Journalist Tool

Kineticist

  • HDashboard
  • IItems
  • ↓Ingest
  • SSources
  • KBeats
  • BBriefs
  • RIntel
  • QSearch
  • NName Review
  • +Health

v0.1.0

← Back to items

#04: Map Or Die

Mappin' Around with Scott and Ryan·podcast_episode·1h 5m·analyzed·Nov 17, 2018
View original
Export .md

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.030

TL;DR

Pinball Map hosts discuss app development progress, tech challenges, and interview a pinball technician.

Summary

In this casual episode of "Mappin' Around with Scott and Ryan," the hosts discuss personal updates (illness, nearby wildfires), progress on the Pinball Map app 2.0 rewrite in React Native, technical challenges with Android compatibility and their own map tile server migration, and feature highlights. They interview Beth (the lead developer) on her progress and mindset, share Patreon supporter thanks, include a creative poem about draining a pinball machine, present location/machine statistics, and interview Elijah, a pinball technician, about his background and repair work.

Key Claims

  • The Pinball Map app 2.0 is a complete rewrite using React Native, approximately 60-70% complete

    high confidence · Scott discussing progress with Ryan on Map Tech segment

  • Pinball Map's map tile server launched without HTTPS certificate, causing it to fail; needs SSL certificate to work properly

    high confidence · Ryan explaining server infrastructure issues and technical details

  • Google Maps API changes have caused millions of embedded maps on websites to break with 'development purposes only' messages

    high confidence · Scott noting Ryan's previous prophecy coming true regarding Google Maps API enforcement

  • The Pinball Map currently tracks 5,790 locations and 18,409 machines across its database

    high confidence · Ryan citing stats pulled from the system last Thursday, looking back 30 days

  • In the last 30 days, 980 machines were added and 738 removed from the Pinball Map

    high confidence · Ryan presenting 30-day statistics

  • Beth and the team discovered several Android-specific compatibility issues during app development, primarily related to default styling and z-index/overflow rendering problems

    high confidence · Scott and Ryan discussing Android issues in Map Tech segment, with follow-up interview with Beth

  • Ghostbusters is the most-located pinball machine on the map with 570 machines, followed by Star Wars and The Walking Dead

    high confidence · Ryan presenting top 10 machines on location statistics

  • Elijah worked as a pinball technician for approximately two years, doing route maintenance several times a week alongside a day job

    high confidence · Elijah's interview segment discussing his technician background

Notable Quotes

  • “Well, the good news about these things is they end, right? Like, I'll play the game, it'll be great, I'll beat it, and then I'll be right back to the pinball map.”

    Ryan (discussing Red Dead Redemption 2) @ early in episode — Shows dedication to Pinball Map project despite personal gaming interests; humorous commitment statement

  • “I have been having a great time doing this. I love working on the pinball map.”

    Beth @ Beth interview segment — Developer enthusiasm and positive sentiment about the project despite challenges

  • “I think that's really exciting... people will actually be using [the app once it's rolled out].”

    Beth @ Beth interview segment — Indicates motivation for completion and anticipated user impact

  • “So that's definitely on the list of things to worry about right now... The big thing recently was that we have several ways of looking at the app as it is now on iOS devices. We have a lot of Android concerns at this point.”

    Beth @ Beth interview segment — Highlights current technical priorities and cross-platform challenges

  • “Stay tuned, but be patient too. Don't be a jerk about it.”

    Scott and Ryan (closing app discussion) @ toward end of Map Tech segment — Community management and managing expectations for release timeline

  • “I didn't even get to touch the ball. It's not fair. I shake the machine in frustration. SLAM TILT!”

    Daniel B.O. Mahoney (poetry reading) @ poem segment — Creative community contribution; captures universal pinball frustration humor

  • “I've been playing an entire game that I wasn't actually playing [before learning about competitive pinball strategy].”

    Elijah @ Elijah interview segment — Common entry point story to competitive pinball; discovery of depth beyond casual play

  • “I'm not very good at this stuff [AWS infrastructure management]... it's been hard to pick up the computer... if you have any problems at all, forget it. You can't Google anything.”

Entities

ScottpersonRyanpersonBethpersonPinball MapproductElijahpersonHannahpersonDrewpersonGround Controlvenue

Signals

  • ?

    product_launch: Pinball Map app 2.0 approaching beta phase; estimated 60-70% complete; planning to beta test with admins and Patreon supporters before public release

    high · Scott: 'I want to get like our admins and our Patreon supporters, see if they want to beta test.' Discussing milestones for nearby activity and saved locations features before beta.

  • ?

    technology_signal: React Native cross-platform development encountering Android-specific styling and z-index/overflow issues; iOS development progressing smoothly

    high · Scott: 'we discovered some Android issues... defaults basically like an example would be on Android like an input box... would have a default underline.' Beth confirms Android concerns are on the list.

  • ?

    product_strategy: Pinball Map migrating from Google Maps to Mapbox/self-hosted tile server to reduce costs and increase control; server infrastructure work in progress

    high · Ryan: 'we cut the tie with third-party map services and pointed the map at our own map tile server... we're spinning up our own server, we're putting it out in AWS.'

  • $

    market_signal: Google Maps API enforcement causing widespread breakage on small business websites (bowling alleys, cafes); many sites now showing 'development purposes only' warning

    high · Scott: 'a lot of sites that use Google Maps like they embedded Google Maps... most people on their own site now have a message over their US maps that say, for development purposes only.'

  • ?

    operational_signal: Pinball Map tracking significant growth: 5,790 total locations, 18,409 machines; 980 machines added and 738 removed in last 30 days

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.196

0:00
Okay, so it's just two guys talking. How are you doing, Ryan? Hey, Scott, I'm doing great. Are you really doing great, though? You seem like you've been sick. Yeah, I have, I mean, do people want to know about the three canker sores in my mouth right now? I don't, I didn't know how detailed we wanted to be, but you and I have both been sick, right? Yeah. For weeks. Yeah. Yeah, I've been sick for like one week now. Do you ever get sick and it's a little more than usual and you wonder why, like what you did to deserve it? I usually am pretty good at finding external things to blame, like coworkers that are sick and coughing for days or someone on the bus that was sitting behind me and coughed a bunch. It's, yeah, I usually could find blame and I don't blame myself. Do you carry around that goo, the alcohol? No, no, I think I'm going to start doing that though. You know, I'm a little, I'm not like a big public pinball guy, but are those like ubiquitous at tournaments? It seems like people would really want to use that stuff.
1:32
Uh, I'd say you'd think they would, but I'm guessing it's not ubiquitous. I haven't been to a tournament in about a year.
1:40
Um, maybe the, maybe the scenes changed since then and now everyone has them dangling from keychains. That would be a good pinball map promotional item. Pinball map branded hand sanitizer. Yeah, I bet we could go to Alibaba or whatever and get those custom made. Oh my god, that's going to be so good. I feel like that's a practical thing to have. I was at Ground Control a few weeks ago and I saw that they put in dispensers, or at least I hadn't noticed them before. And I thought, wow, what an amazing feature of this location. And I put my hand out, hit the little switch, nothing, empty. Ah, drained. Yeah. Well, that shows there's a demand, I guess. Yeah, wow, yeah, that's a positive spin. Aside from being sick, what else have you been up to? There's a humongous fire right near us, so we've been inside the whole weekend because We're not going to expose Hannah's little lungs to the bad smoke. So we've just been kicking back inside, playing with blocks, uh, I don't know, reading the news about the fire in Malibu, and hoping for the best. Man. So. I mean, is there a chance the fire will reach you? No, I don't think so. No, definitely not. We're in like two mountain ranges away from that and it would have to burn a lot of city to get to us. I see. Okay. Yeah, so, but it is absolutely crazy how fast that thing spread and went all the way down to the beach. And it started at this place called Rocketdyne, which is where they used to test technology for nuclear reactors. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi.

Ryan @ discussing server challenges — Honest admission of technical friction and infrastructure complexity; relatable developer struggles

React Native
technology
Mapboxproduct
AWScompany
Google Mapsproduct
Wizards World Arcadevenue
Daniel B.O. Mahoneyperson
Visual Studio Codeproduct

high · Ryan presenting 30-day and total statistics from Pinball Map database

  • ?

    community_signal: Growing Patreon supporter base with 21+ new supporters in recent period; community actively contributing names and content

    medium · Ryan thanking 21 new Patreon supporters by name; noting high frequency of names 'Mark' and 'Robert' among supporters

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: Ghostbusters is the most-located pinball machine on the Pinball Map with 570 machines, followed by Star Wars and The Walking Dead

    high · Ryan: 'There's 570 Ghostbusters on the map... You'd think it was Adam's Family... but it's Ghostbusters.'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Pinball Map development team includes Scott (design/styling), Beth (primary developer/programming), Ryan (backend/infrastructure), Jordan (DevOps), and Drew (graphic artist)

    medium · Credits given during episode to team members and their roles in app development

  • ?

    content_signal: Podcast featuring community creative contributions including original poetry readings (Daniel B.O. Mahoney poem about pinball experience)

    medium · Full poem reading included in episode; demonstrates community engagement with podcast content

  • ?

    venue_signal: Pinball venues (like Ground Control) adding hand sanitizer dispensers; evidence suggests demand for hygiene infrastructure at pinball locations

    medium · Scott: 'I was at Ground Control a few weeks ago and I saw that they put in dispensers... And I put my hand out, hit the little switch, nothing, empty.'

  • ?

    manufacturing_signal: Pinball Map planning to handle more data on dev server for broader beta testing across regions beyond LA, Portland, and Bay Area

    medium · Scott discussing beta test data limitations and need for live data expansion to test with broader geographic coverage

  • ?

    operational_signal: Pinball technicians often work nights and weekends on route maintenance while maintaining day jobs; typical technician tenure measured in years of part-time work

    medium · Elijah: 'held... wasn't doing it full time... a couple times a week I would go out and help maintain Route Pinball... did that for two years or so off and on.'

    • 4:11
    It'll probably turn out that it was like a SoCal Edison power line that shorted out or something like that. That's my guess. But it's a little worrisome about all the like if there's like nuclear fallout from bad stuff burning and I don't know. Yeah. Man, I got a lot of stuff I still want to get done. That'd suck to get taken out by a nuclear weapon triggered by a forest fire. I know, we gotta release the app still. Like, that would suck if we couldn't get that out before we die. I guess. I guess, yeah. It would be cool to die right after it comes out. You're not prioritizing that? So, what have you been up to? Red Dead Redemption 2. In fact, every moment of this podcast is me filled with resent that I'm not playing it right now. I know, I'm sorry to say. You couldn't put your guy on autopilot and just like be mining stuff or something while you're talking? You can put him on autopilot when you're traveling between locations, but if you get ambushed or something along the way, you're in a bad spot. It's just a really good game. I mean, take this opportunity of the podcast to see us as human beings and not just pushers End I've thought about all the things I could do with Clark next to me that wouldn't be totally sketchy, but it's just too random. Like, I'd be fishing and then some rival gang would start shooting at me and Clark would wonder why all of a sudden I was bleeding. Oh. Yeah, so that's what I've been up to. The good news about these things is they end, right? Right? Like, I'll play the game, it'll be great, I'll beat it, and then I'll be right back to the pinball map. Where I put my feelings into. Yeah, that'll be great. I'm glad you're enjoying the game. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I don't have a game except an app that I work on, and then I just read books in my free time. That's all I do these days. You have been very busy with the pinball map, which is good. It's like when one of us slumbers, the other one trudges on or something. I don't know. There's no metaphor in there. No. That should lead us right into Map Tech. M-M-M-Map Tech. Map Tech. Map Tech. Map Tech. Do you want me to chat first about that then? Um, yeah, what have you been up to with map technology? All right, well, Beth and I have been really busy with the next version of the app, and it, as we've mentioned in past episodes, is a complete rewrite using React Native. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi.
    8:14
    Using some of those general ideas. So I designed it all. I think it is a nice design. I think people are going to like it. It'll be very something like new users and we'll be really comfortable with right away. And Beth has been doing right, you know, most of the programming for it. And then I just follow in her steps and apply the design and the styles and stuff to all the pages. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. I'm sure to the best of this community. I'm still just a packaging isn't what I'm looking for. Jackie would you apologize to the network of people that we'reıyorpie. please don't feel too scared, you can continue and we're all here to help you out. I just told Beth what content should be on it and then I just found it too tedious to like do like a really in-depth does like detailed design mock-up and then actually have to do the code for it I just didn't have enough time to do that and so I know generally what these things should look like and she knows what content should be on it so she just dumps the content there's no style to it and And then I kind of, I don't know, go with my, I make it sort of like fit what the other pages look like. I have a color scheme, you know, we have our like base colors of red and blue and a couple of grays and various scales or shades like on a scale for those blues and reds. And so, so this long answer is no.
    10:15
    But, but you have an idea. Yeah. How about, how are we doing with interoperability with Android and iOS? I mean, the whole, the whole shebang here is supposed to be write once, use at least two places. Yeah. Can we do that? We'll hear later in this episode, we'll hear an interview with Beth, and that was recorded a couple weeks ago, and in it she did lament that we discovered some Android issues. And that was a couple weeks ago. We've since squashed most of those. At least, we actually have squashed all the ones that we saw at that time. And that was just because of like defaults basically like an example would be on Android like an input box where you add text would have a default underline on it or something like that and I'd be like why is this there? John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Larry K. Sheats Jr., The Did you avoid this if iOS that? No, I haven't done any of that yet. That is something that can be added and I think we're going to have to add that in some spaces because right now it's like, you know, if I say back icons true, that doesn't hurt anything in iOS. Like, it doesn't mess anything up. It's just more specific code. I think it actually helps the code overall fixing that stuff in Android. But I think right now I've hit a wall with one Android issue that I'm hoping Beth can solve that's based on the Z index or like the overflow where an element, it's basically the autocomplete. If you search for something like ground control, it'll, once you type in ground in the search The Valley Company, Subsidiary of Walter Kidde & Co., Inc., Mirco Playfields, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. I'm a fan of the 3D index. I don't know how to describe that. You could give something a z-index of 900 that you want to be on top of something with a z-index of 100, but it's not working. But you're supposed to be able to position it absolutely, give it a z-index of 1 million, and it'll show up on top. But that might mess it up in iOS if you're positioning it absolutely. So that would turn into a case where if that actually can work in the future, if we could figure that out, it'll be like a if platform equals iOS, then do this. If platform equals Android, then do that. Wow. It sounds complicated. You know what's not complicated? What? Picking up on your horse, waking up. Hit in the planes, taking out bounty hunters, rescuing people, taking a train into town, going to a saloon. Hearing you talk about Z-indexes, it just makes me want to play and play. Are there lots of nice sunsets in that game? Oh my god, yeah. I mean, I was talking to Drew, graphic artist, contributor to the pinball map, also a big Red Dead Redemption 2 player, and he was talking about how he doesn't even like to do any violence at all in that game. He just likes to ride around picking up plants and watching the sunset, sitting by the fire. That's great. Yeah. Fishing. Sorry. Fishing. Well, okay. If you had to put a number on it, how close are we to being done? My last estimate was like somewhere between 60 and 70 percent. That's pretty good. I feel like that's pretty good. When I look at the issue list, there's still some stuff in there that Beth is not worried at all about. And so that, I think that's great. And so who knows, maybe we're even higher. I think it would be, it would be interesting to get Beth's take on how far, how through it we are. I wonder if we can come up with a milestone where we release it as beta for people to actually use. Yeah, I've been thinking about that. I mean, you know, change the focus from adding features to solidifying the ones that are there so that we can have people actually use it. Yeah I think we need to fix this Android issue first Otherwise it kind of gimped on Android And I think maybe like two to three more screens added and then we should do that Because I think the... she just... she wants to add the profile page, which is not really that important, but it's probably not that hard either. And I think the cool things to add would be the nearby activity one and then that saved locations one. Because I think those would be really important things to test also. Mm-hmm. Because right now what you can do is like, you know, search around, look up locations, add and remove machines, add comments and scores and stuff. And I've done that like 800 times. So at least I feel like it's those things are working pretty well. Well, working for your phone, right? Yeah. Well, I have three phones that I do it on. Working for your three phones. I don't know. It feels like you just named out all the core features of the app. And when somebody pulls out like a, I don't know, complicated phone and it stops working. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. I'm just, I have essentially no part in this app, so I'm just armchair bothering you about it. No, I mean I definitely was, I've been thinking about that. I want to get like our admins and our Patreon supporters, see if they want to beta test. I was thinking about how we beta test on the dev server, which is all fake data, and right now it's really limited to LA, Portland, and the Bay Area. And so if we opened up open beta to other people, we'd want to have more data on there for them. And does that mean we should be using live data? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Okay. Any other app stuff we need to talk about? No, I don't think so. I think it's... I'm very excited for it to get in people's hands. I think it's like... I think it's really great. I think Beth's been doing a great job. And I think it's gonna be like a... I don't know. I'm really excited for it to get out there. I just can't wait. So I don't know. Stay tuned everyone, it's going to be a really cool update. Yeah, stay tuned, but be patient too. Don't be a jerk about it. Yeah, don't be a jerk. Other pinball map goings on, you probably didn't notice but for 15 glorious minutes Like three Fridays ago, we cut the tie with third-party map services and pointed the map at our own map tile server, and everything just didn't work. As we mentioned last time, we're spinning up our own server, we're putting it out in AWS, so we actually do have a server running right now. You can you get free map services if you can find that. Um, but it uh, it loaded, it launched without HTTPS and that that is a problem because our main system runs on off HTTPS, which is just like secure HTTP protocol. I don't know why people are gonna hate me for saying this but I don't know who cares for the pinball map I don't I guess you have your user accounts right and in general people should be doing it yeah and they're probably all reusing their passwords from other sites yeah okay fair enough that's a good point I just I'm not very good with this stuff um so anyway we launched the thing we didn't have an SSL certificate so it was running in unencrypted HTTP so So our site saw that and thought, oh my goodness, who's this guy? I'm not going to take any data from this entity. And it just didn't work. So all we need to do is get a certificate installed on our new server and we're done. It works. I mean, it works fine on our computers because we don't use certificates there. That sounds easy. It does. You should do that. Yeah, I'll be honest, like, we got a little bit more time on our third party. And you know, the open trail's been there. Cowboys and camping out under the stars. It's been hard. It's been hard to pick up the computer. Mostly because AWS, you know, as a service is amazing. So many amazing, cool things that you can do with it. But man, if you have any problems at all, forget it. Like you can't Google anything. That's the only way I can be effective is if I can look stuff up that someone's already had this problem. And with AWS, it's just a mountain of text. So it's been tough. And to Amazon's credit, we have a contact over there who is very, very helpful and said, here's credit towards like corporate support. We could probably get someone on the line over in AWS to actually help us out. Why aren't we doing that? I don't know. Yeah, it's a confluence of all my bad personality traits. Like, coming out of once there's like laziness, there's pride, there's like all these things happening. And the net result is we don't have the new Tile server. But soon, I'd give it a week, maybe two. Oh really? Cool. And we have a deadline, so we gotta just do it before that deadline anyway. I mean this is this should be quick and easy so we'll get there and then we'll have in our own map server and we can save money there and use the money on beefing up the actual API and all that good stuff yeah oh one thing I do want to note is the your prophecy from last episode has come true where a lot of sites that use Google Maps like they embedded Google Maps NetEase, And now it looks like most people on their own site now have a message over their US maps that say, for development purposes only. Yeah, it's true. There's like millions of broken maps. It makes perfect sense. They weren't paying attention, and now they have that thing. And most of them probably don't care and rightfully so. But yeah, interesting. I wonder how they're going to solve that problem. Yeah, I don't know. It seems like such a hassle for everyone to get their own key. Like you know, these are like little bowling lanes, websites, because I go to a lot of websites for small businesses and almost all of them have that broken on it. Bowling sites, cafes, probably have like some web developer who set up the site years ago and who knows where that person is anymore. Yeah, someone's niece or nephew is going to get a phone call from Uncle John at his bowling Thank you for watching, Ally.
    24:16
    So Beth and I have been working hard on the latest update for the Pinball Map app, and Scott had a moment to catch up with her on how the app has been coming along, and this And this is kind of a follow-up. She was interviewed in episode two, I believe, one, episode one. And this is a follow-up just to see how things are going along. Take it away.
    24:43
    Hi, Beth. How are you? I'm great, Scott. How are you? Welcome back to the program. Thank you. So where are we at with the Pinball Map app 2.0? Things are good. Ryan and I have been making a lot of progress in the last month, In the last podcast episode, it came up that we're moving away from Google Maps and that's going to be a significant change that we still have to make for the phone app because we were using Google Maps there as well. So that's an upcoming challenge to deal with, but we've been getting through a lot of the other screens that the app will have and making a lot of good progress. With the website, the front end, changing over to Mapbox was relatively straightforward. You use a Mapbox library and a lot of the class names and stuff are the same, so you just kind of copy, paste some words or find and replace. What's the process on the front end? Do you have to find some React library for Mapbox or something? I believe so. To be honest, after knowing that we needed to switch and for a while weren't really sure which way we were going, I took that as a chance to really focus on the other pieces of the app. So that's like a big ticket item that's pending, but at the end of the day, it probably won't actually be that hard. That's just another thing to think about that we need to get done before we can really wrap it up. Gotcha. Is this even fun for you? I have been having a great time doing this. I love working on the pinball map. Yeah, it's been great. I feel like I've gotten to learn a lot and I'm really excited to be a part of creating an app that once gets rolled out, people will actually be using. I think that's really exciting. What is the hardest part of doing this? I don't know if there's any one hardest thing. I mean, as we keep going, we find new challenges. And maybe the hardest part is just not knowing what the next thing is that's going to come up that we're going to have to think about. The big thing recently was that we have several ways of looking at the app as it is now on iOS devices. We have a lot of Android concerns at this point, so that's definitely on the list of things to worry about right now.
    27:34
    Let me take you into my home kitchen for a second, Beth. I've been cooking a lot more lately because I have a growing family and I'm not very good at it but some things that are important to me in the kitchen. Mindset while cooking. I don't want to cook angry. I know that there's no scientific reason for this. I just feel like happy cook, happy meal. You can tell if your food was prepared with love. I think people can really tell. Well, I'm glad that you feel that way too. And I also like to chop my ingredients up and throw away pieces that don't look good to me, like the ends of lettuce or mushroom stems. I don't like to eat those. So my question for you is, as you are doing this development, can you describe your mindset and what you're doing peripherally? Are you listening to music? Is there a Netflix show on in the background? What's behind the scenes to how this is actually being developed? It really depends on the day. There's never any Netflix on in the background, but there's usually music. And depending on if I'm in the zone, it will be something kind of mellow. If it's later in the evening and I've had a few beers and I'm really into it, probably some really annoying rap music that is really loud. Wow, okay, okay. You've reached the lightning round of this interview. Favorite programming language?
    29:10
    Currently JavaScript. Favorite text editor plugin? Or, if you don't have one, I do not, favorite text editor?
    29:20
    Well, my favorite text editor is by far Visual Studio Code. And it's a newish plugin for me that I should have been using a long time ago.
    29:31
    I've been really appreciating it recently, but it's a bracket colorizer so that I can easily see where my brackets are aligned with the codes to find the missing pieces of the bracket puzzle. Yeah, I love that. When the other one highlights when you make one. Yeah, and it's a different color. Yeah, crucial. Favorite pinball map API endpoint? Oh, man. That's very specific. The app calls out to the API. I was thinking maybe a few are in your head. Maybe not. Well, the most recent one I've been working with is confirm location details are up to date, but I don't think that, at the end of the day, that that's my favorite.
    30:16
    That's my favorite because I like when people confirm that locations are up to date. Underutilized feature. What's the coolest thing you've ever done in your life? At the end of the day, I think the coolest one is add machine to location because that's my favorite thing to use and then end up seeing what someone has done. Thank you Beth, we'll talk to you soon. Later. Bye. Let's thank our Patreon supporters. Okay. And I have a list to thank. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Okay, next segment. Thank you. No, we forgot to do that last time. Actually, we recorded a thank you last time and then I forgot to insert it into the episode. So this is like a two, this is thank yous for two months. This is everyone who is newly supporting us on Patreon. We already thanked 12 people last time. We've got like 21 more supporters since then. So here's the list. Thank you Dean. Thank you Tim. Thank you Jordan, who's also one of our DevOps guys.
    31:42
    Thank you Mikko. Thank you Chris. Thank you Abby, who's also my sister. Thank you Mark. Thank you Corey. Thank you Michael. And Michael is the owner of Wizards World Arcade in Fort Thank you, Benjamin. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Joseph. Thank you, Dana. Thank you, TJ. Thank you, Robert. Another Robert. Thank you, Matthew. Thank you, Oyvind. Thank you, Adam. And thank you, Mark. All right. I'm a lot of Mark supporting the map right now. Yeah, a lot of Marks and a lot of Roberts. I think there's four Roberts. Huh. So if your name Robert and you thinking about supporting us you know go right ahead We welcome you If your name Mark we got it We full up on Marks Keep your money Yeah we got enough Marks
    32:51
    Hello. Thank you, Ron and Scott, for having me. This is Daniel B.O. Mahoney, and this poem I'm about to relive before you today is called, I plunge, I drain, I yearn.
    33:14
    Darkness, despair. I've been in here for so long, the motion detector lights have turned off. Yet I still sit, immobile, in the black.
    33:30
    The pings of the pop bumpers are now but pangs of painful memories. I must move. I must play one more game. Or two. If I get a replay. I flush the toilet and in one fluid motion hop to my feet and yank up my pants. I slowly open the door. Am temporarily blinded by flashing lights. A staff member nods at me in horror, like I'm a ghost risen again, and maybe I am. I step up to the machine like a bronzed Adonis who just got his shoes shined and is wearing a cool hat, except I'm less buff than Adonis, and perhaps I don't look anything like him at all. I unzip my fanny pack and pull out two crisp quarters. I drop one to the coin mech. I think darkly at what that quarter has seen in its days and why the machine would reject it, but I quickly fling the quarter and those thoughts away and pull out a fresh one. I take a fighter's stance. This is between you and me and me and you and you and me alone. I say it aloud, just loud enough for the guy next to me to hear. He knows I mean business. He quickly moves away, giving me my space. Good. I plunge gently, pensively, to get that damn skill shot, but the ball doesn't make it all the way up the trough. As it drops like a reject back to the plunger, I slowly twist the plunger back and forth, peering closely at it and try to act like I meant to flail the plunge because I was just testing something. I go to full plunge this time, skills shot be damned, the shiny metal ball whips back and forth between the pop bumpers like a shiny ball made of metal. I give a couple practice flips in anticipation of the ball's inevitable scent. Finally the ball breaks free of those bombastic bumpers. It's in free fall and I can see my future. It's not good. I flip wildly but it's of no use. The ball is aiming straight for the gap. It drains. And my bonus? Practically nothing. I didn't even get to touch the ball. It's not fair. I shake the machine in frustration. SLAM TILT! What the fuck? Fuck. Uh... Lay some stats on me, Ryan. What? Do you have any stats you want to talk about? Yeah, I do. We're going to jam through these again. And so this was, I think I pulled these stats last Thursday, and this is looking back 30 days. In those 30 days we've had 980 machines added, 738 removed, which I don't know, I don't love that ratio right there. It's a net plus. It is, yeah. 413 locations confirmed. Is that more or less than last time? Feels like more. It's now it's last we had 492 last time. Sorry, it's like people aren't even listening to us like come on people confirm. 753 comments 144 submissions, location submissions. Oh, I should actually see what our like total stats are, which are we've got 5790 locations. Wait, 5700 locations? Yeah, 5790 locations total. Wow. Yeah, that's a lot. Yeah, that seems like, that seems like something. Something happened. It does seem like something. Something's happening here. Something is happening. Okay. And 18,409 machines. Did you know that sometimes termites eat pinball machines? I didn't know that. Well, they're wood. Yeah, they are wood, but I guess I don't know much about termites. I think of them in houses, not pinball machines. That's all. That's all I'm trying to say. Yeah, yeah. I just know they're dust. I could recognize that. Or they're poop, whatever that is. I'm going to go ahead and do a quick jam through the top 10 machines on location. This squishes together all the different versions of games. You know how all the games these days have six different versions? Pro, Premium, LE, Special, whatever. These are merged together. When you name them, I'm going to say if I like them or not. Is that okay? Yeah. Since we're jamming through them, that's all I'm going to allow you to say. Okay. All right. I'm going to start at number 10 and then go to 1. All right. Number 10, ACDC. No. 9, Game of Thrones. Yeah. 8, Guardians of the Galaxy. More and more. 7, Iron Maiden. I have not played. 6. Star Trek. No. 5. Addams Family. Yes. 4. Metallica. Don't like that band. No. But do you like the game? No. I can't get past the band. I'm sorry. Yeah. 3. Walking Dead. Yes. 2. Star Wars. Yes, of course. Of course. 3. The Walking Dead. Yes. 2. Star Wars. Yes. The Game 1 Ghostbusters I would have thought it was Adam's Family. Fish... no, no, no, no. Sopranos. You'd think so, but it's Ghostbusters. Oh. I really... yeah. I got a complicated relationship with that game. There's 570 Ghostbusters on the map. So those are the stats. I don't have any fun stats this time. Sorry people, like my sense of humor just drained out. Nothing cool came to mind. You've been sick. I've been sick. Speaking of machines, I had a chance to sit down with an axe, to be totally honest here, an axe machine technician. But you know what they say, once you're a technician, you're a technician for life. Yeah, I've heard that. His name's Elijah. He talked to me. Let's listen to what he has to say. Okay, I will. Who are you? Who am I? Oh. Um, forgive me if this is like a ridiculous... I don't know. I just assumed I would be introduced or something, but... So for the listener, I send a list of canned questions ahead of time. This was not one of the questions, so you are listening to a live response to who this person is. I'm Elijah. I work with Scott. That's how I, that's why I'm here. And you used to be a pinball technician, true or false? True. For a couple years I ended up doing mainly on the side, held. I wasn't doing it full time. So a couple times a week I would go out and help maintain Route Pinball. Nights and weekends sort of thing? Yeah, definitely. We both had day jobs. Can you say a couple years of doing this? I did that, I probably did that for two years or so off and on. What is your history with pinball? Just playing in arcades. I mean like most people like when I was growing up my dad was in several bowling leagues and sports leagues and all of those places had arcade rooms you know and so everybody would bring their kids and that's where all the kids would end up and so I started playing pinball and arcade and those and about maybe 11 years ago or so I met a guy who was very good at pinball and I suddenly realized there was like a I've been playing an entire game that I wasn't actually playing. Got it. And how did that take you into actually being a pinball technician? I already had a radio hobby, so I would kind of build a lot of radio kits, do a lot of repair on machines at home, machines being any number of things, fixing old TVs or old computers. So when I started messing around with pinball, a few people would, you know, bring something up and I would say, oh, well, just look at the schematic, you know, and so I ended up helping people do it and that's kind of how I got dragged into it. I'll add Elijah is the one that gave me a degree of confidence in adjusting a pinball machine because of those schematic things there. Yeah, they're a lot less frightening than they first appear. Yeah, I was worried about the electricity being electrocuted. I have been very mildly electrocuted. And a lot of these old bars that you would go to, these things are plugged into ungrounded outlets. And you know, because they have the metal rails on the side, you put your hand on there and get stuck. Cool. Like someone has to pry you off like with the bar? Not that bad, but you kind of have that brief like, ugh, you know? Do you feel like being, and should I just say pinball tech from now on, and we can all know that I mean pinball technician? Yeah, that's fine. Why am I saying pinball technician? I don't know. Being a tech, has it made you a better player? Yeah, I mean I think that it provided a lot of practice because some of doing the tech work was actually going out and repairing things that needed repair, but a lot of times So you were doing really basic adjustments and cleaning and, you know, really trivial work. But if you went out and they said, you know, this switch is broken or this drop target isn't working, you ended up having to spend some time hitting it. And you could do it the boring way where you leave the glass off and throw the ball at it after you repair it, or you can just start a game. Oh, so you're actually playing to see that you fixed it? Yeah, basically every time we went out I would start a game on every machine and I'd play a ball, a ball and a half. It made me more accurate. I think that it did help make me more accurate because I like to be stubborn about it. I kind of, I had fun doing it so it was more fun than just hitting targets with your finger or with the ball. Were you paid by the hour or by the machine? I was not paid by either. I was paid based on roughly how much money we could pull out of the machines and what could be afforded at the time. This was a lot more like favor work. I mean, I did get paid, but it was not formal and it was all under the table. I gotcha. Gotcha. So as you were saying that, it occurred to me that when people like you are fixing machines, they're fixing machines to their specifications, right? If I show up on a Monster Bash after you've adjusted it, I'm playing your idea of what Monster Bash should be like. That's a little weird, right? Yeah. I mean, a little weird. It was a little weird. I mean, I think that you can often tell, at least previously in Portland, I could kind of tell who was, when I knew more techs, I could tell who was working on stuff because you'd roll up to a machine and it would be ridiculously tight tilt. And so you knew that, you know, there were a handful of people that were kind of prone to doing that. I always tried to make everything pretty fair. So I wanted you to be able to move the machine a little bit but not drag it across the floor. And in terms of leveling, we always took the standard. If it had the little mini level in it, that's how we leveled it. Most of the guides had a rough estimate for leveling. So we tried to keep it pretty default. What are the hardest and easiest ones to work on? I mean, I haven't worked on every era of game. I would say that really kind of easiest are probably the more modern Sterns. I'm a fan of the WC3, because you can't really repair anything beyond lights and coils and things like that. You just swap in entire parts? Yeah, you end up swapping in boards. You'll see things like entire LED light boards that are fixtures underneath, and if something goes wrong with it, you just have to put a new one in. I always thought that the WCS machines were kind of a little bit hard because often I was working on games in a dark bar, usually not able to get in there when they weren't open. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Knapp Arcade, Bally Williams, Straight Down the Middle, Bally Williams, There all this UV light down there too so near light sockets and basically near any lighting general illumination or otherwise all those wires are just completely faded out You can even tell which wire is which anymore So on things like WCS machines you could, and I've done this, reverse the wires on a flipper coil and blow out the fliptronics board. What do you do there? You just have to say you're sorry to the person who owns it, or what? They yell at you? You install another one that you keep around for such an occasion and then you go home and you pull all the diodes that you potentially blew out and test them. It is a repairable brake. You're famous in this town for your prowess on a bicycle. Does that mean that you're showing up and repairing machines with a bike bag full of light bulbs? How did that work? Yeah, a lot of times when I would do solo missions, I was doing that on a bike. Either a basket bike or I was previously a bicycle messenger and I have a, you know, what's called a long john, which is a front-loading cargo bike. And yeah, I used to just throw parts in a tool bag on there and get around that way. At the time I was doing this, I didn't even have a driver's license, so I wasn't really And I'm not able to drive anywhere. Cool. What are the most common issues that you end up fixing? Most common was lights out, blown fuses, especially on things like flippers. Sticky flippers or like misadjusted flippers. Um, yeah, sometimes, uh, I'm trying to think of like weird, any weird stuff that happens. On some of those older games, um, the, the connectors on the main boards, those little plastic molex connectors that you have, those things can get very grimy over the years and eventually they get very hot. And so when you're dealing with the high voltage lines, those things will just catch fire. And I have gone to places where somebody says, oh, there's no general illumination anymore, and you open the back glass, you know, you remove the back glass and look in there and there's literally a hole in the main board where all the general illumination has completely burned out. Presumably there was smoke, but they never turned the game off or anything. I wasn't there when it happened. But yeah, commonly just switch adjustments. Have you run into total losses when you were doing this? Like just the machine that you just said, we gotta wheel this out of here? We took machines out for major repairs, never anything total. The biggest deal were major MPU board failures. And maybe we didn't have a replacement board, but you're talking, you know, multiple connectors having burned out or just a problem that I wasn't able to diagnose in location. I guess the next closest thing was I've broken the playfield glass on a machine that I'm How did that happen? Well, these things are pretty sensitive, and so I always had a... I was always very anal about removing it, setting it on my toes, and then kind of like walking it to a spot and like very gently putting it down. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Knapp Arcade, Bally Williams, Straight Down the Middle, Knapp Arcade, It just literally exploded in my hands. And this was at Voodoo 2. And there was a massive line of people and it just sounded like a gunshot. And I was standing, I remember just standing there with two fistfuls of safety glass. Like the entire place was staring at us. Wow. Did they like drunkenly applaud or? No, it was pretty early in the day on the weekend. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Knapp Arcade, I'm a fan of the place because you would go there and they're they're frying doughnuts the whole time you're in there and sometimes you were in there for hours and you would leave and your clothes were like oily and your hair and your face your skin would be oily and you stunk like doughnut and you just couldn't get it off and the other thing there was all the big cleanup issue there was Every flipper button was caked with sugar. Yeah. And there was always, you could tell that people would set their donuts down on the glass. Yeah. So you would have, you know, streaks and sugar all over the glass. Yeah, I don't miss working at Voodoo on those things. Do you think that the split of money is fair? Like, I don't know if it's 50-50, 60-40, does it seem like it's possible to be an operator and attack and actually make out?
    55:11
    I don't know, but we were doing 50-50. And in my estimation that was not enough money to maintain the machines. When you had a location that was open all night and there's all these people, you know, it's a main attraction. People go there for the pinball, they pay for drinks, and they go play these pinball machines all night. They take a lot of abuse and over time it just costs money to replace bulbs, to replace rubbers, to do basic maintenance, and you're trying to pay yourself. So I found that it was not adequate. Now the caveat being that while I'm not going to name names, when I came in and started helping, we had lost a very major location. And with that location in place, it was actually a fairly profitable venture. So I think it's really critical where you have and maybe your kind of like stockpile of machines. You know, if you have a bunch of that stuff and you're not having to invest heavily in it and you can rotate machines out, it's a little easier. But to be honest, giving 50% of all pinball profits to a bar is insane to me because you're already bringing people there to drink drinks. Thanks. Yeah, good point. What are you paying for? The space? Yeah, I guess. What else were they going to put there? Exactly. And it becomes such a big draw for a lot of these places that it's always been a little bit confusing to me. But this is only personal experience and I don't know what other people charge. I wonder if we just invented a new business model where places like you put machines in and you get to keep all the profits. Well that would be great. If nothing else, understanding that you need to both pay a tech, whether that's one or two people or whatever, and maintain the machine should be coming out before the profit split. Yeah, fair. Yeah, good point. And we were doing that all post-profit split. Yeah, wow. I'm going to think about that. Maybe there's data in the pinball map that we could get out that kind of shows just by virtue of having a machine before and after price changes. Probably we didn't invent this, but I'm excited about the idea. No, but you can look at the database of places with machines and just see the sheer volume of them that are bars. And you know that people are going there. I mean, look at the comments on the machines. You can tell people are using it and at least in my experience if I'm commenting on a machine I'm going to that place because I want to play the machine. I'm not going there just to drink a beer, I'm going there to play the games. Okay, we've now reached the lightning round. Lightning round. Ever fix a Simpsons garage? No. Favorite PDX location to work at?
    58:37
    This isn't very lightning, I apologize. He's stroking his beard thoughtfully. C-Bar. Most useful tech tool? I don't know, I can't think of any comments about the interview. Thank you. All right. It was fun. You know, we did it at Ground Control hoping for some good ambient noise. And there was some, but the owner of Ground Control was like two feet away from us the whole time. It was like he was doing something like fixing the computers or something. And I just kind of kept one eye on him. I was like, I mean, this is fine, right? He would have been cool with it. Yeah, he wants a cut of any profits we make on that recording. Right. Yeah, I mean, I thought it was a good interview. I used to play at Voodoo 2 back when he was fixing those machines, and yeah, they would get pretty gross because people would just have really donut fingers and play. We used to just camp out on those machines for hours though and we'd keep them free of donut fingers basically. So did you walk out of there smelling like a donut then? Yeah definitely. I mean we kind of like sort of stopped playing there as much. I used to go there with Sauce or Danny B and yeah we'd just stink. How many donuts would you eat in a session at Voodoo Donuts Pinball? I'd say like four. Four donuts? Yeah, you'd just like start out with a donut and then oftentimes people would give you a donut. I can't remember why. Oh yeah, one time we witnessed a wedding there, like a wedding showed up all of a sudden. We were the witnesses for it, so we got a donut for that. And you know, we'd take a little break, grab a donut. So yeah, I mean four over like two to three hours. Yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong, I could easily eat four donuts. It just sounds so decadent, you know? Maybe I'm just, yeah, I'm just getting older. Yeah, I think we're just older. I feel like back then it just was like nothing. Yeah, I'll eat four donuts, no problem. Yeah. Oh man. How about some tips and tactics? Hit me up with some tips and tactics. Alright, here's the tips and tactics for this episode. This is a really basic one, but sometimes we get questions about this. People say, this location no longer has machines. Can you remove it? Or this place is closed. And the answer is, you don't need to tell us that. All you need to do is just remove the machines from the location. And so it's just a location with zero machines. And our little pinball map bots will clean up and remove that place in short time, really quickly. So just remove the machines and then it'll get taken care of. That's it. Easy. Easy peasy. You know, it's just one of those things that some people, you know, it's maybe not 100% intuitive. I always just tell them what I just told everyone, and then they know. This is more bang for the buck now in telling thousands of people. Millions of people? I don't know how many I say. Millions of people. All right, well, I guess that's another episode of this podcast. How do you feel about it? How do you think it went, Ryan? I think this episode went pretty well. We didn't get any feedback about our last one, which I thought was the best episode yet. And I'm hoping this episode tops that last one. And if you think so, leave a comment in the comment box. The comment box? Yeah, leave it in the comment box. I'll admit, I'm distracted. I felt a little distracted this time.
    63:22
    I gotta get this game over with. I gotta get back in front of the keyboard. Do you actually want it to be over with though? Yes. It's one of those things... Give me a moment here. I play video games. I don't play a ton of video games, but there's certain games I will play. But one game I've never played was World of Warcraft, and the reason I've never played it is because I knew if it didn't have an ending, I would just play forever, and it would just take all my time. I like throw myself into these things. So yeah, I kind of do want it to be over because I got stuff to do and I can't do it until it's done. Yeah, I could understand that. I mean, I played EverQuest for I think a year and a half pretty intensely when I, my senior year of high school, first year of college maybe, and it takes over. It takes over. And I spent a lot of time just sitting there fishing. Like, you know, I kept getting, talking about fishing and Red Dead, but I just needed to, like, be in the game even when I had nothing to do. Or, like, none of my friends were online so I couldn't go, like, fight with them, so I'd just sit there and fish and, like, listen to the chat. That's great. I've never heard that story before. That's great. It's a big, it was a time suck. Alright, well, I kind of want to end on that note. I want to picture you fishing in EverQuest and we'll see where we're at next month. With my little gnome. What was his name again? Her name, Chiraco. Chiraco Mindmender. Microbender. She is a cleric. Micro. Okay, okay. I'll talk to you soon. I promise I will be more productive very soon. No problem. Enjoy the game. See you. Thanks. See you. Bye.