Another successful year. Had a lot of fun. That was busy. What a wonderful facility, too. I think the Saturday there were like five or six birthday parties going on, but it was separate to the pinball area. It's just this huge facility. I can only imagine how it's hopping in the summertime, but it was nice to go there in November, see you and some other great players, Bill Mason, Kaylee Campbell, and Eric Stone, I think, was there, and so many others. Yep. You've had some big news over the last little while, haven't you? Yes. So as of almost a month ago, we went public. I am now on the IFPA Women's Board of Directors. I'm so proud of you. I think the first time I saw you, I think it was Chicago at the women's event. Not this past year, but the year before. And it was the first time we got to chatting. And look where you are now. I mean, I know you're very, very busy. You run all kinds of tournaments. And now you're on the IFPA Women's Board. That's spectacular. It's been an honor to be nominated, an honor to ask. And it's been good. I'm having a lot of fun so far. Do you still have time for the Triad Pinball Twitch stream? Sort of. So I haven't been playing a whole lot. I've had some medical things since August, so it's not been a lot of playing. I've been doing a lot more admin. But just today, I confirmed with the hosts of the state championship that we will get to stream that this year. Perfect. Where is that? That will be at level 256 in Asheville. That's one thing I didn't realize until I was talking to you and to Kaylee and to Bill and others, just how big of a scene it is in North Carolina. There's pinball everywhere. I just figured it would be in a couple places I knew of, Abari and Flippers, but my goodness, there are so many cities that just have big, big pinball areas. For sure. And it's one of those things, too, that at least around the Triangle and I'm sure in other parts of the state, you look to host somewhere and there's five machines here, there's five machines down the road, there's three machines right around the corner, And there's just a lot of these little spots that you may not even necessarily know or be able to run a tournament at. But there's pinball everywhere. It's just amazing. It's truly a blessing. Well, I know you're going to get a lot more people into pinball. And now that you're on the IFPA Women's Advisory Board, you're certainly going to provide a voice that is knowledgeable when it comes to pinball and being inclusive. It's extremely important, and we can't thank you enough for what you're doing in North Carolina, and now really on a global scale. That is the goal, and we certainly have a lot of plans, inclusivity and growing the scene, and I'm looking forward to it. Sammy, all the best health-wise, and I hope you have a wonderful holiday season and New Year's, and hope to see you soon. Thank you so much. We'll see you next time. Our next caller, our next guest, about an hour away from Seattle, we go to Washington State, Aaron Davis. Hey, Aaron, how are you? Oh my gosh, it's Saturday night and we're talking on the internet. This is awesome. It's not like the radio show, but it's similar in the way that it was my favorite part was actually talking to, in that case, the listeners and maybe they had some requests for this and that, but you never felt like you were alone. And it's weird when you do a podcast. If I were to just talk by myself, I would feel alone, but because I always have a guest or a co-host on Final Round, I'm never alone. So thank you very much, Aaron, and to all the other guests that come on Pinball Profile throughout the year, I appreciate it. But as far as you, I know I saw you in March at TPF. In fact, Marty Robbins was just on. We were just talking about the fast pinball booth and being able to have Haggis there. That was very nice. But what a year for you. I just was one of the judges at Expo for the homebrew section. My God, did the homebrew people love fast pinball. It's a blast. I mean, like getting together at those shows, you know, I think that a lot of us are all looking for something creative to do with our time and stuff. And homebrew pinball has brought people all over the place, all together, around this niche of a niche of a niche of a hobby, I guess, and seeing what people build and create is a blast. And then you get to the show. You don't even need to say anything. You can just see. We can look in each other's eyes and go, I know what it took to get here. And it's not just the engineering and the coding and the art design, everything like that, but negotiating time off, you know, day jobs and away from families and all that kind of stuff. It's a massive undertaking to get a homebrew game to a show. And I think that's one of the things. You get to the show like Expo there, there's a cluster of tables out in front, and most of those tables were filled with just all of us just kind of sitting there just soaking it all up. Our fast booth was just on the other side of the homebrew place, and we were talking about all the people over there playing and having fun. One of the things that I said was, of all the games there, the Battle Stations game that was there, the two-player head-to-head game, I didn't even know it existed until I got to the show there. And it's built on Fast, which was super cool. But what I love most about that one is from our booth, I could see one of the players looking our direction, and they were smiling and laughing the whole time. So it's just great to see when people get out there and they see the homebrews, And then they see, like, oh, my God, I think I could do this. And then seeing all the camaraderie and stuff that comes around from that. And, yeah, this year was even cool with more of the commercial games that people are starting to build now with Fast. It's not just like, oh, Fast, those Humber guys. It's like we built this stuff commercial grade from the start. And so now seeing with Tagus, with Barrels of Fun, and Pedretti and the guys that we're working with on all these projects, seeing these games come out in a commercial format just warms my heart. You mentioned that battle game I was playing with Mark in the city who made Nightmare Before Christmas. And I said, okay, how does this work? And boy, was that ever fun. I just kept going back to it over and over again. You also mentioned Haggis and Barrels of Fun. Boy, good year for you for that because, I mean, that Barrels of Fun, first of all, we talked about Haggis earlier with Marty Robbins. But Barrels of Fun had no idea that came out of the woodwork. David Van Ness did a wonderful job with that. and the lineup, as you saw at Expo, to play Labyrinth was just a real showstopper. In fact, I think it won an award, too, for best booth at Expo. Yeah, something like that. You know what was funny is, like, we got there, and, of course, like, Dave Beecher, my partner here in FAS, like, we got there, and we walked in, and the booth was set up, the Barrels booth, but there was just the games and boxes. So we were, like, goofballs, like, taking selfies with these cardboard boxes, like, oh, my God, this game is here. This is amazing. And, you know, we got to go over there and play and stuff, and we're looking at it. strictly from an engineering standpoint. As cool as the game is, we were there eager at the end of the night when they turned the power off to the place. We wanted to open the doors and touch coils and see that these coils are not burning hot. We did something right. But my favorite part of that booth was, like you said, we would just stand there like flies on the wall. And I didn't even realize for the longest time that we'd walked to the end of the aisle and looked back towards the back of the venue to where people were lined up to play. I didn't realize that the line was going straight back. It looked like it was two people deep, but it was actually going towards the back of the venue. And it was cool to watch because, I mean, as people would play, they'd turn around and as they're walking away, they were smiling and kind of laughing and stuff because I think that the little fiery there was talking crap to them as they drained balls and stuff. And I just love seeing that joy because I know how hard all those people worked to make that game as great as it was. And when this game got to finally come out it had been secret for so long In fact I remember one time I was talking to Rob Burke and we on the phone and he goes hey your friends at Barrels of Thunder are coming to the show And I like he couldn see me but I ghost white Like, I didn't tell him this. I didn't say the name of the company. It was the first time I'd heard the name of the company uttered by anybody that was not like us or them. Of course, my response was, there's lots of people bringing really great things to Expo this year. And just let it roll off. But man, like, it was really great to see everybody there just beaming with all the hard work that is. And I think that that's just the thing about pinball. It's a cliche now, making pinball is hard, but it is really hard. There are so many moving parts and so much it takes to get there. And that's why seeing people get any game to a show and have it be playable is an enormous feat. And again, like barrels, this is their big reveal there, and it was great to see. Well, you also must have saw a great result, too, in your neck of the woods, too, at the Northwest Pinball and Arcade Show in Tacoma, the pin dev con event yeah tell us what happened back in june so this was kind of a an idea we've been kicking around for a while to do this pin dev con thing and the idea was we go to these expos every year and we go to you know all these different pinball shows and there's always that time spent in a loud venue kind of shouting at each other back and forth trying to hear something in these really loud halls and then there's the other extreme where it's you're at a in a presentation space and you're up on stage and you're telling stories and stuff like that. And what we always found was people were looking for something in between. You know, they wanted to hear the stories in a place that's not super loud and annoying, but also be able to ask some deeper questions. You know, they want to see what adjusting debounce settings on switches actually does to the gameplay or learning what it takes to actually send some commands to some fast forwards and build a game and make it run. And so the pin DevCon really kind of came out of like a, could we make this work? And Brian Madden got all of his camera gear together. And we set up this little theater space with the idea being, hey, we're at least a little further off the beaten path of the floor. But with the idea that like, we could tell people who are chatting with us in the booth, asking questions and say, hey, you know, come back at four o'clock, like Dave's going to be standing up there doing a walkthrough of what it's like to put a fast retro board into a I think it was a whitewater and start writing code against it in real time. Let's just give some people some more space to have a little more in-depth experience. And so it was kind of a perfect concept this year. And I think that next year, what we really hope to be able to do is work with, you know, different parties and stuff like that to maybe have some little breakout sessions where it's like, hey, there's a programming track. And if you come in at like 10 o'clock on Saturday morning, bring your laptop, we'll give you some code demos that you can download in advance, but then come in and tinker with some stuff and then walk over and plug it into a pinball machine and see what your code does running on that pinball machine. I think that'd be super cool. What a year for you. So much of what we do is always undercover and quiet and stuff like that. And this year, we got to go around and just kind of stand back and look at what everybody's created with our product. And there's more coming. Obviously, we're not on camera looking over at a project that a whole bunch of us are working on with groups all over the world right now. That'll be revealed sometime next year. And I can't wait for people to see it because I think it's so freaking cool. Keep up the great work. And thanks very much, Aaron. All right. Have a good night. So wrapping up this Saturday night pinball party, if you will, on Pinball Profile, we've gone from A to Z or in Canada A to Z, and we go to AZ. Alan Zuckerman joins us right now from just outside of Toronto in Thorndale. Hey, Alan, how are you? Great, Jeff. Thanks for having me. How are you doing? So a lot of people may or may not know Alan. He's certainly kind of a little bit of a local legend in the Toronto area because he has found later in life how much he loves pinball. And you can see him do his videos on Facebook and Instagram. And you have just caught the bug, my friend. I sure have. I just finished my 89th tournament since January. So I'm totally addicted. When did you start playing tournaments? Actually, I started December 29th of last year. I found Maple Pinball, Shane Jackson, online, and I had no idea that even tournaments existed. And now I realize through all the different apps that there are tournaments everywhere, every night, almost all over the world. Well, that's definitely the case, and you certainly get them in, whether it's at City Pinball at the Great Cabin Fever in Toronto. You mentioned Maple. I know you do stuff with the Greater Toronto Pinball League and other leagues, and you were a guest of our Ontario Open recently. And are you going to do more of this in 2024? I'm not stopping. As long as I can get out and do this, I find it just, you know, whether I win or lose, it's just I can't even explain the feeling. When I was a kid, my dad had arcades and I played, but I think I got the bug later on in life that I just really got into a lot of the older games and, of course, the newer ones, but it's just fantastic. I love it. As much as I can go, I'm there. We were talking with Julie Dorsters earlier tonight and... Oh, I missed. I was supposed to go this afternoon. They were playing... In London. Yes, and unfortunately, I couldn't get out. Hopefully, I will next time. We were talking with her, and she mentioned the same thing. It doesn't matter win or lose. I mean, obviously, you try to win, but it really doesn't matter. It's getting to play games maybe you've never played before, learning games and the people. And you're a real people person, I've noticed too. But it's just as much as the people as the games. I never get out to talk to so many people. We have the same thing in common as pinball and it's fantastic. Tell me about your father running arcades. I mean, I knew that side of it, but that for something like me, if my late father was into pinball, I probably would have got into it at a younger age. But what was it like when you were a little kid around these machines? Well, it was great, but punishment for us were cleaning playfields. Oh. So we used to go in the arcade, and when they used to close it around 11 at night, we used to have to clean the machines. But, of course, when my dad disappeared, we'd end up playing. So things like Captain Fantastic and Jack's Open and a lot of the godly wedgeheads back in the 70s that came out. And it's funny how even now these games appeal to me more than anything else. So running an arcade, machines break down. Your father or somebody else would have had to fix these. Did you ever get into that? Oh, I used to change coils. I still know how to use a soldering gun, and that's what we had to do. Cleaning a lot of contacts, troubleshooting those games back in the EM games were very different than the ones nowadays. Yes, you can move a machine over and move them around, and all of a sudden one's not working because it was moved. But we've learned ways to troubleshoot them and get them working as good as possible. With 89 tournaments so far this year, that's a lot. You're always out playing pinball, but you get to play pinball at home too, don't you? I do. Well, I did at one time. I had Space Odyssey and Noel from Maple let me rent for a month the Addams Family, which actually is the best thing that could have ever happened to me, only because my wife was always upset that I was out going to play pinball. But after that machine disappeared after a month, you know, she said to me, I get it now. Let's go look for a machine. And I told her, yes, well, we're not going to get one machine. We're going to get a few machines. So I'm starting to build up a collection slowly and hunting around. Just came back from Montreal two weeks ago. I was looking at it. It happened fantastic. I know it's not a great game, but the nostalgia. I like it. It's the sound of the game, and Captain Fantastic is a great game, but it wasn't as popular as I thought it would be, but it's just the back glass, the blue play field, the sounds, the bells, and the ding, you know, just the sounds that you just don't get on the new games like you do on the old ones, unless, you know, they're made up. But it wasn't in the shape I thought it was in, so I'm still looking around, but I think I have a list of what I want to get. I definitely am in love with the Twilight Zone. That was always my all-time favorite. Love Evel Knievel. It was the first EM machine, the first electronic machine that my dad had in the arcade. And people used to line up like crazy for that. And, of course, Godzilla's Rush.