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#11: When Was The Last Time You Ate Nachos?

Mappin' Around with Scott and Ryan·podcast_episode·1h 4m·analyzed·Aug 22, 2024
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.028

TL;DR

Pinball Map founders discuss summer travels and announce Discord launch, Ko-fi migration, and global pinball distribution data across 67 countries.

Summary

Scott and Ryan discuss their summer travel experiences (England, Scotland, Michigan, Orcas Island), reflect on limited personal pinball play despite running Pinball Map, and dive into significant map platform updates including migration to Ko-fi, launch of a Discord community with 60+ members and 85 administrators, and new data-driven analysis showing pinball distribution across 67 countries with top locations being USA, Canada, Australia, France, and Great Britain. The hosts also cover ancillary topics like nachos, bowling, and far-flung pinball locations in the Maldives and Åland Islands.

Key Claims

  • Pinball Map currently has 10,643 locations listed as of the episode recording

    high confidence · Scott explicitly states this number when discussing the quiz

  • Pinball Map has approximately 106 paid Patreon supporters (though the number is inflated by inactive former members)

    high confidence · Scott discusses the Patreon count and UI issues in detail

  • Stern recently enabled auto-updates on their venue maps based on machine pinging

    high confidence · Scott mentions this happened about a week after they discussed Stern's map reliability on a prior episode

  • Pinball Map is launching a Discord server with regional administrators and supporter roles

    high confidence · Scott describes the Discord setup and Ryan confirms ~60 members joined within a couple days

  • Pinball Map has 85 regional administrators managing the crowdsourced database

    high confidence · Scott states this directly when discussing reasons for the Discord

  • Pinball Map data spans 67 countries, with 21 countries having only a single location listed

    high confidence · Scott presents this as quiz results from an endpoint he created

  • For every 20 comments made on Pinball Map, approximately 1-3 are edits or deletions

    medium confidence · Scott describes this as 'anecdotal information' without crunching exact numbers

  • A data scientist on Mastodon analyzed Pinball Map data and created per-capita pinball distribution visualizations by country

    medium confidence · Scott mentions seeing this on Mastodon but doesn't have the data in front of him

  • Jawakara Islands resort in the Maldives has Guns N' Roses LE (Jersey Jack) and Led Zeppelin Pro machines

    high confidence · Scott provides specific machine names when discussing new Maldives location

Notable Quotes

  • “I feel like I'm doing pinball stuff every day... but I haven't really played much pinball at all.”

    Scott@ 5:12 — Self-aware irony about running Pinball Map while not actively playing

  • “the cheapest way to play pinball is to just play location pinball... There's no way you're going to get your money back on a home machine.”

    Ryan (referencing Wedgehead podcast)@ 6:45 — Economic argument about pinball accessibility that questions the home collector model

  • “I promise you within 24 hours you will have a response from me I guarantee it.”

    Scott@ 22:20 — Commitment to community engagement on the new Discord server

  • “the map doesn't really think or feel. It's just a mass of data, right? Yeah, that's true. I think and feel sometimes, though.”

    Ryan / Scott@ 33:34 — Humorous exchange about the nature of the Pinball Map as a data structure

  • “Where is this? it's in Scandinavia and it's in between Finland and... it's kind of this beautiful looking Island chain.”

    Scott (discussing Åland Islands)@ 27:18 — Illustrates the discovery of unexpected pinball locations globally

  • “I'd love to go they have some really really good waves in the Maldives... some of the resorts will claim ownership of the waves and will basically prevent other resorts and locals from boating in”

    Ryan@ 25:53 — Reveals the hosts' travel interests beyond pinball and social commentary on resort practices

Entities

ScottpersonRyanpersonColinpersonPinball MapproductSterncompanyKo-fiproductDiscordproductMastodonplatform

Signals

  • ?

    product_strategy: Pinball Map migrating from Patreon to Ko-fi citing poor UI, better store integration, and easier supporter management

    high · Scott discusses Patreon UI limitations, difficulty tracking rewards, and Ko-fi's superior functionality with integrated store and discount features

  • ?

    community_signal: Launch of Discord server for 85+ regional administrators and supporters; achieved 60 members within days

    high · Scott and Ryan describe Discord setup, administrator participation, and rapid adoption; Discord serves as replacement for Slack's 3-month archive limitation

  • ?

    venue_signal: Pinball Map now covers 67 countries with 10,643 locations; top countries are USA, Canada, Australia, France, Great Britain, Germany, Finland, Italy, Belgium, Austria

    high · Scott presents quiz results showing geographic distribution; 21 countries have only single location, suggesting growth frontier

  • ?

    product_feature: Placeholder text in location descriptions asking for payment method information (cards, coins, tokens); users are organically populating this field

    high · Scott describes response from Hopiakula Arcade request and subsequent implementation; reports that especially new location submitters are filling in payment info

  • ?

    business_signal: Pinball Map operates as volunteer-run, non-profit model with Patreon/Ko-fi donations covering only server costs; founders explicitly state they make no money and minimize expenses

    high · Scott states 'we're not making money' and emphasizes keeping costs 'dirt cheap as possible'; all donations go to server bills

Topics

Pinball Map platform updatesprimaryGlobal pinball distribution and statisticsprimaryDiscord community launchprimaryKo-fi migration from PatreonprimarySummer travel experiencessecondaryLocation pinball vs home ownership economicssecondaryFar-flung pinball locations (Maldives, Åland Islands, Gibraltar, Serbia)secondaryFood culture (nachos, bowling)mentioned

Sentiment

positive(0.78)— Hosts express enthusiasm about platform improvements (Ko-fi, Discord, payment method transparency), excitement about global pinball discovery, and pride in community engagement. Light-hearted banter and humor throughout. Minor frustration expressed about Patreon UI, but positioned as motivation for positive change. Overall tone is upbeat and celebratory of platform growth.

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.195

0:00
Welcome back to Mapping Around with Scott and Ryan, the nation's number one pinball map-related podcast. Hey, Scott. Hey, Ryan. What have you been up to, Ryan? We're coming to the end of summer now. Yeah, I know. it's been two months or so since our last episode. Uh, I think my big one is that I went to England
0:35
and Scotland. Did you play any pinball in England or Scotland? No, I, it, it's hard to get all that in sometimes on a trip. Uh, I did look at the map every time I went to a place. Um, when we were in London, we were staying in the Merrilybone neighborhood in zone two. Uh, and there weren't that many places around us and the places that were somewhat near just seemed like i don't know like a kid's arcade with two machines or something like that and uh they they were you know they're
1:11
newish places like i think maybe nq64 or something like that which i think is a shop and i i haven't been to the UK in a while, but you're talking about like zone two and Q 64. What's going on over there? It's like Tron. Yeah. When, uh, you know, I had to spend a lot of time making sure I was comfortable with the transit situation in London before I got there. So I was just
1:41
familiarizing myself with the city by looking at maps a lot. I think, you know, I think it factors into taking transit because if you're taking a bus that i mean sorry if you're taking tube the underground like you scan when you start your ride and then you scan again when you exit your ride and it calculates what your fee will be maybe based on the zone you're in when you started i i could be totally wrong with that but it's something to that effect that sounds vaguely
Kineticist
product
Jersey Jack Pinballcompany
Jawakara Islandsvenue
Hopiakula Arcadevenue
Montrose Bowlvenue
Senor Fishvenue
Spirit of 77venue
Orcas Islandlocation
Âland Islandslocation
Maldiveslocation
Gibraltarlocation
Serbialocation
Wedgehead podcastcontent
  • ?

    industry_signal: Stern Pinball acknowledged and improved their venue map auto-update system shortly after Pinball Map hosts discussed reliability issues

    medium · Scott notes timing correlation between podcast criticism and Stern's implementation of auto-updates based on machine pinging; speculates they may have listened

  • ?

    product_feature: Pinball Map data being analyzed by external researchers for per-capita pinball distribution; potential insight into underserved markets

    medium · Scott mentions data scientist on Mastodon analyzing country-level pinball density; acknowledges not having specific data but recognizes value of the analysis

  • ?

    content_signal: Mapping Around podcast increasing episode frequency after 2+ month gap; more regular schedule enables better feature tracking and updates

    high · Scott notes episode 9 was first in 3-4 years; current episodes (now on episode 11) allow better documentation of ongoing work

  • ?

    venue_signal: Pinball appearing in unexpected global locations including tropical resorts (Maldives Jawakara Islands) and Scandinavian archipelagos

    high · Scott and Ryan discuss newly added locations: Jawakara Islands (Guns N' Roses LE, Led Zeppelin Pro) and Åland Islands with significant machine presence

  • ?

    community_signal: Comment editing/deletion feature showing 5-15% engagement rate; suggests users are curating content and correcting information

    medium · Scott reports 1-3 edits/deletions per 20 comments as anecdotal observation without formal analysis

  • ?

    technology_signal: Pinball Map developers using GitHub commits, SQL queries, and Discord integration for transparency with community developers

    high · Scott mentions GitHub commit feeds in Discord channels and notes he enjoyed running SQL queries for data analysis

    • 2:11
    familiar now. I totally get not going on a family vacation and playing pinball. I don't think I would make the time for that either. But I wonder what it would be like playing a machine over there. What about you? How about you had a voyage to your homeland? Oh, yeah. I did a few trips. I went back to michigan that's where i'm from did not play pinball um looked at the map though
    2:42
    and there were a lot of interesting looking places uh yeah i went i went back uh i also went to uh i took the van to orcas island you know that place yeah yeah up by Vancouver, right? Or San Juan Islands or something? Yeah, it's like one of the San Juan Islands. Have you ever been there? No. Oh, okay. No pinball at all on Orcas Island. Sorry to report that.
    3:13
    But it was great. It's a nice trip. I'd go there again. Yeah, I've heard it's really pretty there. I'm also going to Palm Springs in the winter. Really? Yeah. That doesn't count as a summer news thing. but I've never been to Palm Springs before. Have you? Yeah, totally. I've been there a bunch. Yeah, is it pretty good? What do you do in Palm Springs? It depends on where I stay. There's a natural hot, not natural hot springs, but natural spring
    3:47
    that's really cool. That's where the native, maybe Taquitz, perhaps, Native Americans lived around there. Um, and it's, it's really cool because it has these, uh, palm trees and like water coming up out of the ground. I mean, it's sort of like a bog in some places, but it feels like you're in a prehistoric time when you walk through it, but you're also right near, um, Joshua tree national park when you're there, which is really worth going to.
    4:21
    yeah okay all right um what else i'm doing hood to coast this weekend you know hood to coast yeah i mean that's that's like a relay right it's like a relay race where you run from mount hood to the coast don't think i'll play probably won't play any pinball during that although we end at seaside which tends to have a few machines maybe i'll just go play pinball at the end of it uh That'd be cool. Scene report at the end of that telling what your experience is like maybe.
    4:55
    Yeah, that's not a bad idea. And then ending the summer with circumnavigating Mount St. Helens and doing like a four-day backpacking trip in Sisters. So lots of outdoor stuff. I haven't really played much pinball at all. Have you? No. Not really. I played in a tournament like a month ago, and I think since my last league ended at the beginning of summer,
    5:28
    I've maybe played once or twice. I mean, that's sad to say on a podcast like this. Yeah, we do the map. We do the map for it. I know. I feel like I'm doing pinball stuff every day. If you were to play a pinball machine, like any pinball machine, what would you like to be playing? I don't know. I mean, I will say, looking ahead in this podcast, I just listened to your scene report. And when you mentioned James Bond, it made me kind of want to play that. In part because I sometimes blow it up and get big scores and it makes me feel good. What about you?
    6:09
    Me? Wheel of Fortune. Yeah, that would be a fun one. Still really hung up on Wheel of Fortune. Not easy to find, too, although there's one on Craigslist here in Portland that's been for sale for, like, months. But I can't do it. I can't buy another pinball machine. Doesn't make sense. I guess not. You know, one more thing on this topic. You know, I listened to that Wedgehead podcast. It's real good.
    6:40
    It's probably the best non-pinball map podcast out there. and they got a really good point that the cheapest way to play pinball is to just play location pinball, right? Like, there's no way you're going to get your money back on a home machine. That same money, you could go out and play like a million different types of games anywhere. Yeah, I fully agree with that. It really shook me out of that mentality of like, oh, I'd probably play a lot more pinball if I had one at home.
    7:15
    anyway who cares yeah but i mean you're saying you know that's a game that you want to play and it's hard to find so maybe at some point it's like what other choice do you have that's true all right what's the map what even is the map what are we doing here let's start with what do you call that to follow up action item follow-ups yeah action item follow-ups um so you know we we We definitely don't want to leave people hanging.
    7:47
    This is like a multi-episode saga thinking about what Colin from Kineticist was doing when he entered thousands of machines into the Kineticist machine database. Yeah, the question was whether he was listening to pinball podcasts while he was doing it or whether he was watching something on TV. and you came back with he's watching something on TV. I was a little surprised that we didn't actually say what he was watching,
    8:21
    which to me is the most important part. What was he watching? Yeah, so we were left unsatisfied. We got an answer, but we weren't all the way there. So he was watching, he claims at least, wrestling. That's an interesting preface. Like he might be lying about it. Is that what you're implying? He claims it's wrestling? Yeah, I am. I think I'm going to go there and say, you never know. Wrestling is, so I watched wrestling when I was a young man, like Hulk Hogan, Macho Man, Ultimate Warrior wrestling.
    8:59
    Liked it quite a bit and then dropped out, you know, what, like middle school, the end of middle school or something. it seems like wrestling has kind of made a resurgence for people of a certain age. I think there's new exciting wrestling leagues or something like that. Maybe that's what Colin's keying into here. Yeah, maybe. Maybe he's on fantasy wrestling and all kinds of other... Yeah, I haven't kept up with that at all, and I didn't really watch it that much when I was in junior high.
    9:32
    You didn't watch wrestling? Nothing? I had a friend that was my best friend at the time was really, really into it. But I don't know. It was kind of like, weren't those on at like Saturday morning or something or just like a time when I wasn't at his house? I don't know. Wow. So you probably won't care about this. I recently rewatched Thunder in Paradise. Do you know what Thunder in Paradise is? I don't think so. It's a movie starring Terry Hogan, Hulk Hogan.
    10:02
    I think it was his first movie And it's like a PG Action movie Kind of geared towards kids Yeah it's really bad Really bad? Yeah it's really bad It's kind of sad to see Hulk Hogan nowadays At like the national convention Like ripping his shirt off But it was nice to see him Still doing it Yeah Anyway okay good job Colin watch that wrestling. All right, next follow-up, and we'll just touch upon this for a second. I
    10:38
    don't know if there's any validity to it, but it made me think is that last time we were talking about, I think we, yeah, we talked about for a moment the Stern Insider Connected map, and I made an offhanded comment that sometimes it's not up to date because, and we were saying, you know, maybe don't use that as a reliable source if you were submitting things to Pinball Map, because the Stern Insider Connected map isn't or wasn't. There was little incentive for the operators
    11:11
    who were generally the only ones who could edit the pages to remove the machines. And I think it was just like a week later after the episode, Stern came out and said they have enabled auto-updates on their maps based on pinging machines. And I think we said do exactly that. And so I'm not saying they listened to this and that made a difference, but it stood out to me. It seemed like a nice coincidence.
    11:41
    Stern employee, if you are listening to this, please reach out. Give us a scene report of the Stern break room. What do you guys got in there? What are you playing? When's the last time you went bowling? I went bowling over the summer. it was a kid's birthday party and it was actually really cool because this is not something I've ever thought of while bowling, but it was at a place that was from 1935 or something like that.
    12:12
    They recently remodeled it and there's no screens, meaning that you have to keep your score by hand. And this was a kid's birthday party. So no one's going to do that. And I didn't care to do that. So it was just unlimited bowling in like a very freeing sense. You just never stopped. You didn't bowl 10 rounds and then start over or anything. You just kept bowling forever. And I found that to be kind of nice. Pinball?
    12:43
    No pinball. They had like two multi-arcade game type things there. That's it. And all the food was vegan, which was surprising. What? What does this place call? I think it's called Montrose Bowl. When's the last time you had nachos? That's a month or two ago. That's my go-to at this place near us called Senor Fish.
    13:13
    And, you know, sometimes you get fixated and you're like, you love something at a restaurant so much. And you know they have other good stuff on a menu. But then you just don't want to, you're like, oh, I'm only coming here once a month. I don't want to miss the opportunity to get the one thing I like. So I think I've gotten the chicken nachos from there like the last 12 times in a row probably. Not the fish nachos? No. I mean they have great fish stuff, but I don't know. I don't know if fish nachos would be so good.
    13:45
    Man, I went to Spirit of 77, you know, that Trailblazers bar in Portland, to watch the gold medal game for basketball. And I got nachos there. And ever since then, I just can't stop thinking about nachos. Yeah. I mean, chips are probably my favorite thing to eat. And so chips with a bunch of stuff on them really is perfect. Maybe the worst pinball food you could have when you think about it, nachos,
    14:16
    unless you were wiping those fingers constantly. Yeah. You know, the one thing that's interesting about the San your fish nachos is there's not that much cheese on them. It's you know, there's there's jalapeno peppers and there's a little bit of like enchilada sauce kind of under it. Yeah. Or just like within it and not too much cheese. Definitely not like, you know, Velveeta American melted cheese or anything like that. Cool.
    14:50
    All right, what else is going on? Give me map news. Map news. I think the most immediate map news is the... I kind of decided that... I don't want to go on a rant about Patreon. I mean, we've had Patreon supporters since like 2017, I think, or 18 or so, for a while. and we've had we currently have something like 106 of them
    15:23
    although this is going to allude to some of the things we're going to say in a minute is that when I go onto Patreon and I click paid members and it shows 106 I start scrolling down and some of those are not actually paid members but they used to be so it's just one of those examples of why isn't this working as I expect and why is it so hard to find a basic piece of information which is all to say that their UI is
    15:54
    very bad and it's really hard to give people rewards and stuff and we're also not that good with Patreon, we're not good at giving rewards which I think is maybe okay I expect that most people that support Pinball Map on there the map is the maybe Um and so it kind of hard to it hard It was it hard to track the things that we wanted to give them We gave them hand sanitizer at the beginning, pre COVID. Um, and post COVID you couldn't buy it. Couldn't buy any
    16:30
    more hand sanitizer, uh, cause your aunt stocked up on it. But then after that, it got too hard to track how to like give people stuff. All this is to say that we, I wanted to kind of look at alternatives, especially alternatives that have like more functionality. And there's ones now that you can have a store where you can like sell stuff to non-supporters and you could give discounts to your supporters. It's all nicely integrated into there. We have a store, um,
    17:03
    on square right now, which we sell stickers and beanies, which just a heads up. No one's bought a beanie in like three months, I think maybe four months, maybe because it's summer. Yeah. We're coming into the cold weather season. Maybe we'll do a, do an advertising push for cold weather season. Um, so anyway, I kind of, I started a new one on coffee. I think it's how you pronounce it? K-O-F-I. And they're like a site that, I don't know if you, have you ever
    17:36
    noticed them before over the years? They're like a, uh, buy me a coffee type of website. Like give us a tip type of site. No, I, I never heard of this before. And I've seen it on, you know, GitHub and other things like that, where it's like, there would be a graphic of a coffee mug with a little heart on it. And I thought it was just a site that was just for, you know, one-time tips for, you know, give people a dollar or whatever. And, uh, but it turns out they have,
    18:06
    they've been building a lot more since I've actually looked at it and they have a nice little Patreon-esque setup where you can have a store in there. You can have, um, integrations with thingies. It's just like nice, simple UI that doesn't, Patreon is just too much of a beast. It's really tough. All that's to say we're not actually closing the Patreon, of course. We can't do that. But if people want to shift over or support Pinball Map on Ko-fi, the link is on the homepage of Pinball Map. We just switched to that over the weekend.
    18:41
    And then at the same time, I always say we because I'm just talking about me and you, even if it's a decision that I made on my own and then told you about. But we decided that one thing that would be nice would be to have a Discord, I guess, for a few reasons. One is that we use Slack to chat about development stuff, and it really bugs me sometimes that the current free version of Slack, you only get three months of archives.
    19:16
    And so there's been a number of times where I'm like, what did I tell you or what did I share with Beth or something about the app? And I can't see it without paying for some pro access. And I also thought it would be cool to have a more direct communication with our regional administrators. I think we have 85 administrators right now. And also a cool thing would be to have our Patreon or Ko-fi supporters on there.
    19:49
    And you can give them a role, which isn't that exciting, but it shows to other people there that they are a supporter. It just gives them a little label. So we set that up. Discord got set up a couple days ago. What do you think about it? Well, so you're telling me if I become a Ko-fi or Patreon member, I get access to an exclusive Pinball Map Discord server? I wouldn't say it's exclusive.
    20:22
    Oh. So I get on there with a roll. With a roll. Yeah, it seems too hard to, like, keep something exclusive, I guess. It's like links get out. Anyone could make a link and share it, I think. Also, I think you nailed it. I would hope people are supporting the site for the site, right? We're doing this for free. We're not making money. All the Patreon coffee donations go to server bills, right?
    20:55
    Right. And I think over the years we've worked pretty hard to keep that as dirt cheap as possible. like we're not going to pay for anything we don't have to right how do i feel about discord um i like it i don't know i was really put off by the um stickers at first yeah discord is very sticker heavy um i mean i'm like a irc person you know so it was big big jump um
    21:29
    but it's cool to see people on there there's what like 60 people on there now yeah um yeah 60 people in a couple days i was real i thought it was really cool that so many administrators joined i sent out an email and then like you know five minutes later they were popping in there so if you want to have direct chat access to every member of the pinball map community it's there we could be talking right now
    22:01
    yeah the first thing I do in the morning is I check my phone I'd love to hear from you no promises though no I promise oh you do? if you go into the discord channel you have something to say you got something to ask I promise you within 24 hours you will have a response from me I guarantee it. Well, we'll talk about whatever you want to. I don't even care.
    22:31
    Yeah. Excellent. All right. Let's see what else. I think there was, this is, you know, we haven't talked in a couple months, so this one's a little old, but I thought it was kind of interesting. Oh, and it segues into some quiz stuff. so um there was a data scientist on mastodon is where i first saw this who pulled a bunch of the pinball map data and started mapping it with uh by country and then showing pinball per capita
    23:04
    everyone knows what per capita means right what does it act like literally translate to it's just It's like a fancy way of saying per person. Oh, okay. So capita is person in Latin or something? I guess so. I don't know why you'd – yeah. So, you know, it's just trying to say like there's one pinball – or there's 0.1 pinball machines for every thousand people. You know, it's some way to express that where there might be countries that only have 100 machines, but they might have a small population.
    23:38
    So they might actually have more per capita than the U.S. or something like that. Right. Yeah. So, you know, it's just a data scientist crunching stuff. And I don't have it in front of me, so don't ask me anything about what those stats are. Okay. It made me think about some of the far-flung locales. I think we asked people last time to send us scene reports from far-flung locales. No one did. But we did.
    24:08
    We have evidence that people were at far-flung locales. We had new locations added in the Maldives. Do you know where that is? Nope, absolutely not. Where are the Maldives? That is an island chain off of the kind of southwest of India. Oh, okay. Yeah, sort of far off of it a bit. Interesting. Okay. Yeah, and it's like a series of atolls.
    24:41
    It's really cool to look at on a map because, you know, it's just atolls, so it's like sunken islands essentially with just the rim around them left. And there's a whole bunch of them, but they're all, you know, there's obviously residents that have lived there for many, many years, but then there's also really nice-looking resorts here and there. It seems like it would be a very difficult or a long journey to get there.
    25:13
    What machines? Sorry, I'm not supposed to ask any questions, but do you remember any of them? So it's Guns N' Roses LE Jersey Jack machine. Okay. And Led Zeppelin Pro. Cool. what's the name of the place that they're at it's called Jawakara Islands and it's a resort yeah cool you and I went to India once remember that
    25:45
    you bet I do we should go to the Maldives play some Guns and Roses that'd be awesome I'd love to go they have some really really good waves in the Maldives and it's a little controversial because some of the resorts will claim ownership of the waves and will basically prevent other resorts and locals from boating in to like the wave that breaks off their shore which is not a good
    26:16
    thing to do no one owns the ocean man yeah that's weird and preventing the locals there's some bad vibes in places there but it's also a very idyllic looking place um all right here's another this is another this is not actually part of the quiz but i'm making it a quiz uh another one far-flung locale and i don't know how to pronounce this the oland islands any idea where that is oh oh i didn't realize this
    26:49
    was like a formal quiz oh it's not but it just made me wonder if you know where these things are No, absolutely not. I would love to know where this place is, but I've never – the Maldives I had at least heard of. I don't know where. On Åland Islands? Yeah, this one surprised me. It was one of those ones where I was like – I looked it up, and you're zoomed in on a map, and you don't know where it is. And I zoomed out, and I just kept zooming and kept zooming. And I was like, where is this?
    27:19
    it's in Scandinavia and it's in between Finland and I should really come prepared and like have a map up. Okay. So it's in Scandinavia. Yeah. I guess it's part of Finland. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I looked it up. It's, it's in between Sweden and Finland. Anyway, it's a place that you never really think of, but then you look at it, it's kind of this beautiful looking Island chain. that's pretty big. A lot of islands. It looks like thousands of islands.
    27:50
    And there's pinball in there somewhere. Yeah, there's pinball. Makes you wonder, how'd that pinball get there? Who cares? I guess they sent it over on some freight thing. Yeah, boat. Boat's the answer. Yeah. All right, and the last two were Gibraltar and Serbia. Serbia, I definitely know where that is. I used to work with a guy from Serbia. Gibraltar Straits of Gibraltar I want to say that's Spain
    28:24
    somewhere near Spain I'm also thinking Morocco I think it's in between Spain and Morocco when you enter the Mediterranean it's the narrowest little part right there that's the Strait of Gibraltar and I looked it up and what's funny is that it should be Spain it looks like but guess what it's owned by Britain and it's just this teeny little
    28:56
    it's like the size of a city and it seems like they've retained ownership of it it's their land, it's British land and I wonder if they use it to exact a tax on freights that go by or something like that You think Britain's actively attacking ships that come through the Mediterranean? No, I said exact attacks, like charge freight's money to go through.
    29:28
    Exact attacks. Okay. Wow. Okay. Cool. I thought it was an English thing, but also thought it was in Spain. Yeah, you're right. That's great. Yeah, I guess I was right about one thing today. Okay. I actually have an actual quiz for you, though. What? Okay. I love quizzes. We've done quizzes on this podcast for a while. It's always my favorite part.
    29:59
    Go ahead. All right. So, you know, all that per capita stuff got me thinking. I actually made an endpoint for this guy. It was after the fact, though, but made an endpoint that lists how many machines per country are on Pinball Map. So I want you to guess the top five countries, not per capita or anything like that, just which top five countries that have pinball machines on pinball map. Okay. So I will, full disclosure, I pulled up just to see how many locations we had.
    30:34
    10,643 as of this record. um top five you said yeah some of these might be easy but you know okay yeah number one uh the united states of america yes okay number two uh canada yes okay number three oh australia yeah okay okay i just know they they joined pretty
    31:07
    early right but at least with us yeah um number three australia number four i'll go with france yes france are you serious yeah did i really get that right wow you're right i mean i guess just because i know france was really into pinball for a long time right yeah um number five i feel like I'm playing with house money now. I'll go with Japan.
    31:37
    No. What is it? Great Britain. Oh, okay. Close, though. I mean, geez, you got four right. That's pretty impressive. Thank you. Yeah. And then I think it would be too tough to guess the six through ten, but maybe it's fun to share. it's uh number six is germany number seven is finland finlandia number eight is italy
    32:09
    number nine is belgium number 10 is austria so uh europe europe uh okay next question How many countries does Pinball Map list Oh wow let see you pulled out the top 10 we covered europe earlier you mentioned five or four so there's at least 14 japan wasn't on there so we're up to 15
    32:43
    uh i'm gonna double that number because of south america bring me up to 30 and then because 30 feels low, I'm going to go with 35. Still low. We actually have 67 countries. Wow. Cool. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And what, you know, I was looking though, 21 of those only have one location listed. That makes you wonder if it's still there.
    33:13
    Yeah, I know. We should try to contact those 21 locations. Just email them or something. Call them. Phone calls are free nowadays, right? We could just call. Yeah. Although it would be sad to remove a whole country from the map if they don't have that machine anymore. I guess. I mean, the map doesn't really think or feel. It's just a mass of data, right? Yeah, that's true. I think and feel sometimes, though.
    33:44
    Yeah, me too. Me too. Oh, and here's another follow-up, I guess. Remember when you added that editing, deleting comments feature a couple months ago? Of course I remember. Okay, so then I kind of wondered, and this is just anecdotal information. I didn't crunch any numbers, but I wondered, are people using it? And it looks like yes. I'd say for every 20 comments that are made,
    34:15
    there's like one to three out of those were edits or deletions interesting i would be curious to hear how many of those edits happen within two minutes of the comment being created typos right right yeah yeah you know or is it like a month later where they edit a comment to say oh oh, this is fixed now or something. Or deleted within 24 hours because of regret.
    34:48
    Regret. Alcohol-based or otherwise. It would be cool to see. Regret deletions. Maybe. I do not want to promise a follow-up on that information. Yeah, I get it. Maybe I'll give it a shot. I haven't done a SQL query in a while. I enjoyed it. I always thought those were kind of fun. Map tech, map tech, map tech.
    35:20
    Next up, I thought we would talk, usually ask about site and app updates. I feel like in the last couple episodes, I wasn't super prepared for those answers. And it was tough, too, because episode nine was our first episode in like three or four years. So there was just too much stuff to list, too much stuff to look through. But now that we're doing these more frequently, it's easier to give a nice little status update of stuff we've done on the map.
    35:52
    Again, if you join the Discord or something like that, you can see our GitHub commits. because there's channels there where we just feed that stuff into. If you're ever curious, fix a typo and see our nice little commit changing that. And you can also ask me anything you want and get a response within 24 hours. All right. That's a guarantee. What's your handle on there? SSW.
    36:23
    I'm RyanTG on there. Okay. so one thing we did let's see oh yeah this is an interesting one so there's some folks on Mastodon contacted us and let me see if I could find folks from an arcade called Hopiakula Arcade in Europe and they post a lot of videos about
    36:56
    like working on their machines and Every day, every day they post videos showing their tech work and stuff like that and just talking about machines and things like that. And then they also travel around Europe using the map, looking for places to play. They want to know if they need to somehow find the money they need in that area or if they could just use a card or whatever the system is. So we thought we'd look into the possibility of adding that as some sort of like dropdown or something like that.
    37:29
    But I was like, oh, in the meantime, we can when you're you know, that's information that anyone can write in in the location description. And you can when you like submit a new location or when there's no location description in there and you go to edit that field, there's placeholder text. in both those situations that say, like, write a description, tell us the hours. And so I was like, oh, I could just, how about we have this placeholder text say,
    38:02
    tell us what sort of their money situation is at this place. And I was like, oh, that's a start. Then people will start populating that. It's not something you could search by or filter by or anything like that, but at least it's there in front of you. And I'd like to say that surprisingly people started typing this in, like especially when they submit locations, new ones. They're like, it takes dollars and coins and there's a coin machine there or it only takes cards or something.
    38:33
    So they actually read that placeholder text and do it. I think it's actually super helpful. I mean, it's frustrating when you go to a bar and there's no quarter machine. And then also you kind of want to know if there's the cards for the place. Like, I don't know what you call those things. Or tokens, too. Yeah, tokens. Yeah, actually kind of a cool idea to include that. Yeah, so I thought that was nice and encouraging.
    39:04
    Even without all the work that would be involved in adding, like, a specific dropdown exclusively for that, it's cool that people are starting to put that in. So, you know, you could do that, too. edit any location description put that in do you have a preference uh when you go to a location how you want to pay yeah i just prefer i prefer a coin machine and real quarters not tokens is my preference got it but you know i don't know that it's because i have like multiple
    39:42
    bags of tokens now that are for different places um i don't know i guess the aside i was going to think of is that like sometimes places give me tokens if i know places give you tokens well i mean there's one place near me that they're really nice and we were like selling stickers there and i actually wasn't accepting any money for the stickers i just said here's some stickers sell them and so then you know a few times i would walk in they'd just like hand me some tokens
    40:14
    and see i don't think they would want to like hand me quarters and that would be a little weird because they're they'd then they'd be giving me money that i could just like walk out with but uh that would be funny though they gave me quarters for the machine to just walked out with it yeah so you know it's guaranteed i'm gonna use those tokens at their place now so it's right yeah right what about you what do you prefer uh the same i i mean i i've heard that
    40:45
    quarters are kind of a pain for the owners you know because um with tokens you kind of it's similar overhead as quarters but you're sort of you've already got the person's money like they can't really walk out with the extra stuff yeah um but i hear tokens are a pain because other places tokens will work in your bar and then you're kind of like taking credits from them uh the thing i absolutely do not like are the cards uh those drive me crazy i mean i guess i
    41:20
    prefer cards over tokens but yeah anyway i'm just a quarter quarter guy what else have we added well one thing was this i feel like this is a long long time coming but uh you know the The Open Pinball Database, OPDB, has a big old list of machines, and we've always just maintained our own list. I mean, we put in their OPDB code key, whatever, on all our machines.
    41:51
    But we basically just said, like, we only list machines that have been added to places. and if there isn't a machine listed you can fill out a form or you could type it in on the website and we'll get a notification that it's a new machine and we can add it to the database and then it can be added to the location but after doing this for so many years I was like okay, at this point let's just stop this and let's just import all the remaining machines
    42:24
    from OPDB so I did it that was some SQL that was some fun SQL imported an additional 560 machines from OPDB which bumped up our machine database to be over 2000 machines did you listen to music while you were doing that? yeah I was probably listening to Bandcamp on my headphones, I mean it didn't take me that long though ok
    42:54
    This is a neat one. We get these locations that are in Europe and other places that have diacritics, like accent marks on some of the characters, like umlauts and whatnot. and it seemed unfair that if you're typing a search in, even if you're typing the word cafe and there's like an accent on the E, you don't want to type C-A-F-E and then not get a result in our little autocomplete
    43:24
    because you typed in the wrong type of E and it's like a huge hassle to do that E with the accent. So I did some work to handle those diacritics and without going into it, I did one way that just uses like a translate function that, you know, it matches like that diacritic letter to a non-diacritic letter. And then after that, with a lot of consultation from our active contributor, Squirrel, he mentioned, or maybe I looked this part up myself, I don't know.
    44:08
    But doing it through Postgres and using a Postgres extension called unaccent could just handle that on its own. You don't have to have some crazy translate thing going on, which was, you know, translate would be like creating kind of like a library of matching letters that if a new one showed up, you'd have to update it and update the code with the new matching letters, which is just not that sustainable. So this unaccenting strategy also involved indexing in the database.
    44:43
    And do you know what indexing is, or can you explain it? Or does it matter? Indexing. I think it matters. It's like if you have – oh, no. Index is a thing I've used a million times. It's like kind of a lookup table where you can say, if I ever want to use this field as a join or something like that, I kind of have a little cheat sheet that makes combining data from two tables way faster.
    45:14
    Yeah, it's interesting. It's stuff that I don't quite always understand because it's like, I'm like, you already have the data here in the field. why is making an index of it right next over there suddenly make access to that data quicker these are these things that i don't understand and not having quite the the background here um but um after that so that that's totally sped up the auto completes for auto completing like
    45:47
    location names or city names, it gave us like a 40% response increase doing that indexing with the unaccent stuff. Um, and then last week, last Friday or so squirrel added a trigram indexing. And I think I could kind of explain what that is, but basically like if a, if a name is, if a location name is ground control, it creates an index where it splits up the words ground
    46:19
    control mostly into sequences of three letters. So it'll be like G R O R O U, you know, et cetera, as these little sets of three letters. And it makes it so that when you start typing, and it's quicker to find matches, essentially, because, I don't know, some indexing magic. That's pretty cool. Like, it doesn't wait for you to type out the whole thing before it can use the index.
    46:49
    It has little snippets of indexes. Yeah, yeah. I've never heard of that before, but it makes sense and is cool. I actually had, during all this, like, Translate's diacritic stuff, I checked in with Drew Chandler, and asked him if he had any advice, and that was his advice. And we ended up using it. Like he said, use on accent, and I'd go with trigrams. Love that man. Yeah, that guy is always right.
    47:20
    So I think you'll notice that. I think people will notice if you're doing in the app or the website, typing in the search field where you type in a location name, I think you'll see that the results come up a lot quicker. I think it's like a really nice boost, and it seems to like relieved CPU usage and all this stuff too. I think it's like overall like a kind of substantial thing. Little design change on the site, changed how like pictures are shown.
    47:53
    That was it. Nothing really else to say about that. Just kind of, that's a hard thing to do design for. Let's see. Oh, another thing is like when people are suggesting locations, made it so there's no way for people to type in anything in the machines field. They have to choose a machine. So I added some like JavaScript thing called Select To, and it makes it so when you start typing in a machine name,
    48:23
    it auto-completes it, you select it, you could add more and more and more. This is just a website thing. and there's no way you can type in that field with some random junk, which is what people would do sometimes They paste in their list of machines from some other site and it isn formatted right so this is kind of dummy proofing that oh yeah i made an endpoint to show all the locations that were deleted in the past year because there's some services like
    48:59
    scorebit and pindigo that they retain you know the locations that we're just like no mercy on pinball map right yeah i mean if it's not there we clean it out yeah but you know they they keep them with those other services and they want some sort of record sometimes or it's like you know it's a lot of work sometimes to figure out if it's been deleted from pinball map so i did an So here's a quiz. How many locations do you think have been deleted from Pinball Map in the last year?
    49:36
    Wow. How many locations have been deleted in the last year? I'm going to guess... 150. no wow you're like you're flabbergasted yeah i don't know why uh 1605 oh my god 1605
    50:11
    yeah isn't that a lot like there's a lot every week it's a it's a huge amount of locations being added and then you know it's kind of a two steps forward one step back type thing is that paul abdul janet jackson two steps for two steps back we come together because opposites attract paul right is it paul yeah it is paul abdul with the duet okay yeah
    50:42
    um crazy any yeah any any other uh any you know i feel like i was kind of plowing through a lot of those items and not giving you as much room perhaps well i haven't really contributed anything i think the the one thing that happened behind the scenes which i find kind of funny uh google is doing some sort of flush on their store. I think the idea is they want to get rid of dead apps
    51:13
    or, I don't know, orphaned apps, something like that. So they told us you have to verify your identity through Google Play, which is like their app store, by a certain date, or they would delist the pinball map. So I, you know, okay, that's fine. I thought I did it right and then turns out I didn't do it right I had to do it a second time I had to upload a picture of my driver's license and send them a utility bill
    51:43
    I had to send that to Google which felt a little strange and then, I don't know the mechanical Turk looked at it and said, good to go Do you have the real ID in Oregon or is that just a California thing? We have the real ID, yeah. And if you don't have it by May of next year, you have to bring a passport to fly anywhere. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. It's the same process. You've got to get a utility bill and show some proof of this and that.
    52:19
    So it's kind of surprising. I don't get the logic that Google's playing with right there because can't they just immediately see that the app's not stale by the fact that we released an update recently? Maybe there's other stuff they're going after, too. I don't know. Like theft or, you know, I don't know what the phrase anymore is. Yeah, hijack. Someone hijacked an app or something like that. Yeah, or you have an app that just, like, steals data. I don't know. Anyway, the map was almost delisted.
    52:51
    What was I watching? I think I might have been watching Thunder in Paradise while I verified my identity. The first time you verified it or the second time? Second time. The first time, it was so long ago, it's hard to say what I was watching. I don't really have a lot of shows right now that I'm watching. You got any shows? No. Nothing right now. Yeah. I went through a long period of no shows, no video games either, but now I'm playing Baldur's Gate 3.
    53:24
    You know about this one? I mean, I know it came out, but that's all I know. It's really good. I mean, you and I used to play D&D together for quite a while. It's D&D. It's the same rules. They've somehow managed to have a video game that uses those rules. Cool. It's really fun. Is it the same third-person perspective that it was before on the other Baldur's Gates? It's like turn-based.
    53:54
    Yeah, turn-based. omniscient view of the thing. Anyway, that's what I contributed. I verified my identity. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, when I started making this list, I was like, oh, this is more stuff than I thought. And I left off stuff, too. But little bits here and there. Chip away. If anyone would like to talk in more detail about that stuff,
    54:25
    come on over to the discord server I'll respond within 24 hours Ryan makes no such promise no promises from him I'd be happy to respond on Ryan's behalf I'll give you those privileges ok thanks wait I think my phone's ringing ring ring I actually thought your phone was ringing
    54:57
    I was like man we're going to have to re-record oh wow your phone's ringing are you going to answer it no I'm going to let it go to voice ok that's fine ok I'll check later actually I'm going to check now we're in the middle ok fine check that voicemail Wednesday August 7th 2024 at 3.34pm Hey Ryan, it's Scott from our podcast. How are you? I'm fine. I am calling you today from Slim's in St. John's, Portland, Oregon.
    55:42
    And I moved away from this neighborhood, gosh, about a year and a half ago. And I can't seem to get away. Damn it. I can't seem to stop coming back here. I had to think about that. Slim's is great, though. If you are unaware, it's this, like, nice little cavernous bar restaurant place right in the middle of beautiful downtown St. John's.
    56:13
    Really good food at Slim's. That's the interesting thing here. Good burgers. I like it. I like Slim's. And I get my haircut up here. So I'm playing before my haircut is what's going on, since you asked. Who do they got? Godzilla, Jaws, and Dr. No. Jaws is currently off. Or I think I'd probably be playing that. Godzilla? I don't think I can play Godzilla anymore.
    56:44
    I think I'm done. It's a good game, but it's too present. Anyway, so I'm playing Dr. No and actually having a pretty good time for the first time. There's a girl on the back glass in a bikini. She's wearing a belt, too. I guess that's for a gun, so that makes sense. But somebody put googly eyes over her eyes, and I think that's pretty funny. So I'm really enjoying that.
    57:17
    Let's see. It's summertime now, so I do enjoy coming out or in from, like, a hot, scorchy outside to, like, a nice cold inside. That's always one of my core pinball memories are when you and me and our group of friends would go to the Shanghai Tunnel in downtown Portland, get our veggie burgers and play the really bad Indiana Jones game that came out.
    57:47
    Yeah, good times. Let's see. How am I feeling today? Feeling pretty good. Finally got a handle on sleep. I think I have some pretty good tips on how to fall asleep and stay asleep now, which has been sort of an issue for me for a while. So I feel well-rested, which I'm finding is pretty critical for most parts of my day. I never really gave much mind to sleep before, and now I pay a lot of attention to it. So it's really freed me up to be present and focused on things like Dr. No.
    58:25
    Yeah, if you're ever in St. John's, go swing by Slim's. You could do a lot worse. There's not a ton of pinball up here. So, yeah, come on over. Come on down to Slim's. Why are we arguing about this? All right, I'll talk to you soon. Hope you're having a great day. Love you. Bye. Oh, thanks for that message, Scott. Yeah, you got it. You know, I've never been to Slim's.
    58:55
    Really? You've never been to slums? No, I don't think so Interesting That's not a place that had ping pong for a little while, did it? You might be thinking of, what is it, Marie's? Marie's, a couple doors down They have ping pong there That's a place that had dubs for a while, that barbecue place Oh yeah I had another scene report that unfortunately didn't record properly.
    59:28
    It was in Seattle. I was on a business trip to Seattle. And I went to this hotel that has pinball in the basement. And they had that Beatles pinball where it's like, I don't know, it's called Beatles 60th. I don't remember exactly what it's called, but I think it's more kind of a rarer Beatles game. But anyway, the important part of this story is that it was this little tiny hallway in a hotel that had like four pinball machines.
    60:00
    They were all maintained really well. They had a Congo there also, which is cool. But what's notable is that it says barcade on it. It was like blah, blah, blah, barcade. I know. And they're like clearly flying under the radar because it's such a small thing that's just a room in a hotel. but I feel like if the people knew about it, you know, it'd be trouble. Yeah, they might know about it right now. Well, I hope I didn't.
    60:31
    Yeah, I don't know. It's just a sign, you know. Everyone makes signs. That's true. Everyone does make signs when you think about it. Yeah. I sometimes think about that Tesla song. I mean, that was a cover song, I think, but that band Tesla, signs, signs, everywhere there's signs. blocking up the scenery making my mind do this, don't do that can't you read the signs? I think it's like an old cover of a 60's song from a Sacramento band called Tesla
    61:02
    I keep thinking about that song off the top of my head I don't know what it's called but it goes lies, lies, lies, yeah that's like the chorus do you know the one? lies, lies, lies, yeah is it kind of like a dancey one? yeah it is okay i so all day i'm walking around with that playing in my head um for like months at this point wow yeah that's what it's like i mean are you like are you actually listening to
    61:33
    it too sometimes no i don't i haven't listened to that song in forever i have no idea why it's even in my head if you want to talk about it or if it's in your head hit me up on the discord server We can talk about that last within 24 hours. I will play that song and put a link to it in the Discord server. Okay. Sure. All right. I think that's a wrap. Yeah. Another podcast.
    62:03
    How do you feel about it? Rate it on a scale of one to five. You want me to rate it or you're asking the audience to rate it? No, I don't speak to the audience. Oh. I guess I do. I'm asking them to join us on Discord. No, they couldn't respond, right? So I'm asking you, please, if you don't mind, one to five. I think it seemed maybe a three and a half. Yeah, I hear you.
    62:33
    You know, podcasts, it's tough for me. When I listen back on these, I don't feel good about myself. It's tough to hear your voice. It's tough to hear your vocal tics, or I probably say, uh, a lot. And I swear I was going to not do that, and I didn't think about it once throughout this entire episode, so I probably did do it a lot. I don't know. I'm sure it's fine. And also people have said they can't tell our voices apart, so there's like a camouflage element to the whole thing.
    63:04
    Yeah. Right? Yeah. Who said what? Who knows? Here's what I like about this podcast. I want it to be pinball map news, and I want to talk about my feelings with you. That's really all. We can get those two things taken care of. Everything else is fine. People know what they're signing up for. You want to hear what happened on the map? You want to hear about how many machines were added from OPDB? This is your podcast. I promise a scene report next time. Oh, really? Okay. I would, you know, this is the last time I'll ask because it starts to get a little desperate.
    63:39
    But I would love for people to send in their own scene reports. I think that's when it truly shines. Yeah. And, you know, at the beginning of our blog forever ago, people were writing little scene reports, blogging about scene reports. And this takes much less work. You just have to talk for a couple minutes. talk into your into your phone it doesn't have to be professional it doesn't have to be long all you got to do is say where you are and how you feel about it that's all that's all this is
    64:12
    that's it i mean pinball is fun that's fine um but pinball the power goes out pinball is not going to be around anymore and you're gonna have to live with yourself so i would like to hear more about what that's like you know or don't it's it's your choice yeah do what you want okay well it's always a pleasure talking to you ryan um i'll see you on our discord server right yeah yeah
    64:43
    see you tomorrow good talking to you good talking to you see you tomorrow bye bye