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#07: Collecting and Connecting

Mappin' Around with Scott and Ryan·podcast_episode·40m 32s·analyzed·Nov 8, 2019
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.026

TL;DR

Pinball Map hosts discuss infrastructure woes, merchandise launches, and platform growth to 7K+ locations.

Summary

Scott and Ryan discuss Pinball Map's recent technical infrastructure challenges (DNS issues, domain transfers, App Store review process) and share updates on merchandise (stickers, hand sanitizers), app development (dark mode support), and platform statistics showing 7,012 locations globally with 12% outside the US.

Key Claims

  • Pinball Map had DNS issues lasting 60 days due to switching domain hosts from Epic to Lunar Pages, which didn't support ALIAS records required for their Heroku-hosted website

    high confidence · Scott explained the technical details of DNS problems after switching from Epic to Lunar Pages

  • Apple App Store rejected Pinball Map's update because it contained links to Patreon, citing payment policy violations, despite previous updates with same links being accepted

    high confidence · Scott described Apple's rejection and the process of removing Patreon links from the app

  • Scorebit estimates there are 500,000 pinball machines in the world (including private machines)

    medium confidence · Ryan mentioned this statistic from a FastCompany.com article featuring Scorebit

  • Pinball Map currently lists 7,012 total locations, with 831 (12%) outside the United States

    high confidence · Ryan presented verified statistics from Pinball Map database

  • Canada accounts for approximately 403 of the 831 non-US locations on Pinball Map (roughly 50%)

    high confidence · Ryan revealed specific statistics during discussion of international coverage

  • In the last month, Pinball Map received 227 location submissions, 1,100 machine comments, added 1,378 machines, and removed 928 machines

    high confidence · Ryan presented monthly statistics from the platform

  • Scott purchased Nintendo homebrew games in original-style boxes (Haunted Halloween 85/86) and a CIB copy of the NES Pinbot game

    high confidence · Scott described his recent retro gaming purchases at a retro game store

  • Apple requires a 60-day waiting period between domain transfers, managed by international organizations, not individual registrars

    high confidence · Scott explained the technical constraint preventing immediate domain transfer back to Epic

Notable Quotes

  • “we realized Epic is our domain host that we've been using for eight or ten years or so that we don't really interact with... it was a bummer. I didn't like that we were giving money to this company that embraced 8chan with open arms.”

    Scott @ early in episode — Explains motivation for switching domain hosts based on ethical concerns about company associations

  • “DNS is such a weird beast where like if you make a change they're like thanks you'll see the effect of that change within 72 hours and so you don't really know if what you did worked or not for days”

    Scott @ mid-episode DNS discussion — Illustrates the frustration with DNS technology and debugging difficulties

  • “on google play store it takes one second you just upload it and they're like thanks it's been released now and on the app store they they review this update for two days... three days”

    Scott @ App Store complaint section — Highlights disparity between Google Play and Apple App Store review processes

  • “I went six tones of brown... really dark chocolatey browns and uh like a nice latte goes with it goes with our pinks... not these cold steel gray”

    Ryan @ dark mode discussion — Reveals design philosophy for dark mode implementation using brown color palette instead of traditional grays

  • “I couldn't hold the sticker down while slicing because there was this like plastic film part over it. And no matter how hard I held that down, the sticker always shifted when I sliced through it.”

    Ryan @ sticker cutting section — Humorous explanation of the technical challenge preventing sticker sales for three months

  • “we think there's 500,000 machines out in the world... I'm sure a lot of those, I'm sure they're including private machines, not just publicly accessible machines”

    Ryan @ stats discussion — References external industry estimate that highlights gap between known public machines and estimated total installed base

  • “12% of all locations we list are not in the US... Canada's coming up... we've got some great people that are just like really actively editing the data in Canada”

Entities

Pinball MapproductScottpersonRyanpersonEpiccompanyLunar PagescompanyHerokucompanyApple App StoreproductGoogle Play StoreproductScorebitcompanyHaunted Halloween 85

Signals

  • ?

    operational_signal: Pinball Map experienced 60-day DNS stability issues due to switching domain registrars, requiring API updates and app rereleases; eventual resolution restored service reliability

    high · Detailed technical explanation of DNS failures, domain transfer delays, and workarounds implemented

  • ?

    product_launch: Pinball Map released branded merchandise: stickers ($1 each including shipping) and hand sanitizers (Patreon-exclusive) with extended production timeline due to cutting/assembly challenges

    high · Ryan described 3-month sticker production delay and current availability of hand sanitizers with sticker giveaways

  • ?

    technology_signal: Pinball Map implementing dark mode support for iOS with custom brown color palette; Android support and manual toggle settings planned for future releases

    high · Ryan detailed 99% completion of dark mode reskinning, color choices, and future roadmap for Android and settings screen

  • ?

    regulatory_signal: Apple App Store rejected Pinball Map update citing Patreon link policy violations; required removal of all external donation links; inconsistent enforcement of same policy on previous updates

    high · Scott described rejection reason, appeal process, and workaround of removing Patreon links from blog posts

  • ?

    community_signal: Pinball Map reached 7,012 total locations with 831 international listings (12%); Canada represents ~403 locations (50% of non-US total) and shows particularly active community contribution

    high · Ryan presented verified platform statistics and noted Canada's proportionally high contribution and growing activity

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.122

0:00
good because they start out just like mid-conversation talking about something funny. Those are good, but I find that when I hear those, I can't tell if I'm listening to the middle of a podcast or not.
0:21
Welcome aboard, Scott. Ahoy, hoy. so the only news I have is news it's actually your news that you've been collecting some Nintendo's cartridges lately is that your new kick that started up like yesterday yeah yes the first thing I like is that it sounded like you said collecting Nintendo's which is you're collecting Nintendo's yeah I had a series of events that took me into a retro game store and what i discovered there is that people are making nintendo games like new nintendo games and uh releasing those with boxes like the same form factor as the originals and that really just captured my imagination so i say i'm back uh casually yeah that's cool i mean by boxes you just mean like the the cardboard boxes that they come in yeah like if you were to look at it you'd think oh this could be a game that was made in you know 1984 when everything was better right right that's that's why we're trying to capture that that feeling again um yeah the the games i was looking at it was uh haunted halloween 85 and haunted halloween 86 and the games are actually pretty fun um but to tie that back to this podcast i also picked up pinbot uh in the box cib is i believe the terminology that's used cartridge in box so i think that's what it means but it might also mean cartridge instructions box you know what i mean yeah i could i could see either one being correct but yeah i have a cib pinball package so full package that's cool the only pinball game i played in on nes was pinball which was pretty good if i remember correctly yeah pinball those little rollovers at the top yeah yeah i think there's another one too oh you know next time we do a podcast i'll give you another report on all of the nintendo entertainment system pinball machines how about that yeah that'd be cool too if there were any new ones that came out too they should be making new oh yeah man what a great way to uh take that notion of there should be an x pinball machine and actually make it happen in a way that you know 100 people would actually play at home in their basements and that's it yeah i think if someone was making x game right now they wouldn't be doing it for nes they'd probably more likely be doing it for ios or android yeah good point maybe you'd have a retro look to it but they wouldn't go to all the trouble to have it on a c and then put it in a b yeah yeah uh is that really the only thing that's going on between the two of us that's our news i couldn't well i mean i was trying to think of pinball related ones and i don't get out much and play pinball so i definitely answer a lot of pinball related emails but i don't know if that's exciting to talk about i remember like we originally wanted to record this episode maybe a month ago we never got around to it and uh all this stuff felt more pressing and annoying and sad back then and now it's kind of i feel like we've moved on a little bit but we did have like a really a bad couple months in pinball map land in terms of just like site performance let's recount this saga that we went through didn't it seem like we just had some like string of bad luck yeah maybe i think so maybe I think, you know, some of it was bad luck.

Ryan @ statistics section — Highlights international growth and community contribution from Canadian editors

product
Haunted Halloween 86product
Pinbotgame
i Hodorproduct
Drew Marshallperson
NES Jumpmanperson
Bethperson
FastCompanyorganization
  • $

    market_signal: Scorebit estimates 500,000 pinball machines exist globally (including private installations), significantly higher than Pinball Map's 7,012 public location listings, suggesting massive gap in coverage

    medium · Ryan cited FastCompany article featuring Scorebit estimate; Ryan expressed skepticism about accuracy of figure

  • ?

    content_signal: 'Mappin' Around' podcast documenting Pinball Map operations, product updates, and community statistics; informal discussion format covering technical, product, and community matters

    high · Episode structure showing hosts discussing platform updates, statistics, and behind-the-scenes operations

  • ?

    business_signal: Pinball Map switched domain registrars away from Epic specifically due to company's association with 8chan post-shooting incident, indicating values-driven business decision despite eventual reversal due to technical constraints

    high · Scott detailed ethical motivation for switching, acknowledged returning to Epic due to technical necessity while expressing continued disapproval

  • ?

    product_concern: Significant UX friction identified in Apple App Store review process: 3-day review cycles vs 1-second Google Play deployment; inconsistent policy enforcement; unclear appeal process with duplicate buttons

    high · Scott compared deployment experiences and described confusing rejection/appeal interface with redundant buttons

  • ?

    venue_signal: Pinball Map data shows active location submission and removal activity (1,378 added, 928 removed, 529 confirmations in last month), indicating healthy community curation but high churn suggesting incomplete coverage

    high · Ryan presented monthly activity statistics and discussed gap between tracked and estimated total machines

    • 4:27
    Some of it was other stuff. Some choices were made. Yeah, choices. It wasn't just luck. Right. Which one do you want to start with?
    4:39
    I'll start with the DNS stuff because that kind of cascaded to everything, basically. And so, you know, and I'm not the most tech guy out there, so I don't have a great understanding of what DNS even is. but it's kind of like, how do you describe it? Yeah, it's like there's a few trusted, I'm trying to think of a smart way to explain this, there's like a few trusted entities on the Internet, more than a few, and what they do is they keep a record of how to translate a human readable request into an IP address, and they're in charge of that routing. so at the end of the day we pay somebody to say pinball map translates to this string of numbers all right so here's what happened and back in the summer there were a couple this is a weird way to start this story but this is relevant the back in the summer there were a couple mass shootings in the U.S.
    5:43
    And they found that the shooters were festering on a website called 8chan. And what happened was that I think it was the domain host that hosted 8chan dropped 8chan, and another domain host popped up. And it's like a domain host slash a site that manages their DDoS type stuff. If someone's trying to take them down, they're protected. So whoever had been protecting them dropped them and they got immediately picked up by another company that said, we'll take you on, we'll support you 8chan. And that company was called Epic. So that happened right after the shootings. And then we realized Epic is our domain host that we've been using for eight or ten years or so that we don't really interact with. They don't host our website. They just host the domain. Heroku hosts our actual website. So we don't have to do much with Epic, but it was a bummer. I didn't like that we were giving money to this company that embraced 8chan with open arms. So we decided, or I guess I made the decision, you supported me there, to switch to a different host, domain host. And, you know, that's just a matter of transferring the domain. And I have other websites that I use on a different host called Lunar Pages. So I was just like, eh, might as well have them all in one place. And we shifted it over. and then the DNS stuff happened where the real short story basically is one of the records we have to use is called an A record and an A record only accepts an IP address but since we use Heroku for our website Heroku doesn't give us an IP address you have to use an actual domain so instead of using an A record you use an alias of an A record and that was fine on Epic but Lunar Pages did not provide that service, and we didn't realize it. And it took like a day of basically the site being down, half a day maybe, for us to realize that the DNS was totally messed up and couldn't be fixed. At that point, I had to give up. I said, forget it. I'm not a DevOps guy, and this is just way too much, and there doesn't seem to be a solution. so i took my principles and put them in my back pocket and transferred back to epic and that transfer was denied you can only make one transfer of a domain every 60 days and this is like some like international organization that manages all this stuff and there's no getting around that it's not like epic saying no or it's not lunar pages saying no it's yeah i wonder why like i assume it's for like fraud prevention or something like that yeah it must be so the way to get around that temporarily is to point our name servers to the epic name servers so the domain is still hosted on lunar pages the name servers are pointing at epic which we did and that solves like 75% of the problem but the problem is it's just like DNS is such a weird beast where like if you make a change they're like thanks you'll see the effect of that change within 72 hours and so you don't really know if what you did worked or not for days and what and you don't know if a problem you're seeing is just like a temporary thing that's automatically going to resolve itself in a couple days right and it's you know what i'm not i'm not very devopsy uh myself but i've been trying to be devopsy since like the late 90s and this is technology that doesn't seem to have changed like it it just as frustrating now as it was before um i think amazon has a good solution with this thing called Route 53 but we not fully plugged into that ecosystem right now So yeah it super hard to debug like you said Yeah, yeah. And so the main thing that happened, our problems that occurred during this and that then ended up occurring for the next 60 days is that the website domain would randomly not work. And it would only not work if you did not have www in front of it. But then the www version would always work. That was like consistently working. And the other non-www one was just like all over the place for 60 days. So the app uses our API, which is on our domain. And that points to the non-www.version. So we immediately had to update the app and roll out new updates to just have three Ws in there. So that's a really easy fix.
    11:12
    And, you know, I think this was on like a podcast that we recorded that didn't end up working. We had a glitch. But at one point I talked about how I thought the App Store, App Store Connect, which is like the interface that you use for releasing an iOS app was cool. I just like thought it was neat, especially to think that like, you know, this just garbage interface that we're using is like the same garbage interface that Amazon uses when they release their app and Google and stuff. They're all sitting there staring at this terrible interface. And it just kind of like, I don't know. I thought that was cool. I thought I was like, they don't have special access. They don't have some slicker version. They just have the same janky thing that we do. It's egalitarian. Do you think that's true? Do you think that's true, though? Or do you think there's some enterprise version of the App Store?
    12:11
    I'd say I wouldn't be surprised if there was. Or like, here's our beta one we're working on, and you guys get access to it. So I'm sorry, this is like a digression for a minute here. but I am, you know, I'm a Mac user. I have an iPhone. I have a Mac laptop. I like Macs. I have an iPad. Well, my kids have an iPad now. It is shocking to me how crappy the Apple Store is for developers versus the Google Play Store. It's still called Google Play, right? Yeah. Google seems to have, like, I don't know what they're up to, but it's leaps and bounds beyond what Apple does. Very confusing. If there's any Apple developers who want to explain yourself.
    13:05
    Yeah. Why hasn't App Store Connect changed in 10 years? Yeah, that's weird. So, you know, that's all setting up for it. I had kind of rosy glasses on when I used that App Store. connect and uh even though nothing has changed in the interface i'm just more pissed off now at the uh just the process of releasing an update where your update is three characters www added to it on google play store it takes one second you just upload it and they're like thanks it's been released now and on the app store they they review this update for two days i think it was like three days so there's no quick fix on things like this where our app is suddenly broken and we want a quick little patch out there three days and then they reject it in this case they rejected it because we had links to our Patreon on the app, and that's not allowed.
    14:12
    And even though we had links the last six times we released updates, and they didn't flag that this time, they flagged that, you know, you're only allowed to make payments through their payment service so they can take a cut from it. Also, we have to pay them $100 to do all this where Google's just like, yeah, $30 for your whole life. And this is like, you know, it's for donations. It's not like we're making money off this. So they rejected it. And then this is where, I guess this is where their App Store interface sucks. It's because they have like, you can reply to their rejection, and then you can also click a button that like formally asks for a re-review. and it's and what i found was that they actually do do a re-review if you just reply so i was like why do you have these two buttons that are it's unclear when you need to do the the formal one and when you could just say like hey look i fixed this i don't know it was just it really annoyed me quick story about that um drew and i drew marshall the artist uh person who does the nice art for the app um him and i did an app once called i hodor and this was like at the height of game of thrones uh yeah spoilers are those are past yeah we're past that window this is like right around when hodor died and so we put out this thing i hodor which is a really nice rendering of hodor where you could like uh take a photo of yourself and it would superimpose your face over bran and bran was like riding on his back um and and the other feature of the app was if you talk to hodor uh when you were done talking he would just say hodor back to you like i think drew and i recorded like 10 different hodor and one would randomly play and that was it that was the entire app and it was free uh and we released it on the or we tried to release it on the Apple store. They rejected it. They said that there was not enough content for it to be released to the app store. So those two features weren't enough. And you know, I hear myself saying it now and I agree, it doesn't seem like enough, but back then we were really capturing the moment, you know? Yeah. And it's funny. I mean, it was like, it was kind of a play on Siri, wasn't it? Like you ask it a question and it just responds with Hodor. Yeah. Right. So, so anyway, why I'm bringing this up is i appealed i did that same appeal process that you did um got an email that was like appeal denied if you'd like to appeal again do this thing so i did and then they called me some person called me from apple and he was like hey i'm doing an appeal for your case what's your story and i was like well you know uh you know game of thrones right you know that show game of thrones and he's like like totally not entertained at all he's like yes i know what that show is and i was like well i mean it's you know it's hodor from from the show and he says hodor and he's like yes i'm aware of the show i'm aware of what hodor says and he just wasn't having it like he wasn't entertained at all anyway apple called me up to deny me once uh i hodor is still out there if anyone's interested it's open source there's a commercial for it too that we filmed i know that's so sad that they never accepted the art was great i mean it was cool yeah i guess this is the podcast where we complain about the app store experience with apple yeah anyway i think so you fixed you fixed our dns problem yeah so the yeah and just we eventually got the app working by taking out every reference to Patreon. The problem is on our podcast blog, which is basically a separate site, and in the app we're just pulling that website up in a web view. Every post had a link to Patreon. I totally forgot about that. So I had to just go through all six posts to take out that link, and then they accepted it. they still haven't noticed that we have a link to like sell t-shirts though it's like on the same page that had the patreon link are we not allowed to sell t-shirts in there no we're i mean we're not allowed to say like here's our here's a link to our store where we sell shirts no we're not allowed to do that okay apple developer who we earlier asked to write us and tell us about the experience let's just call it even now don't write us we're good anyway yeah so that was that That was it, I think. That was the end of our DNS issues. After 60 days, the transfer happened. The non-WWW seems to work fine now, as far as I could tell. Heart's in the right place. Even though we're back on Epic, I feel like we hate every minute of it. It's a trash website.
    19:19
    The functionality's not super great. And they support scumbags. so we'll we'll have to find a way off of there someday they've always been very nice to me though i must say that because you know you these are people that we pay like 15 a year to well i thought it was like a hundred dollars a year or something like that no it's just a domain just the registration for a well now we have email on there so that adds it adds to it that's a five dollars a month i thought it was more than that because like some domains yeah like dream host i feel like they charge you $10 or something. But I thought this place was much more expensive. I'm probably wrong. Oh, I don't know. I mean, you did just renew it for three years, so maybe you're right. It is a premium domain.
    20:06
    Yeah. Well in iOS 13 they added support for dark mode and Scott do you use dark mode on your phone? I do use dark mode. I use it on my phone and I use it at work, and I'm a little confused as to why I use it, but I will say it's a very popular thing right now. What do you mean you use it at work, like on your laptop? up yeah like uh slack slack recently released dark mode and so i was like sure i'll do dark mode so i picked it up and i just remember the day it came out all the nerds were just falling over themselves like dark mode for slack and i was like yeah i mean it's cool i mean i thought the idea used to be it saved battery life on cell phones yeah to be in dark mode but is Is there some other thing? I'm trash-talking dark mode. You're about to hype our dark mode release here. What is the intent of dark mode? No, I mean, I don't know. I think dark mode could be somewhat more soothing on your eyes. I don't think it's worth getting excited about, though, especially not at that level.
    21:26
    I've been dark moding for years because I use Linux, and I could just make everything dark, and it's nice and easy. So having like dark mode on the phone, I mean, it's cool, I guess, but it's not that exciting. If I'm given the option, I'll use it. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, you're right. It is easier on the eyes. Yeah. I mean, I use, what is it, like a red shift type thing on my phone where you're, I'm really into that. where at night on my computer, on my e-reader, on my phone, at night there's a red tint to everything, so it's a lot more soothing on the eyes. I care a lot more about that than dark mode. Well, that being said, nerds, you got dark mode now. Yeah. Or soon. Yeah, so now that we have it in iOS 13, Beth took the opportunity to update a bunch of app code and components that we use. pretty big updates although these are all things that you the end user won't really notice and but it added support for dark mode so i've been like re-skinning the app to support dark mode and it's nearly done it's like 99 done there's one like thing of text that isn't dark that i couldn't do myself and beth needs to step in and do and then we'll release it in the next few days and you know I'm actually not we'll see how people like it because I didn't go the traditional like three tones of gray I went six tones of brown so if I tend to like brown more than gray I feel like it's more soothing on your eyes really dark chocolatey browns and uh like a nice latte goes with it goes with our pinks yeah the pinks right yeah it goes well together it's a good match and not, you know, these cold steel gray, like, I don't know, it's not for me. But that said, this might be too much brown. And so we'll see what people think. It's pretty easy to change. Give us feedback once it's out. Let's get a little inside baseball for a second. All right. Is this a user preference that's stored in the database or on the phone itself?
    23:44
    This is on the phone itself right now. This will be like the most basic way you can implement it right now where if you change into dark mode on your phone it uh the app just recognizes the theme that your phone is using and uh gives you a feeds you a different color based on that the next two things we want to do is add support for android dark mode that'll be next uh but we're using like an a component that doesn't yet support that and then after that we want to add a new screen called settings where you can manually toggle it. So you can have your phone in light mode, but you can have the app in dark mode. I see, I see.
    24:34
    I think in the last podcast we announced that we made stickers and we had them, and it took us, it took me, three months to cut these stickers in half and put them up on the website. and I will explain why it took that long. I mean, 90% of that is just me procrastinating. But also, it's surprisingly hard to cut stickers because you need a straight line. And so I brought them all to work. And I have to cut them because I fit two on each sticker. And so they need to be split in half. I think you're burying the lead here. You cut the stickers at work? Yeah, so I brought this stack of stickers to work and found a, what are they called? Cutting boards? Yeah, and it just like, you know, there's one of those things that like slices through. And the problem was I couldn't hold the sticker down while slicing because there was this like plastic film part over it. And no matter how hard I held that down, the sticker always shifted when I sliced through it. And so I couldn't get a straight cut from that. And I think I even tried to go to like a FedEx office and do it there. I tried scissors. I sent you some. I did scissors, but those weren't really that straight. So that is what delayed me three months. I still would like to hear more about you cutting it at work. Was this like at your desk? was it in the break room where did this happen uh where did it happen i think i just did it kind of in the middle of the office there's like there's we have a big plotter that's against a wall so you could print posters and tucked into some cubby is the cutting board and the paper cutter and i took that out i put it on a table and i was just yeah standing there's kind of like this like little lobby area with some couches that nobody's on and i just set them up you know and nobody bothered nice yeah they're they're ryan's cutting stickers yeah did you mark did you mark your calendar as busy how'd you get around that no okay we don't have to explain yeah no i just yeah it's it's free for them. I try to keep my calendar free so people don't know what I'm doing.
    27:11
    I see. I see. But I eventually resolved this by, I bought an X-Acto knife from Rite Aid, and then I had a, like a see-through T-square, or, you know, some sort of, it's actually a triangular ruler, shaped like a triangle. And I put that on, and I just held it down really hard and sliced through it with the X-Acto, and that was it. It worked. They're beautiful stickers, by the way, if you haven't seen them. They are the best stickers we have. Yeah, they're cool. Good size. So they're on the website now, pinballmap.com.
    27:46
    They're a dollar each. That includes shipping. Pick one up. I mean, that seems like an okay price, right? That's pretty cheap for a sticker. That is a bargain price.
    27:58
    And then what we also did, which we've talked about, Here's the timeline for people that maybe haven't listened to every episode of this podcast. So maybe a year ago, Scott announced to the world that we should make pinball map hand sanitizers. Great idea, but like we'd actually do that. Then a friend of the show, NES Jumpman, made a prototype. He just all of a sudden shipped us separately, me and you, a two-ounce bottle hand sanitizer with a pinball map sticker on it and then a stack of stickers on the side.
    28:38
    And in the last episode, we said, we're going to do it. We're going to actually make these. I mean, he got the ball in motion, and we have to follow through. So we did. I bought a box of one ounce. We went down to one ounce because I thought that was – I like the two ounce, but I think one ounce would just fit the sticker perfectly. put the stickers on and then now we have them but we are giving them away only to patreon supporters patreon exclusive it's pretty cool i mean if i was at shorty's wanting to be home and somebody came up next to me and slapped one of those down i would feel very comfortable waiting till they were done and playing the machine they were on knowing that i wouldn't contract whatever diseases uh lay dormant on their hands it kills disease is what i'm trying to say yeah it kills them in their tracks and that's what you need when you're just like rubbing your fingers on stuff in public yeah you know something you always did when you played pinball that i appreciated you would do a full wipe down when you were done it wasn't it wasn't a sterile wipe down it wasn't with the disease-killing goo, but you would do all the way across the bar and then on both buttons. So anyway. Yeah, that sounds nice to me, but that's mostly because my hands sweat a bunch, and so it's just like a courtesy to the next person.
    30:10
    Yeah, anyway, get the sanitizer. It's the right thing to do. Or don't. It's your own life, but you injuring other people by not getting it Yeah so if you want one support us on Patreon and we send one your way I already sent out a bunch a whole bunch so we excited to have those out in the world And we also are throwing in stickers, too.
    30:34
    I think I've been throwing in maybe two or three stickers each to each person. Nice. Yeah, plenty to spare.
    30:41
    Stats, stats, stats, stats, stats, stats, stats. So there's some stats. let's start with our standard batch of stats just showing what's happened in the last month on the map. So overall picture is that it's been active. There's been a lot of map updates, I feel like. This is just the last month, not since we did the last podcast, but in the last month we've had 227 locations submitted. Nice. Yeah, we just eclipsed 7,000 locations total. That's a lot. I can't help but wonder what the real number is. If we were to have every location accounted for, what would it be? I know. Are we ever going to get that? And, you know, on that note, you know the folks at Scorebit? Remember that prototype that they're working on? I do remember. Very exciting technology. And they, where was it? And it was an article in FastCompany.com, I believe. One of the Scorbit dudes mentioned that they think there's 500,000 machines out in the world. That's their estimate. And granted, I'm sure a lot of those, I'm sure they're including private machines, not just publicly accessible machines there. But that would mean that we're not even close, if that was accurate. My God. think about that i don't think 500 000 is accurate though i think that's way too many so chew on that shots fired yeah yeah shots fired uh check your numbers check your numbers to get back with us yeah so we've also had in last month 1100 comments about machines pretty good amount of comments they're saying talking about machine conditions and stuff we've had 928 machines removed which is a lot and 1378 machines added a net positive positive that's always a good thing yeah but i love when there's a lot removed as well just because it shows that the site's getting updated and last of last of this batch of stats is that we have uh 529 location confirmations that seems higher than usual yeah that does seem higher i wanted to complain but i caught myself yeah i'm mostly upset that you didn't let me guess you usually let me guess well i'm gonna get let you guess the next stuff Oh, nice. Okay. All right. So in total, we have 7,012 locations total. 7,012.
    33:33
    How many of those locations do you think are not in the United States? Yikes. Okay. Let me be quick here. I'll try to be quick. I'm going to guess we got about 30 in Japan. You mentioned two in Mexico. I'm going to round that up to five. I'm going to go 35. Ireland, I'll give them five as well. That puts me at 40. I'm going to add 10 more for Europe. That puts me at 50. You said we're having a boom in Canada. Canada is a big place. Love Canada. uh i'm gonna add 150 to that put me at 200 australia's got at least 10 and i'm gonna up my number to 300 because i believe that there is a bigger world outside of the united states that likes pinball probably more like think about france uh i'm thinking so let's think about it and stop thinking about it 300 that's my answer all right that's low pretty low uh it's actually 831 okay 831 yeah what's and the majority coming from canada i assume uh yes yeah but first that's actually going to be the next i'm going to ask you to revise your estimate there for Canada.
    35:03
    But first, I just want to say that that's so 12% of all locations we list are not in the US. And, you know, a lot of I think some of your numbers are pretty low. I think like, what were they? They're just more in more in Australia than 10. You know, there's probably like 40 or 50 listed.
    35:22
    Oh, okay. Yeah, that's fair dinkum. Yeah, it is. I feel like I used to say fair dinkum as a kid and then that just disappeared from my vocabulary and then I started listening to podcasts based in Australia and they started then they reminded me of it I was like oh yeah I used to say that yeah bonzer that's another good Australia has the best slang yeah I think definitely definitely and it feels like sometimes they're just making it up but you still know what they're saying like they're making it up on the go but you know what they mean just because of how good they are they're good like make making it up on the go would turn into like uh fritzel on the gobbly go or something like that yeah like they they add wise to their word anyway austria is a great place too okay so how many now that you know there's 831 how many of those you think are in canada 831 canada i will go high and i will say 600 too high it's uh 403 so basically 50 okay okay that's cool yeah the big place but to to be honest i feel like that's not truly representative of what's what percentage of machines outside of the u.s there are. No, and I agree. But we've got some great people that are just like really actively editing the data in Canada, submitting locations all the time. So despite having over 6,000 in the US, I think Canada's coming up. Last one. This is not that exciting, but it's kind of a nudge to have people help us out a little more filling in data. How many locations of those 7,012 do you think are missing a location type you know this has got to be high yeah this has got to be very high 712 percentage do you want the number of the percent i do percent i think that like i know that for a long time you were doing this by hand um and i know admins pitch in and users will do this too I think but I still think that we've got 60 percent of our locations do not have types that would be sad if it was really that but it's only 25 percent oh not bad yeah not bad I mean I think part of what helps is that basically every single new location that's been added for the last few years has a location type included in it just because of like our admins are on that and our users often submit it with it and then if any of them miss it i always check every day to see like what's been added and then i just kind of fill in those fields because it's so easy to fill in 25 i mean pretty significant still but you know yeah but that's not bad good job all good job so that's a that's a podcast yeah that's a podcast next time next time we'll maybe we'll We'll have some interviews.
    38:29
    Yeah, we definitely should talk to somebody more interesting than us. I'll report back with all the Nintendo pinball catalog. Don't worry about that. Yeah, I'm looking forward to that. Wasn't there, like, a Mario pinball? I have a memory of Mario walking around with, like, a platform on top of his head. Yeah, you know... But that's more of an... it's like an Arkanoid thing. Yeah, that might actually be just the cover of Pinball. The regular Pinball game might just have Mario on the cover, even though he's not really in the game. That's kind of my memory there. I feel like the definitive video game Pinball was that Windows 3.1, or was that Windows 95, had that Pinball game with it.
    39:18
    And, yeah, I played the heck out of that. Yeah, I was a big fan of Sonic's pinball for a while. Oh, yeah, natural fit, you know? Sonic is just kind of flying around all over the place. Yeah, and there's all these portals that he gets scooped into and pops out. It was a weird, I don't know, it felt like you were on an alien planet. The levels were really cool. We've got to get out more.
    39:47
    We're over-indexing on home video game pinball right now. Yeah, there's a lot of new stuff out there. Thank you all the manufacturers for making cool games that we're going to play. Yeah, maybe this is the marching orders for the listeners. Go outside and play pinball. Don't be like us.
    40:08
    Okay, have a good rest of your week, Ryan. I'll talk to you soon. You too, Scott. Bye-bye. Thank you.