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#01: The Plunge

Mappin' Around with Scott and Ryan·podcast_episode·1h 26m·analyzed·Jul 19, 2018
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.024

TL;DR

Pinball Map founders launch podcast, reveal 10-year platform growth and upcoming React Native rebuild.

Summary

Scott and Ryan launch "Mappin' Around," a new podcast about Pinball Map, the crowdsourced pinball locator they created 10 years ago. The episode covers the origin story of Portland Pinball Map, its evolution into a global resource listing 5,500 locations and 17,000+ machines, technical architecture decisions, and future plans including a regionless map and React Native mobile apps. They interview Danny B (Danny Backglass), a renowned location player and tech at 82 in LA, about working at a pinball venue and player behavior.

Key Claims

  • Pinball Map currently lists 5,500 locations and over 17,000 publicly playable pinball machines

    high confidence · Scott introduces the platform at episode opening

  • Pinball Map was started 10 years ago as the Portland Pinball Map in 2007

    high confidence · Ryan provides official project history

  • The site has 96 regional maps, approximately 120 volunteer administrators, and sees thousands of updates per month

    high confidence · Ryan states current operational scale

  • Pinball Map operates with no revenue model, no ads, and no user data mining

    high confidence · Scott explicitly states business model

  • The codebase has 3,177 commits on GitHub with code updates at least once per week

    high confidence · Ryan references GitHub repository statistics

  • They are migrating from native Android/iOS apps to React Native to address maintenance and feature parity issues

    high confidence · Scott discusses technology pivot and testing improvements

  • The Crazy Flipper Fingers pinball league started in Portland and has expanded to include LA chapter with Danny B and Scott (Rom)

    high confidence · Danny B and Scott identify themselves as LA chapter members

  • Danny B works as a tech at 82 in the LA Arts District and plays Pinball on Wednesday nights

    high confidence · Scott's introduction of Danny B and Danny confirms employment

Notable Quotes

  • “The users are our gold. Yep. Yeah, they keep it running.”

    Ryan and Scott @ ~13:00 — Encapsulates the community-driven philosophy underlying Pinball Map's success and sustainability

  • “We could have a nice, pretty map of the world with no locations on it, or like, you know, some locations in super out-of-date machines, and it wouldn't be that valuable.”

    Scott @ ~28:00 — Explains the core value proposition: data quality over breadth, and the tension with regionless expansion

  • “I've got to say, in my defense, I haven't really seen a great testing ecosystem for Android or iOS as far as integration tests are concerned.”

    Scott @ ~42:00 — Reflects on technical debt in original mobile apps, justifying the React Native migration

  • “Why would I give a flying fuck about this game? What kind of people is this? Why would I give a damn about this game, this pinball machine on Alameda, if I didn't work here?”

    Danny B @ ~68:00 — Illustrates the genuine care venue staff have for machines and frustration with customer behavior

  • “So you write one application and it turns into two applications every time you compile it, which is kind of cool, right?”

    Scott @ ~38:00 — Explains the efficiency benefit of React Native approach to the audience

Entities

Pinball MapproductScottpersonRyanpersonDanny BackglasspersonIsaacpersonBethpersonJohn Rayperson82venuePortlandorganization

Signals

  • ?

    product_strategy: Pinball Map transitioning from regional siloed structure to integrated regionless map covering entire world, representing strategic pivot toward global coverage while maintaining data quality oversight mechanisms

    high · Scott: 'The problem then was that people travel and they complain, I hate switching between New York and New Hampshire' and 'going regionless is kind of a pivot' with technology mitigations planned

  • ?

    technology_signal: React Native migration underway to replace separate native Android/iOS apps, driven by maintenance burden and lack of automated testing in original apps

    high · Scott: 'over time it's clearer and clearer that there are problems here that we just can't address as quickly' and 'this app will actually be tested, whereas the Android and iOS apps had no tests'

  • ?

    community_signal: Pinball Map operates with ~120 volunteer regional administrators maintaining data integrity; careful vetting process for new region managers based on communication quality and commitment signals

    high · Ryan: 'sometimes people write to us and be like add so and so, and then I respond to them and they don't respond back' and 'Sometimes even just how you spell your words in the email to us is enough to tell us if they're going to be able to maintain the data'

  • ?

    operational_signal: Location pinball venues face recurring UX challenges with casual players failing to locate start button; staff develop de-escalation tactics for intoxicated customers confusing machine controls

    high · Danny B: 'They will hit every other button. They hit the coin release man 20 times' and detailed strategies for de-escalating conflicts without wearing visible uniform

  • ?

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.260

0:00
Welcome Pinball Explorers to the inaugural episode of Mappin' Around where we talk about using a map to find public pinball machines. I'm your host Scott and I'm your other host Ryan. Mappin' Around is a podcast about a website we started 10 years ago called Pinball Map. Pinball Map is a crowdsourced pinball locator and is currently listing 5,500 locations and over 17,000 publicly playable pinball machines. Our strength is in mapping machines in North America, but we recently started branching out to other parts of the world. A lot of people use and update Pinball Map, so we thought we'd start a potty in order to tell you more about what we're up to and who we are. On this podcast, we'll surprise you with pinball stats, confound you with tech talk, and chat about location pinball. And we'll try to interview at least one person per episode, so it's not just Ryan and I talking at each other.
1:06
Ryan, what is the pinball map, anyway? Set the record straight. All right, here's a brief history of pinball map. Pinball map started 10 years ago as the Portland pinball map. Scott and I were living together and playing a lot of pinball around Portland. Even back in 2007, there was a lot of pinball in Portland. There was a league, the Crazy Flipper Fingers pinball gang, and there were some efforts to keep track of which machines were at what place. We basically remade that existing map into something much better, where people could search for locations on the map and add and remove machines to and from places. We kept the site really simple and straightforward so that it was easy to understand and update.
1:56
And it was immediately popular. It got press in the papers, and the map was really, really up to date. I could go into any place, see a new machine, I'd check the map, and that map would already be updated.
2:10
Crazy Flipper Fingers
organization
Sterncompany
Jersey Jackcompany
Spooky Pinballcompany

business_signal: 10-year-old Pinball Map operates entirely volunteer/side-project basis with no revenue model, no ads, no data monetization; maintained by founders after day jobs and child care duties

high · Scott: 'We do this with no revenue model. There's no ads on the site. There's no data mining of user info' and 'We work all day, we come home, we cook dinner, we put our kids to bed and then we pop onto the map for a few minutes'

  • ?

    content_signal: Inaugural episode of 'Mappin' Around' podcast establishes new media channel for Pinball Map community education and operator/player interviews

    high · Episode #01 titled 'The Plunge' with stated goal of interviewing 'at least one person per episode' and discussed as first of ongoing series

  • ?

    community_signal: Crazy Flipper Fingers pinball league has grown beyond Portland origins to include Fort Worth and LA chapters; LA chapter very small (2 members) but engaged

    high · Danny B: 'So yeah, maybe that's the first question: why isn't the chapter growing at all, dude? Man, it's growing' and reference to John Ray's Fort Worth chapter 'creeping on us'

  • ?

    design_innovation: Pinball Map architected with public API enabling third-party app development (iOS, Android, Pebble Watch); API-first design proves crucial for ecosystem extensibility and testing

    high · Scott: 'the cool thing about Rails is it brought an API with it' and 'All of these things made possible because of this API'

    • And we got operators on board. They updated their own locations and were using the map to see if their machines had problems.
    2:21
    And to this day, some of those same operators are still using it every single day. So it's a valuable resource for them.
    2:31
    And soon we had people in other cities asking us to make a map for their cities. and we didn't really want to do that at first. We were getting a lot of pressure for it, but this was just a side job or side hobby that Scott and I were doing and we weren't getting paid and it was a lot of work and we had jobs. You had a job, right, Scott? I did have a job, yes. Yeah, and I did too. and uh um so but we caved and created maps for other cities like seattle and british columbia and la and stuff like that areas like that and on the condition that they have to manage the data themselves and we also wouldn't add locations unless we i guess unless we knew that they were going to keep it up to date like sometimes people write to us and be like add so and so and then I respond to them and they don't respond back. And so it's like, no, we're not going to add that area because clearly you just sent an email and then forgot about it and you'd never update the map. Sometimes those people get mad too.
    3:45
    Yeah, like two months later or something they'll talk crap about us. Yeah, and it wasn't like you don't belong on a map rejection letter. No, I mean after 10 years of doing this We have a pretty good sense of who is a good candidate to help maintain the data and who isn't. We've had people that seem good at first and then do a really bad job or are malicious or something like that. So in those cases, I guess you never know who you're getting. But there's a lot of ways to tell who is going to be a good steward of the data. sometimes even just how you spell your words in the email to us is enough to tell us if they're going to be able to maintain the data because the data is basically like made up of addresses that are spelled correctly and punctuated correctly like that's kind of what all you need to do uh so yeah and then then we had uh in those early days we had a local player isaac make a ios app for us and scott you made an android app your first android app second android app second android yeah the first android app i made to prepare was uh the floating head from zardoz oh yeah just bounced around the screen and said zardoz over and over again uh-huh sorry not to be pedantic but Second app. All right, second app. And you built off that knowledge from the Zardov app to make the Pinball Map Android app.
    5:23
    And, yeah, people really liked apps, so that kind of gave us a nice edge over whatever other maps were out there at the time, which there wasn't much, I don't know. And whatever there was, they weren't up to date. So that's, you know, part of our big goal in maintaining this project was having maps that were super up to date so that they were useful for people. The users are our gold. Yep. Yeah, they keep it running. We could have a nice, pretty map of the world with no locations on it, or like, you know, some locations in super out-of-date machines, and it wouldn't be that valuable. So fast forward to now. We have now 96 of those regional maps on the site, about somewhere around 120 administrators for those regions overseeing the data, 5,500 locations, over 17,000 machines. And we see thousands of updates a month on these locations.
    6:25
    And you and I are continuously working on the site, publishing code every week at least, a couple times a week, continuously since then. yeah it's what we do it is we we work all day we come home we cook dinner we put our kids to bed and then we pop onto the map for a few minutes yeah you get a half an hour an hour of pinball map work every day pretty much yeah although for me since i do a lot of the data management i could kind of futz around with that at work pretty easily. It's like I do paid work and then I turn over and add a location and then I go back to my paid work. So that helps. That helps like keep the queue of data management down. We do this with no revenue model. There's no ads on the site. There's no data mining of user info. It's a rewarding project because lots of people use it. We are told regularly by business owners that people visited because they found it on Pinball Map. And we're also told regularly that the map is super up-to-date. We've put a lot of effort in keeping it intuitive for users by paying close attention to how they use it and then tweaking things accordingly. And we have some big plans in the works right now, which we'll get into a bit on this potty. So that's a brief history of Pinball Map. Thanks, Ryan. yeah and I listen to a lot of Australian or one Australian podcast so that's why I say potty all the time they say potty in Australia? yeah welcome to the potty wow you know I say potty to refer to the toilet in real life now so okay potty the potty
    8:26
    Who would you say you are, Ryan? I'd say I'm Ryan, and I was born in L.A. I still live in L.A. now. I have an urban planner who works on mapping for my full-time job. If I am giving myself a little intro, I'd have to start at the very beginning when I was born, and then I'll skip a lot, because when I was born we had a pinball machine, so it's relevant here. but I was born into a house that had Paragon. And so I played that a ton growing up. Fast forward, then I was living in Portland and we met and I think I was making websites at the time for universities, but we shared an interest in pinball. And the map for Portland was like a Google map that wasn't searchable, wasn't very model. Not a lot of people were editing it. So we combined our skills together and I didn't have many skills but you were a software engineer so we it ended up working out. My story begins somewhere in the middle of Ryan's story. Pinball wasn't really a thing for me until I met Ryan and then pinball was a thing and you know Ryan and I lived together for a brief period of time. Was that a year? Yeah, I think it was a full year, and then we went our ways. Yeah, good year.
    10:02
    Productive year. Is that a cat? Yeah, but I think that's on your side, right? Yeah. That's sassy. I thought it was your chair. Anyway, my story begins with Ryan in Portland. I was not a big pinball guy. I did not have a machine at my house. Played a lot of video games. pinball was always something that I didn't really attempt because I knew nothing was going to happen with my quarter I'd probably play Street Fighter for much longer but then Ryan you know showed me that you could go outside in public and play this thing and be at a bar and have something to do with your hands that's not smoking a cigarette which is pretty cool and then you know you do that and you're not a big party guy but you want to go places and play pinball but you don't want to go to every place in town hoping that they have the machine that you want uh so how do you do that um you ask you ask the people where the machines are so that's what we did we asked the people um and i oh yeah so who what i do uh i i'm a computer programmer uh i've been trying to program computers since i was a young man um and i think a problem with computer programmers is they don't really have a lot of places to focus their energy outside of work that lasts more than like six months a year projects tend to come and go um so what i really like about the pinball map and what's kept me going for this long is that there's people who actually use it um so it's cool to to make things and test them out and you know get feedback and and keep the map going uh the other weird thing that happened over the course of 10 years is we're dads now yeah that's why we have to tuck away in the other side of the our houses so that our babies can't hear us yeah i'm actually coming to you live from my basement locked away in what is basically a large closet um filled with bulbs um what is this just spare bulbs oh like 44s 44s not to get too pinball-y about it but i'm holding on to not led lights on machines and to be honest with you i'm not i'm not sure i really care that much anymore maybe leds is what i should be doing but i have a ton of bulbs around here ryan would you indulge me to talk for a moment about the back end technology involved in the in the pinball map yeah go right ahead okay that's where this podcast becomes kind of a mystery to me. It's like, does the listener care about the history of the pinball map? Do they care about public pinball in general? I'm sorry, location pinball in general? Are they interested in the technology behind the pinball map or what? So I don't know. I feel like we should just throw it all out there and see what people actually care about. So the website itself actually started out as a Perl site. Perl is like kind of a dated, relatively obscure, but not like in a cool way, dynamic programming language.
    13:38
    That its claim to fame is that it is very much like natural text. like the way you would talk if you were very terse is kind of the way you would write pearl uh so it is it's very expressive i think is what the pearl people say but anyway more importantly it's what i did nine to five at work for like uh like six years or something so what uh what an easy way to start a hobby website um to actually try to get better at what you do at work all day So for a long time, the pinball map was probably one of the few Pearl websites out there on the Internet. I'm sure that'll be offensive to some hardcore Pearl people. I apologize. I think Pearl's actually totally fine, but it's kind of an odd choice is all I'm trying to say.
    14:34
    So we had a Pearl backend, which we turned into a Rails backend, Ruby on Rails, which I'll say again, kind of a slightly outdated choice for technology stack, but again, something that I was using at work at the time. So what better way to get better at work than to practice with a project? So Rails shows up. The cool thing about Rails is it brought an API with it. An API for people who aren't keeping up on that is basically, you can think of it like a web browser.
    15:12
    Wow, my cat's just trying to break the door down. And that's fine. API is basically, think of it like a web page without a visual component to it. Like you make a request, which is essentially, you could think of it the same kind of request a web browser would make of what's returned as text rather than images and things like that. But what the API does is it opens up your website to fuel web application or to be more of a web application or to provide data to mobile applications.
    15:52
    And that's what we did. So from there, we got our API and we use that same API to power the website and to provide data to the Android application, which I think I did. I do the initial one. Yeah. Okay, did an Android app, and then we had somebody come out of the woodworks, and, well, that was Isaac, right? Yeah, that was Isaac. He was in the woodworks pretty firmly.
    16:21
    And, you know, provide an iOS app, which was great. So at that point, we were building up like a little empire of apps. A guy came along later and gave us a Pebble Watch app, too. All this stuff because of the, that was a roller games ramp, by the way, I just smashed into.
    16:40
    All of these things made possible because of this API. So anyway, there's an architecture behind the site, I guess is what I'm trying to say. It's dated. It evolves slowly. But it's ever-changing. And hopefully will continue to change. We have some cool plans for it in the near future, which we'll get into in this and future episodes, I'm sure. Yeah, and I'd say one fun little fact is that, let me bring up the GitHub page where we store publicly all our code for the site. And in the years we've been using GitHub, we've committed 3,177 commits of code, so that many updates basically to the site. And this isn't for the full nine years, nine, ten years, because before we were using, what was that, SVN something? Yeah, Subversion. Yeah, cool. and we probably update the code on the site at least once a week and you know sometimes those are pretty minuscule little updates like change the text on this page or change this color or whatever like some like little front end things but not always i think pretty often we have nice little uh code updates that you know we don't um publicize them i guess because they're just little things and you'd have to be looking at our github page to see what's actually being committed and i'm sure most people don't care but they sometimes they are cool features that are based on getting people's feedback on how they use the site observing how people use the site and then us you know having our our list right now we have 49 issues on the site on the github page and issues could be bugs or they can be feature requests so we're constantly working on the site and for us it's just you know a hobby that we do after we get off work and after the kids are asleep yeah it's kind of i mean i don't know it's weird it's weird to talk about that too much but it is kind of i think it's a little unusual 10 years on for something like this to still get the amount of attention it does uh given you know that it actually costs money to run the site uh but you know i guess by talking about it you kind of eliminate goodwill that you might have had for doing it so i won't talk about it for too much but man i don't know i'm impressed that's a lot of commits um maybe by the four thousandth commit we'll have everything exactly right and it'll just run on its own for the next 15 years so that's a lot of a lot of intro stuff there map and ryan and i which to be totally honest with you feels sort of like an interview so far except we're interviewing ourselves and each other which feels weird for a podcast that we'd like to do more than one time uh so there you go intros uh more than happy to dig deeper on any of that if anyone has any questions or concerns with the information you've heard i say we move right along to what we hope will be regular uh segments on each episode of this segment one map tech map tech map tech This segment is for what's coming up with the technology stack, maybe philosophically or in practice, like directions that the map's going to take. So this week's map tech, we got two big ones.
    20:31
    First one is regionless. I'm hoping people have noticed this, but maybe the next step for regionless is for us to make it the actual face of the pinball map. But we made a regionless map. What is a regionless map, Ryan? Well, when we started expanding outside of Portland, we just made each other city like a separate map. And so the data was siloed on its own. It was, you know, the Seattle map, the Portland map, the New York City map. The problem then was that people travel and they complain, I hate switching between New York and New Hampshire or something like that, or the boundaries of these regions would be sort of vague. So we integrated them all into one giant map, which right now we're just calling regionless because we were calling those maps regions, and now this is the regionless map. And then with that we also added support for locations that aren in any region like a location in Montana which we don have an existing region for Montana We have it right now only on the website It pinballmap slash regionless And there's a link in the header for it. It's in beta mode right now, so we don't consider it done. Two things about the regionless map. Maybe we don't get into it now. I feel like our niche bread and butter, some other metaphor for the pinball map versus other maps was always the regions and because of the regions you had people in the regions who knew the locations so you didn't have a pinball map where like there's one machine sitting out in the middle of nowhere and it was hard to tell whether that location still existed or if the machines there were still around because they hadn't been updated for so long. We were a curated website, right? Like local experts making sure that the data is up to date. So going regionless is kind of a pivot there. And I don't know that we get into it here. Maybe we talk about it in a different segment, different episode. But there are ways that we would like to mitigate that. So even though we're opening it up to the entire world at this point. You can add a location anywhere and it will show up on the map. We still have some degree of oversight to make sure that it's a real place and the machines are going to be there in two weeks. Yeah, totally fair. And yeah, this is something we talked about for years before we actually did it because we just didn't want to, we didn't want it to have like a negative impact on the quality of the data.
    23:23
    Yeah, and not to be regional about this, but there's part of me that was kind of always wanting to keep it a Portland pinball map just because then you don't have to worry about the data. We know that it's good because those were places that we would visit with some regularity.
    23:41
    So the bigger it gets, the more likely that the data can be problematic. But like I said, we have technology ways to try to address that. We'll get into that at some point. The other big news, and I mean, I think regionless is pretty big, but this is probably bigger.
    24:02
    I mentioned earlier we have this website with an API, and because we have an API, we can build applications that talk to the API. but it turns out that it to write native android apps and ios apps and a website and an api it's a lot to maintain right like i'm not a good android programmer i'm not a good ios programmer these were basically the first android and ios apps that i wrote um so they're they're not great to that. I mean, I think they work, but over time it's clearer and clearer that there are problems here that we just can't address as quickly as it should be addressed. So the other big piece of news is that we are putting out a React Native version of the mobile applications. And what React Native is, is basically a JavaScript wrapper around a compiler that'll turn the same JavaScript code into native Android and native iOS apps. So you write one application and it turns into two applications every time you compile it, which is kind of cool, right? I think. Yeah, I think it's super cool. It was so easy. I mean, it was so easy to forget like what to have like feature parity on all three, basically. Like I would, I think for like years, There wasn't an operator search on the iOS app or something like that. And you just kind of forget that after a while. You're like, oh, we didn't add that one feature to the iOS app. Because we had done it on the website, we had done it on Android, and then little things like that sort of slipped through. Just such a pain to context switch, like to work on the website for three months to try to get a feature in and then have to go back to the Android app, which you haven't worked on in six months, but you don't want to leave because there's a bug or a feature, like you said, it's not workable. So I'm pretty excited for the React Native app. We have help on that one too, which is good.
    26:17
    Thank you, Beth. And it will, geez, I don't want to get too deep into this, but any programmer will understand this. this app will actually be tested, whereas the Android and iOS apps had no tests. That was just me running everything and clicking all the buttons and just hoping for the best, which is the worst way to try to put code out there. But, geez, I've got to say, in my defense, I haven't really seen a great testing ecosystem for Android or iOS as far as integration tests are concerned. but I'm going to hold my breath and back up a little bit I don't want to get too angry that's kind of like a fun fact about the pinball map website that I don't know if you have like a number for how many tests there are but there's like hundreds of tests and you just run it and it basically clicks on everything and does everything and tells you when things are failing and so every time we do an update we run the test And it's a really great way to know if an update you made just broke some other random thing, which totally happens. Yeah, geez, maybe at some point in the future we should spend 15 minutes just talking about testing because it's so awesome. And I feel like maybe that's how these projects fail, or not fail, start off really well and then disappear. because if you don't have that testing foundation for your code, it's hard to make big changes, I guess, and have any kind of confidence that your whole application still does what you want it to do. So I'll get off that soapbox, but I want to talk more about that later.
    28:12
    Now it's time to dip in with Danny B. Alright, I just dipped down to Danny B's crib to hear what he's got to say. Danny B, a.k.a. Danny Backglass, a.k.a. Danny Belrose, is an actor. You've seen him in Portlandia, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and a lot more. He's a DJ, a teacher, and one of the most renowned location players around. when he isn't spinning punk metal and occasionally the Grateful Dead just to keep people on their toes each Wednesday night at 82 in the LA Arts District he's working there as a tech or something hi Danny hey how's it going Rom fantastic thanks sweet do people on this podcast know that your nickname is Rom no they don't well it is It is, you're right Rom, R-O-M Didn't John Ray give you that? Yep, John Ray gave me Nickname Rom John Tilt Ray Don't you miss John Ray? I miss John Ray I haven't seen him in like seven years Since I moved out of here He's got a huge chapter Does he? Yeah, Fort Worth Bigger than our L.A. chapter? Ah, he's creeping on us So for those that don't know Danny B and I are in the Crazy Flipper Fingers Pinball gang He's Danny Backglass And I'm Rom And uh We make up the LA chapter It's us two We're huge So yeah maybe that's the first question Why isn't the chapter growing at all dude Man it's growing It is growing and uh You know We had a prospect and he moved to Idaho.
    30:12
    He's growing. I had a sweet nickname for him too. Can you tell us? I suppose I can tell you now. I was going to call him War Machine Multiball. Oh, nice. War Machine Multiball. He liked to box and he'll knock somebody out. But then he plays guitar and stuff, man.
    30:37
    Better than you? Yeah, he smokes me. I don't know. Let's bust it out. Hold on. Okay, we'll just dub in you playing guitar right there.
    30:49
    We'll dub in slash guitar solo. We'll have Tegan and Sarah. Dug in you strumming. And I really love Tegan and Sarah when I'm ripping a sweet game of Cannonball Run, my favorite game. So you put on the buds at work and just crank the T again and go at it? Pretty much, man.
    31:09
    Pretty much. Or do you play, as your DJ, you just put on a full album side and then you just leave the DJ booth and go play for a bit? Just put on Dope Smoker and go home.
    31:21
    I've been actually into the Ghost and Goblins, but I can only play it when it's really slow, or I can sneak one I'll put on like a disguise. I put on, like, you know, a different hat.
    31:37
    Like, a white socks hat. Instead of a St. Louis hat? Yeah. That leads up to a question that I have, or a comment or something. There's, you don't wear a uniform at your work, and you just look like a cool guy cruising around at 82.
    31:56
    And sometimes people have trouble, like, starting a game. They don't know what button to push to start a pinball game And then you sidle up next to them And you give them a tip And they turn and look at you And what are some of the reactions you get sometimes?
    32:15
    You know, I get a lot of great reactions, actually You know, you throw a little alcohol in on the mix, too Yeah You know, some people want to get aggressive
    32:30
    That's an aggressive move, right? For some reason, people in Los Angeles in particular, and I don't know if this is true of any other people who work in arcades. I keep hitting the bill of my hat on the mic. Can you hear that? It's going like a kapunk.
    32:45
    But they love the eject button. I don't know if they think, oh, I'm going to scam it. These things are so old. If you push it in just right, you'll get a credit and your quarterback. or like some people are like jamming jamming jamming on it i'm like hey man i think you forgot to press the uh the start button but i also like i'm pretty clear like there's a lot of just i don't know if it's ego or i mean like you don't roll up to the bartender and he's wearing like a tji friday's like 82 suit and you're like he's like hey what can i get you and you're like do you even work here like it's a bar man right like how many uniform bars are there there's like what what is this i don't think there are any goddamn wendy's you want me to dress like an artesian douchebag yeah or like wear a little quarter thing on the on my belt you know and i'll dress like the guy from three's company a big old tool belt a tool belt yeah i grew the beard though so now i'm a beard douche yeah you could have like an extension cord over your shoulder maybe right but i honestly like i've we got it down to kind of to a science say somebody you know thinks that the pinball machine is like say a dinner table and they have like a six-pack on there and like some doritos and some dip and shit and and you're like so i know not just just walk up and get mad because then they want to fight you real quick. So, you know, I'm a nice guy. I say, excuse me. And depending on whether it's, you know, a group of guys or a group of girls or both, sometimes just generalize it. Excuse me, guys.
    34:36
    But we, we don't allow drinks on our games. And from there. There's cup holders, drinks holders. There's drink holders. Yeah.
    34:51
    There's tables behind you. On the side. And tables on the sides of all the video games. Yeah. And then they're like,
    34:59
    What happened? Well, you see, we don't allow drinks on our games. There's drink holders on the sides. Do they say, who's we? Do you even work here?
    35:15
    Bitch, why would I give a flying fuck about this game? what kind of people is this why would I give a damn about this game this pinball machine on Alameda if I didn't work here why would I give a fine two rips about you man and then what do they say of course I work here now why are you like trying to stick your wiener in the can I curse? yeah why are you trying to stick your dick in my eject button? mhm you hear where I'm coming from? yeah it's whack rom uh huh there's a start button it says start in bright letters so usually blinking right there they will hit every other button they hit the coin release man 20 times is there anything you'd tell Stern or Jersey Jack or whoever, Spooky, and they could make that button a little easier to push? Should it just be like a dinner plate?
    36:27
    Gosh, I don't know. I was almost thinking maybe like an LED, you know, like that goes up to like a bright arrow that says start. And also, you know, the top button and the, you know, like the eject buttons. Oh, yeah, those little play buttons on top. You know, they kind of confuse people a little bit, you know? I like them personally, but people are idiots with them.
    36:54
    I mean, complete fucking morons. You couldn't get any dumber than some of the people who haven't. I don't know if it's just because I played and, you know, somebody lurking. Yeah. Just lurking around. I always got, see, that's why I don't, like, leave my lights on. They're like, oh, what else do you have? What can I steal? So, you know, man, I deal with a lot of stuff there And it boggles my mind But I try to keep, you know, it's customer service Like, I've worked in bars a long time I understand that drunk douchery Do you play in a lot of tournaments these days? Man, I have to say I guess you could say I'm retired And I would if I had time to do it But a lot of my time is, you know, dedicated to that job Yeah, I mean, you work at a place where you're in front of pinball all day. Pinball all day. Then you get a day off. What do you want to do? Go play a tournament? Not really. Not so much. But sometimes I like to, I even end up at 82 so I can actually play a game.
    37:55
    I can get in a game maybe at work if it's slow, but you've still got people dipping up on you. You feel bad.
    38:03
    Because you're just racking up replay after replay. Well, you know how I play, man. I like to go on the marathon and try to beat the whole game and everything. and then I start getting up in like a 20 minute game I start getting nervous like I'm on the clock or like I always feel like my boss is standing right behind me and I'm all like doesn't your boss though you know you want to promote pinball while you're there you don't want people to get too discouraged by having crappy games over and over they're new to it they're draining and you come up and you're like this is what could be done suddenly you've got like a crowd of people behind you They're like, Danny B's amazing. Who is this guy? Yeah, that especially happened a lot when we opened. And people who were there would always say, like, oh, I don't know, the rumor got out that I was one of the best in the world or something. I don't know. But that's all just because I played on a tournament a week for like three years straight.
    39:02
    But I won some big ones and that. you know but yeah be uh you know i probably beat neil shatz three times three times yeah man i i even he was like dan you absolutely out shatts to me man does he like speak of himself in the third person a lot yeah he's like you out shatts the shatts yeah then i was like neil you're a ripper man like you're still a ripper dan you you can't bang back man and he was like I didn't think you would see it.
    39:37
    I didn't know you were... You're like standing right behind you? You got disqualified. And then one time I destroyed Keith. It was our... When we first opened, he was working on the games and stuff.
    39:54
    Yuri owned some of the... Operating some of the games there. Did he cry or what? And we had a little split flip off. A little four on four through a little fiver. And he was like, he was weird because he has the same voice as Neil Schatz. And he was like, hey, Dad, you really kicked my ass again. And I was like, yeah, yeah, I did. And he was like, here's your five bucks, man. And I was like, cool. Is that the five bucks that's on your wall right now? Yeah, right there. Yeah, right on there. Yeah.
    40:26
    That was a sweet time. And Northwest 2011 kicked everybody's ass. Northwest 2011. That's not the one I got. I got ninth on one of them one year. Well, it wasn't the year I was in it because I got ninth too. What? I must have been 2010 or 2001. I think I was 2009. That was a big one, though. That was a big tournament to just roll up in. Yeah, it was huge. I slept in a van the night before. Yeah, man. And I woke up wearing the same clothes I wore for like two days straight. Right Hopped in there to the quarters And then And I got crushed And then you get crushed by Todd McCulloch I got crushed by Keith that time actually By Keith Yeah I think the The Sharp Brothers Would probably were Crushing you a little bit Probably Dash Sharp Brothers Dash Sharps Um Hmm Scott the co-host wanted me to ask this. So one time, you guys, you versus Scott, were playing in a weekly tournament in Portland, and you guys were battling on Simpsons. No, that was not a weekly. It wasn't? That was the first ground control tournament. And that's when it was still like the league, but for some reason they decided one, like, early on, that they would make it like... I think you played in it? Yeah, I played in a bunch of those ones. Because they decided one year in the league, they were like, you know what, we're just going to make the end of our league. Only the same eight people showed up. And they had been doing it for a couple years. That was the first pinball league. It had to have been one of the first ones, especially in the Northwest. Yeah. It was with, I can't remember the guy's name. The one guy, he played in tournaments for a while, too, in the early days. But he was always at ground control. Anthony, who worked there? Anthony would play, yeah.
    42:22
    Weston? Jeff? Yeah, Jeff. and Jeff would run it and those guys, and it was a cool league. But for some reason, like, I might have played in, like, two, I might have shown up for, like, one night and, like, crushed it, and they were like, dude, I mean, you got enough points to play in the finals, you know, or something along that lines. But we, I could not believe that. Like, we crushed Simpsons so bad. Simpsons had just kind of come out. It was, like, brand-new game. It might have been, like, a year or two old, But Ground Control, it was one of the first ones that Ground Control had for sure. It wasn't that old, though, you know? And, God, I feel like so old talking like that. But when it was like that was like pinball was already long dead. You know, they were just throwing out some games. And the Simpsons brought it back. And the Simpsons was a sweet game when that garage door worked. And that thing was on fire. And me I don know how Scott he must have been playing it a lot then too at the time But he I put up like I been playing it a lot at the time And for some reason, I had just rolled up to the tournament and everybody was like, this dude, that was hot. And everybody was like, this guy's the greatest player of, this guy's amazing. I took out all the dudes. I was just having a good game. I played at Ground Control a lot, like all day, you know. and uh man my pump's going off it's being like oh danny b has diabetes low as if 70s low i've gotten down to 20 and drove home on the sidewalk but that was the old days um but yeah and scott man i put up like i walked up to simps i swear to god on that first ball I put up like 150 million Which on Simpsons is big And it was set pretty nasty I got through the aliens Beat it all You gotta beat all the Something All the modes to get into the aliens So I had them all going on the first ball So that means I had everything times two So I was getting nasty points And then Scott walked up And he like upped it Like a buck seventy and I was like this is insane how is this going on and then I came through and put up and got through all them fucking modes and shit again and got the mystery thing going with the spirit dude I got that going I got all the comic guy going again where he times everything up again by getting those hurry ups and all that holy shit man that was insane and I put up like two and a quarter. And then he came up and upped it again. I think I ended up winning though. What was his story? His story is you won it. I did because I won. But it was a great game. I won the goddamn NHL 94, the Sega. And I got NHL 94, which is the greatest game ever made. That's the greatest sports game. NHL 94. It was a little, slight glitch, but you can put your goalie on manual and get past that. So don't be bullshitting with the one-timers. And don't be playing the All-Stars. You can't be playing the All-Stars.
    45:49
    Come on, man. But you get your user records up, and man, it's really something. It's right there. I still have it. It's up there. Just behind the magic curtain of my toys and stash. Still up. As you see. Toy stash. My toy stashes dwindle a little bit. Yeah, you guys can't see this, but there's a toy stash. But right now I just kept up some. He's one of the biggest collections of figurines on skateboards that I've ever seen. It's massive. Boxes, multiple boxes. It's stupid. And I started collecting legitimately like maybe one of my first, you know, some of my first early ganking.
    46:33
    And I remember my granny and my grandpa had a little toy closet. And I was just old enough that I was like, I got to gank that Cookie Monster, man. It's on a skateboard.
    46:44
    And I finally, like, looked at that thing for years. Then one year, I finally ganked it. I must have been in, like, sixth grade. From your who? Your grandpa? Yeah. And then Hardee's was putting out them California Raisins. So I kept going and getting them on skateboards. And I'm a weird dude, man. But I don't even have, but I do have, like, the full collection of, like, the smash-ups. Yeah. That got like taken off the shelves right away. I had, I think, almost all those. You have them all like in, wait, are they in package? Yeah, still packaged. We have them in package. I used to have them. They're so sweet. Yeah, I got rid of them. That's a pro shit. Those things are awesome. Really cool. Savage Mondo Blitzers, I have all those. So when you mentioned earlier that the garage door break-in on Simpsons, that made me think like about, that's, we get, What a battle that was. We get people that leave comments about machines on the map. I should start out, you don't even use Pinball Map.
    47:41
    I don't use it so much. Which means you think that there's only like four places in L.A. that have machines because you just like don't know. Yeah, like I just go to the ones I always went to and... Well, anyway, my point was that like people leave comments and they... An elevator.
    47:57
    But yeah, people leave comments. I'm sorry. I'm just being a dick. Yeah, you are, man. I'm trying to finish a sentence. What was the question? It wasn't even a question. I'm just going to say that I'm going down. Like that door breaking on the Simpsons is one of the most common things that people write. It ruins the game. Like all across Pinball Map, every other Simpsons is like, door's broken.
    48:22
    You'd think they would figure something out so the door wouldn't break. And some people, like, they make it so the door's wide open all the time so it just doesn't close. And then the up kicker will break And guess what Garage is broken And they'll just be like Hug dump hug dump hug dump And Homer going Danny we gotta wrap it up We're only doing short segments with you Yeah baby Mmhmm Loving it up when I'm going down The real question is What mode would you choose on Kiss and I would go with lick it up bow ding ding ding guy maps guy usernames maps usernames of the month so I have noticed I don't know that we have hard numbers on this but as we've made these changes added regions added the applications blah blah blah oh and what like a year or so ago I'm not good with time we actually added a user system because we had some some violators of data i don't know how you want to phrase that but some people who were who are not good stewards of of the data um and since adding that i think there's i don't know there's what like 4 000 people that use yeah 4 800 people that are that have signed up okay 4 800 and uh because it's a pinball site and you know it kind of reminds me kind of like the old bbs days of the internet or yeah i guess that's not necessarily the anyway it reminds me of the old bbs days where people have kind of creative usernames um so we thought it made sense once a month to go through that list and provide you with the username of the month and this month i have to say i don't think they've been the most creative usernames and but to back up for a second and I think it's a really fun thing to be able to have a site where people have usernames. I don't know. I've never had that. And it's fun to see what they come up with. We do limit you to 15 characters or fewer, which I'm sure bums some people out. But I don't know.
    51:17
    It's not like either of us obsesses over this and stares at the users or anything, but it is something that's fun to click over and check on once in a while.
    51:27
    So I put in for this month of June, this will come out, I mean it is July right now, but looking back on June, I put four that were in my top, and maybe we can discuss them, see what you think is the best. We can maybe come to an agreement about which one of these four will earn the title of user name of the month. Oh, I'm into it. Yeah, let's do it. And this first one probably isn't going to win it, but I liked it because it's, well, it's Immolation Fan. And, Scott, do you know what Immolation is? I do. Well, I mean, I know self-immolation is when you light yourself on fire. So I imagine immolation is being on fire?
    52:24
    Yeah, but I'm going to guess that this is a reference to the death metal band from New York, Immolation. And that this person is a fan of that band. Okay, I got it. Immolation fan. So either they're a fan of this band or they're a fan of something being on fire. I don't really know what immolation means, I guess. Yeah, can you, I mean, I definitely hear of like self-immolation, and that's obviously when your self is on fire, but I never hear people refer to other things being immolated. Yeah, like, oh, that's ashes now because of immolation. Mm-hmm, no. That doesn't, you don't say that. Yeah. Okay, all right, that's, I feel like that's a strong entry. What else you got? next up I just like this thought it was funny because it's a Simpsons reference it's mmm donuts I didn't sound like Homer right there but you know what jumps out at me about mmm donuts is I feel like you're going to have trouble entering this username over and over again because you're going to have to remember how many M's that you needed to put in there But I think with our app, I would be shocked if people ever do this more than once, right? Like you put your username in, you probably never have to do it again. Yeah, I don't think you got to log out. I mean, so it's four Ms in this case, in case anyone's wondering. Okay, so the other thing about that one is I could come in with mmmdonuts with five Ms or mmmdonuts with three Ms. Yeah. I guess I'm more concerned about this username than impressed. someone could be pretending to be donuts and making bad comments about machines or something yeah yeah yeah okay all right so next one more two more now we're on number three i just thought this was a funny one it's sad squatch that's pretty good yeah it's like sasquatch but just a sad sasquatch sad squash sad squash okay uh any idea well i don't think we let's go on record here we don't really track much information about our users like anything um so my question was going to be where they're from if it's like a pacific northwestern person but we don't really have a way to figure that out no i mean you could do like some investigation into what locations they've edited if they have edited any locations and you know usually people are based in one region and editing locations in one region so you can see that they're in vancouver washington or something like that and uh yeah so You can kind of narrow it down that way.
    55:20
    Okay. Last one. Name number four has been removed from the record. All right, great. I'm prepared to rule on... I mean, I have a vote of which one I like the most. All right, me too. Do you want to say it on three?
    55:39
    Okay. One, two, three. Immolation fan. sad squash okay i like i liked immolation fan because it feels very um literal you know this person sat down and they're like uh i either they either really like this band and just threw the word fan at the end um or they like things being on fire which i also would find funny yeah and not because it's so literal yeah and it's also like you know this is a pinball site a lot of people a lot of people's usernames are like pinball john and or their initials that you know are wizard something or other and so they're oftentimes like they're the identity they choose on this site is their pinball identity and this person is like no my identity here is that I'm a death metal fan or that I like seeing things on fire.
    56:41
    So what edged out that for you with Sad Squatch? I don't really know. I think part of it was I just thought that's what you would choose and I wanted to be in sync with Sad Squatch.
    56:56
    We'd say the same thing at the same time, which would have sounded cool. Instead we said different things and it's like, oh man. and it wasn't really at the same time well we could just we'll sync that up in post so it's just right on top I feel like you because and we'll I'm sure get into this at some point but Ryan is the I don't know how to describe this the oil that keeps the pinball map engine running with any degree of consistency if you've ever written the pinball map or you've ever had a question or ever had any kind of interaction at all, Ryan is the one that helped you because I'm just the guy who types computer program stuff.
    57:44
    Because of that, I feel like you're a lot closer to the user data than I am. I'm a little surprised, although I'm talking myself out of this, but do most people put their initials? Like, are most usernames what they would be if they put up a high score on World Cup soccer?
    58:03
    No, most are not that. But I would say, you know, looking at the usernames, and there's 20 to a page that I'm looking at, and only three could potentially be initials there. So 17 aren't. Gotcha. We got Robert Hamburger. We got Time Lord Warner. you know these are just not initials i like i like robert hamburger he must not have signed up now that's july so maybe they'll come back up in the next episode okay okay okay um great welcome to shoot the lock the lock is lit and scott just needs to aim truly and hit it to hit it he needs to guess some map statistics in this episode the stats are based around map edits and stuff. Is the data languishing in decay, or is it active and up-to-date? Find out now on Shoot the Lock. Good luck, Scott.
    59:06
    Yeah, I'm kind of excited and a little nervous because I feel like my stats mostly come from you, so I'm going to expose myself as not really having much context for what these numbers should be so let's do it i'll follow my heart yeah just follow your heart uh all right so how many machine condition comments were left in the month of june machine condition comments month of june i will guess in the map do you want to know first Oh, you're looking at how many machines there are total? No, I'm looking at the levels of the microphone right now. I'm not cheating or looking anything up. I'm pensively stroking my not beard. I guess that's just a chin.
    60:08
    Trying to think. And I'm trying to reason it out. There's like 60-something regions, correct? No, there's 96.
    60:16
    Oh, okay. there's 96 regions uh some are active some are not plus now there's the entire month region list locations too so you got another i don't have that stat right now but that's 50 or 60 regionless locations right now and regionless was added in june correct and that means japan showed up which was pretty big well japan yeah japan started out as regionless and And then the guy that was adding the locations there decided he wanted to have a Japan region.
    60:50
    So we added a region. So those aren't regionless anymore. That's a legit region. But it was a large area of pinball that showed up. An entire country of pinball that showed up. All right.
    61:05
    God, this is really... I feel like I don't want to say anything too high or too low. I got a number now. Okay. 400. 400 comments about the conditions of machines. You're low. You're actually almost, that's almost half. It's 881 comments were made.
    61:28
    Wow. Yeah, pretty good amount. That's pretty good. Okay. Yeah. And, you know, another little fun fact we could bring in is that we do get part of, well, I guess we weren't going to get into this, But part of being like someone part of like overseeing the data and making sure it isn't crappy is making sure that people aren't tampering with it or doing bad stuff, which they almost never do. So it's, you know, that's great. But we get a little digest of what the comments were for for whatever region you're an administrator of that. That administrator gets a little digest of the day's comments. and yeah so that i don't want to egg anybody on but like let that be a lesson to you people are watching you can't just say that f word somewhere and have it go unnoticed yeah we'd see that f word we'd read it we'd talk about the f word we'd consider putting asterisks in that f word a lot would go on yeah those are like behind the scenes things we talk talk about like should we edit that out right yeah right all right okay what else you got all right how many machines were removed from locations which is you know it's sad when a machine is removed we don't like that but it happens so how many do you think okay so what i do know is i i've seen your graphs and i feel like uh month over month there's a slight increase in the number of on location machines which you could attribute to growth of the map or growth of pinball. I feel like it's both.
    63:10
    It's both, yeah. Okay, yeah, both. We remove less than we add. There were 880 whatever comments, 81 comments.
    63:24
    I'm going to guess 553 machines were removed. Wrong. It was really close to the comments, actually. It was 842 machines removed.
    63:43
    Wow. Okay. Are you also going to ask me how many were added? So that'll be different. You know, just, I guess you could work it out in your head. Or you could work it out with your mouth. Well, say it again. 800 and what? 42.
    63:58
    42. Okay. 842. Proceed. Proceed. now you have to tell me how many machines were added okay 842 more were added but not much more but more 981 machines were added in june now wrong again interesting um it was 1,422 machines added wow okay yeah so that's a lot more yeah net positive definitely and you know i guess 255 of those were in japan uh okay that helps like you're saying it's a it's a combo of adding a new region because all of a sudden we have japan on the map and there's 255 machines, those aren't brand new machines put out on location, they're just brand new machines added to the map. Right we not gonna stabilize until every single on location machine is accounted for on the map okay yeah but that actually i did put that in a chart and that was the most since i been like keeping monthly stats which has only been a year and a half um and that's the most in a month by like 300 wow okay thanks japan yeah thank you japan it's cool to look at that japan map too not to be like a US guy who doesn't look at maps as much as he should. But to see a country that just fits on my screen nice like that, but I still feel like has some zoom level detail. And to see exactly where the machines are, it's kind of cool. And it's cool just to see what they call their locations too. There's a lot of all caps. This one is called Banban Kinayama. And Banban is all caps. I don't know why. Yeah, what's up with that? Maybe somebody from Japan or who knows more about Japan than we do can tell us what's with the caps? Yeah, maybe they could. So one stat we have is location confirmations. This is a feature maybe we added three or four years ago, I don't know. But people used to wonder when was this place last updated.
    66:19
    And I think we added that at the same time. So we had a thing that says location last updated June 5th, and then people could see that people are actually using the map at that location, and it's probably up to date. And then we also added location confirmation, where someone could point out that even though they don't have any machines to add or remove from that location, to or from that location, they still want to click a button that says, I've been here and I can confirm this is the lineup. So we added that, location confirmations. I have found that the iOS app, people accidentally click it when I think they're just swiping.
    67:07
    It's an easy one to accidentally hit. I've had instances where like a business owner, this is kind of weird, but a business owner was looking at his competitions, another business's location, and accidentally clicked location, confirm location, and he emailed me and was like, now it says that I was the last one to update their location. I don't like that.
    67:33
    And I said, calm down. Yeah, I feel like we could do a whole episode of this thing about operators and interactions with the map. Yeah, so anyway, to be honest, I think sometimes that this stat is maybe inflated, but who knows? Maybe it isn't. I don't know. So how many times do people confirm a location?
    67:58
    Okay, so here's my reasoning here. As a relative layman to using the actual app and the website, like I don't get out very often is what I'm trying to say.
    68:13
    I will say I feel like this is a really great feature, and I feel like the average person isn't going to pick out their phone and hit that button as quickly as they can. And I wish they would. I feel like this is a super useful thing to be able to just say, yeah, it's the same. It's all still there. Because if nobody did that and the location didn't update the lineup very often, it would look old and people would be questioning it. Um, so I, I hope that it's part of like, uh, people's workflow going to a bar, taking a look. If it's the same thing, hit the button. Um, yeah, now that you're saying, yeah, I don't do that when I go to a place I should. Yeah. No, I don't either. Um, and I, I should, um, but here's my, here's my thought process here. You said it's potentially an inflated number. Makes me wonder if it's a high number. We know that number of ads is in the 1400s, number of deletes is in the 800s.
    69:20
    So that makes me feel like there's at least 1400 moments where somebody was in a bar with the app open, or I'm sorry, in a location with the app open interacting with the website. Oh, man, and then there's excuse me there's comments there's like 800 and something comments so i feel like this number uh should be very high but i also think it's not going to be very high because people don't think to do that uh so i'm gonna go 512 wow that was really close actually that oh yeah i thought you were gonna go somewhere in the stratosphere with that but no it was 470 okay okay yeah yeah ballpark yeah i mean it's like the the gut i mean by the numbers it should be pretty high but i just don't think it's something people think to do and we should all we should all do yeah we should that so we'll see next month if people listen to this really lobbying for that feature it's a fantastic feature yeah uh so i got some more stats uh you know how many we we allow people to add scores this is a feature that we added right at the beginning didn't really do much with it's just a you know it's just a form they they can input a score in we didn't really emphasize it too much it's not one of our strengths there is another site app that we are integrated with called Pindigo that manages scores.
    71:02
    Mm-hmm. Thank you, Pindigo. Yeah. So we don't have a lot of scores. So how many scores do we have, Scott?
    71:12
    Scores. Yeah. I also, we can get into this at some other point, but I feel like our core user base is, well no now i'm going back and forth i was saying we have less of the uh like i have seven machines at home people and more of the i just want to go play pinball people but i feel like the i just want to go play pinball people are just as likely to get a good score and be excited and want to put it in there than the you know i i know how to game theater of magic people yeah uh oh boy um I'm going to go low. I'm going to say 314. I think you should have gone lower. It's only 66 scores. 66.
    71:59
    Yeah, it makes me think, I don't know. Do we even need to have that? Part of me, when we put scores in, it's like the pedantic nerd part of me was like, yeah, people can just put whatever they want. So what is this feature? I can just put, I got 100 trillion points. I almost didn't want to add it unless there was some sort of like, take a picture of your score. And we write software that parses that image to actually pull your score out.
    72:31
    So how would you do that if there's like a four player game? And I guess you'd have to just be only have your score in the in the picture.
    72:40
    Yeah, I don't I mean, that's why this didn't happen. There's just so many questions. I'm sure maybe Pindigo does this, or I don't know. But there's only so many fonts that they actually use in Pinball, right? So it seems like that would make it easier. And then, you know that thing where you cash a check using your phone, and they kind of force you to have it in a little box and all that stuff? Maybe we do something like that.
    73:08
    Yeah. Anyway, that's disappointing. Yeah, it is. I spent some portion of my life adding that feature, and nobody cares. No, yeah, sorry.
    73:22
    All right, well, this one is a more heartening stat. How many locations were suggested? And so these are places that aren't on the map yet, and people want them to be on the map.
    73:36
    What do you think? And this doesn't include, say like Japan, they added 50 locations, 55. Those are 62, I mean, 62. And those weren't suggested through this suggestion form.
    73:55
    So these ones are only for people that use the form to say add John's bar. Okay. my thought process here going back to what i said earlier about ryan being the oil that keeps the website actually going um when we receive these suggestions we get an email about them and i i look at those emails and then delete them and ryan ryan uh and our admins uh some we have some very very good admins um excellent admins and we also have ryan who is uh an admin himself for many reasons yeah um anyway i'm just trying to say i get the emails ryan does something with them as do our admins um so every day i do a select all and the delete. I'd say it's about a full Gmail screen of select all, but maybe I don't look every day. That would be about 50, we'll say every other day. So I'll say 20 a day, 30 days in a month. I'm going to guess 60 based on region lists. I think June was probably bigger. so I'm going to guess 114.
    75:21
    Pretty close-ish. 145. Okay. So it was, yeah, so they're streaming in a few a day. So 145. This is a tangent, but I do feel like we need to get regionless out of beta and have that be the first thing you see when you hit the website. Plus, it's just kind of a cooler experience for first timer, you know? Yeah, I think it is. In one of the commits that I have pending right now, it adds like more descriptive text at the beginning for the homepage that talks about regionless very briefly and has an extra link to it. I mean, there's a link in the header, but I'm sure people are going to miss that. so this is one other little uh nudge toward it but yeah obviously we should probably just have it on the home page okay we'll work on that anything else uh one more stat so we also get okay good yeah this is fun how many like so people contact us they write to us and i was trying to think of like what they're there i guess there's a whole range to what people will say to us it's sometimes it's like bug reports or like i'm i thought this was going to happen but instead this happened or it's um they want something they're like why isn't this place on the map why isn't this like area represented uh or you know things like that so they contact us and i respond or i ccu i you know do you ever wonder like did ryan respond to that or do you just assume that I'm taking care of it?
    77:10
    No, I do wonder, but I'll say I used to wonder more than I do now. I mean, it's been almost 10 years, and I think I wondered a lot at the beginning.
    77:22
    And I'm sorry this is not cool for you, but no, I don't wonder anymore. I have total confidence that you respond to these people. And I also kind of feel like if you didn't, we would hear about it again. does that make sense yeah and you know occasionally i do forget and then we do hear about it they people are pretty good at being like what's up like i sent you a message two weeks ago you didn't respond and so how many people do you think sent us a contact message okay and again i do get these messages and i do click through them all uh there's sometimes i get a little lax in that because we get a lot of seo optimization you know yeah do you know those kind of come in waves i think we got like two in the last two days where it's someone from another country that have they've carefully analyzed our website and they have a lot of ideas for how they can optimize it you know i wonder about it some of these are they like click farms like they're gonna they're gonna click on our site a bunch or something or are they seriously just gonna optimize our seo they're gonna optimize our search engine optimization yeah i think i don't know i i get the impression i don't always read them all of course because they're just form letters they're like spam form letters basically but they i i get the impression because they cite like oh your meta description is this and it should have more like keywords that are awesome in it and i think they're trying to act like they could just like tweak little things on the site to make the seo better well we have we have a one-page app on the website which adds all kinds of complexity to seo which maybe we'll talk about at some future episode um okay let me think i'm picturing my gmail inbox i'm mentally filtering out the suggested locations i'm leaving the comments i'm trying to factor in clicking on those i especially click on the Portland region once.
    79:42
    I'm going to guess something around five a day. I'm going to go 30 days. So that's 150. But that seems very high to me. So I'm going to subtract for slow days, which drops me down to 124.
    80:06
    And that's your final? now it feels too high it feels too high but just think do you think i respond to 124 in a month that's no i mean if you did that would be crazy but i i think you would i okay i'm gonna go lower 105 a day is too high so i'm gonna say two a day and that's gonna drop me down and I'm going to filter some out I'm going to say 53 still a little high the answer is 36 okay that's lower than I expect clearly because we just talked about it and I gave you a number but 36 is a little surprising to me yeah but it's still getting like one it's a little more than one a day It still is like a nice little stream of people chatting us up.
    81:06
    Yeah, okay. It's a good manageable amount. But, you know, it's kind of nice because it tells us, it's another indication that people are using it. Right. Because they're taking the time to write us a message. Yeah, no, messages are very helpful.
    81:25
    I think we got one more segment. upcoming stuff non-tech a segment to briefly talk about what's coming up with the map outside of a code context which is what we usually talk about there's a lot of code a lot of data maintenance of data etc that goes through the map but there's some stuff that happens in the real world too and that's what we go over here Ryan I think there's something very real world coming up again soon, right? Something physical that man or woman might cover thyself with. So in the past we sold t-shirts and then we sold all those shirts and so we ran out of them. But we decided to make some more of them. So we've got two t-shirt designs coming out right now. One is basically the same as the last one, except the graphic will be on the back, and then we'll have another graphic on the front. And then the other one, which is, the other one will be a surprise, but it's kind of a throwback graphic that we have in the bank. And it'll be a cool shirt. They're being made somewhere in downtown LA right now, and maybe by the time this comes out, they'll be done. And we'll have them on pinballmap.com slash store. and you can buy one. Cool. Any excess money that comes out of those, those go into our overhead costs for the site since the site costs money for us to run. And so it's helpful for us if you want a shirt and you want to support us to get a shirt and it'll keep the site, keep those databases tabling, keep them tabling. Yeah. Man, I feel like as we're doing this podcast, it's like a brainstorming session because i would like to to go into excruciating detail about the costs of keeping the pinball map site up not in a complaining way just from a um i feel like it's been an interesting exercise to try to keep things as as close to free as possible um but as things grew we failed um to do that so anyway yeah yeah i think that's a good topic and then the other thing geez i have some notes on it and they're not good notes it's The notes are basically to not mention this thing. So I guess this is me being like teasing information, which is silly because it implies people being on the edge of their seats. But we do have a development in the site, which I think is in the works right now. We've had some meetings about it with a pinball company. I think we can say that. There's a pinball company that we've been talking with about doing some work with them, some more work than we've done in the past. Now you're doing great. Yeah, it's cryptic enough.
    84:32
    Okay, great. So hopefully we'll be able to talk about that soon. It's kind of exciting for us, you know, working on this project to be more directly involved with the larger pinball community. So stay tuned. Yeah, super cool. so that's um that's a podcast about the pinball map and the things that we do with that pinball map hopefully something in here resonates with somebody we're going to try to keep it up just because there's been times over the years we're like oh that's a pretty decent story like we have a blog which isn't crazy updated but is updated well and we thought yeah well now maybe we'll have a podcast that we try to do once a month um yeah and i think we're not i think we're not super great at disseminating news to people in part because i would i would attribute it to not being on facebook i feel like that's kind of where most people get their news and we're just not on there if people talk about us on there we have no idea sorry uh and so we got a blog that probably not that many people read but it has some cool updates to it blog.pinballmap.com and and then like twitter will post updates you know basically places that people can easily miss and i think having a podcast is another effort to give people another like medium to tune in on definitely and thank you all users for your continual participation in the pinball map community and let's give an off the cuff attempt at podcast catchphrase thanks for listening and keep mapping around bye everyone bye
    86:34
    Thank you.