-strike where people would install software to allow them to auto aim or to like see through walls yeah so i there was a someone else olo if you remember Olo, he's the one that actually created the software for that. And I kind of joined that team and helped to write some new plugins and integrate some other ideas into that software. Yeah. So didn't like most people who played that game have your software installed at some point? Yeah. Some of the stuff that I wrote ended up being the default on most servers and most servers ended up writing or running some of my code yeah so anyone who played counter-strike in the early 2000s was probably benefiting from your hacking skills on some level yeah and apparently games later too people ported some of those plugins to other um to other games yeah i remember like your like signature username and stuff like that was popping up like in other places where you didn't even weren't even involved with it but they had used your code yeah i made the mistake of putting my email address in the source code. Rookie hacker mistake. Very much so. It's cool that you were on the counter terrorism, counter strike team. Yeah, I never thought about it that way. You were the most counter terrorist of any of the counter terrorists in that game. Without you, people could not have counter striked. that was the problem with that game is like there were people who were so good at it oftentimes it was difficult to tell who was hacking and who wasn't there was even people in our own clan sometimes that we would play with all the time and didn't know if they were cheating or not man these people are really good yeah they were so good yeah like like one day just overnight oh my gosh he's really he's really good today no but it was like this vetting process where people would come and hang out on our server for a while and like play with us and be like man yeah and then eventually you're like do you want to join our clan and it's always this weird thing it's like well this person seems almost too good and i remember there was one one guy who was like a child like his voice clearly hadn't even changed and like fuzzy i remember his his fuzzy Fuzzy.mod Our clan was called the Mod Clan I don't remember why No relation to the Ministry of Defense In Russia Yeah I was PurpleMonkeyDishwasher.mod And you were We can't say What your name was Yeah yeah don't go there We're going to get sued Sued by who? I'm not sure yet how much money did you make counter striking terrorists for counter-strike can you can you say are you at liberty to discuss it was many many years before this hacker made a penny you gotta pay your dues as a hacker before you can start really monetizing it i think yeah i don't know anything about hacking he was a benevolent charitable hacker at that time The good hackers don't make as much money as the bad hackers. Because he's been trying to benefit the community. It's like life. Yeah. And now for a word from our sponsor. The year is 2021. The last hope for mankind has been entrusted to a lone courier known as Johnny Mnemonic. Johnny. Who are you? Now he's a threat to the powerful. A target to be eliminated. And this summer, he's the future's most wanted fugitive. Keanu Reeves is Johnny Mnemonic. Rated R. At theaters Friday. And now, back to the show. So the theme of Johnny Mnemonic, how well did they integrate the theme with the movie, you know? Yeah. There is the context of like, well, they were developing this game concurrently with the movie and they hadn't seen the movie yet. so you don't really know how the movie's going to get cut together you don't really know what parts of the film are going to stand out yeah versus what's in the script yeah there were a lot of little things missing like the dolphin is not in the game at all other than a little drawing and on the back glass a little bit yeah yeah and the data glove is has a more significant role in the game in the game yeah yeah the movie yeah he didn even use a data glove right or did He uses it briefly At the end when he had to hack into his own brain and loop it through Jones No data glove right No, just the Crazy Bobs. Actually, just the Crazy Bobs scene. Only at Crazy Bobs, right? Yeah. And also, Crazy Bobs is kind of like a huge thing in the game. And it's like one little scene in the movie and then they never mention it again. Tops. We wouldn't even notice that it was Crazy Bobs if it weren't for the game. Right, right. It was one line. It was a throwaway line. It's like, oh, let's go to Crazy Bob's. And then literally Crazy Bob's gets blown up less than like three minutes later and we're done. It was interesting watching the movie after the game and like your whole idea of Johnny Mnemonic is the game. And then you see this like alternate reality version of it. But yeah, overall, if I was critiquing the game and the theme integration, I would say it's a little off. It gets the vibe. I agree with you. And I love the vibe of the game in general. The colors and everything is cool. The DMD stuff is cool. The callouts are cool. But there's so many things from the movie that could have made it into the game that didn't. And like Jones, the dolphin, like you said, it's just a little drawing on the play field. I think this would be like Jaws. you know we'd be like why why didn't jaws eat the ball where's the dolphin like there should be a big dolphin should be like it's like wires coming off of it should be like a tank with like like fake water and like a creature in there and it's moving around and you know yeah now i wish the game had a dolphin like a like a big sculpted dolphin i know i know because it's such a critical part of the movie other stuff like there's a pink hand grenade in the movie which makes pretty significant appearance and that's like completely absent from the game there's dolph lundgren's insane cybernetic street preacher street preacher that also doesn't even exist in the game at all i don't think doesn't exist at all not to mention on the back glass keanu's up there ice tea's up there asian guy who looks like gilbert godfrey is up there yep and no dolph lundgren like i didn't even know so that was one of the the most fun things about the movie is just this bonkers dolph lundgren character who comes out of nowhere that I wasn't expecting, but he's not in the game. You're selling this movie right now. And I'm happy about it. Yeah, I kind of loved it. As much as it's not a good movie, I loved it. You talking about this? I want to watch it again. I loved it this time around. The first time I watched it, I think just expecting something different and didn't really pay attention to it. I don't know what I was expecting, but it checked all the boxes for me in that nostalgic way. It feels like it sits right alongside Total Recall and other sci-fi 90s movies. It has that same sort of crazy vibe, like overacting. Just nuts. The other thing about the game is you're trying to get to power down. And we were just playing the game again after watching the movie. And we were like, wait a minute. Like, okay, a lot of this stuff makes more sense now that we've seen the movie, but what the heck is power down? That's like not in the movie. That doesn't seem like a goal in the movie. Yeah. Like you don't want to power down, right? Is the power down in the game supposed to be like him getting the thing out of his brain? I don't know. It's weird. It's weird. The only power down I remember is when I think it was Jesus cut all the monitors. Yeah. Yeah. He powered down all the monitors. But that wasn't a goal. No, that was like a setback. It was a negative thing. Yeah. Yeah, the goal should have been broadcast the NAS cure. Yeah, the disease that makes you have weird, bad acting muscle spasms. Muscle spasms, yeah. And then you die from it. Yeah. And you get left in the mall. Keanu, he didn't. He went back to her. No, no. But it seemed that way. Yeah. But I knew he's a good guy. I knew he would go back and save her. Yeah, we don't want to spoil. No spoilers. Spoiler alert. Nobody's going to watch that movie, man. No, but seriously, people should watch that movie. I think if you like this podcast, you will probably like that movie. If you're around our age and you grew up watching 90s action movies and 90s sci-fi movies, you should absolutely watch this movie. I'll give you a dollar if you watch it. I'll refund your $4 if you don't like it. Ask me for $4. Limited time only. while supplies last. Next 10 customers. Not a guarantee. Not a guarantee. Thanks for listening to the Hacker Extravaganza episode. And thanks, Jay, for being our guest. Hey, guys. I got to go. I got to make a long-distance phone call. Oh. They still have those? That was abrupt. Double cheese and anchovies, please. Sorry about that. Jay's a pretty busy guy. It was super cool getting to know Jay, and we're super grateful that he prevented us from getting hacked. We're going to be dropping some short-form bonus episodes with additional content from this conversation soon. Until then, just remember, if someone asks for your password, think twice before just giving it to them, you doofus. Oh yeah, and don't forget to snatch back your brain, zombie! Leave this territory now. Return to your home. evacuate all personnel