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#03: Map Tech Tech Tech Tech

Mappin' Around with Scott and Ryan·podcast_episode·1h 35m·analyzed·Oct 3, 2018
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TL;DR

Pinball Map migrates from Google Maps to self-hosted OpenStreetMap to avoid pricing crisis.

Summary

In episode 3 of Mapping Around with Scott and Ryan, the hosts discuss technical challenges with their pinball location map service after Google Maps pricing increased dramatically from free to ~$525/month. They detail their migration strategy from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap tiles self-hosted on AWS infrastructure, with help from volunteer DevOps experts. The episode includes an interview with Chris Rhodes, operator of Wedgehead, a new pinball bar/arcade in Portland, discussing venue operations and machine selection.

Key Claims

  • Google Maps pricing increased from free to $525/month (after $200 monthly credit applied, ~$300-350 after credits for Pinball Map's usage)

    high confidence · Scott and Ryan discuss Google Maps pricing changes; Scott clarifies the actual $525 figure before credits

  • Mapbox costs approximately $125/month based on 5 days of usage data, despite marketing claims of being 'a tenth the price of Google Maps'

    high confidence · Ryan calculates estimated monthly Mapbox cost after running service for 5 days; notes the pricing comparison is 'apples to oranges'

  • Google Maps counts a 'view' as loading the map (pan/zoom counts as single view), while Mapbox counts a view as every 4 tiles loaded

    high confidence · Scott explains the different definitions of 'view' between the two services

  • Mapbox provided 3 free months of service after Pinball Map questioned their pricing model

    high confidence · Scott mentions Mapbox customer service provided free months as goodwill after pricing discussion

  • Pinball Map Patreon launched with 26 total patrons generating $83/month within ~one month

    high confidence · Scott reports Patreon stats: 26 patrons total, 14 new since last episode, $83/month

  • Ryan's father received a Paragon (1978 Bally machine) as a Christmas gift from band accountants in 1980

    high confidence · Ryan's father (guest) describes receiving the pinball machine as a surprise gift

  • Ryan's father played in REO Speedwagon and the band recorded 'In My Dreams' video at The Record Plant in LA, which had multiple pinball machines

    high confidence · Ryan's father discusses band history and pinball machines at recording locations

  • Switching from Google Maps API to Mapbox required only ~45 minutes of work and ~20 lines of code changes due to similar syntax

    high confidence · Scott describes the drop-in replacement nature of Mapbox's API

Notable Quotes

  • “Google Maps is 50,000 free views a month and then every additional 1,000 views after that is $7. Which goes up very, very quickly. It's just the weirdest pricing scheme.”

    Scott @ ~18:40 — Highlights the dramatically unfavorable Google Maps pricing model that prompted the migration

  • “If we are priced out of using this thing, I mean, how many other people just got priced out of using this thing? And it used to be you could just toss a map on your website. Now you're really going to have to think about that.”

    Ryan @ ~22:45 — Reflects on broader internet implications of API pricing changes affecting small service providers

  • “Google Maps is 50,000 free views a month and then every additional 1,000 views after that is $7... Mapbox is 50,000 free and then every additional one is 50 cents. 50 cents? Let's do that. Let's switch to that.”

    Scott and Ryan (exchange) @ ~19:30 — Initial excitement about Mapbox as a solution, before discovering the definition-of-'view' problem

  • “Because of things like the Patreon... We were able to say no [to putting ads on the site]. That way, community activity is going to be more different, and the desired quality is removed from the list as a result.”

    Scott @ ~7:30 — Patreon support enables ad-free model; though content becomes garbled mid-thought suggesting transcription artifact

  • “I honestly do wonder if things like this are going to change the face of the internet as we know it.”

    Ryan @ ~22:30 — Philosophical reflection on the long-term impact of API pricing changes on internet services and startups

  • “We're going to host the tiles ourselves... It feels cool to think that there's going to be a computer out there with pictures of the world whose only chore in life is to serve those pictures to the Pinball Map users.”

    Scott @ ~27:00 — Captures the team's solution approach and positive framing of the self-hosting effort

  • “George Gomez designs... he knows how to sell a game. It's happening with Deadpool right now... People love playing that game. Because I think they're good, like, beginners games for people.”

Entities

Pinball MapproductScottpersonRyanpersonGoogle MapsproductMapboxproductOpenStreetMap (OSM)productAmazon Web Services (AWS)companyChris RhodespersonWedgeheadvenue

Signals

  • ?

    product_strategy: Pinball Map responding to Google Maps pricing increase by migrating to self-hosted OpenStreetMap tiles on AWS, demonstrating shift from vendor-dependent to infrastructure-independent model

    high · Scott and Ryan detail multi-month transition plan from Google Maps to AWS-hosted OSM with volunteer DevOps support

  • ?

    business_signal: Pinball Map successfully launched Patreon with 26 supporters generating $83/month in ~1 month, enabling rejection of advertising model

    high · Scott reports 14 new patrons since previous episode, total revenue of $83/month

  • ?

    technology_signal: Google Maps API pricing restructuring creates sudden cost burden on small service providers; pricing increased ~525x from free to $525/month, highlighting vulnerability of free-to-paid API transitions

    high · Scott and Ryan detail Google's $525/month charge after $200 monthly credit; delayed response to pricing change

  • ?

    venue_signal: Wedgehead opens as new pinball bar/arcade in Northeast Portland under operator Chris Rhodes; converted from previous venue with focus on game quality and social environment

    high · Chris Rhodes interview discussing Wedgehead opening, venue design philosophy, machine maintenance focus on Sopranos

  • ?

    operational_signal: Venue operator prioritizes machine reliability and game selection (Sopranos, Deadpool) based on beginner accessibility and revenue potential; George Gomez designs noted as popular in commercial settings

    high · Chris Rhodes emphasizes Sopranos maintenance, discusses George Gomez design appeal for bars

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.287

0:00
Hey, this is Danny Backglass. You're listening to Mapping Around with Scott and Ryan. Episode 3 on 94.7
0:10
KC 95 Real Rock Radio Hi Scott. Hey Ryan, how are you? I'm good. I'm good. Um... Great. Great. Right off the bat, I want to apologize for the quality of my voice. I've been talking all day, and I have a sore throat. I don't know if that comes through or not. Today was Clark's fourth birthday, and we hosted a party, so I did a lot of talking. Just being the MC of the party? Well, you know how parties are. Talking to people. Yeah. Right. You gotta do the rounds, and etc., etc. What have you been up to in the last month? Well, I could say the last day. Today, that's a little easier to talk about today. We took Hannah to swim class, her second one. She's eight months old, so just kind of pushing her around in the water, and it's pretty fun. Oh, and then my sister came by. She was in LA, and they checked on Hannah, and she listens to the podcast. Hi, Abby. On that note, we've gotten feedback here and there from people who've listened to the first two episodes, so I kind of thought it'd be fun to address some of the feedback really fast because some of those things are topics we'll be addressing in today's episode. So first off, like a lot of the feed, well, from friends and family, a lot of the feedback is it's too long, which, you know, so what? That's true. I've seen some feedback in general and I'm not saying it's not too long. It's probably too long. But the only people who have told us it's too long are friends and family. Yeah, that's it. Then I think the most common other feedback we've gotten is that people actually like the tech talk. They like the hearing the background like detailed information about how the map works. We were, I don't know, maybe a little surprised by that, but that's good. It's encouraging. We'll keep going with it. This other person said that they had suggestions for topics and one of them was covering what's good and bad about tables that are coming out for smaller manufacturers and I kind of want to note that that's, I don't know if that's our forte or not my forte at least. Yeah, I mean I have an opinion about it but it's not educated. Yeah, and there's a couple other podcasts that do that well. I don't get out and play pinball that much, so who cares? Then the same person said it might also be interesting to have some operators on and hear their thoughts. Lo and behold, that's what we're going to do this episode. We have an interview coming up later with an operator. Another one is, what ideas do you have for driving engagement with operators, like getting operators on board to use the map and have it help them? And that's something we'll chat about also later in the tips and tactics section at the end of the episode. That'll be dedicated to how the map can work for operators. It's something that some people might not know about, so we might as well chat about it. Fair. That's very fair. And you know, read ahead here. The operator we interview has some feedback on that too. Okay, cool. What's your appetite for that operator interview? Don't fast forward, just hang tight, you'll get there eventually. Somebody asked if there's a way to organize locations by date last updated, and I wanted to note that right now there is not, but in the upcoming app there is a way to do that. On that note then, let's chat about the Patreon, which is something we love. Hey, wait a minute, wait a minute. What? Before you do the Patreon though, sorry, I gotta, maybe I'm remembering this wrong, but Don't the apps have a feed for updates? I think there's like an update feed that you can look at? Yeah, you could see the most recent updates. So that's like Pirates of the Caribbean was added to Wedgehead. So that does kind of get you that information, but in the new app, say you're looking at You're viewing an area on the map and it loads ten locations in that area. Then you can click over to the list view and it'll show those ten locations in a list with text. And then there's three ways you can sort that list. You can sort that list of locations by alphabetical or by distance or by last updated. Got it. Okay. That is different. And the segue to Patreon was going to be that we on Patreon you could do this thing where you can have like members only or like patron only posts and only people that are patrons can see those posts and we did a post last month that is like a sneak peek of the app like a one or two minute long video showing just some of the features of it and how it looks. I mean, it's pretty rough. There's going to be a lot of like feature and style changes coming up, but we thought it'd be fun to just show that. And so Patreon update then. We launched a Patreon, patreon.com slash pinball map as a way for people to support the map. And since it's been, I don't know, a little over a month, we have now 26 total patrons. And since the last episode, we've had 14 new ones. And we're, I think we're at a total of $83 a month. That's pretty good. Yeah. That seems good. So I think in the tech section we'll talk about what we're using that money for, because this is a new thing, us having money. Um, no, I mean it's really cool. We were, I don't want to ruin any future conversations here, but we were on a call I had a call with representatives from AWS, Amazon Web Services the other day talking about costs and how to cover costs and what our budget was and blah blah blah. And it came up in that meeting that maybe we should put ads on the site to try to get more money. And we were able to say no, we don't want to do that. And the reason we are able to not do that is because of things like the Patreon. That way, community activity is going to be more diferentes, and the desired quality is removed from the list as a result of extensive waste collecting. The keep Якина Are the people who are going to be calling them Patreons? Yeah, I actually haven't figured that out yet. I feel like sometimes they're called Patreons. I think Patron might be the thing, but that... I don't know. Why not just call them a Patreon? I feel like... I don't know. Your site's called Patreon. I kind of think it's acceptable to call our supporters Patreons also. Yeah. Whoever you are, thank you for your support. Whatever you are. Yeah. And on that note, yeah, we have shirts for sale still. extrovert, I thought that was a good idea to have it double-sided. Yeah, double-sided. One comment I got today was that they're different brand blank shirts than the last time and these ones run a little bit bigger than before, so keep that in mind. I will. I wasn't talking to you. Oh, sorry. Sorry about that. Okay.

Pinball Map will self-host OpenStreetMap tiles using AWS infrastructure with volunteer DevOps help from Elijah and Jordan

high confidence · Scott and Ryan discuss their migration plan to self-hosted solution on AWS

  • Mapbox GL JavaScript library has performance issues on older computers due to animations and is 'heavyweight'

    medium confidence · Scott expresses concern about Mapbox GL performance; mentions dragging on older machines and heavy animations like pan-to function

    • Chris Rhodes (Wedgehead operator) @ ~42:30 — Operator perspective on George Gomez's game design appeal and accessibility for bar/venue locations

  • “It's George Gomez. He knows how to sell a game... Sopranos, Batman and the Dark Knight. People love playing that game because they're good beginner games for people.”

    Chris Rhodes @ ~43:00 — Venue operator commentary on what makes George Gomez's designs successful in commercial settings

    • The Know
    venue
    REO Speedwagonorganization
    Paragongame
    Sopranosgame
    George Gomezperson
    Deadpoolgame
    Elijahperson
    Jordanperson
    Mapbox GLproduct
    Alan Robertsonperson
    The Record Plantvenue
  • ?

    community_signal: Pinball Map securing volunteer DevOps support (Elijah, Jordan) and AWS employee assistance for infrastructure migration, demonstrating community investment in service

    high · Scott mentions volunteer DevOps team paid in t-shirts and AWS employee who is Pinball Map user providing guidance

  • ?

    technology_signal: Mapbox API designed for near-drop-in replacement of Google Maps with minimal code changes (~45 minutes, ~20 lines), enabling rapid migration between services

    high · Scott describes API syntax similarity allowing quick switchover from Google Maps to Mapbox

  • ?

    product_concern: Mapbox GL JavaScript library exhibiting performance issues on older hardware due to heavy animations (pan-to, zoom effects); potential accessibility concern for users with legacy computers

    medium · Scott notes Mapbox GL feels 'heavyweight' and draggy on older machines; mentions pan/zoom animations as primary culprit

  • ?

    content_signal: Mapping Around podcast actively soliciting and responding to listener feedback; addressing episode length, technical depth preferences, and feature requests in subsequent episodes

    high · Scott addresses feedback from first two episodes; incorporates operator interview and Patreon discussion based on listener suggestions

  • ?

    industry_signal: George Gomez's games (Sopranos, Deadpool, Batman) identified as commercially successful in venue settings due to beginner accessibility and long play duration, supporting operator revenue model

    medium · Chris Rhodes praises Gomez designs for beginner appeal, long gameplay, and thematic appeal to bar patrons

    • 8:45
    And now Ryan interviews his dad about a pinball machine that they owned while Ryan was growing up. So you grew up outside of Chicago. Yes, I did. Arlington Heights, Illinois. And that Chicago, I don't know, this area, I don't know if you knew this, that's where most of the pinball was manufactured in the U.S. There was Gottlieb, Bally, and Stern pinball, which is, they were in the early 80s and then they're back again now and they're in that area. So as a little kid, were you ever, were you aware of pinball? I think at some point I was, you know, we would go, I mean, I don't remember playing I don't know about pinball specifically, but I'm sure we did. And, you know, we didn't have video games when I was young, so we played pinball sometimes. And then, when I was born in 1980, we had Paragon in the house, and that's a 1978 Bally machine. How did we get that? We got it because from our account I played in a band. They were, the accountants gave us Christmas presents and that was my Christmas present. That was it. Got a pinball machine, won Christmas. Wow, did your accountants know that you liked it? I think they just you know wanted to give something that was cool and hip at the time and I didn't request that it was kind of a total surprise. Wow and you still have it and still in your garage. Yeah, we still play it. The grandkids now play it too. Yeah. And the eight-year-old Oliver just got over a hundred thousand on it a short time ago. He was very thrilled. And then in the band you played in, REO Speedwagon, in your video In My Dreams, that was recorded at your studio. Well it was recorded at a rehearsal space. And you had two machines in the video. Is that a prop? No, I don't know. It might have been, but I think that we, that space that we recorded that video in was more not our space, but just a space that the guy making the video used and may have put it in or may have already been in there. I don't know. But I do remember seeing it in the video, yes. Yeah, because the other band members liked playing pinball. They'd come over to our house and everyone liked it. Well the record plant had tons of pinball machines and we recorded there more than once and... Is that the name of it? The record plant, yeah, in LA. That was in LA. And we played pinball all the time. Oh, okay. Cool.
    11:51
    Pinball rocks. Alright, well, that's probably good enough. Okay, then let's talk about some map tech, tech, tech, tech, tech, tech. Tech, tech, tech, tech, tech, tech, tech. In this map tech segment, we're going to chat about maps and the technology behind them. It's a very literal map tech this time. Sorry, is this the golden map tag? Yeah. Because it's the time, yeah, forget it. I think it is. Or it's the bronze one. Yeah. So, this, in this map tag, we'll chat about moving from using the Google Maps API to an alternative to service our maps. Well, here's a little background on what map tile services are. Basically, every time you visit a web map, it consists of these 256 pixel square PNG images that are all geo-referenced and stitched together seamlessly. So you're just looking at a bunch of pictures that are in the correct latitude and longitude, And they've been projected from a globe to a flat plane. Or from a flat earth to a flat plane. Oh yeah, exactly. Yeah. You don't know what projection is used. It actually probably uses the Web Mercator projection. And as a quick aside, if you want to know anything more about map projections, because it's very complicated and weird, and I do mapping every day and I just barely understand them, uh... you could just go to wikipedia for map projections and you see all the crazy ways that people convert a globe or a flat earth into a flat plane. It's really weird. I don't work with maps all day. If you'd like to learn more about flat earth, Google research flat earth. Yeah. So you were saying... So I was saying... Um, yeah, so there's an ice wall around the, or, oh wait, what are we talking about? Okay, so that's it. We got these tiles, and those tiles are sitting on a server. Previously, they were, we were using Google's server, and when you bring up a map, or, you know, when you search something on, on Pinball Map, You get these tiles served up to you with like streets and points of interest and things like that overlaid on top. As a map novice, which I am a map novice, I feel like a mind-blowing moment for me is thinking about everything you just said. These are PNG files being stitched together seamlessly. But now think about zooming in and panning around on Google Map. Think about the level of detail that they like down to the street level or all the way up to the earth level. It's got to be like, I mean, we're talking billions of images. How many images? It's I don't even know. Yeah, I have no idea how many images because yeah, for each zoom level, it's a new set of images because the different levels of detail come up on each zoom level. It's crazy. I don't know, 20, 25 zoom levels? So for someone to host all that data and serve it up as quickly as it gets served up, I don't know, it's kind of impressive. Yeah, it feels pretty impressive to me. I think, you know, who knows how much space the Google Maps tiles take up, but if you use OpenStreetMap tiles, I keep seeing ranges for how much space those are, but it's somewhere We're between 60 to 200 gigabytes just for the earth. What's OpenStreetMaps, Ryan? I'm glad you asked, Scott. So we have been using Google Map for 10 years and it's been free and it's been nice. I love Google Maps. I think it's a great service and it's served us really well. However, they increased their price humongously. They went from free to we tallied up, it would cost us about $350 or so per month to use their service with their new pricing scheme. Yeah, I mean it's like and we already have a $200 credit, so that makes the total only $150. Oh wait, no, sorry. I have to well actual you there, Ryan. The $300 price tag is after the credits applied. Ah, really? Yeah. If we didn't, I mean everyone who signs up gets $200 a month. That's their way of saying it's still free or whatever, but our usage puts us at $525 a month. Wow, I didn't realize that. Oh yeah. Okay, that's crazy. Okay, so whatever it is, it's not tenable. And we had like a couple months, six months or something to get off and find an alternative. And we delayed that until about two weeks before it was due. Because, frankly, I didn't believe it. Like, I didn't. And I, you know, this is my fault because I'm, I have the eyeballs, I guess we both have eyeballs on that console. But for a service that we got for free for so long, you know, I just assumed this was somehow going to work out. I'm just saying it out loud. It just sounds so dumb, but it feels like such a massive shift in their policy. Which, yeah, it's humongous, but it did almost work out because we got an early adopter extra credit that kind of floated us for some extra months. Like, if that could have kept going, that would have been all right. Yeah, totally. And because the service works as good as it does, it's not the kind of thing you want to sink time into or thought, which is our mistake, I guess. Unless you really need to. Yeah, yeah. I mean, and the way I think about it in my head is most of us probably get email for free nowadays. Um, imagine if one day Google said, hey, your Gmail accounts now cost, uh, 30 bucks a month. You know, you, you would, you could pay it, I, you know, but you'd be a little put out, right? Like to the point where maybe you'd just look somewhere else. Yeah, you go to Fastmail for $5 a month. Just kidding. Right. So where, what is the Fastmail of map services? Surely there is an alternative. From the surface it seems like it there that there is and our alternatives are using
    19:13
    first for the tiles themselves using OpenStreetMap OSM and that's like an open source crowd-sourced map tile thing map tile map that uh um you can download and then use there isn't There isn't like a map that you can use just like Google Maps, a web map where you can just use OpenStreetMaps. So there's basically it's like the people that create and maintain OpenStreetMap, they all started little side businesses to sell us map tile services. That's how they make money and make it worth their time to be developers. And I don't know if that's the case with this, I'm going to give you a list of these examples we're going to give right now. But basically there's a lot of options and they're all kind of the same. But we went with Mapbox at first because we had a Pinball Map user who works at Mapbox and told us, hey, you might be interested because of this massive Google Maps price increase. You might be interested in Mapbox. And we priced it out. Google Maps is 50,000 free views a month and then every additional 1,000 views after that is $7. Which goes up very, very quickly. It's just the weirdest pricing scheme. It is weird. It is weird. Yeah. And Mapbox is 50,000 free and then every additional one is 50 cents. 50 cents? Let's do that. Let's switch to that. And we did. It's basically a drop-in replacement. You just have to change... How much code did you have to change? A lot or not a lot? I find this to be pretty clever and funny. So when you use a service like Google Maps, you end up writing methods and calling code to get their objects into your code. What Mapbox did is they made their code essentially almost the same exact syntax that Google used. So I think, I want to say it was like 45 minutes of work and maybe like 20 lines of code that had to be changed in order to make an entire switch to an entirely new service and software. 言 We're going to hit our 50,000 quota in five days. It's basically way faster than we were with Google Maps. Way, way faster. It's almost as if the word view means different things to each of these companies. Yeah, it is exactly almost like that. Well, here's what it means. To Google Maps, a view is when you load the map. That counts as a view. You can pan, you can zoom, you can...and, you know, keep in mind when you're panning and zooming, new map tiles are loading during that time, but it still counts as a single view. Pretty cool. Map tile on the...I mean, sorry, Mapbox, on the other hand, they define a view as when four tiles load. For those PNG files? For those PNG files. And if you load up a single location on Pinball Map, you might be seeing eight or ten of those tiles. That's before you do anything, before you zoom or pan. So what happens is their definition of a view is completely different and you end up just like eating through those views. So the comparison of the price comparison between the two is apples to oranges. It's not a good comparison. It doesn't make sense. There's folks from Mapbox on forums saying that they're a tenth the price of Google Maps. I mean everywhere it says they cheaper and they might be a little bit cheaper but they not a tenth the cost What was the estimated cost on our box Well after running it for just like five days and seeing those stats I estimated about a month Okay. Still, I mean, definitely better than $300 something bucks, but $125 is well beyond our current budget. Yeah. And we'd spend all of our money on a map service that we were getting for free a few weeks ago. Yeah. Ugh. Oy. And we did actually chat with the Mapbox people and they were very nice. They can't... I would like to emphasize that they had good customer service. Just because we had questions about the viewing. I actually straight up asked them. I was like, is this real that your definition of a view is totally different than Google's definition? And they ended up giving us three free months of Mapbox. Which is awesome. Yeah, very cool. It gives us some nice breathing room. We're not paying $125 plus a month.
    24:56
    Yeah, and I mean just to echo what you say, I feel like a goofball complaining about paying for a service that is like amazing, right? Like you're serving up tiles of pictures of the earth in near real time, and I'm going to complain that you want me to pay for that, And you're also cheaper than Google. So to be clear, I don't begrudge them their livelihood. It's just a bummer to have to pay for something that used to be free. That's all. Yeah. And to pay so much more than free. Right. So what do we do now, Ryan? I guess pinball map's done. Yeah, we're shutting down in three days and this is our last podcast. Well, real quick soapbox before your big reveal on why the pinball map isn't shutting down. This might sound a little dramatic, but I honestly do wonder if things like this are going to change the face of the internet as we know it. Because we're a map-centric service, but we're not a huge one, right? There's a lot of people that look at the map, but I'm sure there's much bigger map services out there. But if we are priced out of using this thing, I mean, how many other people just got priced out of using this thing? And it used to be you could just toss a map on your website. Now you're really going to have to think about that, because there might be a real price tag associated with it. Yeah, definitely. And since I do mapping for my work and for fun, I sometimes have ideas for mapping sites that could make me money or something like that, like a side business. And now how I think of that is totally different because now I'm like, oh, but I can't, if it got popular, suddenly my bill might be humongous and I can't just dump money into 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.
    27:23
    We're going to host the tiles ourselves. That sounds hard. Is that what you thought I'd say? Yeah, I guess I was hoping you'd say that, yeah. It sounds very hard. Yeah, it does sound kind of hard. You have to have a map tile server that serves them up and fortunately, I mean, OSM is kind It's kind of in a good place. It just has a good community where there are lots of resources. There's a website called Switch2, with the letter, I mean the number 2, OSM, that gives you tutorials on how to do this. There's another service called Map Tyler, which is a, like a, it's kind of like Mapbox. And they also have a little Docker package for a map server. So, and the Docker package could ostensibly just pop into, you could just drop it onto some hard drive somewhere. Hmm. Nice. No, I mean, to put some color on that, Ryan and I are, well, Ryan more than me is capable of running his own servers and, you know, Ryan uses Linux, I'm looking at a Mac right now. We have engaged two DevOps experts to volunteer their time. I believe they were paid in t-shirts. Yeah. To help us through setting up the actual hardware necessary to run a service like this. Because think about it. I mean, it's, I don't know. Is it cool? It feels cool to think that there's going to be a computer out there with pictures of the world whose only chore in life is to serve those pictures to the Dumbbells. To the delight of pinball map users. Uh, you just got replaced, Google. I'm drunk with power. Yeah. Um, yeah, so, uh, so we get the tiles. We put the tiles somewhere with this amazing software that people wrote for free and are letting us use for free. Uh, Scott, where are we gonna store those? Oh, geez. Well, I have a computer in my basement, but I don't have a reliable internet connection. Heroku might be able to do that, but I kind of don't think so. It sounds like you need a pretty beefy machine to do that. Where would you go to get a highly configurable, beefy machine in the modern age? Well, I'd probably go to the beefiest place on earth, Amazon. Yeah, so kind of in line with our last podcast conversations, we're continuing to engage AWS Amazon Web Services, which is a suite of software, I don't know, is that the right way to say this? Massive warehouses of hardware that people have written software on top of that lets Most of us practically leave the computers alone while running around the� so funny. In addition to our plan of migrating the actual API and web server, now we're going to set up a map server there. So that's great news. And I don't know how much detail we should get into here, but... No, we're still working all that out. And we've been chatting with a person, a couple of people from AWS, and one of whom is a pinball map user. Right. Maybe we've already mentioned that. I don't think we have, but it's great because this guy's really helping us out and excited to see where it goes along with our DevOps team of Elijah and Jordan. Yep. Elijah's in your neck of the woods and Jordan's in my neck of the woods. Oh yeah. Yeah. One of these days we should have some sort of pinball map. What do people have? Like a company retreat? Oh yeah. Yeah. Company repose? Anyway. A company kickback? What were you going to say? I was going to note that even once we're using OSM map service on our own server, we're still going to be using the Mapbox GL JavaScript in order to help us communicate with the server and serve up those tiles. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghezo, Gary K. Kylian, and Jeff Gettmacher. You could customize the info window and the pin, the map pin. It's really customizable and I think that's going to be fun to work with. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that part up because it's important I think to divorce the two concepts of tiles and software to show tiles. For people who don't care at all about our conversation about tiles, maybe you care about We're going to talk about the software part and actually this is something you can see right now. Like if you go on the Pinball Map website and look at a map, you are looking at the new mapping software that we're using. And this is where I'm going to call for feedback because I got an opinion here and I don't think we agree on this necessarily. I think the Mapbox GL software is super cool. Does all this customization work that I know you get really into. But I am a little worried that it's kind of heavy weight. I have an older computer and if I go to the site, sometimes it feels like it's dragging a little bit. It's so cutting edge and cool that maybe it doesn't work as well on older computers like mine. Anyway, I'm not bringing that up to be a downer. I'm bringing it up to say that there are multiple map tile software display mechanisms, and some are lighter weight. So I'm putting it out there. I'm saying if you're like me and your machine's dragging a bit, let us know, because we can always try lighter weight ones too. Yeah, or we also might be able to turn off some of the animations or something like that. Yeah, it's the animation thing. I think that's it. With Google Maps you'd load it up and it felt like a static image almost that you dragged around. Now it feels like I'm playing Doom 2 Quake. Yeah, there's this big swooping animation where it pans out to the world and then zooms in. It's like, I don't need that. Which, yeah. I mean, it's cool. It looks cool. I just, I notice the performance, that's all. I will have to figure out what that is. That might be the pan to function. That's my guess, but that's all I could see in there that's doing that, but whatever. There's probably ways to just like a binary to turn that off. Well, feedback appreciated, and it's a work in progress. So the good news is, well, there's mostly bad news here, I guess. The bad news is suddenly we had to pay for something that we used to get for free. We found that it was basically impossible to not pay for it. We're mitigating the cost as much as we can by hosting our own service and we got lucky that people are helping us do that, but it still is going to cost money. The other bad piece of news here is, I don't know about you, but this is what I've been doing for like a month. Yeah. You know, like imagine somebody's, you know, hey, this thing that used to be just I'm going to be spending more time on the React Native app than this. Yeah, so to be continued. Hey, check it out. Next up on Mapping Around with Scott and Ryan, we have an interview with Chris Rhodes, loggerhead of the React Native app. Hey, I'm Chris Rhodes. I'm a member of React Native. Next up on Mappin' Around with Scott and Ryan, we have an interview with Chris Rhodes, long time operator and now a recent owner of a new bar slash club slash pinball arcade on Sandy in northeast Portland called Wedgehead. Chris has also been a long time supporter of the tournament scene and the pinball community The City of Portland And also one of the original gang leaders, OOO, Out of Order, one of CFF's first rivals.
    36:35
    Check it out. So tell me about Wedgehead, where we are right now. Okay, so, I don't know, this is always a tough question. Like I did a little radio interview and they were like, so tell us about it. And I'm like, what do you want to know? You know, like, I could, you know, like, we inherited this building from a place called The Know, and we removed the stage and did a lot of work to the building, and we tried to build a place where you could play pinball or you could hang out in a bar when it's comfortable. Were you an operator for The Know? Yes. Were you an operator for The Know when it was on Alberta? Yes. Ryan and I used to hang out there and play. Yeah. I'm a family guy there. Yeah, that was my family guy. Okay, nice. Yeah, family guy, the one that always has been at the know and will continually be here is Sopranos. Of course. Yeah, like that game I've taken special effort to make sure that it's working really well all the time. And I've been told that people are like, this is the best working Sopranos around. Is that like in general a pretty big route machine? I see Sopranos all over the place. Yeah, it is. I mean, it's George Gomez. He knows how to sell a game. It's happening with Deadpool right now. You know, like, it's like, George Gomez designs Earth, you know, Lord of the Rings, you know, Batman, whatever it was, Batman and the Dark Knight. People love playing that game. Because I think they're good, like, beginners games for people. I feel like they get their money's worth because you can play it for a long time, get several multiballs. The themes are always good for a bar, I'd imagine too. Sopranos? Yeah, that's pretty much true. Yes. Sopranos, I've, you know, like, it's so funny how often Sopranos come up. Like, a friend of mine, you know, who's just watching Sopranos for the first time, we were talking about it the other day, it was pretty funny. You know, like, he's just like, I'm just watching it for the first time, so all of it's starting to make sense from the game. It's like he's piecing it all together, you know? Yeah, Stu Gatz and all that stuff. Back to Wedgehead. I mean, it's the first time I just walked in. It's amazing. Huge space. I like that there's a game area and there's kind of a hangout area. Yeah, that's purposely done so people can be comfortable hanging out. Like, if you don't want to spend quarters, there's a place to eat and drink. And I mean, we've created a food, like a menu that is definitely edible. It's really good. Our kitchen manager, my business partner, Alan Robertson, is definitely a great cook. Like he's, he was at Clyde Common, he was the kitchen manager of Bunk's Sandwiches for a number of years, so he's got a lot of chops. San Diego style tacos? Did I read that right? He wants to make that happen on Tuesday nights. Oh, taco Tuesday. Fish tacos, that's going to be a rotating thing. It's not on the menu yet.
    39:37
    Yeah, we haven't even rolled out our whole menu yet. We're probably at about 65% of it. Okay. When did you open officially? We had our soft opening last Tuesday, which was September 11th. Oh. A great day. Never forget. Never forget, yeah. So, yeah. So we had a soft opening and we had a tournament the next night. It went dark for a day and then last Friday was our first real business day. We've been open since. Are you planning on doing regular events here? Yeah, that's something that... I don't know. I want people to hold events here. I don't know if I necessarily want to be the person planning them. Got it. Because, I mean, I might try to do some fun stuff every once in a while, but I think there's enough people in the community who are doing things that if they want to do them here, I'm very welcoming to whoever wants to come in and try to do something. I feel like there's almost tournament fatigue in this town. It seems like every night of the week there's a different event going on. Yeah. And I don't want to try to get into that mix. I want someone to come in and do it. And I mean, that just helps people feel like they're more connected to the place as well. Sure. You did run tournaments where machines were the prize, right? You buy in, you play, you get a machine? No, I've never done that. Oh, okay. I got my facts. I would bring machines to tournaments and whatever the collection was I would give away 75% of the collection. I gotcha. And they were usually like really old games that nobody had ever seen before and nobody knew how to play. So that's been kind of the signature of the way that whenever there's a tournament at my locations I don't reveal what's going to be there. I'll swap out games right before so players won't know what they are. Just to kind of mess with people. Like when I've done the state, the state, when I hosted the state tournament the first couple years, I wouldn't release, you know, I would have 23 machines at the old mill. I think it was 20, maybe it was 17 or 18, but I would bring them all in like right before and not let anybody know what they were. Nice. Yeah. I don't really compete. I just have machines I like. What I find is over time these tournaments happen and then it gets harder and harder to get those machines like Skateball, David B Zhenick, He's a tournament player, and he always, it seems like he gets a kick out of it. He thinks it's hilarious how I do it. Unveil? Yeah, it's kinda like, ah, come check it out. Are you still gonna operate around town? Yeah. Outside of here? Oh, nice. I've gotten rid of a couple locations, but not now. Okay. I've always been curious as an operator, it's usually 50-50 split or whatever the deal is with the owner. When you get paid out, do you just get like a bucket load of orders? How does it work? Well, I pay them out. So I do a percentage split with the bars and then I pay them out and I usually pay them in cash. So you're walking out of there with buckets full of quarters like constantly? I have, when I do bank runs, you know, I'll have like $5000 in quarters. Oh my god. I have like a little, like a little dolly that I'll, with a milk crate and we toss all the bags of quarters in there and then I go and change them. Cool. Bank runs usually take me, I don't know, like a week or two. Cool. Bank runs usually take me like 45 minutes an hour. So really it's just like you go home, you dump it in the machine, it rolls it, and then you show up. No, they won't take rolls. So it's all loose quarters and plastic bags. Whoa. And then they take those and... No, they run them through a machine. And then, yeah, I count... I have an old Klopp is the name of the company. It's a change, it's a counter. And I had a hand cranker for a number of years I got from one of my locations. It's over in St. John's called Slim's. It's an old time bar that used to be, you know, the doctors and all those people used to go there. And they used to have a bank in the front actually where you could cash your paychecks and stuff like that. Really? But they had one in the back and when the new guy took over, he's like, hey, you want this? He sold it to me for 30 bucks. And it was a hand crank and I have actually like a callus right here on my index finger from cranking. And then recently I got, and I think I dated that one back to the 40s, and I recently got one that is exactly the same but has a motor in it, and it's super old too, and it's, you know, I count all the quarters one by one. Speaking of St. John's, I saw that this place was almost in St. John's. As a St. John's resident and a guy who plays at St. John's, that's my only place. I'm very happy for you and this is an amazing location. I'll say when this works out and you expand, please consider. Hey man, this was, I mean, I don't want to say it was second choice, but this kind of opportunity felt... Like, after we tried to set up in St. John's and we had a bunch of hurdles that we couldn't overcome with the city and zoning and stuff like that. We had a lot of fun doing stuff like that. We applied for permits, and when we went through planning, they told us one thing, and then once the permits were submitted, they told us something else. So, when that fell through, we were bummed out and me and Allen just threw it in the trash. I didn't even think about any, because it was a lot of time and effort that I put into that, money too, and I was like, I didn't even want to think about opening a place. And then the opportunity just came. 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.
    45:55
    When you were an operator, or primarily an operator, or I don't know how you characterize, now I imagine you're a restaurateur bar owner slash operator? Whatever. When you were pushing the routes, was there, for a user of your machines, is there etiquette that you expect people to follow? Like obviously don't beat the shit out of the machine, but if I show up and it's off I'm a guy who's been working at a bar and there's no sign on it. Am I allowed to turn it on? Am I allowed to turn it off if it's broken? See, I would just shut them off and like if I get a call from the location, I'll say put a sign on it and shut it off. If there's a sign on it, people usually don't turn it on. But I've started actually pulling the fuse out of the machine so people can't turn it on. Oh, nice. Because I had a Centaur over at Blackbird that somebody turned on and it cried out of coil because it was like locked on because of switches. So it's like the older, like the new machines kind of are safeguarded against that sort of thing. But yeah, so I just pulled the main fuse for the game so people like, I tried turning it on, it wouldn't do anything. It's like, or unplug it, you know. Yeah, and it's on, it's not working, they blame you. Yeah. Um, Out of Order, that's still what you're operating as, right? That's my amusement company, yeah. Was this a pinball gang at some point as well? Yeah, man. We started with CFF. Like, CFF was kind of starting and doing their thing. This was a long time ago. I don't even know what year. But then I was like, alright, well then I'm creating Out of Order. Because I want to be the... you can't be the only gang in town. You've got to be rivals. And we had a couple rumbles Like I think three rumbles beat them in one Rumble and they won the other two Nice. So. Yeah, I remember CFF and OOO were the two that were kind of burning my head. You play around town. Maybe uh, yeah. There's still some guys, there's still some guys who played with us who still put up OOO. Oh, nice. So, yeah, I stopped putting up OOO. When I started operating games, I was just like, I don't want to have any beef with anybody. Not that CFF and I have ever really had a few, it was kind of like a fun rivalry. Yeah, and it's like ever since I started operating, it's like, I don't really want to, you know, I want everybody to play the games. So it's like, I don't want any weirdness or anything like that. So I still, if I'm playing on games that aren't mine and I get a high score, I'll put up a low score. But on my games on location, if I'm testing them and playing them and not cheating or anything like that, I'll put up a bub. I'm a B.U.B. and if any marijuana is in my system I'll flip a club. But... Very rarely anymore is there any pot, but you know, whatever. Nice. How'd you learn how to do this? Like, fix machines and fix them at scale? Like, people can tinker but you're, you know, flipping machines all day long. I get help from people still. I mean, I try to do a lot of it myself. It's kind of like, you know, the whole learning curve. And it's like I was climbing for the longest time and now I'm like a little bit the way down. I'm not a super, I'm totally dyslexic and I'm not really good at reading things. So I watch instructional videos. I do read some things. But like the super technical stuff I kind of just make it till you make it. You just kind of keep doing it and then you know like rely on people's Google search. I mean computers can figure anything out these days it seems. Yeah, so it's just been a you know kind of going against like trying to figure it out. It just kind of happened. Do you use as an operator, do you use the pinball map at all or do you rely more on bartenders at locations? I do sometimes. I usually, I like the public to kind of run it you know because I feel that's the way it should be. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Knapp Arcade, Raydaypinball, Bally Williams, Straight Down the Middle, Bally Williams, Some of the comments though just have really nothing to do with like the actual how a machine works. It's more so people complaining that the machine's too hard. Yeah. Because I set my tilts really tight. I put my machines really steep. People don't like it. But it's like I kind of feel like the harder you set up a machine, the better people are going to play. Yeah. You know, it's like, it's like, because I come from the lineage of skateboarding and like skateboarding parks we've built and people would be like, how the fuck am I going to I got a skate. It's so steep. It's so scary. And then two years later, kids are pulling airs on it. You know, like, you know, like, it's like you build it, people figure it out. So it's like, you know, it might not be the best for the beginner player, but it's what's going to get you to be a better player. Well, I mean, you're definitely a really reliable operator in this town. We get operators using the map that will delete other operators' machines or tell us to remove their machines because people will comment that their stuff's broken and the operator won't go fix it, but they also don't want that message on there. So we... there's shenanigans is what I'm trying to say. It gets really goofy. I'm all for power of the people. You know, like if I don't update the map, I figure someone will come in and play who will update the map. Yeah, yeah. You know? I mean, yeah, I think players will work it out themselves, man. Yeah. The public is smart enough and fast enough and quick enough to take care of it themselves. Can we do the lightning rounds? Sure. Hardest machine to keep running? Right now I've been battling Black Holt. I hate Black Holt. I mean, I fucking hate it. And my other nemesis is Theater of Magic. I haven't had Theater of Magic on location for a long time and I brought it back out and I have it here at Wedgehead and it's like I'm having problems with quarters. They're not getting stuck in the mechanisms. They're getting stuck in the slot after the mechanism for some crazy reason. So not a playfield issue? No, the trunk of the goddamn shit show, like the Eddie sensors, like games are a drag. What about the garage on SenseNess? I've never had a problem with it. Never had a problem with it? It might start getting slow and then I put a little bit of synthetic lube on the two. There's two, there's two like you know where the door hinges. Like I put a little bit of lube on that and then the thing started playing like super like key and it would open up right away. Okay. So I've never really had a problem with it. Best money maker title, not necessarily machine on location, but I'll take both if you know. I mean it's usually whatever's the newest out. You know like. Iron Maiden, Deadpool, you know before that was Star Wars, before that it was, you know like new games earned big, but like over the long haul, you know, Sopranos has been really reliable for me, Lord of the Rings, you know all the games that are super popular, you know, Medieval Madness. I only got a Medieval Madness remake, I didn't think I would ever have one, like when I would start new locations people were like, do you have a Medieval Madness remake? I'm like, no, I probably never will. I'm sorry. Like $10,000. Yeah, it's like $10,000 plus for a machine that was built in 91. And I'm like, I don't have, I mean, it'll take a long time to earn that back. It's just business stuff. What neighborhood in Portland is the roughest on the machines? None, man. It seems like people are pretty kind to my machines. You know, like, I mean, I'm there to fix them when they're broken and people see that, you know, like, I carry, occasionally I'll get a sticker put on the side of one of them. I hate that. Yeah. But, you know, I've had the lock bar carved, like, once, maybe twice, but, like, pretty much, like, I mean, I had machines at the NO in Alberta when that place was kind of dark and whatever it was and people were almost the nicest to the machines over there. I found the, I don't, I mean, my locations are kind of a little bit hand-picked too. Like I don't, like, sports bars and stuff like that, I don't do that sort of thing. So I can imagine there, like with some Jocos, might get a little bit aggressive with the machines. Yeah. Okay. I think you answered this, but personal all-time favorite machine? Big Casino. Big Casino, what is it about Big Casino? I don't know, I wish you could play it, but it's... So, you know, it's an EM, you've got to push the ball to serve the ball into the playfield, and the flippers are way, like, on the opposite edges of the cabinet. People look at it and they're like, this is going to be impossible. And I've put some really... the silicone and others on there so the ball bounces like crazy. And you... it's like the ultimate nudge and flip game, you know, like, it really... It teaches you how to play pinball. You know, it's like, watch how the ball is gonna hit something and the angle comes off of. And when you're gonna be conscious of, don't just swing at it like when you hit it. Where it's gonna hit off the bat, you know. It's really fun, man. It's really, really fun. I should have checked before I came but I imagine this place has got to be one of a handful of places in town with EMs or wedge heads or any of that stuff. Yeah, maybe, yeah. I tried to... Ground Control had that bowling game for a while. Kingpin, yeah. Now that's... I don't think they have it anymore. I try to, you know, if I have more than five machines on a location, I try to put something that has a little bit of history in just because, you know, if you have a bunch of games that everybody else has, like, why not try to mix it up a little bit? I really try to curate lineups where it's like you get a little bit old, a little bit of new. You know, like try to keep a certain amount of DMDs, new Sterns, solid state, maybe an EM. You know, like I really try to balance all that. So if I take like a 90s DMD game out of the place, I'll put another one back in. Gotcha. You know, like if I take a Stern out, I'll put another Stern in its place. It's kind of the way that I work it out in my mind. Yeah, keep the ratios. Yeah, when I do big swap outs, I'll draw like a little flow chart where I'll have all the locations in circles and then draw lines where they're all going to go to. Oh, nice. Yeah. Do you have like a hundred machines or something like that? Yeah, I've got over a hundred machines. And there is a warehouse in Linton that has all these machines? I don't know if I want to disclose that. Is there a machine you'd never put on location? No. That's what they're for, man. Banzai Run on location is a check. If I had one. Okay. I would do it for sure, man. That's what they're for. I mean, I got to fly them over there? That's a valuable game. People are like, no, you can't... I mean, I said this in an article before. It's like, this is what they're made to do. Put quarters in the slots. They're not made to be hoarded in somebody's garage. You know, like, they're meant to be played and have quarters ran through, you know, like, so it's, I've taken a lot of, like, the EMs, like, I've changed them back so they can take quarters again because they were all on free play. You know, like, I have two Gottliebs here, the Incredible Hulk and Black Hole was the same way, that were wired when you hit the start button, it automatically writes credits. So I had to take that out, take the hack out, you know, because I want the games to take quarters, man. Yeah. It's when they're happiest. It's when the operator's happiest. Yeah, fair. I, I, I, and by the way, I hate free play on, like, you know, it's cool to get a lot of people in the door, but people don't, like, they'll just hit four players on a game. Yeah, and walk away. And then walk off, and then the next player walks up, they want to play a fresh game. Yeah. And then you've got to either drain all the balls or power cycle it. Yeah, that's the worst. Yeah, it's, it's, it, I do not like it. It's a waste of time. Yeah. Would you ever consider putting linked fast breaks on location in St. John's? For sure, man. I would love it. I mean, it would be great. I would, like I said, I would love to do something in St. John's. Okay. Like that's, that was my first choice. I mean, I love that neighborhood. I live in the hood. So it's like, that's, that's my spot. Same. But for now, we're at Wedgehead in the Hollywood District, where the No used to be, and they have a lot of good stuff. Yeah. So, I mean, I would love to do something in St. John's.
    58:41
    We're a great team. We have an amazing lineup, great food. Come on down. Noon to midnight every day. Miners until 6 o'clock. And anything else, go to the website or Facebook page. Come put quarters in these machines. Thanks, Chris. Yeah, thank you. Hit me with some stats. Here's some fun ones. Ready to have fun, Scott? I am. This will be the only fun I've had today. Lay it on me. Here we go. Two minutes of fun. I thought it would be interesting to see how many locations on the map are called saloons. Oh. How about you guess? How many saloons are there that have pinball? Saloons. Let's see. How many locations again? 5,689. I'm flashing back to the first episode where I reasoned these out for like 10 minutes. 5,000. All right. This is Midwestern. No. I'll say there are 150 saloons with pinball. Not quite. There are, well, this has actually changed a couple since last time, but there's, I think there's 66 now. Okay. Yeah. I'm looking forward to playing Red Dead Redemption 2 in October. I really enjoy westerns and saloons. So you'll probably hop into a saloon in that game? Yeah, definitely be in some saloons. Nice. Well, you could go to a saloon in real life also. I don't... do we have saloons in Portland? Yeah. Oh, okay. I mean... There's gotta be one, right? Yeah, just... what is there, the... I'm actually looking this up. We're both typing now. There's two. There's Silver Star Saloon. Uh huh. That's in Vancouver, Washington. No, it's gotta be Water Trow Saloon. Water Trough Saloon. Oh, operated by Quarter World. They got Kiss and Pirates. The Kiss LE though. That's a pass. Okay. All right. What other fun are we having? I thought it'd be fun to... This is just something I noticed when machine comments would come in, that a lot of the times people were misspelling the word slimer and they were spelling it slimmer. Like two M's instead of one? Yeah, two M's. Okay, slimmer. And I didn't want to... You know, this isn't to, you know, criticize you if you don't know how to spell slimer. I get it. Okay. I get it. But it just, there was more than two and that stood out to me. It's the kind of thing where they know who Slimer is, which is to their credit, but they probably don't care enough about Ghostbusters to have read the word Slimer a lot, you know? Right. Whereas like we probably had those little record books when you were a kid where they tell you the story of Ghostbusters. Yeah. And it says Slimer. Anyway. Yeah. What word do you use outside of Ghostbusters? No. All right, so you're going to guess. So there are 14 total instances of a comment that talks about Slimer. And how many of those, Scott, are spelled Slimer? I'll say I'm also very curious to see how many of those have a capital S, like a So, that's like a proper noun versus slime. 14, how many say slimmer? Oh, geez. Well, it seems to have jumped out at you, so I will say eight of them say slimmer. No, only five. Oh, five, okay. So, basically five do and nine don't, which is good. That's 36% say slimmer. That's pretty good, yeah. That was fun. Yeah. And those are the stats. Let's discuss about this now. Scott, when you're out playing pinball with your friends or your coworkers or your family And it's, you're not the one playing. You're, you know, you're playing a two player game. It's not your turn. They're playing. What do you do when you're waiting for your turn to play? Let's discuss about that. Oh boy. Uh, man. So there's, there's a number of different things I will do. Um, but this is a challenge. I, you, you, uh, indulge me for some history. Go for it. I'm a little nervous. I don't think my mom listens to this podcast, so this shouldn't be a problem. But I'm a nervous, not so much anymore, but there was definitely a time in my life when I was a nervous public person, especially in a bar situation. So much so that back when you could smoke in bars, there were a few times I tried to start smoking just so I'd have something to do with my hands. I don't know, it's ridiculous. Raydies Habenbrug,
    64:46
    Who's playing, who else is around, and where I'm at. Like, if it's a new game, I'm definitely gonna watch. If it's only me and this other person playing, I'll definitely watch. If there's multiple people playing, then it's chaos. Like, I'm probably gonna have a conversation, I'm gonna be drinking a beer most likely. Yeah, but, and here's like the sad third option. Is that even? I don't even know what the other two options are. And I see more and more of this nowadays. The old cell phone, right? Yeah. Like you see people pull out the phone to check on something real quick and like there's that feeling when you're the one playing and you do really well or like do really poorly and you turn around expecting to have a conversation about what just happened and someone's looking at their phone. It's a real downer, isn't it? Yeah. I feel like that's, and that's, this is kind of what I was gonna, hoping we'd talk about in this section, is that it is a downer. That's something I've noticed, you know, cell phones have been around for many years now, but when I lived in Portland, I swear we just didn't care as much about them. And now we just we're more prone to scooping them up into our face when we have a free moment. And I notice it especially in LA when I play with Danny because he's like the only one I play with here. And I played with him a lot in Portland too. And it's a little different now not to disparage him. But there are a fair amount of times when what you described happens exactly where I'm really excited I'm excited or like I got like an unlucky drain or something crazy happened. I spin around and I want to, I'm all excited. And he's looking at his phone and he didn't see anything. And I'm like, ah, ah. And he's like, oh, what's what? Oh, sorry, man. I had to do this. Yeah. And I'm like, all right, well, it's your turn. I think, you know, obviously not picking on Danny here, like everybody does that now. And it's weird because, and I think what you said earlier resonated with me, spare moment. People think they have a spare moment so they look at their phones. We've decided that when you are not playing pinball, that is a spare moment now. Like once upon a time, you'd be doing something else. It's not that you'd be sitting there staring at a wall. Like you'd, I don't know. That's weird. I don't really have a solution to that. I guess it to me feels like we've discarded activities and now they're considered spare moments. And you know, there is a balance when you're watching someone and if you're looking over their shoulder and watching them play, there's a balance in how much you can engage with them during that time. It depends on how casually you're playing Or how open that other person is to hearing you chatter over their shoulder. Yeah. And I gotta talk about Danny again. But he doesn't like it so much if I make a comment while he's playing. And that's just because we happen to have a relationship where sometimes I make comments I'm a fan of Danny here. I'm totally with Danny. I feel like when I play, I love talking to people, but I need to be the one talking. Like, unless I'm talking to you, don't talk to me. Uh huh. Kind of thing. But what if you're just like, what if you, what if all you need to do is hit that lock and it seems clear to me watching you that you just have like no idea that all, you're on ball three, you're just behind my score, all you gotta do is knock it in that lock scoop and you're good to go. You don't want me to just be like, hit the lock dude. No. I mean, I think your heart's in the right place. I think it's you're only trying to help but for me when I'm playing the only way I'm gonna play well is if I'm in the zone and you can't be in the zone with a voice in your head you got to be your own voice so yeah if you're not playing you know whatever it's pinball it's fun I'm gonna and Elijah is a talker but uh you know I'm not gonna get super mad about it or anything but I I do play my best when I'm a player. Either I'm focused or in a conversation that I feel I have initiated. That's all. So yeah, I tend to not talk to people when they're playing. That is not a thing I do. And then when they drain, do you comment usually? Are you like, wow, that was a great ball but you missed that one shot so many times that looked frustrating? I feel like when you and I were playing a lot, our post-ball conversations, I think the conversations would be more retrospective. Like you know, oh, I was trying to do this and then this happened. But nowadays it's just like hey, good ball. You know? It was just because we're not, I mean at least the people I'm playing with, we're not as, I don't know what the word, we're not practicing, put it to you that way. We're playing. We're not training. Oh yeah. Yeah, I was in it to win it. I was training. I needed to maximize. We all were to some degree. So yeah, when there's a lot of people standing around a machine, it's often hard for me to tell where to stand. And then as I'm trying to figure it out, I become aware of my arms and my hands, and then I don't know what to do with them. What about scooping your thumbs in your belt loops? You try that? That feels very like, if I do that, I have to start leaning forward and backward, you know? I did hands in back pockets for a while. That felt fine, but if you do it for too long, you feel like you're grabbing your own butt because you kind of are, right? And you can't do that for too long. Yeah, it just starts building up like your hands are in there and then one squeeze turns into two and you know, suddenly you're squeezing your own butt. Maybe that's where the cell phone comes in is people have a hands moment and that's where their hands go and then the focus is gone. I going to think about this more I don have a good go thing that I do when someone else is playing Okay That good then Okay What do you do listeners Yeah What your favorite thing to do when you adjacent to pinball and will likely play it soon but are currently not playing it? Now it's time to dip in with Danny B. Alright, now I'm on shot with Danny B. We're dipping in, we're actually dipping, literally dipping right now. We are really dipping in. Philips, original eating French dip sandwiches, and we're dipping with Danny B. That's right, how you doing? I'm great. Mr. Grazer, sir. I'm good. So last we left off, you were taking acid. Really? And like huffing, yeah, and talking about playing pinball as a kid. I want to just like... God, those were the days. I want to just, you know, this will sweep over many years right now. I just want to note, like, you had a bit of a drug problem for a number of years. Since I've known you, you have not. I've known you for ten years. I've never known that side of you. It's just like some thing from your past. A long, long past. Yes, this will be true. But it is something you did experience. You were a junkie? 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.
    73:39
    Men's The Podcast And you got hooked. I did, yeah. But let's, when I met you, you were in, and you still are, I met you through the Crazy Flipper Fingers pinball gang in Portland. Correct. Which, you know, they are a group of folks that I meet every other week, we meet at a bar and people would get pretty trashed. Right. There'd be a lot of drinking. However, Right, they used to say we're a drinking gang with a pinball problem. Yeah, yeah. Nice. And, but beneath all that, there were a number of guys in there that were recovering. Yeah, yeah. DT, Jay, he didn't drink, did he? No, yeah, Jay stopped drinking a real short time after I did. Maybe right around the same time, I think. I don't know, yeah, I almost feel like it started sort of a chain effect. I mean, before I had moved to the Northwest, like, I had never known anybody who didn't do some form of chemical, you know, whether it be herb or cigarettes or booze or whatever the fuck, like, everybody had something, you know, and if they didn't, there was some other vice like gambling or sports or girls or boys or girls and boys. Was there something in the in CFF, in this pinball group that helped you? Because on the outside it would look like it would not help you because people were just like getting trashed together. Getting trashed and nobody was sober until I got in. That was kind of an issue with me. I had just come off like pretty being homeless and basically living out of a GMC conversion van and not in Portland. I was never homeless in Portland but you know I had moved there with you know for my last friend in the world. Yeah, it helped me a lot man like I always looked at I didn't want to you know I think that's the hard part about getting clean and granted like I was I wasn't like I mean I was definitely like had drinking problems and that you know whatever but especially after I got off the dope like I tried to drink a few more times and it was like it was really excessive and scary. I started having like my first major blackouts where I'd black out like you know seven, eight hours of the day. I'd wake up in Taco Bell over there on 50th and in Foster like right by DV8. I like woke up with a burrito, sleeping on a burrito watching American Idol or some shit. And I was like, man, I can't. I had a TV in the van, like a little TV in the back. And I remember I woke up and like, I was like so early in the morning and I was like, and I'm like, oh fuck, I hadn't eaten. And then there's the diabetes and all that. So I probably should have eaten that burrito. You didn't eat it. You were sleeping on it. I'm on the side of my face, my face is a little burnt. So I, yeah, I mean there's definitely that aspect of it but for me it was, I think the scary thing about cleaning up and that is like everything you have to give up that you associate with that, you know, like pinball definitely like, I'm not gonna lie, like I sat in a lot of Chicago places and shot dope in the bathroom and played pinball, you know, there was a Fishtails right down the street, I said, Chicago, that place is like a nice I'm not sure if you can see me, but I'm a little bit of a burger joint now, but it was a little shit hole wide trash bar on the west side there over on Chicago and California. And there was a Fishtails up in there and I used to, and it was like right at the safe place, so I used to go in there and play Fishtails. I mean there's a lot of things associated with drinking, all that stuff, but I didn't want to give up. Pinball allowed me to like get, stay in the vein of like having some sort of social, that wasn't just whitewash, you know like recovery stuff. I'm a fan of your stuff and, oh, I gotta stay away from the stuff and everybody who uses like, yeah, I mean, that's probably smart to do, you know, but I never really felt threatened either that, everybody in the gang knew, you know, like, cause Matto told them. Matto was the guy who lived in Portland who knew John Ray, Tilt, and all that. And he broke it down to me, he was like, dude, if you see him drinking, like, beat his ass. I remember the first time I met DDT, he was still drinking. And I was like, yeah, he had some substance abuse problems within his family and friends and all that. So we started talking and he straight up said, if I ever see you walking down Burnside on the west side, I'm going to beat your ass. And that's when Burnside was, you could cop down there when the Burger King was open and all that. He's, I'm going to beat your ass, you know? And if anyone knew DDT, a drug DDT at that, it was like, well, fuck that. I remember I had a couple squirrely times where I went down to try to look and cop down there and I was looking over my shoulder for DDT. I never did, luckily, circumstantially, I never did any drugs. I drank a couple times in Portland but I haven't fucked with any drugs since then. Nobody in Portland would know me loaded on anything. Yeah, and yeah, we'd look out for you and whoever else was in recovery. It wasn't acceptable for you guys to just be like, oh, everyone else is drinking, I'll take one now. Well, it was also, it kind of, it brings this thing that you would associate with kind of being a burnout and a loser. My whole life, like getting big, playing pinball, like, oh, I loved it. I just liked doing fucking drugs and playing pinball. Yeah. And even like the coffee shop there, that I lived above in Chicago for many years, pinball, just get big, take a nice fresh dipper and go down and play some, drink all night, play pinball. Being in the gang kind of upped that. We had goals. Yeah, we had goals to put up initials throughout the whole city. Tim Mikkelson's First group to take advantage of the IFPA points. Yeah, definitely. We just exploded the hell out of those. Yeah, we did. We had a different... every week there was a new tournament with a different name. Yeah. Remember, the real way to do it though was we found out that, you know, you could have those seven point tournaments at the same bar and they would all count together for some reason. Like he would just take... Oh yeah, you do like four in one year or something like that. He couldn't do more than four, yeah. Then he would add up the four you won. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Knapp Arcade, Ballywin, The Valley Company, Subsidiary of Walter Kidde & Co., Inc., Mirco Playfields, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi, The Valley Company, Subsidiary of Walter Kidde & Co., Inc., Mirco Playfields, Tim Kitzrow, I think Noah cracked it. Aaron definitely cracked it. There was somebody else too who would like creep. But everybody was in like the top two, three hundred. And then you also, I mean, every place you worked at in Portland usually had pinball too. I had pinball too. I mean, I was still a bartender and all that. Yeah, it's kind of crazy to be a bartender in recovery, no temptation. You have strong will it seems like to me. Yeah, I mean, I don't know, I kind of believe in playing the tape forward, you know? And I, you know, as much as I'd like to get fucked, I just, you know, if you don't pick it up, you won't get drunk, you know? You don't pick a bag of dope up and throw it in a cooker and throw it, you don't cook it up and stick it in your arm, you won't get loaded, you know? Stick a cigarette in your mouth and light it up. I don't want to test that. I've tested it with like cigarettes, nicotine, you know, stuff like this and I'm just back on full force, you know. Yeah, you test your limits, you see that you can't give an inch with the hard stuff. Right. And that was all in my 20s, man. Like, I just wanted that to be over. I couldn't wait for it to be over. I tried everything, it didn't work. Finally, I like moved to Portland, I made some solid friends. I was like, I found this gang that I wanted to be a part of, you know, like, I had this big tattooed dude with the, who's nicknamed after dynamite. And he gave you this like straight edge tattoo on your back, is that what it, he did? Yeah, yeah, that's, uh, my, um, what's, what's that, what's my youth of today tattoo? Yeah. What's the Krishna one though that he turned into? Oh, yeah. Ray Capo. Shelter? Shelter. Was that Ray Capo? We're here today, yeah. So yeah, in conclusion, pinball helped you recover from being a junkie? I mean, I would say it had a, definitely, it was a very, like almost as equal, I would say like 30% friends, I guess so, I'd say we'd throw that into CFF too, but let's say like 60% friends, like 40% still being able to live a normal life and have some fun socially It's not sitting in some church or some damn sober dance with a Motley Crue cover band or something. Oh my god, I hated all that stuff. They'd have dance parties and everybody would be in there dancing to Guns N Roses. I just rolled out of Chicago, hip-hop house, like the bangin'est DJs. The banginest DJs in the world and MCs and musicians and then I'm like, She got mild and it seems to me. I swear to God, the first time I went out I went to that, what's that 80's club, the one above that was in Vaseline Alley. It's still there, the Fez maybe, is that what it's called? Oh yeah, uh huh, yeah. There were some people that I met in NA, this was kind of before I met anybody in CFF or maybe around the same time, but I swear to God they were like, they were dancing to like, Lovin' an elevator, livin' it up and I'm going down, and everybody was like going crazy. And they like put on like a Nirvana song or something, I didn't make the connection that like he's kind of from there, you know, everybody went nuts, man. I was like, this, this sucks. This sucks. This is like, what am I, the white man's paradise is Danny B's Hell. We're loving another love thing, though. Yeah, glad you got an Aerosmith reference in this episode. I'm leaving and I'm going down. Alright, I gotta get back to work soon. Lightning round. Lightning round, you ready? Yeah, yeah, lightning round. Lightning round, fast answers. Alright. Jerry Only or Jerry Garcia? Jerry Garcia. I know that's a weird way to say it. I knew you'd answer that. Jerry Garcia. Jerry, that's a great one, man. God, that is a tough one. But yeah, I mean, I gotta give props to Jerry Only a little. Like, he kept the shit going with, man, I hate that Michael Graves. Jerry Garcia. Yeah, you almost got pissed at me the other day when I asked you about Michael Graves. I was like, what do you think? I hate that guy. And you're like, I'm getting pissed. Oh my god, I hate what Eddie Vedder sang for the Misfits. Man, that's the only lightning round one I have. It's a lightning round lightning round. I had another one but I don't have my notes in front of me. It was like, what would you prefer, Roadshow or Jackbot? Jackbot. I know that's crazy too, I'm a quick answer, but Jackbot's so sweet. There's just so much, it's so deep. Roadshow's deep. You can just go safe. Yeah, yeah, roadshow's deep, but... Trade your goods. Yeah, but to really crank up roadshow, like, you have to get lucky on the goods. You know, you have to like score. Like, there was one time when I broke the world record. Yeah, I remember that. And, uh, when they used to just have the world record, like, posted up on some weird, like, site. It was so weird. I had a ridiculous amount of loot for some reason. I got like 50 lassoes or something like that. Then I hit Texas and it was over. It was over. I hit like at least 11 air fresheners. When I got back into New York, you know, a couple times through, I think my bonus was up to like $4 billion or something like that. I bet you wish like... Didn't you just have to max the bonus points? I bet you wish those things could translate to real life. Like you finish the game and then the machine just dispenses out 14 air freshers. Just 14 air freshers. 50 lassoes. Lassoes, that'd be sick. There was the one game that gave you the pogues, Safecracker. Oh yeah. Did you ever play one that paid out? No, I never played one. I think it was Shorty's or the Northwest Pinball Show had one but they didn't pay out. Yeah, it was probably Tom McCulloch's. I played that one at IFPA finals one time when they were at McCulloch's house and me and what's his name it must have been god what was it it was somebody's kid who's like a really good player now it wasn't Usher or whatever is that his name Usher? Usher. MC Usher? God I'd be so pissed if I got beat by a kid. MC Usher. It wasn't him but it was god what was that dude? It was some short Italian dude I can't remember his name now. His kids are cool as fuck though. We ganked all of uh, we went on some Italian shit and ganked all the uh, all the poves in the safecracker from Tom McCullough. And Julie Gray was like, you're putting those back aren't you? And we were like, yep. And I like left the room and I'm all, ching ching ching, and homeboy's kid was like, ping ling ching ching ching ching, pockets just chinging. Good chat. Alright, we gotta end it.
    88:34
    Thanks for coming around. Thanks for dipping, Danny. Yeah, I got some toys in this on this on the shelf
    88:41
    We're not gonna talk about your toys Danny's got a couple toys on the shelf doesn't matter you describe them all Danny a little special episode where you Catalog your toys for now. My new name is Danny Backless over Adorita's Bella Rosa nice
    89:00
    till next time Tips and Tactics In this Tips and Tactics segment, we're going to chat for just a couple of minutes about operators and how you can get operators more involved in using the map. We had a comment asking that we address this, and we do have things on the site that can I mean, basically the pinball map has two overall goals. Those two goals are help people find machines and help businesses that choose to have machines thrive. We want to help those businesses and help those people. So we have a number of things on the site to help operators, one of which you as an operator might not know about. And even if you're not an operator, this could be useful to you because you can tell your We're operator friends. And we do have something like 274 operators listed on the map. And a fair amount take advantage of this tip and by using this tactic. But a lot don't. But they might want to. If they knew about it, here it is. If you're an operator, you can get tagged at a location like Water Trough Saloon is operated by Quarter World. And that's data on our site. And Quarter World has elected to have their email address in our system and nobody sees it but it's in there. And what happens is if somebody leaves a comment on one of their machines, once a day they'll get a digest of all the comments left on their machine. And so that's the tip is that you can get an automated message telling you what machine comments have been left on your machines. And a lot of operators find this to be really useful because a lot of the comments are related to problems with machines. And it's an easy way for them to keep on top of issues with their machines. You know, there are other ways. A lot of times people write down notes and give them to the bar, but those don't always John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Knapp Arcade, We get machines added and removed to and from the map and a huge amount of those edits are done by operators. I mean, like, we have a lot of operators using the site. I don't know, maybe half of all those are done by operators because that's just kind of a wild guess, but a lot of them use it. And I think it's because they see the value in the site and that's great. That's what we want it to be valuable for them. We want it to help their business. We want it to be useful and easy for them, thus the automated messages. And as a fun aside, yesterday we had an operator in the Philadelphia region, Lansdale Amusements, who have a lot of locations in that area, they just purchased from us five pinball map t-shirts. And I sent them today and I asked her, I was like, just wondering why you bought five. I actually asked her, did you mean to buy five? Because I thought it might have been a mistake. And she said that she's giving them to her service technicians to wear. And I just thought that was really, really awesome because, I mean, I don't know. It shows that she likes Pinball Map enough and sees it as valuable enough to have her technicians actually wear our t-shirts as they go out. Yeah, getting operators on board is huge for everybody, users and the operators. I will say as a user, I feel like it's huge for me. I would hope that it's equally useful for operators. Yeah, I think like in Portland the operators are really on board. Gorder World and Mike Mahaffey and stuff like that. They who just they they... Chris Rhodes out of order. Chris Rhodes He's an operator and friend of the show. They regularly once a week or once every other week will kind of start They're rotating machines around and they just update the map as they go and you can just see that they've made 20 map updates today. It's really cool that they're that on top of it. But yeah, that's a nice little tip for operators. If you're an operator, you know an operator, how can they get their email in our system? First off, we won't add your email without you explicitly telling us it's okay. We're not going to be sending unsolicited daily digests and machine comments to you. So you need to just contact us. Contact your regional administrator or contact the map, which is pinballmap.com slash contact and tell us you want your email in, tell us your operator name and then we'll add it. And that's it. Thanks for that tip. You betcha. Well, I guess that's about it. I guess that's our time for this month. Yeah, I guess that wraps it up. I feel like we got through a lot of interesting topics. There was some fun mixed in there, which is nice. Yeah. If you have any things you want us to cover, specific questions about how the map works or whatever, please get in contact with us. Yeah, we're especially interested to talk to operators and site admins to get your Thanks for watching this video. I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to check out one of the other episodes, please do. And if you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment. And I'll see you in a month. See ya later. See ya. Bye.
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