All right, well, welcome to the blockade back room, where we just kind of, for those of you that used to listen to the former format of the blockade, I was known for going off on tangents, and then I'd get complaints saying, you're not talking enough about pinball. And then you'd write me in, and I'd go off on tangents with you, and we'd just tangent away, and then two hours would pass, and then we'd go, crap. Exactly, 45 minutes of no pinball, and people would be like, what the hell, man? So talking about TV shows and twigs and stuff. Yeah, it did get pretty random. Warning. The following contains little to no actual talk about pinball. In the comments section here, we just have Walter Koch says, as long as I don't have to listen to someone walking to work. Walter, here's the funny thing. So we have the ability to look at the analytics of the downloads and all that jazz. Jared's walk to work actually has more download requests than our regular podcast. That's right. Now, I don't know if that's just a matter of people that have yet to stop subscribing to the old feed as opposed to joining the newer feed, which, well, if you're listening to this, you know what the new feed is, don't you? It's Blockade Podcast on iTunes and Blockade Podcast on ShoutEngine. That's right. But, yeah, I found that very funny. I was like, holy crap, more people have requested downloads. And actually, the verified listens was still higher than what our regular podcast was. Oh, really? I think people just have a lot of old podcatcher subscriptions. I was one of them. I hadn't actually deleted my old subscription to the Pinball Blockade podcast, which is the old feed. So, yeah, I got it. I went, oh, okay, I should probably cancel that. Yeah, on the one hand, it's a bit disappointing that, you know, come on, people, listen to the real podcast. But on the other hand, I also kind of found it funny. And, hey, I'm one of those that specifically downloaded it just so I could listen to what you did. I didn't listen to the whole thing. I might have fast-forwarded through some sections. I actually said, what are you still doing here? You should go to the other feed now and not listen to this because it's going to be really boring. And all you're going to hear me is like puffing and panning as I walk up the hill from work. So, yeah, if people like that sort of thing, I can totally release more of those. I'm going to actually put them as a subscription service only, though. So you're going to have to back me on Patreon. Walking with Jerry. walking with Jared around random places and you'll hear random things. Today we will be walking through a butterfly garden. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, butterfly garden or some random thing. But yeah, I could totally do that if people want to pay for hearing me talk about crap. Because I could talk about crap lots. Warning. The following contains little to no actual talk about pinball. So I got to work on a new show this week. I got to go... HBO is doing Westworld, which is the... well, it's not a movie remake, but there was the movie Westworld with Yul Brynner and James Brolin. It was written by Michael Crichton and that's essentially Jurassic Park before Jurassic Park ever came to be. Anyway... With robots instead of dinosaurs. Yeah, with robots. or as they're calling in this show, hosts. But anyway, so I got to go do a day on that. And I tell you what, I have not been that dirty on set in a very long time. We were in this dirt that when you take a step on it, it just kind of goes poof. It's like that silt that just gets everywhere. plus we had horses and about 50 extras and uh there was a little bit of wind so this stuff was just everywhere and i've never had to do this before but every time they rolled the camera i had to use my air canister and blow off the front of the lens before slating i went through an entire air can that day um i got home my goatee was just like gritty and grimy it's just oh it's just and it was the dust was everywhere so that was an experience the other thing was they didn't break us for lunch so you know yeah you know 12 hour day no lunch break meal penalty city so what is what happens when you don't get a uh a meal break do you get like super extra mega overtime it's not overtime but what we do um so basically 12 minutes after uh lunch is supposed to be called you get your first penalty that's worth $7.50 go another 12 minutes so now you're a half an hour past now you get I think it's $10 another $10 on your paycheck $17 or something now go another half an hour after that and now it's $12 every single half an hour extra until the end of the day until you get properly broken which properly broken means sitting down having a half an hour and sitting down to a hot meal It has to be a hot meal. It can't be them providing a sandwich. Oh, right. Okay. A hot meal. So you guys get hot catered lunches every day on set? As part of the... If you're being given a half an hour lunch, yes. Otherwise they do what's called an hour walk away. In which case that usually happens when you're on stage. Yeah. And so it's, well, here's an hour. We're in the city. You can go do whatever you want for an hour and do that. But yes. Okay. So my paycheck, I should have an extra... I'll probably have an extra $100, $150 on my paycheck for one day of work. Jeez. That'll be an expensive charge for the production house doing that. Oh, yeah. Hang on. We're going to have to pay everyone about $130 extra. Probably 100 other people? No, we have about a crew of 60. Wow. now some people actually were able to go on given a break they were able to break some people but I'm in camera department we can't leave you know camera sound you're there you know if you leave then there's nothing going on in production so okay yeah I've heard of some movies yeah Dusty and Hungry well and then they did bring us a plate of food and now you're eating your food in the dust. So you're having your food with the garnish of dust. Delicious. Yes. But I have heard of certain movies that the entire movie they never broke for lunch. And, you know, to the tune of by the end of the film, you know, they paid out something like $3 million in meal penalties. Far out. Yeah. That's a lot of money. But anyhow, I guess depends on you know what's going on with the production if they're running behind three million dollars may not be that much when it goes to the box office or three million dollars may not be that much when they sell it you know so well and in this instance you know we on location and as soon as the Sun goes down we done so that that why they didn break us because it was like hey we going to get all the floor shooting Right Because we don want to come back to this location So they had to push on through. Yeah. At least you get rewarded for it, I guess. But yeah, it makes for a sucky day, not having anything to eat. I was going to say, right now, I can sit there and say, yeah, I got rewarded for it. At the time, I was like, give me some food. and here's what you don't even think about it was like i just want a bathroom break yeah true that won't even give you one of those well you could but unfortunately where our location was because it's supposed to be set in the west you know so you're not supposed to see any modern amenities right yeah the the uh portageons were parked you know call it 150 yards up this hill so it's going to take you five minutes to get to them and you know well it's downhill so then you know three minutes to get back down um but again it's hey do we have the time are we about to roll do i have the time can i run away real quick are you gonna need me to you know help you build with the camera and stuff you know i mean obviously if push comes to shove anybody will let you let you go but yeah yeah you know or you just duck behind a tree yeah been known to happen is the set usually male or is there a decent mix of male and female oh no most sets are predominantly male um except for in obviously hair makeup and wardrobe those are typically female um so therefore it wouldn't be that hard to you know take a quick slash behind a tree no one's really going to care? No, nobody's really going to care. For the most part, the women aren't really going to care either. It's like, hang on. I'm just going to take a leak. I'll be back in a minute. Not the most politically correct environment. Let's put it to you that way. Oh, really? I can imagine. Yeah. The personality types, you get there, and the gallows type humor that goes on, you know, you spend 12, 13 hours a day with the same people in the... You get a rapport, though. You get a rapport, plus in the semi-pressure environment that you're in, and then throw in the subject matter that you're usually dealing with. Again, my usual gig here is American Horror Story. Anybody that watched those episodes of the right now, yeah, knows it's not exactly corporate America going on there. No, not a lot of ties, and and white shirts going on in there. No. Not so much. Not so much. It would be a fun environment to work in, though. I enjoy, just strictly first, never the same thing twice. And I get to see things that people pay to see. And I just say that when I'm at Universal Studios working. We'll be on the back lot, and every five minutes, there goes a tram. They're waving, and you're sitting there on the set. People are paying to see you. Wow. Yeah. Okay. That's, yeah. They're actually still doing the studio tours there. Oh, yeah. All right. There you go. Cool. That's pretty sweet. Do you chuck them a wave occasionally if you're not doing a take? What do you mean chuck them away? No, chuck them away. Give them a wave as they pass by. Yes. We do the, frequently people do the, call it the Rose Parade wave. So it's the prom queen wave. You know, the figure eight. Yes. Yeah, yes. I'm doing the little, the queen's wave in the chat at the moment, which you may or may not be able to see. I don't know. Yeah. That's funny. Yeah, speaking of the same day twice, it's a little bit like that where I'm working at the moment. So I'm working for a company called Ladbrokes, which is an online gambling company. And when I started, I was coming on as a technical writer. And technical writers, for those who don't know what we do, we write user manuals and stuff like that. Anything that requires instructions for the end user, we're involved with. And that could be a printed manual, an online manual. It could be video tutorials. It could be marketing copy. So the stuff we all chuck as soon as we open up the box. yeah and then the stuff you go back online later for when you go shit how do i actually use this thing yeah that's why we have it online so um yeah the other day um i got called into an office and they were talking about a new feature that we released and um there was no public facing documentation for it and i thought i wasn't going to get a chance to to write any public facing copy all the stuff I do for LabRix's internal developer documentation and documenting the features internally so the devs know how to use it, all that sort of stuff. So when I heard that I was able to go and do a bit of front-facing stuff on the website, I thought, yeah, boy, I'm going to do that and get on it. And so I put my marketing hat on and wrote a whole lot of content for the feature, and it's now live up on the site. so it's pretty cool to actually see a little bit of stuff sort of publicly available and i'm sure that you probably get the same sort of satisfaction as well with your job you know seeing a a tv um series or a film that you've been involved in going yeah look i remember that scene that's cool i had a pan in that like it's good to actually see that right there's okay there's this movie called bubble boy uh jake gyllenhaal was in it and it was one of the first movies that I got to work on. And specifically, there is this one scene that I, whenever I watch it, the same thing comes to mind. It was election night when it was Gore versus Bush. And we had some people that were just tracking the stats and call it 10 o'clock at night, 11 o'clock at night, or whatever. Gore had more of the popular vote. And so people are like, oh, Gore won. Well, we were working an all-nighter. So come about three in the morning, it breaks that, no, it's indeed Bush is the one that won. And most film sets are also heavily in the States, Democratic, I don't know what that, we have Democrats and Republicans. So most film sets are fairly liberal-minded or whatever. And so it winds up being more people favoring Democrats. And they were so disappointed and just like non-believing that Bush won. And so when I would when we went to the screening of the movie and then when I watched it on DVD, that particular scene comes on and it's just like I don't even watch the scene. I just remember where I was set that day. It's very odd. and then I listened to the audio commentary and sure enough they talked about it in the audio commentary so I was like oh really did they I honestly stuck with the director too that's funny so with a certain scene in Westworld you will always be quite hungry after watching it right? oh that's the day I was starving yeah that's pretty interesting indeed yeah that was cool well now I should probably actually really for really real go and do some work because it's now 7 30 here in the morning on monday so it's time for me to log off the virtual world and log on to the real world cut my hair and get a real job so i do that now see you later everyone all right interesting enough his audio seemed to suddenly crap out at that same time Exactly yeah It was almost like his bosses were, you know, going, Jared, would you like to come to work now? Thank you. I was just checking if my girlfriend was starting to download something, but she wasn't, so it's fine again now. So it was Jared. Right. Hey, if anybody in the peanut gallery here wants to say hello to us, I'll take the chance and open up a seat. Just if you have something to comment. We haven't tried this yet, so I'd rather try it in the non-official podcast than the official podcast. Oh, here we go. Here's our first guest. Welcome, PinballWiz45B. What's up, dude? Oh, welcome back. Fine. How are you? Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. We can. I'm doing just fine. How are you guys doing? Ooh, peachy. So I managed to play a bit of Fantastic Four. Oh, yeah? After the podcast, I was like, darn, just remembered. It's not just about spelling modes. Go for modes and multivolves. The table seems to be incredibly balanced for the most part. The modes pay out decently. The multi-balls are decent as well. I mean, it's just like Portal. All the points and all the scores are relatively balanced. I was at least able to figure out how to light the mode, which thrilled me because Usually I can't figure things out on Zen, but yeah, hitting the... The Baxter building. Yeah, the Baxter building and that lights up the mission. But you crushed... I haven't played that much for the last two weeks, not as much as I would have wanted to, but you crushed my high score by about a factor of 10. That was like three playthroughs, Wanzo, come on. I had like 20 or something, and I don't know how you do that. I got like 500 million just now. Yeah. I think about 550, 540 million, and I'm stuck at, I think, 55 million. Yeah, I don't even know what my score is. I wasn't paying attention. Yeah. It's mostly the flame mode killing me. I don't know. It's just hitting the orbits, but somehow I'm obviously too stupid to do that, and I end up draining the ball trying to get it on the other flipper. I don't know. There's this technique that we learned from the forums. It's called the nudge pass. Have you heard about that? No. Say you have a ball trapped on the left flipper. Let that flipper go and nudge upwards. At the exact same time as you let go? Not in the exact same time. But as the ball rolls down on the flipper, you can nudge upwards, and the ball will hop up to the other flipper. And I'm trying post passes, which are way more complicated to do than on TPA. On TPA, I can do them. I don't know. Yeah, they don't work well on Zen tables. No, not as well as we do. There are only a few tables on TPA where they aren't ridiculously easy. I think big shot, for example, is a little bit more tricky, but on your standard Williams table, just let the flipper go, hit it again, whoop, other side. I've tried using the technique on real tables, and actually I've found it fairly effective. I mean, I can pray to TPI never to do, no, not mesh pass, but the post pass. Yeah. Any other Zen tables that you've been playing? No. I haven't had much time this week to play any of them. Instead, I'm battling my DVR for space because it's recording things faster than I can watch them. Like down to my final four hours of space. I come home and I'm like, okay, what half an hour can I kill off this thing so that I can still have more room? And in your show you're watching? well guy what am i watching well i get i watched no i watched scream queens for about half the first episode and then i tossed that to the floor and was like i'm done with that um i'm i am watching horror story uh i want you know what has really been really good this season is gotham um i'm quite impressed with the changes that they made and it's uh pretty interesting viewing they're dividing up into two seasons or two halves of the season so it'll be 11 or 12 episode first part and then they'll go on hiatus for a couple of weeks and then they'll do the other half and it'll be like a new story so right now it's Rise of the Villains but they're doing a really good job I mean because last season was very hit and miss I really don't like I really don't like Batman should I still start watching it? Well but here's the thing is batman's not in it ah okay because it's bruce wayne is only 12 13 his is discovering basically you're seeing why he would ever become batman in the first place in a much longer form than just oh they killed my parents you know this is you know how is he finding the bat cave and how is he gonna you know go about learning his skills that he has um but the the crux of what they focus on is Jim Gordon and he's just a detective at the moment. And they're building up like Penguin last season started off as just being somebody that was holding an umbrella for the head baddie and he's only just starting to get his group together. So that's why last season they were kind of doing Villain of the Week and Crime of the Week and now they realized that's not the story to tell and so now they're trying to do these long arcing stories. So much better on that front. I watched Walking Dead. I've got Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. recorded but I haven't watched it yet. Well I'm more than a season behind have to catch up on that. I hate watch it. Really? I don't really care for it but I feel I need to keep up with it just for the Marvel movies. But I don't think it's a very good show now. Well I I was genuinely surprised at the end of the first season, and I really liked that. It was kind of a little shock, maybe even, and I liked that. I can't remember when, but you told me that there are really a lot of inconsistencies in there, and I really didn't see them. I don't know that consistency so much as they have to be shoehorned. That first season especially was hampered by being shoehorned into, they couldn't create their own stories. They had to fit in with what was already planned in the Marvel Universe and have to be timed out with it, as opposed to then when they had Agent Carter on, and I watched that. Well, Agent Carter didn't have any of those issues. They could create their own things because it was all taking place in the 1940s. So it was much more watchable of a show They gotten better They got better with it last season But the problem that I have with a lot of these superhero shows is that they can They don't have the budget to do what the movies can do. And so there's this huge gap. And you almost have a hard time believing that they're in the same universe. And there's only so many times you can hear about them talking about what Thor did or talking about what Captain American did. And it's like, well, yeah, I want to see him pop in, but we're never going to have that happen. yeah that's that's why something like uh gotham or maybe um daredevil worked better i think right where it's a much more contained area yeah yeah yeah and they're not going for the well especially with gotham they're not they're not playing up the superhero element it's not about car chases and explosions or whatever it's you know about petty crooks it's i think almost the same with Daredevil. Well, he's more capable than anyone who can see, although he's blind. But still, the stuff he does is not that much over the top as Thor or Captain America or any one of the Avengers, actually. I'm also recording Fargo, but I'm holding onto it and not watching it because I want to watch it in one fail swoop because last season was just brilliant and i and i desperately wanted to do that last season but i couldn't wait to watch the next episode so so this season i didn't even start i didn't even start watching i'm just like okay i'm gonna wait until there's about five of them and then i'll just Ed Boon plow through i watched the first episode of the first season and it was brilliant and i thought to myself that i had to binge watch it too yeah and then i haven't done that yet well there is the problem with like i still haven't finished hannibal and i love hannibal but i still haven't finished watching it um partly because i can't watch it until my kid is asleep there's a lot of crap on my ddr and the other problem was that we got um like hbo free for a weekend so then i wound up downloading like five movies those take up a lot of space i just watched The Maze Runner last night, which was, meh. I hate movies that all they're doing is setting up the next movie. It's like a trilogy planned before the first take is even shot. Well, yeah, because it's based off of a young adult novel, and there's a whole series of them. And it's like, no, I want, wrap up your story. Like Hunger Games, for example. Well, Hunger Games actually at least wrapped itself up the first two. It wasn't, this one it was just like hey we got out of this section of the maze look more maze oh great end of movie thanks yeah that's kind of those what my viewing habits have been as of late we started watching heroes reborn because i still think that heroes could have been brilliant but they totally destroyed it with the second season i never liked the original heroes so i wasn't and even waste my time. Well, it's not really bad, but it could have been much better. And once again, I think it's due to a show, a TV show not having the budget you need to really show all the special effects you need to have cool superhero powers. I am really looking forward to X-Files, just seeing what they can do with that. I'm not even sure if I watched the second movie. have to brush up on what has happened to Mulder and Scully the last two years before the new season. Oh, I am so lost as to what... I don't even remember the last three or four seasons of the show. But I enjoy the characters and everything, so that's why I'm just like, hey, you bring back for six episodes, that's awesome. That's how I feel about Twin Peaks. I desperately wanted to work on that. If only I'd gotten the phone call. I was pretty stoked, though, because I think I mentioned it last week, Machen and Mick was on Horror Story filming a scene. So I was like, ah, look! Look, she was on Twin Peaks! She was so much younger then! Have you watched the old show once again? I watched it maybe two years ago, three years ago. Okay, I tried to watch it maybe a year ago, and it's so darn slow. Yes, when you know what's happening. It's a very different TV. I mean, yeah, it's definitely a slower paced show, but I think the first time you ever watched it, that was perfect. You don't get what's happening, but it's happening slow. Right. But now that you know what's happening, you're like, well, come on, hurry up and get to it. Why are these people so tense? Or you're like, well, when's Bob show up? And then you realize that Bob doesn't even show up for the first season at all. Not like, oh, yeah, that kind of sucks. Oh, well, I don't know. I'm out. I'm like, what else do I have to talk about? I don't know. There's no good food I've eaten. There's nothing brilliant going on. No, I don't have a good topic to go on with. Yeah. So that's why this is the open-ended blockade back room where we have no idea what's going to happen and no idea when it's going to end. But if this will be a regular thing, I'll try to think about it before the real show starts so that maybe I can add something. You know, it's just... It's the repository for things that people didn't want us talking about in a pinball podcast. That and our shorter time format, the half an hour time format. I oftentimes feel like we're jamming as much as we can into that without even having much time to comment on the pinball aspect of things. So, you know, this is a place to breathe, to relax. That's all. And no switch I have not worked with David Lynch. I wish. Anyway, yeah, I think I'm going to close this down. Thanks for listening, folks. Yeah, maybe this will happen next week. Maybe not. I don't know. If you want to get on air like PinballWiz45B did, though, certainly come check out the Blab.im recording session that we do every Sunday at, well, I don't know. Now the time change is going to be I was going to say 1.30pm Pacific, but I think it's going to be 2.30pm Pacific now. Or 12.30pm. Yeah, I'm not sure. I don't know which direction it's going to go. Anyway, early afternoon. We set up the session in Blab and you can subscribe to it and then obviously you'll hopefully get notification, although Bonto apparently didn't. But it's It should be an hour earlier because we already ended Daylight Saving Time from yesterday to today. It was an hour earlier for me this week. I'll take your word for it. I was punctual, but I didn't know how to get to you guys. See, this is why I leave Steam open and then you can message me and I can go, get the hell in here! All right, gang. Yeah, that's it. We'll chat with you all later. Bye-bye. Auf Wiedersehen.