Thank you. bonus podcast. Coming to you from beautiful River Higgins, Nova Scotia. Oh, oh, oh. I don't like 2 a.m. summer night. I don't care, hand on the wheel. Driving drunk, I'm doing my thing. Rolling in the mid-bath, I am now living my life in my dreams. People tell me slow my road, I'm streaming out. Welcome back, Pinball Nerds, to episode 4, 560 of your fifth favorite pinball podcast. My name is Orbital Albert, and boy, oh boy, I haven't been excited to do this show for quite some time now. I'm not going to lie. I've been dealing with a number of, I had like laryngitis and I was dealing actually with a pretty serious health issue that also kept me in Ontario a day or two longer than I thought it would be. And when I got home, honestly, it kept me out of the game for a couple of days. And finally I was able to overcome that health issue that almost put me in the hospital. I'm going to save that one to the end. We're going to talk about that at the end. I'll let you know. It is as serious as a health issue as a not serious health issue can be. I don't know if that makes sense, but like, um, I will say this, I will say this just cause I like to throw a little bit of click bait or a little bit of save it for Ron later on. Okay. Um, basically a nurse told me that a, a, a registered nurse told me that they see this a lot in Niagara Falls, both in Canada, mostly in Canada, but Canada and the United States. But the number one place they see this is in Las Vegas. So I don't know if that gives you a tip or not at all, but I was in serious freaking pain. I was down and out for the count. I was, I was KO'd. In fact, the only other time this happened to me in my life was the whole week I came home from Pembroke. So it did feel like Pembroke in that one way, that summer camp feeling as an adult coming home. But none of that's important. What's important is, first of all, thanking each and every person who supported me, every donor, every person who gave me a place to say every single person who like bought me a beer or um offered to give me a meal or a food or a ride or like or did do all of those things um I have so many people to thank you know what I'm gonna try to save most of it to the end but if I learned anything from the king of the poor man's pinball network here with Dronean you do a little bit of advertisements at the start so I gotta start with my gold um so before I left for those of you who don't know and maybe are jumping on now as your First time ever listening to the Pinball Nerds podcast. And we're probably going to hear some dogs barking in a second because I had no clue the recycling truck was going to go by right now. But they picked a wonderful time to go by when I'm easily distracted. Squirrel! But no, some people, so many people are very generous with their money. So I want to start by thanking the people who financially supported me. As many of you know, and some of you probably don't, Flair Airlines here, or was it Lynx? I think it was Flair. Geez, no, it was Lynx. Because Flair's still flying. That's right, because I'm looking for flights right now. Um, big announcement in a second of somewhere I'm going, but let's first start by just thanking everyone who donated to me. Many of you know that, uh, Flair Airlines, or sorry, Lynx Airlines went bankrupt after I had already paid for my entire flight. And, uh, of course, as many of you know, when that happened, um, something else that happened was that I was left without a way of getting there because it was too late to book another lower end flight. Even the most expensive places, which would have been only a couple hundred dollars more, we're already up into the thousands of dollars and my only option to get there was to actually drive there, there's no way I could have driven you know, all, I think day one we were in the car 19 hours and day two we were in the car 23 hours now, were we driving every single hour of that? No, you get lost once or twice there's detours, we did have a police officer, I believe it was an OPP, yeah I'm an OPP you know me that's an Ontario Provincial Police Officer we did have one tailgating us, I mean it wasn't dangerously tugging us. He just happened to be behind us for like an hour and a half with Hayden driving. And I'm like, bud, the cop wants to go 10 over. You can go 10 over. He's like, no dad, I'm not speeding in front of a cop. I'm like, you'll be fine. There's no place on planet earth where you're going five over and you would get a ticket. Well, I had never been to Wisconsin, but we'll talk about that later. So the first person I wanted to think, and this one was kind of out of left field. This was actually my, I'm going to call it the gold level. These people did not know they were getting sponsorship. I'm not going to give exact amounts for everyone, but I'm going to tell you my two gold level people happen to be over $200, which is just incredible. Now, is it over $200 US? I'm not sure, but it was well over $200 Canadian, so I'm assuming it's in around that American. Just to give you some levity for my Australian, my second most beloved continent that listens to me, it is a continent, is not, is Australia and New Zealand. Don't forget about those guys over there, the lords of the world and such. Don't want to get in trouble. I'm going to try to be a little bit less controversial. I had such an incredible time. If Drop Target Danielle were listening to this episode, I would say that this was the second best experience of my life, that my honeymoon was by far, my wedding and my honeymoon, come on, by far the best experience of my life. However, because my son was on this trip with me, this trip included seeing a whole bunch of my friends and family. As some of you know, I am from London, Ontario, which is only a hop, skip and a jump, you know, as far as I was. It was only about eight and a half hours from, I almost said Greensboro, Green Bay, Green Bay. Frickin' trees heads got me all mixed up. I'll tell you this, as a cheese nut myself, oh my God, having cheese curds, having cheese curds at every single solitary variety store all the time, like high quality cheese curds, fresh ones that still squeak between your teeth. That's something we don't have out here. I mean, there is good cheese curds out here, but you've got to go to Moncton or somewhere else. I've lost myself in the jam already, guys. Let's get back here. So the first person I want to thank, I believe this was directly from Aaron himself, but this is Aaron over at Fast Pinball. So I have Fast Pinball up here. Just wanted to give a quick shout out. Might go more in depth later, but they are going to be getting three months, basically. I'm going to say gold level buys you three months of been propped to, and if for some reason Fast Pinball, you don't want to be sponsored, you don't want to be acknowledged, you just like this one shout out, you can let me know, but I would like to give you guys some free shout outs and a little bit of chat and maybe even have Aaron or someone from Fast on the show, you know, maybe near towards the end of this sponsorship to just A, personally thank them and B, kind of find out a little bit more about what they do for pinball. But I'll just read the synopsis here when you go over to FastPinball.com, it says, we are Fast Pinball, we make premium electronics that let you make pinball machines, whether you're a home hobbyist, an indie game studio, or a commercial pinball manufacturer. We enable you to build a new machine from scratch, update the code, and play the game on an existing machine. That is so rad. Homebrewers must love this. Or re-theme an old machine into your dream machine. Drive in and see why Fast Pinball Platform is the most, um, performant, I'm sorry, reliable, and well-designed pinball control system in the world. We also have the best docks, too. Okay. And just a couple of their products. I'm not going to go on and on here, guys, but a couple of their products I can see on the left here are platform controllers, I.O. boards, node boards, of course, same thing, I think, different name, expansion boards, lighting products, display products, power products, audio interfaces, auxiliary boards, retire products. And the reason you should use Fast Pinball, I've never ordered any of the products, so I'm not going to sit here and blow smoke up your little bleached starfish, okay? I'm not going to do that, you bunch of buttholes. But what I'm going to tell you is that Aaron, out of nowhere, without even asking for any type of recognition or anything, donated to me hundreds of dollars, making my trip way, way, way better. Aaron's donation itself almost took care of half of what my flight would have been anyway. So that's just incredible. The next gold sponsor, of course, this one wasn't completely out of left field. Here's the guy who got it started by all, and I owe him the most hell. I should probably give him Ryan's six months minimum. But Ryan Barry himself, and I think along with his wife Kimba, they donated from Phantom Tilt Pinball. Now, I've just about caught up. I'm all the way up to episode seven. I will say this. Episode six is my favorite so far. Everybody knows, like, geez, don't go listen to my first, honestly, 50 to 100 episodes. They were horrible. There might have been some little tidbits of truth in there, the odd funny moment. But the first couple episodes, you're really just finding your way. And wow, Ryan and Kimber, like from episode one was good too, don't get me wrong, but you're really finding your confidence. The funniness is coming out. You know, obviously they're, you know, they're a couple, so they have that nice camaraderie together. They get right to the point. There's not a lot of like, you know, with me, I'm going off topic tons. So if you like Pinball Podcast, and what I really love, it's very similar to Don in his first year. Don's hit the one-year newbie badge. Only four more until David Fix will love you and let you have a point on anything, Don. Don't worry. And Kimba and Ryan, you know, it's probably four and a half years, but Dave Fix has, I've said many times, I think, on several different podcasts that until you get to five years, really nothing you say has any bearing. So just remember this, Dave Fix, when I talk about barbecue later on this week, don't listen to a word I have to say. I'm saying it all on Minecraft. I haven't even played it yet. you know I wasn't a TPF I do want to talk about TPF and don't worry I'm not going to put my TPF chat behind a paywall because I don't have to because everybody on this freaking list I'm telling you has sponsored me in one way shape or form so I'm going to quickly run through the list but if you have not listened to Phantom Tilt Pinball go do it if you if you have listened and you love it I know that Glenn the skateboarder has given a resounding uh positive review and if Glenn says it's good I listen to him if he says the pinball podcaster is not good I listen to him If he says a pinball podcaster is good, I listen to him. You know why? Because Glenn and I have very similar tastes. We don't like people to sugarcoat it too much. We don't like you to gloss or bleach the asshole to make it nice and white. We want you to just full out starfish and tell us how it is. You know what I mean? We don't need someone being a negative Nancy Debbie Downer on one side that's super rude and super mean and hates everything and doesn't own any pinball machines. We don't need someone on the flip side of that telling you every pinball machine is incredible. It's minimum a B+. Go buy every pinball machine. What you want is someone like me in the middle, or I would say Ryan Barry, who can be critical but kind. Let's be critical of these pinball companies and their products, and especially their pricing. That you should be critical. If you're not critical of their pricing, then you're either a bazillionaire. I even think Elon Musk would be like, okay, cool, rad, this is awesome. How much is this, I don't know, we'll say Pirates of the Caribbean. How much is this Pirates of the Caribbean pinball machine? Yeah, like is it like four grand, six grand? 20, 18 grand for the LA, what are you talking, you know, like, so of course that was in Canadian-American, Simma down, Simma, Simma. I also don't like Price Police, right? But what I want to do with my show is I don't want to be, sometimes I go a little bit shock jock, and I'm, you know, being angry or getting extra excited just for, you know, partially for the views. I've said this before, on a show of mine where I'm just kind and calm and casual and cool, I might get 400 to 800 listens, but on a show when I, like, lose my chats and I get angry and I call out another pinball podcaster or maybe a company or I go over the top, I quite often get 20 to 30% more listens. And I don't want to be that person. I'm willing at this point, pinball has done so much special for me. Pinball has done maybe more perhaps even than my parents have. I'm sorry, mom and dad. Well, okay, I'm not sorry, dad. Dad hasn't done all for me. No, I'm just kidding, dad. I love you. You're all right. You're fine. He's done better these last few years. As a kid growing up, he wasn't a super rad dad. Let's just say that. Neither of my dads were. I had two bad dads and one good mom and the Lord Almighty took my mom and my best friend. Yes, I was a mama's boy long before it should have. But while I am talking about that, that does remind me of a more serious topic. Buddy of mine, Jack Danger, haven't got to hang out with him since Pemberg in person, but I spent thousands of hours in Deadflip's Twitch channel, of course, in the chat. The mods know me well, sometimes having to time me out, other times thanking me for helping out, depending on the day and time. But I did just want to give a moment of silence because Jack Danger's mother unfortunately passed away, and it's going to be an exceedingly challenging time for him and his family for a little bit, for a while. And I know he did mention that he had a bit of a complicated relationship with his mother, and I certainly have complicated relationships with my two parents who are left, but I love them dearly with my whole heart and I wish the best for them. But please, if you're friends, obviously with Jack Danger or even just a big fan like I am, just go easy on him for a while. Let him have his space. Let him have his time. Please don't expect him to do any live streaming soon. And if he does come back and he's in the live stream and he doesn't really want to talk about that, I just think out of respect, everyone should just obviously not bring it up. But I think that everybody loves Jack Danger as much as me or more and they know that. So just, yeah, sorry, Jack, for that happening. If you ever want to reach out personally, let me know. I'll fire you off my cell phone number. I think I have in the past. But if I haven't, Jack, you're probably one of five people in the pinball industry I would actually toss my phone number out to. I'm pretty private that way. But if you ever wanted to talk on the phone, I lost my mom at a very early age, and it was devastating to me, even though it was like 15 years ago now, even more devastating to my younger sisters. My one sister, my youngest sister, Mal, had just turned 20. So obviously that's a very tough thing to talk about. To any of you out there struggling with this sort of thing, make sure you reach out to a family member or a friend, especially maybe if you haven't talked to them in a while, this might be a starting point for you to try to build back some type of relationship. I don't know why I've gone into giving relationship stuff. Let's bring it back to just this positive trip that was life-changing for me. If you ever tell my wife I had more fun there than on our honeymoon, I'll say, lies, all lies. And then if you play this for her, I'll say, honey I just said that because like I was talking to the pinball nerds I want them to know how much I love them respect them how much I appreciate all the funds they give me so the other the other gold sponsor of course was Ryan Barry at Phantom Tilt if you haven't listened go over and give you don't have to start number six but I think that's a really good jumping off point not just because he talks about me and my journey with Hayden and I going on thousands of miles together and I think overall we were in the car for 89 hours was the total never minding all the little drives we did with other people. So almost 90 hours in a car with two people. I started to lose it the last few days. Holy cow. I can't be caged. I'm a wild stallion. I cannot be caged, my friends. But wow, I had a great time, and I have to also thank a whole bunch of, I'll say, those are the two gold level sponsors. Here's my silver level sponsors. These were 100 Canadian or more, and it's just shocking to me. Drew, Drew, poor man Drew, Beau Surveyor, I'm probably never going to say it right. I'm the worst pronunciator in the world. But listen, guys, if you live anywhere in, near, or around Drew's area, somewhere there in Wisconsin where he lives, I think near where MGC is being held, if you live somewhere anywhere in his area, reach out to him. Let him be your realtor. He's the coolest, calmest, awesomest dude. It seems like that way. He keeps winning all these awards. I don't know. I've never bought a house from him. I don't want to lie. I've never bought a house from him, but wow. Now, let me have a little sip. Let me have a little sip-sip of my drink here for a second. I'm losing my voice already. I should have brought my honey out here. Okay, first time I'm going to do a little mini commercial break. I'm going to go get some honey for my throat. This is why I didn't record earlier, guys. I had laryngitis plus a couple other nasty, like, tournament crud or expo crud or what do they call it? Show crud, something. And then, of course, I almost had my voice back, and I went to the Junos here in Canada. I had 12,000 people in the same room, including people who flew from all over Canada and were traveling on boats and airplanes and trains and subways and whatever and close, you know, and partying for a week straight with people they don't know at different live venues. And so I'm very, very, very sick, or at least I was yesterday. I'm feeling like 80% better, which is good because I have a super, super rad interview planned for tonight. two of my biggest interviews I've ever had in my life outside of maybe like, I don't know Christopher Franchi, Eric Stone Jeff Teolas I don't know, I'm trying to think of like my top five big interviews, but you know I'm very excited I'm very excited for tonight, I'm also very excited if you're the other person that booked an interview with me this week or said that you were going to be doing the interview with me and you haven't written back to me any time and you're listening right now, I think it would be very fair to say I would appreciate a particular time because I want to record with you as soon as possible, my guy. Oh no, I've given away too much. I've given away too much. It may or may not be a guy. I may have thrown you. It could be a wonderful woman. We don't know. You'll have to find out later. But thank you, thank you, thank you to Fast Pinball and their awesome products. Guys, go over there and give them a like on their Facebook. Even if you're just curious about how any of those products could help you with a current existing game, doing a re-theme, doing a homebrew, changing it up, or even just helping a current game that you have even sounds like sound more rad, work better, look better, everything. So go check out Fast Pinball. And while you're there, tell him, or be sent in, say thank you so much for supporting him on this trip. Because guys, my trip, like I just want to be honest with everybody, my trip cost in the round, and I'm estimating around $3,600. And my total donations were around $1,200. That doesn't even include everyone who gave me a free room, free food, free drinks, drove me around, all that kind of stuff. So I just, I need to just thank all of those people so much. I'm going to do that right now with the Drew being of course the gold level sponsor oh also Drew and the whole poor man's tribe which all of them I felt supported by all of them which was great not rich fuck Drew I thought he's just so rich rich fuck Ian not to be confused with the other Ian but also another tribe member I thought he is so wealthy the guy's been on my show like seven times I'm a huge supporter of P3 I love Birdwatcher I thought here's a million dollars Orby I thought he would And, you know, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding, Ian. I like to mess with you, buddy. Ian and I were friends for years and years and years at Loppel. And by years and years, I think it was like two or three years before I left. But love the guy, miss the guy. And, Ian, I hope to see you at what's coming up at the Ontario Open. So that is in early April. Let me just ask Google here. Ontario Open, April. So, oh, gosh, I should have typed pinball. It's not karate, is it? Ontario Open pinball. Ariel, I don't want aerials areolas, I don't want those either open pinball Ontario good things grow in Ontario oh sorry Josh I know I'm not supposed to sing Josh only wants me to sing if I'm going to be singing Duck Tales woo no I will sing at the end I have to, I'm committed to This is not the information I'm looking for. I will find the information for the Ontario Open, and I will talk about it in a memento. But I am going there. I believe it's April 13th to 16th. It is in Mississauga, Ontario. They are going to be giving away a ticket for Pinberg. That's not the only reason I'm going. The Pinberg ticket isn't just going to first place. It's actually going to a random person. I was like, wow, this is the first time I could actually win something at a pinball tournament, right? So let's move forward here in our thank you list, though. So Drew was my silver level. Thank you so much for that, Drew. He says, have fun at Nationals, Orby. Go get them. Thanks, buddy. I tried to go get them. You know what? I actually got to 3-2 in Nationals against Derek Thompson, one of the top players in Canada. I think he's currently ranked 42nd in the world. I think he was like 37th when I played him. Obviously, when you play me, you get worse. No, I'm just kidding. I just made that up. But, wow. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much, Drew, for that. Who else is in this hundo level? Also, Antonio. Oh, Antonio, I want to pre-apologize. I don't know if it's my wife's writing. She was drop-targeting and was awesome enough to write this all out for me this morning, which is great. Thank you, honey. Thank you for going to work today. Thank you for your patience. Thanks for putting up with me being a spaz when I came home for about five days. I think my cortisol had been spiked because I'd just been in this, like, I could have called this podcast today. I didn't sleep for 20 days. There was that one day I got seven hours at my dad's house after the guy stopped smashing the car outside my window, which was sitting right beside my Corolla, and I was like, please keep smashing that car and not mine. Apparently his girlfriend pissed him off or something. Don't think that's a good reason to smash a car, but when I said to my dad, can I yell down at him to stop, my dad actually said, no, that guy lives across the road right there. He'll come and start smashing my car or our families or he'll start harassing me. So we just leave that guy alone. And I was like, okay, well, this is a new London that I was used to when I left five years ago. But, like, back when I lived there, if someone was smashing a car, you called the police and they came. And now apparently when you call the police about someone smashing a car, they go, yeah, we'll try to get there. And then they maybe do or they don't. So crime apparently has gone way up in London, Ontario. But one of the other reasons it was hard to sleep is for the last five years I've lived in the middle of the sticks. one of the positives of living in the middle of nowhere and being able to have goats and being able to have a beautiful new dog we called Drake, Drake, Drake so we did get our oh he just fluttered an eyelash I probably shouldn't have done that but my new dog Drake wow he's over there he's sleeping he's in the crate we tired him out before the show Hayden and I took turns taking him outside and tiring him out with Luna Tuna Elowen Agar V hopefully they're going to mate together even though at this point she's a little annoyed with him because he's 10 weeks old So he's kind of like an obnoxious, you know, I don't know, like probably like a 10-year-old, I guess, and driving her crazy. But I've gone off topic again. Let's get back into it. If you're at MGC, go see Drew and buy all their junk, as they call it. I don't think it's junk, but it's like their garage sale. Go over there and meet all the poor men that go to it. A whole bunch of tribes members go to it. And tribe adjacent folk as well. Don't want to forget about them. Go see them. Support them. Tell Drew. Orby really, really, really appreciates. I think now between Drew buying all that coffee from me last year to help me out get some snow tires, which we finally are getting. We're finally getting rid of those back-to-snow tires. They made it a whole year. They made it through the summer. They made it too long. We're getting all new tires next week, thankfully. So in case I have to drive back to Ontario, at least I'll have four new rubbers on there, which is nice. But Drew, go support Drew. Whether or not he has a new show come up, Drew and Ian, the third show I'm guessing hopefully will come out in a little bit. Go support them if they have any merch. Go support them by just by listening to all the different shows that's on the Poor Men's Pinball Network over here, whether it's the Ray Ray Show. I don't know. I don't actually think Drew gets very much financial support for that, but it's nice to keep the network relevant and make sure we're listening and supporting all the different shows. Also want to thank, of course, Antonio Verdesgo. Verdesgo. I probably mispronounced that. He says, best of luck. Antonio, thank you so much. a random stranger, I don't even know if I have you on Facebook, but thank you, thank you, thank you Antonio, if you have any businesses or a local arcade you want me to shout out or a Facebook group or custom pinball, or if you have anything cool Antonio that you want me to shout out, because you're at that silver level of over $100 Canadian, you're going to get shout outs for the next month, I'm going to go, we're going to say the next month is starting April 1st, so this is not an April Fool's Day joke this is legit, okay, not fooling anybody for the next month, every time I do a show Anthony, you're getting a shout out. Now, I'm going to say two months. I'm going to say two months. That was supposed to be two months for everyone that's $100 or more. And everyone at $200 or more is going to get three months. Then everybody down here, wait, is there anyone else at the $100 level? Should double check. Okay. So I think that that's it. Now we're going to go down to the, ironically, the silver level. The first one is Stephen Silver. P3 Multimorphic Stephen Silver. Thank you for donating Stephen Silver. You freaking butthole. No, I'm just kidding. From now on, whenever I talk about P3 Multimorphic, they're going to be like, Oh, that one time Stephen Silver sent Orby $65. No, wait, gold, silver, bronze. This is the bronze level. I'm such a dork. But Stephen Silver, thank you so much for donating. He says, hopefully this gets you a tank of gas and helps you and your son too. Dude, Stephen Silver, $65. I have a Corolla. If I fill that sucker to the brim, which I don't because there's like some fuel gauge issues, I normally put in like $45. Apparently when I fill it to the very top, a little bit of it goes over top and like, I don't know. Anyways, I've been told by the dealership, hey, we got 300,000K on this bad boy. That's like, that's over 200,000 miles. You know, it's good. It's good, but just don't fill it to the very top. So I put in 45, and that left enough money for my son and I to go to Five Guys and get some burgers. So Stephen Silver, my guy, you gave me the best burger of my entire trip, and I had a lot. And you also gave me a full tank of gas. That got me, honestly, like, I like to think of it as my American gas tank I filled up in the Sioux. for non-Canadians. We call it the Sault Ste. Marie. It's like the last place when you're going west across Canada before you get to like, you're going towards the prairies, right? Outside of Ontario, it's also the last place you turn south before you drive through five and a half hours through northern Michigan when you don't see one car and it's scary as hell. I think there was one truck that came up and tailgated us with truck nuts. When they passed us, they had a sign on the back of their tailgate that said, keep effing buying foreign cars and my entire family will beat out of a job, you arseholes. and I was like, holy cow! I've seen those in commercials from the 1990s. I didn't know people still had those on their cars. And frankly, I couldn't get why the guy was tailgating us like two inches behind our car, almost hitting us. I thought it was just because my son was driving like three miles over because he was too afraid to go any more than that. But it turns out, we haven't seen a car for hours and it turns out, after he passed us and then got in front of us, and then went really slow for a while so we could purposely read his tailgate before nailing the gas in his dually quad-core F-550 and watching, surrounding us in a big thing of smoke so bad that we actually had to turn the air conditioning on while it was cold to get rid of all the smoke smell in our car. And I was like, yep, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore, Dorothy. And I'm not calling my son Dorothy for any other type of reason than, like, the Wizard of Oz comment. I'm just suggesting that, like, wow. I couldn't believe it. I was like, wow, we are, like, never in Canada once have I been tailgated and blown a poof, a poof of giraffe fart. no a poof of smoke of like black diesel at just because I was driving a Corolla I was like yo I'm buying a Corolla because I'm broke and I worked at Ford for like 7 years and I saw those I worked at Ford Canada before as a security guard and I've walked in on a group of guys who were all shooting up and I'm going to tell you right now they were not doing insulin I saw where they were putting it in their arms so at the very least they were doing like black tar heroin or some shit and when I went back to called the guard house you know what they said Albert if you want to write reports on all four of them and get all four of their names they'll what will happen is they'll get a week off with pay or a month off with pay and they'll have to go to Alcoholics Anonymous or whatever Drugs Anonymous for a couple weeks and they would love nothing but that and I was like what they're allowed to shoot up and then like like like crazy hard drugs like that and then go operate like heavy machinery and like I don't know in the paint shop and welding and seems like this is like a conflict of interest now mind you this was still the 90s, we weren't super uber woke. Uber woke? We weren't as crazy fire woke as we are now, so who knows. But the point is that I never wrote up those things because my bosses were like, yo dude, if you're difficult to work with, there's not going to be more shifts. And I wanted to be off the duck's back and be easy going, so I was like, okay. So literally you'd come around a corner, I'd be driving my little golf cart, the little fireman's golf cart, like a super dork, not even a nerd, a super freaking dork, and they painted it red, and you've got all these different fire extinguishers on there and everything. I've gone off topic and I haven't thanked everybody yet, so I better get back to that. But basically I put out a giant flaming thing of tampons and it was incredible. Best moment of my life. Doesn't matter. Ari, hitting up that bronze level. Have a great trip, Orby. Ari Jones, thank you so much, Ari. I said something. I can't remember what it was. I said something that pissed off Ari. Ari, I was joking in the tribe chat. That was a joke. Now, Ari, I love you, bro. Got to talk to him at New Year's. So hopefully, Ari, Maybe you were just joking back, but I wanted to let you know it's a joke. Now, what's not a joke is, now, thankfully, I'm in a very liberal marriage, okay? Very open marriage where we talk about everything. And I'm kind of like the whole time I worked at TD Canada Trust, third largest bank, second largest bank here in Canada, not sure. But I worked at Easy Line. I was one of those dorks you called on the back of your car and you said, oh, blah, blah, blah, what a good overdraft year. Can you pay this bill for me? Or can you transfer money? Or can I pay off my mortgage? Or can I refinance my mortgage? or in my case, because of the level that I was, I got for months and months and months tax questions. And what kind of stuff can I shelter? Well, it would be a 401k or whatever in the States, I think. But up here, we call it your RRSPs or your Registered Retirement Savings Plan. How much money can I dump into that to make sure I'm not getting taxed on it? I like to put it in GICs. I didn't really push mutual funds much. I did not get up to getting my mutual funds license. I probably could have done that. But all I know is that while I was working there, one of my favorite things to do at tax season was to help everybody invest their money. Why was I even talking about banks? I don't know. Let's get back into it. So I wanted to thank Ari, of course. He said, have a great trip. Greg, Jean Pegg, Jean Pegg, I don't want to say Greg, Jean Pegg. Good luck or, oh, good luck Orby on your trip. Hashtag big deal customs and get a clue on Evil Dead. All right, Greg or Jean, sorry, Jean. I think it's Jean. Gene Pegg, he's over there at Big Deal Customs. Don't know what they are. I've never used them. I'm going to try to look into them. You get a whole month, sir, for being bronze level. I haven't seen Evil Dead. Maybe I need to get a clue on it. Probably not good to talk about pinball machines or movies that you haven't ever played. And let you say, first impressions. And my first impressions of Evil Dead are it's like a lot of those movies back then that I think I watched once or twice. And I went, wow, that's crazy. That's insane. That's scary. That's weird. I just don't watch a lot of horror movies. I don't watch, I haven't seen all 17 like Freddy the 13th Friday the 13th or like I don't I watched some Stephen, like I fucked with some Steven King shit back in the day but I'm just not big into horror movies so like I'm not going to go watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre that's like the only pinball machine in the last year I haven't done a top five, I still need to do one of those gotta go watch it first who else do we have to thank here let's get done with thanking so we can get into talking about today Ryan Barry, mentioned him oh Michael Henriksen then. Thank you so much. $65. Thank you so much. So, Michael, you'll be getting shout-outs for the rest of the month. Same thing with Gene. I think Gene mentioned Big Deal Customs, but Michael, if you have anything you want to shout out, your favorite pinball machine, your favorite pinball location, you're going to be getting a month, so thank you so much for that. Ari, you'll be getting a month, so I don't know if you have anything to, like, I don't know if you want to send people over to your other favorite pinball podcaster, or, like, if you want to tell people to go support anything in pinball, let me know, Ari, and if not, I'll just shout you out, bro. Also, So, Jason Forbes, my guy. Jason Forbes is also a coffee nerd, listens to coffee stuff. Jason, once I get back into re-roasting, we've got to order more green beans. We've finished all of our current ones. We're going to start re-roasting. Jason, I'd love to have you on the show sometime to talk all things pinball and nerd out about coffee. So that would be cool, Jason, if you'd like to be on the show. Let me know. I have about four or five people in line I've got to chat with first. But then we also have, not quite at that tier, Russell Dagger. Not quite at that tier, but thank you so much, Russell. Sean Praden, thank you so much. Fired me off some money to get a brewski. Or actually, in the States, you could get two nice beers. That was the wonderful part. Lumberjack Johnny's had incredible beers at like one-third Canadian prices. Like if a good sour up here is $8.75, they would have a great sour there for like $3. $3.75 max, even at the bar. It was crazy. But Sean Praden, thank you so much for that. Says, good luck at Nationals, Tribe Member 008. Well, from Tribe Member 026, Orby, thanks you, Sean, so much. All right, Mike Williams, another fellow Tribe Member, coming in at that little bronze level. Bronze, you get that, bronze. Everything golden is bronze. Have a great time at Nationals. From Mike Williams, I believe he's a Tribe Member, if not Tribe Adjacent, but I'm 99% sure he's a Tribe Member. So who did we miss here? Who did we miss here? Oh, only the most important, the most important possibly of all of them, Glenn the Skateboarder. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Glenn, so freaking much. Glenn didn't give me a monetary amount per se. I guess he paid for, which is incredible, and helped hurry and ask Foghorn, Leghorn, and I think Crafter Sally. of course you would know them from the pinball junk drawer which just had episode 42 on March 13th go check that one out timing is everything this is all about their trip to Minnesota and how that timing affected Canada so I haven't listened to that one I'm excited to do it it's on my long list I think I have 7 pinball podcasts to catch up on I had to make sure I listened to all Ryan Barry's I'm not even caught up on Don's I'm sure there's a shout out or two there on Don's I haven't caught up on I'm going to do that this week is the week of catching up on podcasts and it's not something I loathe it's something I love it's just I had to balance out I have I had four new chickens who I have to father who my new flock had to go outside and had to deal with you know an old chicken dealing with that then I have an older dog I'm not going to call her old tuna don't get mad at me Luna Tuna Elowen Agar but she's four years old so in dog years that's like I don't know like 20 something right so she's kind of older and she's kind of more mellow and she actually it's I think she overstrained a hamstring or I don't even call it a hamstring, a dog string. I don't know what it's called. But she over pulled like a muscle in her leg while trying to get away from him. Because Drake is half Doodle, so same half as Luna. But then he's also half Old English Sheepdog. He's a biter. He's a bit of a nipper. We're trying to nip it in the bud so he stops nipping us in the bud. But he got my ear this morning. He like didn't quite draw blood. But like I saw it almost coming to the surface. it was very red. So like a couple times a day, we have to just, Hayden, you know, researched it for us. Toonie, you can't come over here right now, I'm recording Toon Sork. She tried to come up on my lap right now. She likes to, she's been very emotional since we've had the new dog. So between, you know, re-assimilating myself, and I said this was really hard, coming back from this trip for three or four days, I just didn't feel like I was home. And I think I was actually chatting with Ryan Berry about this, and he said a lot of musicians, when they come back from being on the road for a couple weeks, it feels strange in their own house for a couple days, and that's definitely how I felt here. But, alas, huge thank you to Foghorn Leghorn, and Crappier Sully. They also do We Suck at video games. The last one was FIFA 10. Now, I'm not going to lie, I don't listen to every We Suck. I try to, I try to, but if I miss one or something and I'm busy, I don't normally go back and listen. This one I'm going to go listen to, because it's about FIFA Soccer 2010. Arguably the best FIFA Soccer. I know that my other son, Owen, would totally disagree. He likes the newer stuff. I think that's probably when FIFA peaked. But I'm going to go listen and see if they agree with this, you know, what they thought of it. So I'm going to listen to that as well. Thank you for getting that. Also, you know, thank you to Glenn for asking them to get it done. Thank you to Foghorn Lakehorn for shipping it up, getting it done and stamped so easily, putting that ahead of whatever you were doing so I could have the luck of the tribe the whole time I was at D82. And boy, was I lucky. But I'm going to talk about that in a minute. There is a last one more thing with Glenn I wanted to talk about. And I'm not saying this just because Glenn's been my buddy for years. Glenn's probably my top supporter. He's not just, Glenn's not just my top supporter. Whether you're talking about Slam Tilt Pinball Podcast or even the Loser Kids, I know what their Christmas special. And then again, you know, probably multiple times since then, almost every pinball podcast should be thanking Glenn for all he's done for all of us. He gives us unlimited content. He's emailing all of us. He's chatting with all of us. Um, he's just probably the kindest, nicest, like I've said before, if you can't get along with Glenn the Skateboarder, I don't know if we can be friends. Because, like, he is the most positive, outgoing, people have said that about me. Like, after I was on, uh, the gentleman we no longer speak of, uh, other people have called him Voldemort. I wouldn't do that, maybe in Minecraft I would, but I wouldn't call him that. But there's another, uh, negative Nancy Debbie Downer Pinball Podcaster that we, all of us don't speak of. and like there's a reason why we don't speak of him because he's just so negative and rude about everything all the time but I'll tell you this if you can manage to be the one pinball podcaster blocked by him you're doing something right because alas I frankly couldn't deal with him anymore I'm glad I don't have to listen to his Saturday bullshits anymore and I haven't paid for that BS even though he's tried to send me free links before and I don't want to listen to it because first of all as a pinball content creator do I need more negative in my life? No. Years ago, I stopped watching all, not just leftist news or right news, I stopped watching all news channels because they do like 95% negative and 5% good. And so if I were you and you want your life to get better, especially if you're paying for said content, just don't. Because, first of all, you could hear all that content for free on the Saturday morning thing if you weren't blocked. And then second of all, although the person who's doing that content has really good cadence, and I do like that they do call it the manufacturers, they just do it in such a negative and rude manner that it's like, you can find other, like if you type into YouTube or Google, like good news only, you can watch websites that will be like, they have good news only. And of course, that's not all the news. You want someone to be critical. But if you want someone to be critical about pinball machines, but also be kind, then come and listen to me. You don't need to listen to that nerd anymore, that dork. I'm not even going to call him a nerd. He's definitely a dork. First of all, the thing he banned me for, I was totally just kidding. He has been miscalling me or orbiter, orbiter, orbiter. I've explained to him like five times, even on his own channel and even while doing an interview with him on my channel, that my name is Orbit, like an orbit shot, the second most common shot in all pinball, orbit. Should be easy to say, orbit. Okay, not trying to make you say wooter here, but I was trying to get you to have some H2O and I was trying to get you to call me orbital water and you're calling me orbital wooter, I would get it. But I'm trying to get you to call me Orbital Albert. Because my favorite shot is an orbit shot. And when you shoot, if you do anything that's an orbit, it's called orbital. That's what it's called with any type of, whether it be a rocket, or whether it be a spaceship, or whether it be some type of drone. If it orbits something, it's doing its orbital whatever it's called. And that's why my name is Orbit. And then Al, like Albert. Because most people actually call me Al on planet Earth. Some call me Bert. Really good friends call me Biff. I'll tell you about that later. It might have to do with me having the good sign of Biff. But the point is, is that I don't mind if you call me Al. I don't mind if you call me Bert. I definitely don't mind if you call me Albert. Love that. Don't mind if you call me Orby. Thank you, Zach Many, by the way. Sometimes I'm a little critical of Zach, but in this one case, I want to say thank you, Zach, for all you do for pinball and for giving me probably the coolest name ever, because most people just call me Orby, which I love. But if you wanted to call me Orbital, you could. If you wanted to call me Albert you could, which you can't call me and what I'm just not going to accept anymore or ever again, whether or not we're frenemies or not, I don't give a flying rat's ass, okay? I don't even give a flying rat's bleached ass, okay? I'm telling you right now, if you don't stop calling me the wrong name, either call me Al, Albert, or Orbital Albert, I'm going to tease you mercilessly to the end of the fucking world, and there's nothing you can do about it. There's just nothing you can do about it here on earth or even maybe if I were doing it in Minecraft because my name is Orbital Albert and he knows I'm on the Poor Men's Pinball Network. He's aware of those two facts and he purposefully is minimizing and being condescending and rude to me by calling me the wrong name on purpose. So from this moment forth, he shall be known as Voldemort because he really truly is evil and evil doesn't deserve your five dollars a month and evil doesn't even deserve your time on Saturday mornings. And evil is no longer on the come up because evil gets less and less views and less and less scars and less and less people caring and less and less people ready to simp for him because he gets more and more negative and more and more rude and spirals out of control and beefs and argues. Like, I was the only bimbo podcaster that would even, like, I never talked back to him, but the guy would send me messages fairly often until I stopped talking to him about six months ago. And now I said, if I'm going to talk to him, it's only going to be to tell him he's wrong, basically, or once in a while thank him, you know, if he does the odd show where he wasn't rude to a pinball podcaster, I would, yes, at said time, thank him for doing that. I mean, I was costing him 10 stars. I hope that the rest of the pinball podcasting and pinball media does not think I'm a simp for Voldemort just because I gave him 10 stars once in a while to try to nudge him towards, because I actually do think a lot of his takes in pinball are correct. Unfortunately, he just presents them in the most negative, rude, and, you know, he is entertaining. I'll give him that. It's entertaining. but entertainment at what cost? Fox News might be entertaining. CNN might be entertaining. Even CBC or CTV here in Canada might be entertaining. If you had to go, I guess, on the flip side of that, like Star Newspaper or something in Toronto, all of them might be entertaining as hell, but what's the trade-off? The trade-off is that afterwards, you went from a hobby that you loved and you didn't give a shit if you lost 500 bucks on a stupid pin after enjoying it for a year or two or 1,000 bucks. It went from something you loved to I would find I hated pinball after I listened to him. So I'm glad that I've been blocked because then my weak ass, who would just want to go listen to hear what the hell is going on, can't listen. So to be honest, if you want to help yourselves out, not only stop wasting $5 a month, you can come listen to me for free. There's tons of other critical people, especially on YouTube now. Kerry Hardy is probably the best guy to go listen for free. And in fact, Kerry Hardy, you should go sponsor this guy. Take your five bucks a month you're giving to Voldemort and give it to Kerry Hardy. he's critical and he's funny and he's entertaining okay now he will admit to you when he is getting a sponsorship from a particular company or a service and he'll be honest and upfront about it and that's what I love so he honestly has figured out how to monetize his YouTube channel while being open and honest while being critical while still being pretty freaking kind so that is the type of pinball content creators we want those are the type of people we should build up those are the people we should support and there's tons of other ones slam tilt and and you know I love the loser kids I I love triple drain speaking of triple drain I did not get to talk to Tom I wanted to talk to Tom several times I tried to make eye contact Tom it's okay if you're a little bit intimidated by me I'm sort of a weirdo I get it uh one time I was even walking by Tom and there's like no one else around and he knew I would be like hey Tom how's it going just love your show thanks so much for all you do for pinball like he knew I was gonna try to talk to him just for like five seconds I swear to god Tom this isn't true totally call me out on it maybe it is, maybe it's not, I don't know, I love you, thanks for all you do for Fox Cities, but as I'm walking by Tom, I swear to God, he just, like, pretended like he was getting a phone call, he was like, oh yeah, uh-huh, uh-huh, and he lifted his phone to his head and started talking as he walked by me. Now, to be fair, first of all, Tom's kind of a smaller guy, he's kind of a petite fellow, he's very, like, you know, I hope it's not size, I mean, I'm mostly just a fat dude with a big gut, but I also happen to be six feet tall, broad shoulders, and he's probably maybe heard, maybe he's never, he's probably, why I would tell him to listen to the Pinball Nerds podcast. Come on. Obviously, he's never heard of me. I know that even when I took my break, Travis Murray was one of the very first pinball podcasters to pipe up and say, dude, I know what you do is hard. You know, I don't think Travis listened to every show for the love of God. Of course, he doesn't. But when he did listen to a show I think that Travis you know was like knew that at least I was coming from an authentic you know a place where at least I love pinball I want to help pinball My whole point isn to like make manufacturers not get new in box sales My whole point isn just to make fun of every other pinball content creator My point in doing the show is to try to be a positive outlet that also critical that isn't maybe, you know, supported by a distributor and isn't maybe supported by a pinball company. And that's totally okay. I'm actually happy. Like if Stern Pinball had given me like a grand, it would have been like incredible. But then for the rest of my life, y'all would think when I'm saying like, oh, I don't like this about, you know, the Munsters, I think the code's a bit easy. Or if I'm saying, oh, I don't love this particular art package or something, you'd always think, hmm. Or if I do say, even more important, if I say, oh, I love this new pinball machine. I love the artwork on Venom. It's stunning. It's incredible. It's great. You know, when I'm saying stuff like that, you might forever think like, hmm, hmm, right? So I'm actually kind of glad in a way I didn't get that. But I should, before I go any further, talk about the last person that supported me, Mr. Ian Haberman. That's right, one of the two original poor man's people. Okay, that's right, that's right, Ian himself. Now, Ian is still doing the Ian and Drew show, which we're excitedly waiting for the second episode for, but in the meantime, and I'm going to check if my audio is working here. There we go. Okay, in the meantime, you know Ian is not like a realtor like Drew go support Drew that way I'm not sure if Ian is going to MGC but if he's there go say hi to him give him a big fat sloppy kiss on the cheek dot on the lips you weirdos on the cheek and tell him Orby sent you with that big wet Canadian French kiss no don't do that to him that's rude unless he wants you to and then in which case do it or say Orby wanted to know if I could French kiss you just this one time you sexy bastard, what a good looking fella, especially when this guy, he puts on those suspenders, you're making me think the wrong thing here, Drew, come on, no, that's okay, that's okay, but Drew did this thing with the Tide House, okay, the Tide House, so it's called the, like, how do you think it's spelled, Tide, T-I-E-D, and then house, H-O-U-S-E, it is over here on YouTube, and his most recent video, he's actually talking about the three best cocktails for St. Patsy's Day. Now, if my voice was working closer to St. Patsy's Day, I could have came on here and got that for you. But my voice is sucking, and I still have to tell you about D82, and I have to tell you about Nationals, and I have to tell you about Finmasters. And I also have to tell you about my new pinball crush. Thankfully, that's why I was talking about the bank. Thankfully, Drop Target Danielle allows for me to have a crush within reason, okay? No emotional cheating, no physical cheating, just someone that I'm crushing on a little bit. Of course, the rhythm guitarist for the Beaches, the little sister of the lead singer I believe her name is Kristen is kind of like my and I did get to go see her at the Junos three days ago they won band of the year and they were the final performance shout out to the Beaches incredible I've been following these girls for the past at least two years really hardcore gone back and looked at their whole back catalog congratulations to the Beaches but I did want to say that the Tide House from Ian and thank you for that bronze level sponsor Ian thank you so much go support Ian especially if he's over there at MGC buy all his junk up okay who knows last year at MGC he just crazy crazily went out randomly I won't say crazily randomly went out and he bought a not a shuffleboard not a skeeball machine it's a jukebox he bought a jukebox thought that was so funny get him all liquored up this guy bring him all your liquor bring him all your shots if you get him drunk enough he might just randomly like spend five grand on your uh two thousand about pinball machine. No, no, that won't happen. This man knows, this man knows it, but go over and support him. Please, please, please. There's at least one of you listening right now that hasn't subscribed, liked, or, and if you have subscribed, make sure you go over and like and comment. That all helps the YouTube algorithm. Drew's taking, or sorry, Ian's taking a lot of time to put these up. This is called the Tidehouse. This is a drunken leprechaun. This is the only drunken leprechaun I want to see. This is the only leprechaun I want to see in all pinball podcasting, okay? This is it. All the other leprechauns can go after themselves. This is the one you want, because he's going to teach you how to make three incredible drinks. Let me go get some honey. The honey right here from my homestead does wonders for my throat, so you don't have to listen to a guy sounding like he's got a frog. I sound like I'm from Quebec. I am from Quebec now, and go smoke another cigarette. Speaking of Quebec, I got to meet Adam Kessler, and that was incredible. He's the owner of North Star Brewing. Well, I don't know if he's the owner, but I don't think... Wait, now I've got to rethink myself. He owns all the pinball machines at North Star Brewing. I don't think he owns the brewery. Maybe he does. I don't know. We should have talked more about Crappier Adam if that's the case. Adam, I want you on the show. I want you and every single other provincial champ to come on my show, but I'm going to start with Adam. Love you, bro. Adam, okay, I had just finished driving for 21 hours, including being so late for Rachel with Rachel Risto, right here on the Poor Men's Pinball Network. You know her. You love her. Thank her. Tell her she was the biggest lifesaver ever. right when I got there, Rachel took me out back and helped me out, she showed me where the yummy food truck was for the Korean BBQ which was incredible, or it wasn't Korean BBQ it was just regular BBQ, but it wasn't regular because it was outstanding, it was extraordinary, she also showed me where the cool kids go without giving you too much info, she also helped me out by giving me a nice big hug, showing me the pinball machines, introducing me to Drew Sitch that was so cool, Drew Sitch, he got the Sitch, what up Drew, thanks for helping with all the tournaments there, even though you're from Canada. I thought that was cool. I believe he's up from Manitoba? Saskatchewan, Manitoba? Somewhere up there. So neat to meet him. So neat to meet all the other people. I'm going to go take a quick pee-pee. I just want to play the start of, and I found this so interesting, the start of Ian's most recent video on the Tide House. This is his Easy DYI Drunk Leprechaun Cocktail Tutorial. Perfect for St. Paddy's Day celebrations. So have a little listen while I run to the bathroom and grab some honey from my honey. Hi everybody, welcome to Tidehouse, happy St. Paddy's week. So, what's going on today? Oh, we've got a few drinks to make, but today we're going to focus on the first drink of this week's specials. That's right, we're going to do three drinks this week, hopefully we can release all three. First one we're going to do is called the Drunken Leprechaun, that's something I found online. I have not tried it, it's a very simple recipe, anyone at home can do this one. All you need is orange juice, vodka, so I got a screwdriver thing going, right? Blue curacao, turn it green, and then just a cherry and an orange to make it very nice. So, without further ado, let's get it going here. Today we're going to bust out the very fancy glass. What do you think of that? It says, get your green on. And like I said, this is a very simple cocktail. Let's start it. First thing, ice. Ice, ice, baby. Ice, ice, baby. Don't be shy on the ice. Fill her up. Ian, I'm never shy, my guy. Next thing up, we're going to do one and three quarter ounce vodka. Vodka. Vodka. And today we will use... One second, one scoop of honey. Our sausage tree Irish vodka. He likes using the sausage, huh? So we're going to do an ounce and three quarters. You guys ready for this? Oh, Jesus. Okay, here we go. We're going to drop it right in there. No shaking. Guys, there's the first minute. Go listen to the last four. Go check it out. Like, subscribe. Even write in the comments. Wow, Orby told me to come check out the Tide House, and I did, and I'm not disappointed. Keep it up, Ian, and go check out all those videos. Make sure you subscribe. Make sure you like. Make sure when a new holiday's coming up, I'm sure you're going to see new videos from him. This one's almost got 100 likes. For just a couple weeks ago, that's actually really, really, really good. Or sorry, 100 views. So get out there, Tribe. Support Ian. He supported me. Support everyone else there I mentioned. Someone else who kind of did support me was my new pinball crush. Now, luckily, when I worked at TD Canada Trust, I did have my, I called her my work wife, okay? And my work wife, April, shout out to April, love you. She sat right beside me. She was really good at doing, like, if a business account called in and a regular consumer, and they were trying to tie their accounts together so they could do transfers between their small business accounts and back. I forget what that's called, but there was, like, 32 steps, and I would get lost between step 9 and 14 somewhere, and I would screw up something. so when they went to use their bank card, they would press, like, personal account, it would come out of their business or some shit. Like, I just sucked at that. I was really good at, like, selling GICs and talking about, like, the security GIC+, which is 50% dependent on the gas index and the oil index on the TSX, and 50% dependent upon the bank index. By the way, if they still have the security GIC+, and you're putting away $1,000 at a time or more, that's what I would put it in. But let's be honest, I'm not here to give you bank advice, let's talk about pinball. So I thank everybody I have to thank, and now I've got to get right into it. We're going to jump right into the deep end. Don't worry, we're only 54 minutes in. Wow, okay, okay. We took our time getting to it, but let's go. Start of, what I'm going to do is break this up. This is partially for Franchi. Oh, and another person on the, before I tell you my big new pinball crush, okay, and shout out to April. We drove to work together. We went working out almost every day, either at lunch or after work. We had our lunches together. She helped me out immensely. it was completely platonic. She was happily married. I was happily married. But I don't know. I could have a new pinball wife. I don't know. It could happen. I do have a pinball crush. I'm going to tell you about them at the end. I don't want people to take it too seriously. I'm a very loyal guy. But, you know, sometimes you get a crush on someone, and what can you do? You have a crush. And I even asked Drop Target Danielle if I could mention this on the show, and she kind of, like, gave me the, eh, fine. So, you know what? Just so y'all will listen to the end so I can shout out these sponsors one more time And speaking of drop-targeting, you know, that's almost for sure with her. Tommy's Taco Shack, how can I help you? Can I get five fish tacos, please? You wanted five fish tacos? Ew. You're live on air with the Pinball Nerds podcast. You probably shouldn't be admitting that out loud. It's just us. Okay, can I call you back after the pod? Okay. Bye. I was just talking about you, believe it or not. But don't listen to this show, if anything, okay? Yeah, okay, you never do, exactly. Okay, bye, love you, bye, see you later. All right, what are the chances drop target? Oh, it's actually a good chance because she's on her launch. But I did say I was recording this morning. I thought I'd get to record earlier. The dog, good old Drake over there made a little challenging on me. But the good news is for a lot of you, you were hoping I wasn't going to talk about every single pinball game and go through it. I'm not going to. I'm going to give you the highlights. So I'm going to go through the whole thing from a pinball standpoint, and then I'm going to go through it through a personal one. So, Christopher Franchi, thank you, thank you, thank you. I could really include you in the bronze-level sponsors. Hell, I could probably include you in the silver-level sponsors with what you paid for shipping my guy. But Franchi was kind enough to send me 50 signed, and he's no longer going to be sitting down and getting a table at Expo and getting a table at TPF and signing stuff. He might sign stuff from time to time if you see him, but his autographs just went way, way, way up in value. They just limited edition themselves because he went from being the easiest guy, not the easiest, but one of the easier people in pinball because he was at pretty much every show. And it doesn't matter if you ask them. One time I asked him to sign my G-string and he said, the front Orby. I said, well, of course. How are you going to get your signature on the back, bro? No, I'm just kidding. That never happened. That never happened. I don't even know why I thought of that. But Franchi, I love you, dude. Thanks for all you do for pinball. I got to say hi to Franchi on Don's Pinball Podcast live stream as well as Kerry Hardy's. So that was cool. But day one, Hayden and I, so I'm going to skip out on like all the personal stuff for the most part and only talk pinball. And at the very end, so for the franchise of the world that mostly want to hear about the pinball, not the personal stuff, for the most part, y'all can deke. I'm going to tell y'all it's time to deke. You're not going to find out who my new pinball crush is and maybe my future pinball wifey, right? You're not going to find that out. But you're also not going to find out what the hell made Dalton Eli, that's right, the national champ. Congratulations, Dalton, by the way, won nationals. Again, Drew C. I'm not going to try to pronounce Drew's last name. Drew is kind enough, though. Drew came up to me, and Drew, I'm going to be careful how much I share here, but Drew Cordola, Cordella, I'm probably not pronouncing it right. I'd love to have Drew on the show. I did invite him on the show. He's not 100% sure if he wants to come chat on the show or not, but he may come in the future. He got second. Drew was playing out of his mind. I mean, he's a great player. He's like a top 130 player in the world. If he traveled more, he'd probably be a top 25. And honestly, after seeing that experience, if he traveled more, and honestly was probably even a little bit younger, he might even be a top 10, top 5 player. Who knows? But wow, he rolled through, I believe, Eric Stone and Zach McCarthy, or did he take out... I forget who he took out, but he took out a lot of good people. See, I'm supposed to try to be less blog and more reporter, and I should have researched this, but Drew took out a hell of a lot of good players all the way to get there against Dalton, and you end up getting second. Everybody at Lumberjack Johnny's, Lumberjack Johnny's is just really rad, as you might expect, Lumberjack, or like Axe Throwing Bar slash Pinball Bar, that is like 10 minutes from De Pere at D82. So a lot of the people that play will then go after the Lumberjack Johnny's to play, A, who don't want to play with the caliber of players that are left at D82 playing, or B, just were kicked out early, and they want somewhere to go play and shoot the shots and buy some craft beer and have some awesome pizza and get some good food trucks. And I can't say enough good enough about Lumberjack Johnny's. But I did want to say, I did want to say congratulations to Dalton Eli, who killed it and did great, played out his mind. I got to play with him on the second day at Pitmasters. That was great. But Dalton did turn to me and say, you got some explaining to do. It was so funny. I don't know. Okay, you might have said you have some explaining to do, but I heard it differently. And I'm sorry, Dalton. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Adam Becker. I kind of did frick up. I won't say I messed up like really, really, really bad, but I kind of did a somewhat major, I would call it a somewhat major faux pas, and I kind of burned some of the tournament director's time and possibly made Dalton look not great. So this tournament, he's like, you've got some explaining to do. And I was like, oh, man. The one person I didn't want to disappoint was Dalton, and the other person I didn't want to disappoint was Adam Becker. And it's like, I disappointed all of them, and I'm sorry, but I will save that to the end. Let me circle Dalton at the end here, so I remember to do that. Dalton. You got some explaining to do. I love Dalton. He's just such a class act. He's like down to earth. He doesn't kiss your butt, but he's just like, he's legit. He's authentic, and I really like that. I love Dalton. I got to reach out to you. Not only do I want to have you on the show, of course, especially after getting to play with you, but I love his, go look at Dalton's art, or his comics. I wonder, ah, I should see. Again, I should know the Facebook page. I'm going to look it up and tell you all to go there. He does this really, really cool, he has this very, like, it's very simplistic, but it's also very, like, you know who he's drawing. And he does these really cool comic things, and I'd love to have them in the future version of the Pinball Nerds Podcast Rating Guards, because I think they're freaking incredible. Okay? So, but day one, we end up at the Castleman's house on the Pinballers on Twitch, of course, and we're playing with Carter Castleman, who I think he won, like, Virginia or North Dakota, or whatever the hell the state, it's not North Dakota, whatever the state is that's above Maine, that's like, maybe it was Maine. He won the state there, but he chose not to play because it was going to be too expensive with getting flights and everything else. And then also, unfortunately, Mike, I guess, was going to be playing for Quebec. But then Adam Kessler, I think, decided to go. I believe that's what happened, something like that. Because Mike was second, but Adam wasn't going to go. But then Adam, obviously, I probably screwed Mike Kessler over. I'm so sorry, Mike, after being so nice to me and having me over at your house and setting up all the live stream just for me to come play with you, I ended up being a jerk. Because possibly, possibly, possibly, after meeting Adam Kessler and him hugging me for like two minutes and me turning to him and going, I'm sorry, who are you? And he goes, Orby, it's Adam Kessler. You know me. I'm like, oh, shoot, I'm so sorry. I hadn't seen Adam in like five years since he kicked me out of this Ottawa tournament years ago. And I'd seen pictures of him and stuff online, but he had like short black hair and now he had much longer hair and some of it was gray and I'm sorry I didn't recognize you but I love you my guy it was so cool to meet you and chat with you and he just said such kind things about my show and he's like oh I listened to your I listened to your last two episodes on the flight on the way here I loved it and he said like F you F you this guy and don't worry and I'm like I can't say that on the show I'm trying to be less controversial Adam not more but Adam I love you thanks for supporting the show I might even consider come doing a one-week residency where I do live streaming on like a different pin in the morning and different pin at night at Northstar for a week a just I mean Northstar doesn't need to be put on the map it's like the most rad pinball bar probably in Canada I don't know you probably have better beer selection but then maybe slightly I don't know it's up there it's one of the most rad bars if you're ever in Montreal you have to go there and no I'm not going to call it Montreal yes I'm a freaking anglophone but come on I can still say it correctly I'm not going to don't go to Montreal and order the poutine, okay, it's poutine, okay, and you'll call it poutine, because then they're going to spit in it, and you'll, oh, tabernak, put a little cigarette butt in there for you, no, they won't do that, they won't do that, but it was so neat to meet him, but on day one, I could have chosen to go get a full night's sleep, which I probably should have done, or I could take up Mike Castleman's, you know, invite, and I don't know how, and I don't know why, but somehow someone alerted Jack Danger, or maybe it was my Facebook post, Mike Hossman said I could choose the machine, he gave me his whole selection, I said, it's got to be Foo Fighters, I knew I was playing Foo Fighters in Nationals, I knew I was playing Foo Fighters in Pin, sorry, in Pin Masters in the Nationals, but I'd only played one game on a completely, like, the worst setup Foo Fighters ever, maybe two games, or part of one game and part of another game, because I let Drop Target play as well, but I'd only played two games of Foo Fighters on the worst setup one on the entire East Coast at a bowling alley outside of St. John in New Brunswick, and it was like literally flat. I thought they thought you were supposed to make the bubble like go to the whole back end because they had the front ones up to the top and the back ones all the way down. So it played so slow and slow floaty. I couldn't do the figure eight. Like none of the shots were fun. It was so boring. They also had like, please, please, please, please, if you're spending thousands upon thousands of dollars of putting pinball machines in there. Use the dumb little bubble that Stern puts there. That will at the very least, it might not be perfect left or right, it'll at least be, you know, between 6.5 and 7.5, whatever the right angle is for that machine. So, anyways, gone off topic. Mike, thank you so much. Jack Danger jumped in chat, was freaking giving away subs like Oprah with cars, like, you get a sub, you get a sub, you get a sub. Rachel Risto was there. Jack was, like, complimenting, I think, Mike on how well he was playing it. Mike did happen to get several hundred million. I think he got, like, 400 or 500 million and he did get to the mini wizard mode and like go watch that on the pinball as you can see Hayden and I there Hayden didn't have a lot of good balls but he was exhausted and stressed out and tired I didn't have a lot of great long balls but I had a couple decent ones and the main thing is Mike taught me to play it far far far better so that I wouldn't get a 10 and for those of you don't know what a 10 is in pin golf a 10 is like the worst a 10 is like a mini putt when you get a six and it says on the sheet if you get to your six shot and it doesn't go in, just pick it up and leave and mark it as a six, right? So it's kind of like a little Debbie Downer horn, something like that, right? Anyways, talk about that in a second, but had a great time there. Then that night we stayed at my friend Anna's house. The next day was our longest drive by far. That one was just according to paper, it was supposed to be 14 hours and three quarters. It ended up taking us about 21. We had to stop three times to stretch our back out. We had to stop several times to do a quick photo op, including at the Nickel and Sudbury. I'm supposed to talk about that later and only talk about the pinball. So let's move on to that night. I got to play a little bit of Jaws for the first time. I played a game with Rachel Risto. She let me win and made me feel good about myself because she kicked my butt in every other tournament there. But thank you, thank you, thank you, Rachel. Guys, if you ever get the opportunity to see Rachel at a show, tell her she literally was a lifesaver. I wasn't allowed to bring my typical medication I used to keep my ADHD amped up, possibly, probably bipolar self very calm. So she helped me a little bit with an alternative medication that helped keep me, I won't say calm or relaxed because y'all got to see on video, I was like the least calm or relaxed person at Pinmasters. However, I would say it kept me at like even keel. Okay. So that's like, that's the best, you know, I didn't completely lose my shats at any given point, at least not until I got back here, but We'll talk about that later. So this is a little bit of drama. This is a little bit of heat. I don't want to throw anyone under the bus, nor do I plan on doing said thing. That angry alpaca coffee is still good half-assed cold like that. Still good. Still tasty. Delicious. So, okay, I was supposed to play Eric Stone in the first round. Everybody knew that. Everyone had accepted that. That was completely fine. Eric, I don't know if this was on purpose but at Lumberjack Johnny's I was just standing across from someone I knew that there were still like four players playing but I didn't know, I hadn't seen it was Eric Stone yet and all I heard was like, FUUUUUUUUUCK like I thought like someone had like dropped like a pinball machine on their freaking toe or like someone had kidnapped someone's child or like someone had just got like banned from uh, tuning, you can't come in here right now sorry, sorry love, I'll be with you in a minute anyways, I thought like something happened and I just glanced over and I looked over and there's Eric Stone and he's just mad because the ball went down. I was like, Jesus Christ. I had heard him yell on all these Twitch channels, but I've never, and I've been to over 200 pinball tournaments, I've never heard anyone yell like that. Everybody in the bar, the people doing axe throwing must be like, what the fuck is happening over there? I've been in the room with my wife while giving birth to two babies and anyone who knows Owen, I love you Owen, this man got a head bigger than Jay Leno's he makes Jay Leno's head look like a freaking dick back on a whale okay this Owen got a big head and he's grown into it and he's a handsome fella and he's incredible at basketball even better at soccer also going to provincials again most likely this year for badminton um and and honestly every and has been killing it at pinball not gonna lie pretty sure you're gonna see Owen in the top 16 for the Ontario or the Ontario the New Brunswick Pinball Championships this year, okay? But, I've seen my wife scream with that, like, nine-pound head coming out of her. She didn't scream as loud as Eric losing, like, 40 bucks at Lumberjack Johnny. So, I can understand why people don't really love playing right beside Eric, because he's a screamer. He's a yeller. He's interesting, but he screams so loud that, like, I swear to God, there was blood coming out of my ear worse than listening to Aerosmith. And that's saying something, because I don't like, I like Eric Stone most of the time when he's not being a screamer. When he's just talking, he's like super entertaining. He's funny. He knows a shit ton about pinball. I will say this, Eric Stone getting timed out from the $7 million, honestly, it was smart from Stern's point of view because it would have ruined their competition for the whole month. It looked bad on Stern for the top tournament players because they were like, whoa, what happens now if we find a little tiny way to make extra money without taking the glass off? Or not extra money, but what was he going to win? A freaking t-shirt, right? So at the same time, I'm going to do a whole show on this later, but it's like the conundrum of Eric Stone. He's like the most entertaining guy to watch. He's constantly talking to himself. He's yelling. He's screaming. He's praising God. He's getting mad at the devil. You know, if he played well, it's praise to God. If he played bad, like his opponent prayed longer than him the night before. I don't know. I'm trying not to be controversial here. I love Eric Stone. He did talk my ear off the next day after he found out we weren't playing each other, because I didn't say a goddamn word to him the first night, or, sorry, Erica, gosh darn, word to him the first night, or the next day. But then the next day, we kept hearing, would Bo and Karen's please come up and register at, like, quarter to whatever, nine. And I will say this, friend of the show, or ex-friend, I'm not sure, of the show Julie Dorsers, hopefully still friend of the show, shout out. If she's listening, love you, Julie, sorry I didn't get to see you. Julie was, like, honestly, in the top five people I was looking forward to seeing in London, so Mark and City was up there, didn't get to see him Mark Tourand would have been up there, but like Mark Tourand doesn't fuck with pinball anymore but I did get to see Sean Russell, which was incredible I did get to see Mike Dimas right up there those are my two homies that I probably hung out with the most got to see both of them, which was great Brad Hopkins came out wow, he's a comedian now, he's actually opening at Yuck Yucks, if y'all live in southwestern Ontario, go see Brad Hopkins at Yuck Yucks coming up, Brad if it already happened, I'm sorry, but like Brad, get yourself a Facebook page or something, Brad is also a Poor Men's Pinball Tribe member. And so I was telling Rachel, oh my god, this is the first time I ever met a Poor Men's Pinball Tribe member. And then I remembered later, wait, Ian Richfuck, also known as, Ian Harewer, and Brad Hopkins both played with me in Lawple and TCPL. Well, not Brad as much, but, and all the Toronto events. So, shout out to both of them. I guess Rachel was my third Poor Men's Tribe member I've ever met. I'm probably forgetting one of you. Let me know if you're in the Poor Men's Tribe and I've met you, and my old hippie brain just forgets because I forget a lot and also if I forgot a thank you somewhere in here please let me know because I want to include it so instead at five minutes two they're like like Eric's like just pacing back and forth like where's Bowen where's Bowen where's Bowen Bowen was no call no show and I'm sorry Bowen if I'm not supposed to like relay this information that was pretty rude Bowen that was pretty rude I don't know if Bowen was specifically purposefully doing it, like, if Bowen got a flat tire, and he was somewhere where his cell phone didn't work, and he couldn't call, or he was in the hospital, or he was going through stress, like, if there was a legitimate reason why you couldn't even call, and let Josh and Zach, or I don't know if Zach had anything to do with it, but if you couldn't let Josh Sharpe actually start, like, figuring out the ladder, and letting everyone reposition themselves, like, it wasn't just rude to me, it wasn't just rude to Eric Stone, it was rude to everybody else who affected, which was everybody lower than Eric Stone, so no one played who they thought they were playing, from what I understand. From what I understand, unless they just moved around me and Derek Thompson, I don't know. But definitely, obviously, if someone at Eric's caliber, you're going to be researching who you're playing. Do you think Eric Stone had to do a lot of research on Orby? Of course not, nor is there any live streams of me playing until now. Can you believe my first live stream playing pinball outside of my own that were like non-tournaments? But my first tournament live stream is at Nationals and Pinmasters, that's incredible. That's a cool rad stat that I'll get to remember for the rest of my lives. And honestly, watching me in Pinmasters, it's a little cringe. It's hard to do. I can let myself watch like one per day, and I have to not read chat because some of the chats, yeah, I've heard some of the chat was not so nice to me when I was screwing up on Adam's Family, but I was legit like having a massive brain fart on Adam's. So if you're only going to watch me play one game, Please go watch me play like Flash Gordon or like Foo Fighters or, I don't know, I did okay on Godzilla. I wasn't really warm by then, but let's get back into it. So I had a rad time at Lumberjack Donnie's the first night. Couldn't play in the tournament. Got home by about 2 a.m. Was almost asleep, and I'm not even going to lie, there was straight up, I could hear the talking and everything. It was straight up, it was a hooker. I'm sorry, that's probably not the right term. Jesus, jeepers, creepers. It was a woman of the night. That's probably not allowed either. it was a woman who takes money for sex or a man it sounded like a woman I couldn't see but they decided shortly after thank god my son went to bed because that would have been super awkward all of a sudden I started hearing that rhythm like Michael J I was like Michael J Fox in Secret of My Success and it was like da da da da let's go okay you guys are almost done and thankfully the first time my guy didn't go too long and I was like yeah bedtime and I like turned off my headset stop watching the video from the Nationals that day to see how all the machines were playing for pinmasters or no sorry getting this is alas alas this is the wrong night I'm talking about this is getting ready to go play the Nationals and I think they started up again at like 3.30 and they went to like 4.20 so to the best of my knowledge I stopped from 4.20 to like 7.20 got a good solid 3 hours and I got 6 hours a night before that who cares how much I slept all you need to know is I was tired as shit going to Nationals so that when they eventually said, okay, Bowen Kerins is a no-call, no-show, no one knows where he is, no one knows what's going on. By that time, they had to do the big shuffle, it caused a bit of a commotion, it started a bit late, it allowed me to have my energy drinks and my five coffees to freaking out. I had like three coffees, two energy drinks, I never drink energy drinks. For the record, I'm like addicted now, it's probably part of the reason why I got so sick maybe, so my body was not used to, you know, I use caffeine all the time, but I have like three to five teas a day and two to three coffees. I never, ever, ever have those energy drinks, but I went to town on them, for the record, I love rain, has no sugar, has taurine, has all, they haven't paid me for this, I might have to go after them, see if I get a sponsorship, but wow, these suckers kept me awake, kept me alive, gave me a little bit less time, thanks to my guy beside me, the second time, he went much, much, much longer, and I was like, dude, you're like smacking against my wall, can you just like, I was like, go, just bring it home, bro, bring it home, I know you're paying per hour, but like, bring it home, man, anyways, not a great night's sleep that first night, but thank you, Ray Day. Ray Day recommended that I actually stay there. Had a wonderful, got to chat with Ray Day several times over the time. Ray Day even was kind enough to give me a ride home or back to our hotel, I guess, after Lumberjack Johnny's, gave Hayden and I a ride. He also, like, he even popped by our room. I think I invited him. It's not like he was just like, hey, Orby, let me in. No, I, you know, I don't know if we're having a night. I think I had a little nifty-gifty to give to him, which he may or may not share with others, but I gave him a little, kind of a super nerdy gift and just thanked him for all he does for pinball. I said sorry for the time I drunk dialed him and forgot to mention we were live on air last Christmas. I'm sorry for that. I guess it'd be like two Christmases ago now. Also apologized for me being a little bit rude and mean to some of his code on, I think, I don't know if we just jumped over that. I've already apologized on the show, but I did say something a little bit rude without having never played Led Zeppelin, which I still never played. Where is his pinball machine? Where is it? Do I have to go to Jeff Deolos' house to play it? Who knows? Maybe Deolos will let me pop by for one quick game of it while I'm at the Ontario Open. I don't know how close to Mississauga he lives. I think he's more like Kitchener-Waterloo. But I don't want to dox him, but he lives somewhere in the GTA... What does Don call it? The Diaspora? I don't really know what that means. I like saying it. Jeff lives in the Diaspora, the Greater Diaspora of Toronto. Or as I call it, Tirana. Tirana School of Business. All right. So what I loved, though, was when Josh Sharpe was calling each person up, he would call their name and then say where they were the champion of. And I swear to you, I'm not even kidding. The only time I was okay with hearing Orbital Albert, Orbiter Albert, was when Josh Sharpe said, and now the new Brunswick champion, Orbiter Albert. Now, Josh probably didn't quite, you know, carny call it out that well. But thank you so much for that, Josh. I felt very embarrassed going up even getting my sheet and stuff after that because I was like, everyone's looking at me like I was like, shoot. I thought like to me most of the state and provincial champions, they don't really F with tons of podcasts and stuff. They might listen to like, you know, the top two or three or whatever, but they probably don't listen to tons and they certainly don't listen to my tiny little blog. And enough people clapped and looked over and I was like, damn, I think one or two of these people, well, I know Drew C. Shout out to Drew C. Thank you so much, Drew. Drew actually was very forthcoming and said like, I believe Drew. and I was a little tired, a little bit hungover, and might have enjoyed a little bit too much fuzzy peach vape, but I believe that Drew said that I was not just his fifth favorite, but one of his favorite. So Drew, I could be wrong. I did invite Drew on the show. I'm not sure if that's going to happen, but just thanks so much for the support. Honestly, I'm not crying. You're crying. I had to keep saying there's no crying in pinball when Drew was talking to me because he was telling me some really cool stuff that made me feel really good about this show. It makes me want to just be a positive force. And I owe pinball for what pinball has given to me, I owe pinball for the rest of my life. This is show 560 of your fifth favorite pinball podcast. My goal is by the end of the year to be your fourth favorite pinball podcast. And who knows, by the year, in the year 2030, in the year 2030, Orby goes on to be your favorite pinball podcaster. Probably not. But if I could legitimately be your fifth favorite pinball podcaster by then, what's wrong with that? I don't need to be top two. I don't need to be top three. I don't need to be a negative Nancy Debbie Downer shock rock. I don't need to be saying every pinball machine's a B plus, okay? I just need to tell y'all straight up how it's going, how I interact with pinball. You're probably going to hear more about pinball tournaments, but I'll try not to get into every single game. Let's talk a little bit about Nationals. So instead of, because Bowen wasn't there, and I don't want to call shade on Bowen. I don't know why he wasn't there. Maybe he was dealing with a sincere emergency in Bowen, And if that's the case, then I'm sorry. But the word on the street was, and I'm not going to give any names, but I heard some talk about maybe he had done that purposefully. I don't know if he has a beef with Eric Stone. I don't know if just maybe he's going through his own stuff. Who knows? Maybe he's busy there making one of those pop-up videos. I don't know why. But Bowen didn't show up, and it kind of like threw a kink in it for a lot of people, including myself, who found out, thankfully, because Derek Thompson, you're an incredible player. Again, I think you were ranked 37th when we played. Derek Thompson also runs Yagpin. I'm going to try my hardest to make it to the Eggpin this year. Incredible player, even nicer guy. Incredible player, even nicer guy. And that's saying something, because he's like ranked 37th in the world. Now, finding out, thinking you have to play like the number five, or what is Eric Stone, number six player in the world, and then finding out, and if Eric Stone traveled a lot, he would be in that top five, okay? But Eric Stone, alas, has like a full-time job and doesn't live as close to Chicago, or, you know, he lives in Florida where there's still free play Florida in some big tournaments and such, but there's not as many big tournaments as Chicago or say even, you know, in California, that sort of thing. So here's the thing. I was looking forward to playing Eric Stone. I had already picked out every machine I was going to play against Eric Stone. They were all going to be Carl Weathers related or possibly, well, okay, not all, but I was going to play like Hurricane and I was going to play, it doesn't matter. There was an oldie that was, no, that other old one I found out later wasn't going to be played, but I was excited to play Eric Stone. equally, not equally, but very excited to play Derek Thompson because A, Derek Thompson isn't probably as good of a player as Eric Stone, isn't as consistent, and probably had not played there as many times as Eric Stone, so didn't know those particular machines as well either. Now, Derek was probably happy to be playing me because the chances that a 32 or 37th ranked player in the world is not going to beat like the 7th or 6,000 ranked player myself in the world pretty low. So obviously he went from having to play someone really hard to getting to play someone really easy like myself. So he was probably happy about it. That being said, now I don't think Eric Stone was doing this on purpose, but he was talking my ear off every single ball. Why am I not remembering? Is it Hurricane? What is that game? It's not Hurricane. What is that? I can't remember it now, but it's about a storm. It's the one that they did the upgraded kit on, the 2.0 on. It's a really good tournament game. It's not Hurricane. It's going to bug me. I'll remember later. But Eric was talking to me between every single ball, and a couple of times he was even like not quite coaching me like while I was playing, but I could hear him like almost talking. And then when I finished the ball, I'd be like, oh, why did you do this? Why did you do this? And I turn around, I was like, because I'm not Eric Stone. Okay, I can't Eric Stone to the machines. I'm too stoned to Eric Stone the machines. I'm just not you, buddy. Okay, so but no, we're having a very friendly conversation, but somewhere like in the second or third game where he was talking to me between every ball, I purposely moved far away from him, went outside, had a quick vape. I don't, you know, as being a hardcore Penn Constable, I'm assuming Kristen, and I don't know if he wants to stand close to people that smell like the Fuzzy Peach, the old Canadian Devil's Lettuce, okay? I wasn't sure, but I made sure I walked with myself an anti-Christian smell, and then I went back in. And for some reason, he seemed to stay a bit further away, but I think he was just chatting with someone else. Now, Eric, I had a great time talking to you. I actually don't really truly believe that you were attempting to distract me. I just don't think you know how entertaining and funny you are, and I don't think you can help yourself from giving someone pinball tips. But I will tell you, while someone's playing the biggest tournament of their life for potentially thousands of dollars, if in between each ball you're trying to give them tips, it's going to be distracting to them. So I love you, Eric Stone, but this is the Eric Stone conundrum, because he was not only the most entertaining and funny and charming person I talked to that day, he was also the most annoying. And that's probably what people say exactly about me. So it's like, it's not just the Eric Stone conundrum, it's probably also the Orby conundrum. Because although we're both very interesting to watch on television, and we might yell and scream and get yellow-carded the most, other than Adam Becker, who's also very entertaining, and, you know, interesting to watch play because he's such an incredibly skilled player who also takes it very serious and wears his heart on his sleeve like me. If he gets angry about a ball, you'll know about it. Eric Stone, I don't want to put myself in there. Like, I'm ranked 8,000th, and they're, like, number 15 and number 8 in the world or something, right? But Eric Stone, Adam Becker, and myself are probably the three biggest hotheads there. I'm shocked. One time I thought for sure, ooh, I'm getting a yellow card. No yellow card appeared. I thought about it. I could have called this show the time I got a yellow card. Adam probably could have given me a yellow card for screwing up later, or some type of card. Alas, he didn't. Thanks for not doing that, Adam. Even though it would make for, again, interesting commentary. But now, do I actually think Eric Stone was specifically, purposefully distracting me? Of course not. Like, I don't believe that that's what's happening. I think he's just a kind dude, and when he found out he didn't have to play me anymore, he's like, well, I guess I can talk to Albert for a bit. Now, I don't know if he listens to every show, but a couple things that he said made me believe he might. So, Eric, if you listen, please, I love you, bro. I want to have you on the show. I want to talk about the Eric Stone conundrum. Really, the, you know, because you're a blessing and a curse to pinball. And I want to talk about both sides and why you're a blessing and a curse. And I'm not using blessing and curse just because you're a Christian. That was just a accident. Let's move forward here. Josh Sharpe calls up Orbital Albert. I go play Derek Thompson. At one point, Derek Thompson is up 3-1. I think I nailed one on Flash Gordon. I think I got him on that. I was playing very confident. I could tap pass like a mofo. At one point, I did like seven shots in a row perfectly with even like mini tap flutter flips across to get the ball back over. And if you don't know what a flutter flip is, I don't really know either. I just know that the greatest compliment I've ever gotten in my life, I believe it was Andy Bagwell said that while I was playing on one of the machines, he said, wow, Albert just did a pretty cool flutter flip there. And he said something to the extent of, and I haven't found it again since I was there. So if it wasn't about me, I humbly apologize. I was a little bit drunk and whatever back in the hotel room. And he said something to the extent of his play style reminds me a little bit of Carlos del Cerda, also known as Laser Los. Also like number 12 in the world. So when I almost had a little tear up to my eye and I was like, no, there is no crying in pinball. So I didn't let myself tear up. And I was like, wow, did Andy Bagwell say my playing style reminds him of Laser Los, who, like, is the number one player I look up to and who I've watched the most number of hours on. Other than maybe Escher Lefkoff, okay? Other than maybe Escher, I've probably watched a second of all the top tournament players because Carlos under LaserLos on Twitch. Go like, subscribe. Go make this man eat some beautiful, wonderful Cheetos with his chopsticks, okay? So he doesn't get any orangeness all over the flippers. Thank you for doing that, Laser. And to everyone else who's not eating with chopsticks, come on. I don't care if it's pizza or KFC. You're eating anything greasy like that, get out your chopsticks. At the very least, get out a knife and fork. What are you doing? Don't be eating pizza with your greasy hands and then freaking flipping it on it, wrecking the whole thing, my guy. Come on. Delicious. Delicious. Even though it's cold. Okay. So, basically, I ended up going down 3-1. Then I was feeling really good. And I came back and I was at 3-2. and I was only one away from getting out of that first round and bumping up from $500 Canadian to like triple that. I think it was like 1200 US or something. If you get out of the next round, it could be wrong, but just getting to round one, everybody just going there, just me getting there, just by Ryan Barry getting there, that basically allowed me, oh my God, I'm at 120. Okay, by Ryan Barry getting me there, helping me get there, it allowed me to get that $500 in cash. So Ryan Barry not only donated a couple hundred bucks to me, but me getting those couple hundred bucks caused me on the show to say hey if Ryan's gonna pay pal me you guys can too that helped me bring in another thousand dollars Canadian over that and because of that that helped me go get another five hundred dollars Canadian that I got handed over to from Josh Sharpe which of course I handed right back to Josh with fifty dollars more to play pin masters like come on you're gonna travel all the way to d82 and you're not gonna play pin masters like that's what I'm sorry and you know what I might not even be able to afford to have play pin masters if it wasn't for Ryan Barry doing that or at least drop target Danielle might have been like should you really spend 500 more on one game you have no chance at the answer is yes because it's hell if I somehow if ever again in my life I win the new brunswick pinball championships and I can't really afford it I might not do pin masters even though I think it was worth every penny of it to get to play with such awesome incredible and I think I've actually made possibly made some friends for life by playing in that probably also some enemies but at one point, Escher's dad, of course, as everyone knows him as, Escher's dad, he says on the commentary, he goes, oh, this guy's wearing pink. We need more pink than pinball. I wasn't completely sure if it was a backhanded compliment or like he actually likes pink, but yeah, why can we not have pink in pinball? Give me a break. Like, I freaking love pink. Pink is, like, for some reason, pink just pops with, like, my eyes. I'm sorry. You know, I got these hazel green eyes that, you know, you can look, like, deep space nine into. hell, it's Orbeez, Deep Space 10, I'm so freaking far out in orbit that if you can even see the color of my eyes with them squinted that much, you're lucky, so like, hey, cheers to you, but like, I love pink, pink pops, I also wear a lot of green, I wear a lot of teal, I wear a lot of neon, I love the 80s, I love the 90s, that's just how I roll, I got a little, I'm a little fresh about it, I got a little flair, if there is another pinball podcaster with better style than me, that's the thing, you might say like, oh yeah, this pinball podcaster is richer, this pinball podcaster owns the pinball company, this guy gets more listens to you, sure, the one thing no one's ever said is, does any pinball podcaster have better flair than me, no, did you see my pinball jacket I wore on hole one on Godzilla, come on, there was more than 37 pieces of flair on there, okay, like if we're in office space, and I worked at that little cafe right beside all of them, and they went in there, the boss would be like, literally yelling at Jennifer Aniston's character and saying, look at Aubrey over there, he's got way more than 37 pieces of flair on his pinball jacket, That's right. Who's got more flair out of pinball podcasting? Absolutely nowhere. Anyone can go spend 15 grand and get an ugly Gucci jacket. That doesn't mean you have style. That just means you have more money than you have brains, okay? If you want to have style, you've got to match your colors. You've got to make sure it pops. You've got to make sure the fit of your clothing is not so tight that you look like a German sausage popping out of it constantly. To someone or at least one other pinball podcaster who always wears baby, baby. They're already a tiny person as it is. You don't need to wear a baby gap, bro. Anyways, let's not talk about Voldemort. Let's go on and talk about some other people. God damn. See, you get blocked. You get cock jocked. So take it easy, bro. Take it easy. All right, so yellow cards. None. Should Adam Becker have given himself one? Perhaps. There was one or two times with possibly giving the finger to the screen and smashing it. I thought maybe Adam Becker could have yellow card himself. I've seen him do it in the past. That would have been funny. I don't know. I haven't read all the rulebook. I would like to start TDing in Moncton next year for New Brunswick, so I probably will have to read the entire TD book, and who knows, I might even have to yellow card mine own self sometime and if I do it be a moment of pride and embarrassment all alas at the same time because I play with my heart on my sleeve I get crazy I get mad at myself when I F up I get mad at the machine when it gives me a tilt when it shouldn't have, like on flight 2000. Mind you, again, it's a little bit of hearsay, but I guess at the world championships last year, they had earplugs in all the pins. And because of that, people were able to get away with nudging a bit harder without getting a tilt. and they were able to get, like, double debounce saves or something. Like, they were able to get saves that without ear... So for those of you who don't play a lot of tournament pinball, this is something that's newer to me as well. But earplugs basically stop the tilt bob from, like, going on and on and on, like, after someone stopped playing. So instead of, you know, the tilt bob going back and forth for 45 seconds to a minute and a half, even up to two minutes, after a hard nudge or a hard tilt, the earplugs would basically... I'm going to get some honey out here because I can hear my voices. Oh, God. Sorry, I'm sorry. What if my pinball crush listens to this and they no longer like me? Oh, no. I'll have to find a new one. Okay, hold on. I've got to do a little bit of the magic hummingbird homestead honey for my troat. Mmm. Oh, my God. If you love chicken nuggies like I do, you've got to get real honey. You've got to. Don't be getting that stuff they give you there. they call honey. That's just corn syrup with a little bit of fake artificial honey flavoring. Get the real stuff. Our stuff has a mixture of probably 700 different wildflowers in and around our house. And it's just like, oh! Even my voice even got slightly less raspy there. So, anyways, it was 3-2. I was playing Derek Thompson, one of the top players from Canada. I think he's like third in Canada currently, or maybe fourth. I believe Jack Tadman's at the top, and then probably Adam Becker, I'm assuming. I didn't look all this up. Bad Orby, bad Orby. But anyways, I, alas, tilted on the tightest machine there, which everyone said, tilt ends game, tightest machine ever. Everyone knows on volley, if you're first and second ball, you don't get one of your lanes, you're basically screwed, because now you're going on to your third ball. You have to get a couple lanes to win on volley. That's just how it is. I let myself play first, because I wanted to put up an intimidating score. I've won on volley in tournaments several times, including back at Call the Office in London. Shout out. Got to do another shout out to a guy in London there. Mike Dimas of Pinball Shenanigans just hit 1 million views. If you have not watched, liked, subscribed, or gone back and watched some of his rad videos, Mike Dimas showed up from Pinball Shenanigans. Go over to YouTube and do that right now. I got to see him when I was back in London. I'll talk about that in a minute, but wanted to give that shout-out while I was there. So I was on Volley, which I used to play at Call the Office in London, with the Monday Night Crew. Shout-out to them as well. And so I'm very familiar with Volley. I love Volley. I'm a good player at Volley. I know where to go. I know what to do. I know all the rules. Who wouldn't know the rules? Like, the easiest rules. But if, my God, if you don't shoot up a lane at the top by your first, second, or third ball, that means none of those drop targets. It's a drop target heavy game, obviously. They're worth 500 instead of 5,000. You basically can't get a good score. And I knew if I didn't. So, it was just about to go into the correct one. It went to go the wrong way. I gave it a slight nudge on ball three. Tilt right away. I mean, this was the tiniest, like, literally, like, I think, I think when a Kakarotch, when a cockroach, when he farts, a cockroach farts in the vind, it would have made this frickin' tilt go off. And I love you, DA82, I do, but, like, they would... That volley, she too tight. She too tight. Like, what are we doing here? Are we playing pitbull? Can we nudge on an EM? It's a luck box. Anyways, for me personally, it was too tight. But you know what? If it was not set up that tight, then maybe, like, the top... I mean, I'm ranked 7,000th or now. actually, I just looked at my rank this morning, it's 5,777. Gotta love that. I love the 5,777. Love it. But, like, what do I know? So, like, in the top 25, maybe they just would play for hours if there was an easy tilt. I get it, and the scores would be too high, and we really want to see who's the most accurate player, not who's the best nudger. I get it, but as someone who nudges heavy with heavy hands, and that's the only way that, like, I'm not an accurate player, I don't remember a lot of rule sets, The only way I win tournaments is just from knocking that bad boy around forever. I play pinball like a goalie. I've said I'm like a French pinball player, or I'm like the Patrick Waugh of, you know, or who's like a famous one nowadays. I don't know, like Skinner for the Edmonton Oilers, obviously, has been doing. Shout out also Ryan Barry. Edmonton Oilers won against the old, who were they playing, Winnipeg? The old Jets? Let's get back into it, though. So I ended up losing there. Derek Thompson went on to do very well. I'll go to the next round. Had I got a good score there... Wait, did we go to 3-3 or was it 3? I think it was 3-2. I was planning to go to 3-3. Derek Thompson probably still would have won the seventh game. Let's be honest, he was ranked higher going into it and seeded higher, so he would have got to choose it. He probably would have kicked my butt. But had I somehow managed to beat him on game seven, I would have been one of only two Canadians as far as I remember, myself and Jack Tabin. So not only would I have been the second highest ranked Canadian left in nationals, had I somehow got through that round, which looked even much, much, much harder, I don't think harder than Drew, but harder than me, obviously, and got into the next round, then depending on how I did, I believe I could have beat Jack Hadman, I mean, I wouldn't have, but had I got through to that third round, I would have, I don't know how it works, but I could have won the Canadian champion, and if I went home with that, I would have just been crying. I also would have went home several hundreds, if not thousands of dollars richer, by getting even to the third round, never mind possibly winning the third round, which again, alas, you could say that with everything, what if, what if, what if, what if, All I know is I was exhausted. I got no sleep for like three days straight by then. We went back to the hotel and Hayden was like, dad, dad, dad, I've been playing all day. Hayden's having a great time. Hayden was watching me on the big screen. He was running back and forth. He wasn't like coaching me so much as like, dude, just relax or like calm down or like no more coffee or like, you know, leave your hands on the pin more. He wasn't like looking up pin tips for me or anything. He might have on 8-Ball Deluxe because I couldn't remember. But like most of them I had researched. Most of them I kind of knew. Godzilla I played like 30 games on I think most of the other people there have played a lot more but anyways that was Nationals we got the hell out of there Hayden let me go sleep at the hotel for about an hour and a half it was so cute I said wake me up with an IPA in hand so I can start to get ready for Lumberjack Johnny's Hayden who was all warmed up for pinball had seen Lumberjack Johnny's the night before was just stoked and pumped to play at Lumberjack's so he like woke me up at like 3.30 like half an hour before we were supposed to walk over to Lumberjack Johnny's he had cracked open a little IPA he had poured it into glasses like here dad here's your beer I was like, this is so cute. When he was a little boy, you know, he would start crying in bed, or I'd wake him up with a bubba and give him his bubba and sing him back to sleep because I was a stay-at-home dad then, thankfully. I did work for TD Canada Trust then. They gave the mom six months off, and then they gave the dad six months off, and they topped up my pay for, like, the first 12 weeks, which was awesome. So I made the exact same amount of money I made at the bank because staying home and getting quality time with my sons. And I think for the rest, every dad out there, or dad-to-be, or a dad who has more kids coming, if you can somehow, someway figure out a way to do the second six months, if you let your wifey or partner or whomever it is you're having the child with, if you let them have the first six months, obviously there's like breastfeeding that the women can do and it depends who's the primary caregiver, but they can also support them that way. But if you get the chance as a father to stay at home with your kids for six months, you'll have a better chance. It's not impossible, but you'll have a better chance of having, you know, an even stronger relationship with them. So this is not a parenting podcast. So let's get back into talking about pinball. Alas, oh my God, I'm getting close to two hours. Let's go a little bit quicker here. Okay, so I go to Lumberjack Johnny's, had a really, really fun tournament. I think after, I couldn't find this on Matchplay, but it was a progressive three strikes tournament, I believe, just a regular three strikes tournament or something, Matchplay. And by the third tournament, by the, sorry, by the third round or second round, I had one and one, or one and second, so it was Swiss pairing. Sorry, I just had to adjust the mic there a little bit. By the third pairing, or the second pairing, I got stuck with the number 12 in the world, Carlos Del Cerdo, also known as Laser Los, who I look up to, and I was like, oh my god. And then I looked over, and the next guy in my group, Drew Sitch. Like, I don't know, fourth or fifth best guy from Canada. I think he runs like hardcore pinball in Manitoba as well, and they're having like a, he's helping throw like a big tournament or something. I have to look into that. I do want to speak to all the provincial reps, and also Drew, of course, would be up there for him helping run all those. There's so many people I have to talk to in so little time. Two awesome interviews coming up this week. Can't wait for the one for tonight. Going to have to rest my voice after this so I can even talk to him or them. But, yeah, I cannot wait for it. Going to repair my voice a little. Please forgive me if the next few shows I'm a little bit hoarse. Just go back and listen to one of my 500, I don't know, I'll say 550 of my 560 episodes. I make sure my voice is tip-frickin'-top before I record. Today, this was the best that I could do. That night at Lumberjack Johnny's, I end up getting put in a round with Zach McCarthy. No, wait. Was it Z-Mac? I think it was Z-Mac. Zach McCarthy. Drew Sitch. So, like, I don't know, like 60th in the world, I believe. Zach McCarthy, like, 4th in the world or 3rd, depending on the day, probably, or how he did at Nationals and Pinmasters. And then, like, top ten player no matter what. Like, top five usually. And then, who was the other player? Well, then I was the fourth player. So, anyways, I'm playing with these three freaking legends. Chatting them up a little bit. I talk more so with Carlos. Talked a little bit with Z-Mac, but he's kind of quieter. And, you know, I don't want to make any judgments. I'm assuming he wasn't drinking. I didn't notice he had a beer in his hand. He was probably just concentrating on, like, pin masters the next day and that sort of thing. And, you know, I talked with him a little. He seemed very nice. But, you know, I really connected with Carlos. Carlos and I chatted quite a few times, I think, between each ball. And after I finished my first ball, I got like, I don't know, it wasn't that much. It was like $50 million or $60 million. After everybody else played their first ball, I was like, holy cow. I took a picture. I actually have the receipt somewhere on my phone. I was in first place playing against the 12th best player, the 60th best player, and the 5th best player on planet Earth. And after ball one, they had all played Elvira before, House of Horrors. I had never played it. Not one ball. I had never seen it before. In fact, I didn't even know it was at Lumberjack Johnny's because it was in the back room where you actually had to pay for coins. Not that night, but some of the other nights you had to pay for those ones. They weren't in the area where it was free play. So, now by the end of the game, they all kicked my ass. Okay, I think Carlos got like over 150. Z-Mac came back and got like 170. You know, they all got in the hundreds of millions, and I had two shitballs after that and got like 70 or 80 million, which is probably really good for your first game on it, but like nothing to sneeze at, right? So, anyways, that night I stayed out way too late. I had way too much fun. I partied with way too many people. I met so many kind, nice people. I know Hayden played a game of Jaws. And, like, this big dude with a beard, I think he's, like, the Wisconsin champ or, like, runner-up or really nice local dude with a super deep voice. He made me look like I was only half a hipster. Like, this guy's, like, full-out hipster. And he's like, holy shit, dude, you got it. And, like, I walked up behind Hayden and kind of heard him saying something like, oh, you had a great game on that. Wow, dude, like, do you play that in your local or something? And he's like, no, it's my first game on it, which wasn't entirely true. He had played one ball on it the night before, and we each played a ball quickly when we were leaving. Like, we didn't even get a whole game on Jaws. And earlier that night, I played one game on Jaws right when I got there because it was empty, and normally that was the one pin that was, like, busy all the time. So, anyways, he's like, wow, look at that score. Hayden got $158 million. It's no $7 trillion, Eric. It's no $7 trillion, but he got $158 million on a very hard setup. I think it was a premium because it did have, like, had the upper play field, so it had to be at least a premium. It might have been an LE because they had the white power coating. I can't imagine they would have an LE there. But, wow, I don't know. Anyways, alas, Jaws looked prettier than I thought it would. I love the artwork. So much more stands out in person when you're there looking at it than the blue on blue does on a flat surface like a screen. It's just something you have to see in person. I don't know how to explain it other than if you took a picture, a beautiful picture of the ocean, the most beautiful picture of the ocean ever, and you looked at it and you went, yeah, that's nice. But if you're just standing there looking at that same beautiful ocean, and you're like, holy shit, like it's 3D. You can see the movement of the waves. You can see all the detail. That's the same thing. That machine is gorge. Michael, you did a great job on it. Barnyard? Barnyard? I also love a lot of Michael's stuff that he does. It looks like Garbage Pail Kids. Love all of that stuff. I might even talk to him about possibly getting one or two of those awesome, awesome things into the Pinball Nerds Podcast trading cards. They're back, baby, especially with Christopher Franchi. Finally get me those cards. Those 50 cards will all be going in the Pormans Pinball, sorry, the Pimble Nerds Podcast rating cards, of course, here on the Pormans Pimble Network. But, Eric Card Yellow, Distracting, blah, blah, blah, 7 Trillion, blah, blah, blah, blah, Lumberjack Johnnies. Yes, getting to play with Drew Sitch, of course, Jared August, and Laser Los. I don't think they knew who the hell I was, and that's okay. Well, Drew did, because Rachel introduced us, but wow. oh and Rachel she should get come on Rachel Risto she should get at least several levels for everything she did for me some of it I can talk about some of it I can't thank you so much Rachel you rock she was just there for me emotionally physically like introduced me to all these people gave me the best hug I've probably got in a long time so nice to meet her in person I will say this once in a while you meet heroes and they're like not as rad as you thought you know I didn't get to talk a lot to Jared August or Zach McCarthy the, I guess, they're younger guys. I didn't get to, Tom talks, Neil Graff, I didn't get to talk to him at all, so I'm there a lot. It's a little bit intimidating to go talk with them, too. Not the same way, maybe, that Tom Graff was intimidated by me because I'm a weirdo. Tom, you're allowed to say okay to me, or at least give me a head nod. I promise I won't fanboy out too much and ask for a selfie. I did get to speak to Travis Murie a little bit, just on the first day. I don't think he was there the second or third day, but at Nationals I kind of bumped into him and said, hey, buddy, how's it going? I got to chat with Travis just for a moment or two. He was very busy talking to a lot of the other people there and look at the machine setups, but that was really nice. He at least knew who I was immediately. Like, I mean, I have a pretty recognizable face, but like I haven't talked to him at all in the last few years, like on a private level at all. So I wasn't sure if he'd necessarily recognize me, but that was cool. They knew who it was and said hello. Um, I didn't get to speak to Joel, man, if I ever saw that beautiful beard, that guy has the nicest beard in pinball. Okay. Straight up. I mean, like, you know, I don't know, maybe not better than I'll say straight up the best in pinball podcasting or pinball content. Come on, Joel. Look at that. And the one thing, three different times people came up to me and they were talking and all I could hear is, hey, you didn't do that well in pinmasters. You didn't do that well in nationals, but wow, you won something. And the same thing I kept hearing was you had the nicest hairline. Well, here's the thing, and it's not even fair. When you're playing these pinball things, they have a camera facing towards the player. And when you get really into it, you're leaning down. So, man, if you don't have, like, a God's perfect hairline like me, if you don't have the hairline of, like, a 17-year-old when you're 43 like me, soon to be 44, hell, I'm a year off to get my AARP card. Okay, I don't even know what that is or when you get it. But I think there's some places at 50 they give you, like, a senior discount. I'm, like, six years away from that. So, for me to have the hairline of the freaking God's, like, Tom Hanks looks at my hairline and goes, frick, Orby, wow, I would go back and do big all over again and still not have a hairline that good in my first big movie, bud. No, I'm just kidding. I'm not kidding. I'm half kidding. I'm supposed to be not controversial anymore, so I'll say I'm kidding, but I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding, let's say, in Minecraft. I'm kidding in real life. So, hairline of the gods. Go back and watch it. Just tell me. Hairline of the gods. And now, after the third time I told this joke, Alasdair Hayden said, Dad, that joke wasn't even funny the first time you told it. So, the only person saying that I had the best hairline on stream when they were saying how bad I did was me. I said, yeah, but did you notice I won best hairline? And that's not even true because Andrew Foster obviously has the best hair on stream. This guy's got like, as the Australians would call it, akadaka. He's got like the ACDC hair, like down to his waist. Not quite down to his waist, maybe his belly button. Okay. He's like the champion of Northern Robert Englunds, Robert Englunds, Wales, Ireland. I don't remember. Scotland, Edinburgh. He's the champion of Edinburgh. I am by lots the best pinball champion of all Edinburgh. But Andrew Foster is the man. go watch Pinmasters, I play with, well, I've gone ahead of myself, I've gone ahead of myself, I didn't end up doing that well at the end, I did beat Zion, or Zyron, those of you who don't know Zyron Silvers, remember that name, mark it down, in the year 2023, wait, no, in the year 2030, in the year 2030 in the year 2030 Zyron Williams will become the number one pinball player in the world. Actually, I think, here's my real prediction. If you did not watch Zyron, if you're going to go back and watch anyone, go watch either the Nationals, he plays a couple times, at least once or twice in the Nationals, or go back and watch Pinmasters. I think he plays for like a whole round. Or maybe, no, he made it to the finals I think of Pinmasters. Wow. For a guy who's, you think it's cool that like a guy ranked 8,000th and now, you know, 6,000th in the world, managed to, like, hold his own and never shoot a 10 in pinmasters? Yeah, that was me. Or, you think it's cool that a guy who's not even, like, in the top, you know, 100, he's ranked 800th going into pinmasters and nationals, and Zyron went to the finals, hanging out with the big boys against, I don't know, like, 75 of the top, like, 100 players in the world or something? Like, I don't know, at least 60% of the top 100 players in the world were playing? Because I know the European champions, not all of them were there, even though, of course, Andrew Foster was there. But, like, so many good players were there and Zyron, I'm going to double check with his name, but he made it into the finals and played out of his mind. My guess is, by the end of this year, he's easily in the top 250, if not higher. By the end of next year, easily in the top 50. So, I'll just say it out loud, by the end of 2025, Zyron, I believe, is going to be in the top 50. And unless I'm wrong, or unless he quits pinball, or unless he finds out he's also a God, it's some other freaking sport that's more lucrative or more fun than this, which I highly doubt. If we keep Zyron for the next, like, five years, I'm shocked. I'm shocked if he's not top 10 by 2026. I'm shocked if he's actually not even top five possibly by then. And I would say by 20 in the year 2027, if he wasn't top 20 or top five by the year. I would be shocked if he was even top five. Maybe I don't know what the Zach McCarthy's, Arvid Flergens, you know, so many other up and coming players. I don't know, but I would say he's the top of what I am naming the COVID kids. And by I, I mean, I've heard other people say it as well, but another COVID kid. And I don't even know if you'd put them on that range, but just his flipper skills are unreal. I'd say he's easily in the top 10 nudgers in the world, at least from what I've seen. His name is also Andrew and I forget his last name, but he's the Ohio state champ. I believe he's a gentleman who is also playing with me and Adam Becker or Adam Becker and myself, I guess in pin masters. what a great day I did not get that much sleep that night this was not thank god the people next door were gone no one was loud at the hotel you know who was loud? my earbuds because I was watching nationals I was so interested in watching all those machines that I stayed up myself to like even home to like three Hayden actually tied Zyron and went out the same time as him in like the third or the fourth round I think he only didn't get one X and this is no beef on Zyron but I did manage to beat him in that one game which, you know, that will be probably the first and last tournament I'll ever be able to say that. I'll tell you that. And that tournament had so many state, national, provincial champs in it, had so many great local players who knew those pins way better than us and played at D82 tons of times. Like, there was just such a high caliber of players at that Lumberjack Johnny's. I don't even feel bad with 58th of, like, 70 players. I don't even feel bad about it. I don't. Or maybe even less than that, like 66 players. I still got some offers for it. I had a great time. I opened a tab at the start of the night. I swear to God, all night long. And I hope this isn't illegal, but Hayden was drinking beers in our hotel room. And when we got there, we found a thing on the Wisconsin State whatever saying that if kids or whatever, not kids, but people under 21 but 19 or over could drink with their parents as long as their parents were there. So I just got all Hayden's beers on mine all night long, including getting like pizza, including getting more food, including I think there was a food truck that first night as well. We went out and got barbecue. But after everything, everything outside the food truck, at the end of the night, I think my bill was like $46. I honestly thought it would be like $150. I was like, what? How much are these crazy awesome sours that you guys are like, oh, those are just $4. I'm like, what? So I had like six or seven incredible beers, had this awesome, they called it frozen pizza, but it's made by like this couple at a local farmer's market or something. It's freaking to die for. It's incredible. It tastes great. You tell them in like 10 minutes there, they bring it out in like a legit pizza box. They will tell you it's frozen. but it is better than most non-frozen pizza we have here in Nova Scotia. I'm sorry, Scotia. I'm sorry, Maritimers. Maybe there's great pizza in Newfoundland. I haven't been there yet. Maybe Cape Breton's just got some bomb ass pizza, but I've been to like the authentic Italian guy in Halifax and maybe his pizza was slightly better than that. But this is just like their, their frozen pizza had like five meats and seven cheeses. I was like, yo, you guys turn up your pizza. And another thing I said on one of my last shows I was totally wrong about was I said that the fast food when I was in Detroit wasn't nearly as good as the a Canadian fast food when I tried BK and McDonald's. Alas, Hayden and I were very, very, very late getting to Lumberjack Johnny's that first night. I'm sorry, Rachel, we were trying our best. So we stopped at the quickest place we could, went to the bathroom. I grabbed, literally, I went in there, I was looking through the McDonald's venue, trying to find something not like $15 each just to get a Big Mac or, or sorry, 15 bucks combined for a Big Mac or a, you know, a quarter pounder or something. But I was a little bit too hungry for the McDouble. And I saw a triple cheeseburger and I went, we don't have those. I was in northern Michigan, so I had to pull a little Tom Arnold. Tim Arnold? Tom Arnold. Tim Arnold? Who was Tim the Toolman? I had to pull a little Tim the Toolman. I go, you know, like, I was like, what? What is this burger, alas, you have? So it was only like a buck more than the McDouble, but you got an extra burger and an extra patty. And I was like, wow, that's way cheaper than Canada. Never heard of it. I got to try it. So Hayden and I got it. We both agreed. The meat to bun ratio is incredible. And that's the thing. It's like I like the Big Mac sauce and all, but they put on so much of that iceberg lettuce, so many tomatoes. Like if I wanted a salad, I'd ask for it, bro. And then they add on like pickles, and then they add sauce, and then they add the biggest. It is a good bun, but it's this big, giant, thick bun, thin slice of meat, big, giant bun in the middle, thin slice of meat, big, giant bun. It's like too much bread, bro. I'm not trying to go keto here, but I also am not trying to have like fall asleep driving on the world's straightest roads with no one on it in northern Michigan. So anyways, I got a triple cheeseburger. Chef freaking kiss. I even tried to order them here in Canada. The girl's like, we don't make triple cheeseburgers. Oh, and the customer service in the States. Oh my God. I'm tipping everywhere. I'm tipping at McDonald's. I'm tipping at, what is that? Cheesecake Charlie's? No, cheese, what is it? Cheesesteak? Cheesesteak Charlie's. Oh my God. I don't care if it's in a food court. People are just looking at me like, why are you tipping? I'm like, I don't know. This is what we do. like even if I'm at McDonald's and the bill comes to like $16.45 and like they're nice and they bring it out fairly quickly and they're not being rude I yeah I just cost them a $20 and be like yo thanks and they have like a little tip jar they put in or whatever it's not a big deal I'm like tipping like 15% whoa big spenda hey big spenda anyways I had a great time all the food was incredible the five guys burgers cost less even with our exchange and they're bigger like I think we get like 10 ounce burgers here at Five Guys and they're like 12 or 14 there and I was like oh my god no more beef now that was an incredible burger that was a Five Guys is better there I already said that on my Pembert thing Five Guys is better there I don't know if y'all use like I don't know if it's just the servings are better I mean it tastes very similar it does taste very similar maybe the potatoes weren't quite as fresh because they weren't coming from Prince Edward Island to Halifax in our case but like wow everything other than the potatoes the burgers itself the customer service. Holy cow. Here in Canada, like, you can go up to Tim Hortons and be like, hello. And they'll literally look at you and say, what do you want? And you're like, oh, hi, I know you're getting paid $18 an hour to work minimum wage here, so I'm going to try to be really nice to you. And they're just literally like, no small chat. What do you want? Then you're in the States and they're getting paid like $5 an hour. I saw less than that for some servers. I think only places where they get tipped, but like, go up to Lumberjack.com and be like, well, how you doing today? Now, okay, I'm not in the South. I'm not going to do an American accent. I'm definitely not going to try a Midwest accent. Not even Americans can do a good Chicago accent usually. But basically this kind gentleman was so nice. And he's like, oh, can I put on extra? Okay, I'm not going to do that accent. Can I put on extra onions for you? Did you want these grilled? Did you want this? I'm like, but it's not just what they were saying. It's like they were intent to, they weren't staring at their phones. They were like every single, every store I went to at the mall, the customer service was like so much better than Canada. I don't know if just like we're privileged here because we get paid more and we get free health care and now free dental and we get like, I don't know, all the schools and shit are free and still like good level. And like there's even like good options for post-secondary that are very low, low, like low cost. I don't know what it is if we're just privileged in some way, but like nobody treats you that way at a mall. Nobody. I'm not saying Canada's horrible. I love Canada to all the Canadians. I love y'all. but like the customer service at like now if you go to a higher end restaurant if you're at like a you know where I'll call it the $20 burger or more line I guess in the states would be like the 18 or $16 burger if you go to somewhere with like legitimate food you're gonna and someone's living off that tip they'll give you like okay service in Canada and there is some places that do have exceptional service there's many places with exceptional service if you come see Orbital Albert, Drop Target Danielle, Little Orby Jr. or Hurry Up Hayden also known as and preferably would prefer to be known as the hey dude so I should remember to call him that if you come to see one of the four of us at any of our shows you come to see us at the Pugwash Farmers Market you're going to get like a level a a a a a plus not just because that's my initials but also because Albert Adrian Orby Agar likes to please you're going to get good customer service even if you're buying for me a three dollar organic free trade solar roasted coffee okay I made the solar roasted part up, even though both facilities are now run on solar, but alas, I had a wonderful time at Lumberjack Johnny's, Hayden didn't finish as well as he wanted to that first night, but he had a blast, we both got home safely, we got better night's sleeps, I mean, I stayed up watching too much, then the next day, I was really hungover, really tired, really pooched, and extra, I had a couple too many beers at Lumberjack Johnny's, I hadn't got a good night's sleep in like five nights now, and I, what I did I'll just say that I don't know if Josh Sharpe or if Eric Thorne or anybody from DAE2 is actually monitoring all the videos. But let's just say when I went outside, I probably had a little bit too much fuzzy peach vape. It's not just peppermint in the vape or nicotine. But I had a wonderful... In Minecraft, it certainly was. But in real life, it was just peppermint or nicotine. And let's say I normally have five to seven puffs. I probably had 11 or 12 because I was waiting for my hangover to go away. I do use that as a hangover cure quite often. Even with me having two 300 milligram rains over like four hours and having four or five coffees, I still couldn't get rid of that hangover headache. So when you're watching me play, just remember I have a resounding tilt bob in my head going bong, bong. Like it's just I had a bad headache. I was tired. I was stressed out. I was at the end of my rope. And I was trying to have fun and have a blast hanging out with both Andrews and Adam. Everybody watching and a lot of people thought, oh, man. I even had messages from my dad, oh, you've got to relax. You're getting upset at the end of each ball. I had people in the poor man's tribe going like, oh, just calm down, or it's okay, or he's not doing very well. Guys, I was playing incredible. I was playing out of my mind. Nobody else I was playing with was ranked. I think the worst ranked player was 110th or something, or 130th, maybe Andrew from Ohio. And I called him a COVID kid, which, again, that's a silly term. But basically, I think during COVID, he played a shat's ton of pinball and got really good at nudging because it looks like he's won Ohio the last few years since that's ended. So, again, I don't know. I haven't asked him too much about it. All I know is if you watch his nudging, he doesn't hit the cabinet anywhere near where the tilt bob is. So if he needs to do something on the right-hand side of the cabinet, he'll use upper sometimes or lower. But if it needs to be done on the left, he's either doing forward down nudges instead of left and right and upward. Yeah. If you need to learn to nudge, go watch Dairon or go watch, well, both Andrews and Adams. Don't watch me. I know how to flutter flip apparently, even though I don't know what that is. But it sounds really cool. I think it's actually when you do like a live catch, like you do a light, you almost do a, instead of doing a tap pass, you do a tap pass in the air and catch the ball into a live catch and then re-flutter flip. I don't know. I think it's like when you do two or three quick flutter flips. I might even have a guest this week who I can ask about flutter flips, but that's getting a little bit too dirty and into the notes. So let's just say that night I looked at my son after he was helping me with pin golf and everything. And I said, Hayden, we are going back to the hotel, and I'm going to sleep, and I'm not going to Lumberjack tonight. He said, Dad, it's the Eight Strikes Progressive. I really want to play in this one. I talked to people there who were going to play in it. And I said, son, but I can go back to DAV2 and play for free. I have a $20 entry to their Friday night thing, and, you know, I want to play with all those players. He goes, Dad, I can't go play in that one because then I can't have drinks or you can't have drinks. Someone needs to drive us there. Someone needs to drive us back. Also, that one's going to cost $25 more. The other entry was like less at Lumberjack Johnny's. And he said, where do you think most of the good provincial and state champions are going to go? I said, well, D82. He goes, yeah. So don't we have a better chance now that there's a big tournament there to now go win at Lumberjack Johnny's? And I went, oh, yeah. And then he goes, and then, Dad, I'll even buy you dinner. I said, what? Okay, okay, okay. Now I'm in. And then I actually changed it to whoever lost in the tourney had to buy dinner the next day. Dave, thank you very much for that. So I said, fine, but I've got to go sleep. So I went back, slept for a couple hours. He again woke me up with my bubba, my little IPA. Here, Dad, have your beer. I was like, this is so funny. This is total role reversal. Like, we were father and son before we left on this trip. I think we came home with a newfound respect for each other. I actually listened to and F with a little bit more rap music. He kind of slowly, through 70 hours, 80 hours of being in the car, whenever he was driving, he got to choose what was on the radio. Whenever I was driving, I got to choose what was on the radio until he talked me into listening to something he would rather listen to, which, fine, at 19, we're all more passionate about music than we are as old farts in our 40s. We get it. We get it. I'm being a little ageist here. I'm sorry I said I wouldn't do that anymore, but from time to time, you know, it is true. It is at last true that you're less passionate. But Hayden really got me back into rap music, which I appreciate, because, you know, I listen to a little bit. I listened to, like, Beastie Boys back in the day, and I did actually, like, swoon members here in Canada. I went to go see them play at Much Music Live, which was awesome. And I did listen to, like, I don't know, like, those rap rock people, like the, uh, uh, I'm not ICP, I'm not quite Don from Don's Pinball Podcast, but I didn't listen to Insane Clown Posse, but I did, I did have with, like, um, who was Cypress Hill, I listened to them a little bit, like, insane in the membrane, insane in the brain. don't worry I won't sing till the very end of the podcast from here on out I promise Josh Sharpe oh yeah yeah in my head this is what happened I don't know for sure if it was true I think it was true Josh I'm sorry if it's not true I think this happened in Minecraft or maybe at D82 I was outside and I was probably vaping more than I should have and I saw a couple like a couple people were going in and out and probably saw me out there vaping I don't know if anyone may have mentioned anything to Josh or if Josh or maybe Eric Thorne or, you know, the guy who owns D82 and runs it, or someone else saw in the video I was out vaping. I don't think it actually had anything to do with this. I think it's just alphabetical order. But right as I walked in from, like, vaping more than I should have, my heart rate was going through the roof. I was like, wow, you actually had too much, and I didn't want to, like, make eyes with anyone or talk to anyone. I was pulling a Tom Talks, like, just avoiding everybody and, like, pretending I was on my phone. And basically I ended up immediately talking to Zach Sharp, and he's like, oh, hey, just wanted to let you know, Albert. I don't think he was calling me Orbiter Albert anymore at that point, out of respect, thankfully. But he got me once with it. He got me once with it. Maybe he did say Orbital Albert. I was just too tired or vaped out. But he goes, Albert, just wanted to let you know you're going to be playing on the live stream. I'm like, what? Like, of 144 players there, or I think it was up to 144 players. I don't think we got that many. I think we only got like 80 players. But 80 players is still incredible. At $500 Canadian a pop or $350 plus your D82 entrance, which thankfully I didn't have to pay, so it's already there for Nationals, which is the reason why most provincial and state champions stay there, because they've already paid their whatever $100, $150 fee for, I don't know how much it is, but they've already paid part of the fee for D82, so we save a little bit of money over that, which I would have stayed and played Pinmasters anyways. But, like, literally, I think it was Josh Sharpe, I'm pretty sure it was Josh Sharpe, maybe it was Adam Becker, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure Josh Sharpe was like, hey, hey, Albert, just wanted to let you know you're going to be on the livestream, and I was like, oh my god, what did you do? So for, like, the next four holes, I had no vapes. Like, I went outside to maybe walk around a little. Okay, maybe one little puff to stay fresh. But, like, I was... So then I was like, oh, my God, I'm losing my shots. I've got to be on the live stream. I'm playing with Adam Becker, the, like, tournament director. Of course, I believe Josh Sharpe could, like, overrule him because he's the president. And I think they would bring in Josh Sharpe if it was, like, a serious issue. But from what I saw, Adam Becker was taking care of most of the rest of that. And then, of course, if it was an issue, Eric Thorne would come fix it. But, anyways, Eric was a pleasure to play with. I got to play with him on the second day of Pinmasters. I'm probably going to avoid some of the personal stuff, including the next show, because I'm already well over two hours. Oh, my God, I'm only halfway through the first sheet. Oh, my God, I better go faster. Several times, well, oh, so for the record, okay, someone who I respect very much, oh, my God, I'm drawing a blank on his name. He is a very good poker player. He likes to do, he does the booms. It's, oh, my God, I can't think of his name. It will come to me later. Very well-respected player. Top 40, top 50, original pinball degenerate. I can see his face. Him and his wife live in Brooklyn, I believe. I think his wife even works at a thing. Oh, my God. He was commentating, and it'll come to me. If not, I will apologize on the next show. Like, I always have to apologize. Every show I have to apologize on something. But he was saying that, hey, guys, if you're watching in chat right now, any time you see someone get a five or better, that is extraordinary. To even get a par as hard on these. because some people in chat were being rude. And I do remember someone else said as well, getting like 150 million on that Godzilla is about the same as getting 450, if not 500 million on a typical one. And the funny part is that's the truth. My average score on Godzilla is somewhere between, well, like my top five best games of like my 30 games were all well above 300 million. And so it wouldn't be outrageous for me to easily be able to get half of that on there. However, that Godzilla was set up so freaking hard, Godzilla himself couldn't even breathe fire on that fucker without it tilting to Wisconsin, Maine, Indianapolis where's all the play, Indiana, I think I drove through Indiana, I became a hoser this one hoser became a hooser for five minutes when he drove through Indiana and I'll say this, driving through Chicago, fuck you Chicago traffic, I did not like that I was a driving instructor, I've taught over 300 people to drive from scratch Dozens of more people, if not, you know, probably half a hundred people I've taught to go do their full G after getting the beginners. And then re-taught to go, like older drivers going back for their re-testing. And I was scared shitless driving through Chicago. No wonder every good pinball maker, designer, distributor, rules maker, no wonder all the top players are all from Chicago. If you can drive through that Chicago traffic, oh my lordy, look who's 40. If you can drive through that traffic, no problem working at it. Like, oh, all I got to do now is code a pinball machine? No, I'm just kidding. But, like, wow. If I lived in Chicago, I think I would just Uber or, like, Uber or GoTrain or, like, I guess I would get used to it. But, like, as some, I don't want to call myself a redneck or a hillbilly because I probably got a little bit too much riz for any of that. But, and I'm kind of, like, a half city slicker, half not. Like, those of you who know me knew I grew up half in Sheddon, Ontario, which is, like, the rhubarb capital of Canada. if there's ever anything half as quaint as that I don't know what it would be but my battery is about to die here you're going to have to give me like two seconds to grab my charger because I talked way too long you're probably going to hear the dog come out rather soon because he's going to start bugging me but that's okay he's been in there for a little while now and he normally only sleeps for about two hours for his little morning nap so I might last let him go soon but I'm going to try to go quicker and I'm going to save the personal parts of this trip for a bit later because, yeah, at one point, though, I remember I tilted, and I was so upset, I tilted on Flight 2000, and Escher Lefkoff ran up right away. Escher, you're a champ. I appreciate you saying this. It actually calmed me down. It made me feel better. And Escher, I think he saw on the live stream that I, like, looked over at Josh Sharpe. For the first time ever, I looked over at Josh Sharpe and Adam Becker to be like, did you guys see this? I plunged the ball. It hits around in the pops, and before I could even possibly nudge or move, it tilts. Now maybe there was a tiny little micro-movement, but I barely touched the machine or moved it. I don't even know why I would be moving it up in those upper lanes. I don't even know how valuable they are. I kind of remember the rules for Flight 2000. Basically, just get those drop targets down and shoot the freaking left spinner all day long, and when it's on your left flipper, shoot the right spinner, right orbit, slash those drop downs all day long. But the point is, I plunged and barely did anything and it went out. And right away, Escher came over and he explained, because there's no ear muffs, ear plugs, I think they're called ear plugs, not ear muffs, ear plugs on them, someone before me, or while we were actually, I think during our warm-ups, we had both purposely tilted, because you only play player one and player three, so I think I was playing with Andrew Foster, and during our warm-ups, we both vigorously knocked the crap out of it, like you're kind of supposed to do to figure out where the tilt is. Well, from what Escher was explaining with that particular machine, or I don't even know if he said that particular machine, but with all machines that don't have an ear plug, if you violently move them back and forth to test their tilt you need to wait like two or three minutes and I think Andrew and I both just went up and just started playing so from what I understand if I understood Asher right like the tilt bob was already still like moving back and forth probably already going past half or like really going back and forth so us even doing the gentlest or even hitting the pops might just think it up to push it through the edge to go to a tilt and it looks like that's what happened when I went back and watched it but I was just like what that can't be a tilt I didn't even touch the machine. Now, I probably did touch the machine. You're amped up. You're excited. You're vaped up. You're rained up with energy drinks. You're coffeed up with that free coffee at D82. Thank you for that. I will say this. Hayden noticed it. I also noticed it. We don't have this thing in the States that you call whitener. Instead of adding cream, like most people, some people like to add 10% half and half cream. Disgusting. I only go, I will do whipping cream at 30%. No freaking problem. I will accept 18% cream, but I will not accept 10% cream in my coffee. Oh, no. And don't even say that I'm a hoity-toity, freaking come on, that I'm a posh, bougie, son of a bitch. Yes, I am. But I'm not having 3%. I'm not having Homo milk in my friend. I'm not even having 2%. I definitely don't want 1%. And I definitely, definitely don't want Whitener. And it wasn't just D82. I think this is an American thing. I think whitener is like what they used to use in the 80s here. It's like this weird, dried, crusty, preservative-laden, disgusting thing that kind of resembled milk, but with none of the good things that you would want in there, like fat and other things. And they call it whitening to whiten your coffee. It just takes it from tasting bad to worse, man. First of all, y'all need to get some good coffee kicking there. because, like, there's not good, like, even the hotels here have, like, even the gas stations have, like, I don't know, a 3 out of 10 coffee. Every gas station there, one. Like, I threw the one out. I threw it out because I had a symptom of, oh, God. So that's why I started drinking energy drinks. I couldn't get good coffee. Now, the coffee at D82 was deece. I mean, obviously, like, Eric's not back there brewing it himself like me with his little hipster mustache or something, you know what I mean? But these are just the Keurigs with the, you have all the different Kirklands and stuff. So there's a couple of neat old ones there to try. They're fine. They're exactly what you thought they'd be. The sugar was great, but, like, whitener? Maybe Eric just, that's what just everybody does. I'm not calling out Eric here. I'm calling out every single place in the state. What is whitener, and why would you want it? How much is a thing of cream? I think it's $2.99. That makes, like, 40 coffees for you. We're talking two or three pennies per coffee for it to taste incredible. Have you ever gone to an artisan, like, have you ever gone to, like, even Starbucks, a non-artisan place, like, the most, like, corporate of all corporate coffee places, even they use real cream or at the very least coffee cream at 10% like I like mine with whipping cream that's why people get like a Frappa Mochino Grande with the whipping cream on top because it tastes freaking incredible the more fat you add to that shit the even better it makes mediocre coffee taste which is why Starbucks can get away with such mid coffee and people simp out hard for it but the point is that I've talked too much about coffee so let's just get back here so anyways I went for a sleep that night I had a blast my very first game, or second round, I think it was the first round, they're calling out the names. It's like, Albert Agar, Hayden Agar, Escher Lefkoff. I'm like, oh my God, Hayden, you and I are playing the number one pinball player in the world, the guy that I've been watching, the guy that really, when I was watching Bo and Karen's and Escher Lefkoff play in the finale of Pimber, when Escher's dad had told Escher if he wins, he gets an ice cream truck, I was just sitting there the whole time like, oh my God, this is the coolest dad on planet Earth. I don't even care if he doesn't like the color pink or me wearing it. No, I'm just kidding. I don't even care if he calls me out for shitty play on Adam's family. It was shitty play. Maybe it could have been nicer, but I don't even care. It's Escher's dad. And without Escher's dad, we wouldn't have Escher's son. Wait, we wouldn't have Escher's dad's son. Without Escher's dad's son, we wouldn't have Escher. And without Escher, he wouldn't have ran over and told me like, hey, this is what happened to you. And then that night when he got me, he brought it back up again. And then I reminded him, because I think maybe Escher had forgot that now he had had a couple beers or wine or something. I don't even want to say that because I'm not sure if he's 21. In Minecraft, Escher may have had a couple drinks, okay, in Minecraft, not in real life, and joined the Poor Man's Pinball Network Christmas chat or New Year's chat or whatever it was. And it's possible that Rorden had to leave for a bit because he had a work phone call. And it's possible that Dr. John was there but was kind of half busy, kind of in the background doing whatever. And it was mostly just Escher and I talking for a large period of time. and then when I reminded him of that, he went, oh god, that was you? He goes, did I say a whole bunch of stuff I shouldn't have? I said, not at all, slash maybe. So in Minecraft, I signed an error NDA while I was talking to him and I said, just like when I'm talking to you right now, everything you say is NDA'd, it doesn't matter that I do a dumb little pinball blog, or blog cast, blog cast? I should have called it that. Except for that sounds like someone's puking when they're talking, like they're saying moist too much and it's getting moist critical. So, go watch the moist critical video, moist critical, one of my, probably my third favorite YouTuber, he's in like my fifth favorite, I call him White Guy Rapper, his name's Baby No Money, or also known as B, like if you type it into YouTube, it's B-B-N-O, and then money sign, anyways, awesome video, don't know why I did that shout out, but let's go Baby No Money, was looking for him at the Junos, didn't get to see him, he was nominated, but I think he was busy getting to drop the Moist Critical video, so anyways, there you go, Moisty, little shout out for you, bud, what happened with Pinmasters, Oh, Greg Pavarelli. I'm sorry, Greg. I forgot your name. Greg Pavarelli said he was a gentleman I was talking about who also plays pinball, and I think he's from Brooklyn. Incredible pinball player. He loves the booms. He's up there with Levy doing the booms all the time, the New York Pinball State Championships and all that kind of stuff, and I think we're going to see him again at that other pinball show. So Greg Pavarelli, awesome dude. Got to chat with him a little bit on the last morning. He basically was saying on the stream, hey, anyone who gets even a par did something extraordinary. Well right here this guy that talking to you right now Orbital Albert managed four pars And I freaking proud of those four pars I didn get anything better than a par No I didn ever get a birdie which would you expect that But imagine like you just a mediocre I also a very mediocre golfer. Imagine you're going out and golfing with like Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, who is the bear there? Jack, Jack Nicklaus. If you're out there playing in a foursome with three of the best players in the world, and you managed to even get four pars out 18 holes, they're going, hey, dude, for a scratch weekend player, you did alright. And I didn't have to pick up my ball once I didn't even get a 10. I believe did Escher get a 10? Rayday, I thought maybe Rayday got a 10 on one. Several really, really, really good players in the top 100 got a 10 or two. Most of them didn't, but a couple of them did get the odd 10. They also got lots of ones and twos and threes and fours, which I didn't get. So again, I'm not saying I'm better than freaking Rayday. I'm just saying I had five goals when I went to Pinmasters. So to anyone who may have written in the chat or wherever else, like, oh, look like Orby didn't have that much fun. Okay, first of all, I was blasted out of my mind. So yeah, I was a little bit more nervous than I would have liked to have been. That was not my goal. I had no clue of the 80 players I'd be one of the four that was going to have all nine of their games recorded. Even though I loved it, it was a blessing in disguise. But I think you can tell from seeing me converse with the two Andrews and even Adam a couple times later on, like, that I was maybe having the most fun there. I don't know. The other two Andes, their names were Andrew, but they both go by Andy to make it more confusing. They were both having a great time as well, and just living it up. And you can see we're really, like, the first game or two, we're not really playing in our styles. Like, we're not really comfortable with it, but I never got a 10. Other than on the second day when I kind of made a fool of myself, which you all have stuck around long enough, I will mention, I'm not going to tell you my pinball crush chances. I know there's a couple of you hoping it's you. And it might be. it might be, so at least to the one or two of you hoping it might be you, stay tuned, but alas, the only thing I did that was embarrassing in Pin Masters, the first day, it wasn't my scores, a couple times I got more angry than, like, I watched on the live stream, you can see I'm just, like, really mad, I'm mad, but I get mad whenever I play pinball, like, like, even when I get a GC and I get a billion on Guardians of the Galaxy, I'm still like, fudge, I was so close to the final wizard mode, like, wow, like, you shouldn't be angry, but you do, and I think that's a thing, like, probably the top 10,000 pinball players on planet Earth, like, the top 10%, or whatever, the top 8,000, the top 10% of the 130,000 players, I guess, well, I guess that would be, like, the top 13,000, you'll notice something that a lot of them do, is they get very, not all of them, like, Keith Elwin could give a shit lesson, he goes, oh, well, cool, what next, you know what I mean, but, like, a lot of us players get really disappointed or frustrated when we mess up, because we know most of the time the ball goes down, there's something we could have done differently, whether it be one flip before that, two flips before that, a nudge. You know, like there was some, we messed up in some way, shape, or form for it to go down. Some absolute house balls, there's nothing you could have done. Maybe you could have plunged slightly different. Those machines, you could have nudged different, but some you could have, right? So, anyways, that night, I got a strike on Escher Lefkoff. That's right. I gave Escher his only strike. In fact, he played perfectly after that, probably going, wow, can't let Orby have a strike on me. I was his only strike, I think, to the best of my knowledge. I got like 39 million on Metallica, which on that tight as hell Metallica, both Escher and I, I think I tilted twice on Escher. I think Escher tilted once on his last ball, and he actually would have beat me had he not tilted. But once you're in multiball, you couldn't even use Q-tips on that bad boy. My new dog, Drake, has like these. If you want to touch the softest, most beautiful animal on planet Earth, it looks like it would be a polar bear, which, by the way, because he's part Old English Sheepdog, his gait at the back makes him look like a polar bear slash panda bear. It really does. He walks, talks, acts, and bites like a bear. But he has these soft, if you take a golden doodle, or sorry, if you take a doodle, a poodle, sorry, and a full-sized poodle, and they already have very soft curly hair, and then you mix it with an old English sheepdog, it ends up giving you a sheepadoodle, which is what we have, a sheepadoodle. They have the softest, most gentlest hair on planet Earth. And even if I took, like, brush from his hair, which this would be really weird, but even if I did this and, like, I wrapped it up into these little, like, paintbrushes and I gently touched, like, the flippers with those, it would still have tilted this machine. This Metallica was, like, more sensitive than, like, Lars when he was getting mad because people were uplighting his music. I'm like, I'm only a billionaire. How dare you college kids with no money be stealing my free music when I made billions of dollars in music. Alas, let's change it. Let's go back over to here. Turn it around. Okay, okay, okay. So I will say this. I had five goals for Pinmasters. A, not to get too drunk or too high. I accomplished at least one of those. B, not to get a 10 on any hole. That one I thought was near impossible, but I did accomplish that one. I got quite a few nines, but no tens. The other thing that I wanted to do was knock it last place, and if you look, I think I got fourth last. Nah, nah, I beat someone's mom, who just came for fun. But no, like, all the players I played were incredible, and I was even happy. Like, Carrie Hill, incredible player from BC. She was so kind, really fun, also rad, got to play with her at Lumberjack Johnny's. She destroyed me and gave me an X on that last night, But more importantly, like, she destroyed me in Pin Masters, and, like, she's way, way, way better than me watching her play. She knows the rules better than me. She's better at tilting, or better at nudging. I'm better at tilting. She's better at nudging. And she only finished, like, ten slots ahead of me or something. So I was like, wow. If I'm finishing even close to these, like, incredible players, and if you look at the people around me, it's like, one of these things is not like the others, not like the others. Go, fart on a giraffe. and basically like there's I'm the only player not in the top like thousand that's even playing in Pim Masters maybe the top two thousand like 90% of the players are in the top 250 in the world so I don't mind not doing well I know a lot of people thought I thought I was going to do better yeah I would have loved like 1-4 I would have loved a couple of those 8s or 9s or 6s or 7s I was messing up most of the time I wasn't used to playing on machines that tight all those other players were I've never played at D82 before even the local players playing on the D82 machines that were moved out of the main room, down to Lumberjack Johnny's. Like, they know those machines. So I didn't feel too bad that I didn't kill it there. What I did do right was, well, I was hoping, I guess the fifth one is iffy. I was also, well, I was hoping to be able to give shout-outs to the Fundy Flippers, the people that I play with here, that we play one month in Moncton, one month in Fredericton. Shout-out to Dylan and Dylan's crew there. and then we play one month in St. John. And shout out to Tom MacArthur. He is the New Brunswick rep. Shout out to him and June. Actually, we had a tournament this last Saturday. June took me out. Now, to be fair, June, I picked it. I shouldn't have picked it. I knew she owned it, but I just beat her on it earlier and by quite a bit. So I thought maybe I could do it again. But I picked going to finals. I like finals better when you play best two out of three. But in our finals, you know, just to speed it up and stuff, I totally get it. People have already been there for hours. People want to go out with their Saturdays. We just play one game, even for the top four. So it's not a big deal, but we played one game, and we played it on the getaway. Getaway, getaway. And she smoked me. She destroyed me. June played great. She deserves every second of it. Something that I did notice, which this hasn't, like, this isn't on June at all, just it is, I like it better when they do tournament mode with the more modern pins, just because I hit it into that lock earlier, and I got a multiball, and that multiball probably helped me destroy and beat everybody. Or not the lock, the scoop on the left, just to the left of the right orbit. And then I hit it in there against June, and it only gave me the $3 million, and it did happen to give her the multiball. So, like, I got a big advantage going into finals, then she got a big advantage during finals. Because, you know, I think she ended up getting $30 or $40 million on that multiball, which is a good multiball, but not, like, incredible for it. And my whole thought was, like, wow, it would be great if we could, if there was a way to, like, turn these on to tournament mode. However, again, this is no shade on Tom. Like, I don't think Tom has anything to do with this. I think just the facility's like, yo, I'm not going to go in and change everything over. and maybe until they get more into pinball, that's for the best, but I am glad in large pinball tournaments that some of that randomness has turned off because when you're playing for like thousands of dollars, you wouldn't want that to happen. I was just having fun. I had a great time. Thanks to Tom for organizing. He got first. He totally deserved it. He played like a boss the whole time. I think up until the last round, I was in first, then he ended up being in first. He had to go against his partner, his wife, his best friend, I'm assuming. He had to go against her in the finals, and that's kind of like, hmm, who's going to have to pick dinner or make dinner or do dishes. Anyways, Tom did go on to win. June got second. Congratulations to them. Even being tired, exhausted, having no voice, and having a little bit of sickness still, I ended up getting third. So I was actually pretty happy with that. I think one thing Hayden said really stuck out to me. What was so tough for Hayden there was he's like, Dad, I got used to playing on some of the best set-up machines in the world. In London, Ontario, when we were playing at Lopple, we did get a little bit spoiled. I'm going to take a little honey from my voice. so y'all take a sip of your coffee or tea, or fast forward like 15 seconds if you can't handle a little bit of silence. Hmm. Damn. Amsterdam. What Hayden was saying is that because these machines weren't set up nearly as good, it was just challenging to wrap your brain around. Like, for the most part, they were level and they were in good condition, but like a lot of the older machines had cupping around the lights, and just the regular stuff, you know, inaccurate feeds or different feeds, a little bit of luck stuff. Like, so it's just very hard to go from some of the best set up pinball machines on planet Earth to, like, just a regular norm core, like, mid arcade. And it's not mid. Go see Carny Island if you're anywhere. What's not mid is the customer service. Customer service there was great. The girl didn't even explain it twice when I said, I'm really sorry. If you don't have any craft beers from the outside of this $8 Radler, I'm going to have to drink Coronas. Is there any way I can have a couple of lines? slices, she didn't even blink. Most places would be like, really? You're going to make me walk over to the bar and chop limes for you, bro? But she didn't. Maybe it's because she wanted a good tip. Maybe just because she was having fun and it's a new spot or new to working there. I don't know why. But it's really cool. They've got about 10 pinball machines. Mostly solid state. No modern modern, but like nothing past, I'd say, like 1998 or something. But they have lots of solid states. One or two decent EMs. The original Elton John, Captain Fantastic. That one was playing a little wild, not going to lie, but they had one of my favorite, you know, lock ball mechanisms of all time is in break shot. They had that. That was playing a little bit long, but sometimes fair, sometimes not so much, but had a great time at the tournament. Please, if you live in and around the east coast of Canada, or you're going to make the trip out here, which you should, if you're listening, you live anywhere else in Canada, you live in Maine or New York State, you should come visit. Unless you live in a penthouse in New York City, then please don't come visit. But, yeah, you should come visit up here. Go to Kearney Island. They have, like, you know, the thing with the darts, and the thing with the ball in the basket, and the thing with the... They have all the carnival games, hence it's called Kearney Island. They have, like, Glenn the Skateboarder would love this. They have a karaoke. It's probably... It probably had to pay extra money, because we know from TPF how dangerous karaoke is. But Glenn was not allowed to do karaoke anywhere in Texas. Texas, everything's bigger in Texas, except for karaoke's smaller. You can sing, but you can't sing on stage. But no, I probably should drop that and get over it, but poor Glenn wasn't able to do it. He could have done it here, though, at Kearney Island, if you come visit me. Glenn and Tim the Lion Man Lee and all the other tribe people, you're all invited. Come visit me. You can't necessarily stay at my house, because I don't have a lot of places to stay, between the dogs, the chickens, the goats. Okay, the goats are gone. But, anyways, I had a great time at Kearney Island. I hope you all had a good time on the show. I'm sorry went so long. Please, please, please, I've said this before, if it's a long podcast, break it up and do a whole bunch of tiny little morsels or bite-sized 10-bits and you don't have to listen to all two and a half hours at once. Imagine this was five 30-minute shows, and it's probably too late because we're at the end of the show and I'm saying this, but y'all probably want to know what I did to make Dalton Eli, the national champ, look over at me and go, you've got some slainin' to do. He didn't quite say Lucy. He was thinking about calling me Lucy. You've got some slainin' to do, Lucy. But he didn't say that. He said, you've got some explaining to do, I think. Maybe he said explaining. I don't know. The point is, Dalton rocks. He won it. And why did he say that? Because the road show we were playing on, I believe on the final hole or the second final hole, with Eric Thorne, the owner, or at least I don't know if he's the hole owner, but I know he's the main guy who works on all the pins, and he's like the main point of contact there. I think he's the owner. Really nice guy. Actually chatted with me for a little bit after the 18 holes. was kind enough to bring me out and even recommend to take a really cool picture with my poor man's tribe, my coin that I got from Foghorn, Leghorn, and Craft Beer Sally, and of course, Glenn the Skateboarder for getting it sent over there. Go watch the Saw video if you haven't from TPF. Wow, Glenn did the entire sound package on it. And I know that they didn't even win Top Homebrew, I think Friday the 13th or something did. Both Friday the 13th and Saw looked legit fire. They looked awesome. They didn't even look like homebrews. and I will say this, I don't want to say anything negative about the barbecue game, I don't want to say anything negative about the barbecue game, I don't want to say, but I'm sorry that sizzle reel, the video that came out first off, was legitimately better than the video from barbecue, am I right? Oh wait, we didn't get a video from barbecue. Why was there no video about barbecue? Oh, I might have bought a barbecue if only there was a video about it, see? And sizzle reel, sizzle reel, get a sizzle reel out American Binball. No one's going to buy those shows are real. No, at least some live streams. I got to go watch the live streams. I did have the pleasure of speaking with Steven Bowden a couple times, just briefly, I think, on the first night at Lumberjack Johnny's. Just wanted to let him know that even though on the show I am a little bit of a negative Nancy or Debbie Downer, or at least I used to be, that from here on out I would like to just be constructive, criticism but constructive, in a kind way. Constructive criticism in a kind way. You can do that. You can say, I don't think barbecue is the best theme on planet Earth for pinball. I think by making it Barry O, it makes it even more niche. And it's not niche. All you American podcasters, y'all say niche. It's not niche. It's French. It's niche. Like, niche-y. Okay? Come on. Come on. Like the philosopher. Niche. No, I think it depends upon if you're from the Midwest or where you're from. But I say niche. You can say niche. I don't care. Niche. Niche? Is it niche? You can say niche. I'll say niche. I don't care. It's all Benishki. All right. So what I want to say is that I will be in the future still being, I still want to be very cognizant of me making sure for all the listeners that I'm giving them fair warning. Like if I think it's priced way too high, or I think that the $2,000 topper is not worth it or something, I'll still say those words, but I want to make sure, and it's something I did talk with Steven Bowden a little bit about briefly. We didn't have tons of time to chat, but on the very last day when I was leaving, in a little bit on the couch that morning before he went to go to the commentary, I did want to make clear that I do want to be like, I am my own worst enemy. Some episodes I make sure I stay clear from being rude or condescending or judgy and being difficult and a dick and a douchebag. I want to make sure I'm only recording when I'm in a positive mood and I can speak constructively but kind. That's going to be my new whole thing. Yes, I'll still be your fifth favorite pinball podcast. Yes, I still eat, sleep, and breathe pinball, but you know what? My constructive criticism moving forward might be a little bit more kind and might not be quite as mean. That being said, I've already been quoted as being like the most positive guy in pinball. So positive, I have rainbows flying out my arse. My nice bleached arsehole has a lot of pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, rainbows, rainbows. Who doesn't love rainbows? Excuse me. Posty. So, what did I do to Dalton Eli to annoy him so much that even Adam Becker gave me the head nod and the shake and walked away, and that caused Dalton to look at me and go, you've got some explaining to do. What I did is, I had to do all these plunges of whatever, because Eric Thorne, who owns the game and had just finished working on it, as well as Dalton Eli had got to their, whatever their score was in Pinmasters, and I'm just plunging away everybody's balls to get back to my own, and I plunged the first one and I watched it move around and I watched it do whatever and then go out and then I saw it move back to player one and then I plunged player one and I was watching it for a little but then I looked up at the screen and I saw what was happening. I don't know if it was Zyron Silvers or if it was just like Escher Lefkoff doing Escher things or who it was up there just doing incredible things like Ray Day just killing it. Ray Day was keeping up with those young fellas. Not that Ray Day's old by any means but I mean he's not like Zach McCarthy and I think he's slightly older than him. He's like level two of the new up-and-comers, and they're like level three, and then you've got Zyra in level four. So I'm watching someone, and I'm being a bad boy, and I'm not watching what's happening to the ball, and all of a sudden I noticed that the ball was gone. And keep it bare in mind, none of you other than Dalton and maybe Eric know this, but every time the ball was disappearing and not coming out previous to this, the ball had gone into one of the scoops and then was getting stuck there, and then for some reason one of the switches didn't know it was in there, so it would do a ball search and it still wouldn't take it out. So like Eric had gone in and like, I was going to say sizzled it or fusioned it, but it's none of those. It's soldering. He had soldered it. Fusioned it. He had fusioned it. And basically he had soldered it and we had tested it and we thought it was working. And I was like, oh no, whatever he did didn't fix it. Because I think at the time even Adam Becker or Dalton or someone was like, well, I don't know if that will fix it, but we can try. And so they had paused the whole game and lifted the thing and soldered the whole freaking thing. Or maybe they, okay, maybe, maybe, maybe they did it after this. But at my point, all my brain could think is, oh my God, I didn't see the ball go down. The ball's not there. Where is the ball? What happened? Oh my God, it must be stuck down there. And then I kind of replayed it and I was like, oh yeah, sometimes on the plunge it can bounce off here and go into that same scoop where it's getting caught. So I immediately turned to Dalton and went, oh my God, I don't think the ball ever came out of the scoop. Now I might have just, I might have not said I think, I might have said the ball didn't come out of the scoop. In which case Dalton's going, well dude, if the ball went in the scoop, it's not coming out. It's the same problem he had before. So almost immediately, Dalton, without taking much time or energy to look around, just believes me, which I'm sorry, Dalton. I'm sorry. You're awesome. I love you. I'll forever be in your debt. I'm not worthy. I'm not worthy. So Dalton says to Adam Becker, Ah, I think the ball's stuck down in the scoop again or whatever. And so Adam Becker comes over and he looks over and he's looking around and in about two milliseconds, Adam Becker looks down, looks over at Dalton, looks over at me and goes, Really, guys? Really? Now, I don't know if he said exactly that, but he just turned and walked away. And Dalton looks down, and Dalton is just mortified. He sees the balls in the shooter lane. Oh my God. So yes, of course, the ball had gone into a ball lock, and it had popped it up in the shooter lane, but you could quite clearly see it was not my turn to play yet. So I just need to plunge that ball and move on with it. So yes, the ball had auto-locked, but it had shot out of the trough. I hadn't heard the sound. I hadn't noticed it. And even worse, before you go to complain to Dalton, or even worse, go complain to the TD Adam Becker, you check to make sure the goddamn ball is in the fucking shooter lane, you stoner idiot. So I fucked up big time. I, you know, Adam was probably busy doing other stuff and he had to come and leave to see that the ball needed to be plunged, you moron. And at the same time, Dalton's like, well, now you just made me look like kind of a dork in front of Adam by getting him. But of course, there's no skin off Dalton's back because, well, I mean, maybe Adam thinks like, dude, you should have looked, but Adam doesn't know that I told Dalton, no, no, I think I said the ball's in there and locked, because I assume that's what happened, because I didn't see it. Anyways, I fucked up. If that's the worst thing that happened to me on the whole trip, it was an incredible trip. And now I'm going to tell you the absolute best thing that happened to me on my trip. And the best thing that happened to me on my trip is, after this, we end up driving back to London, Ontario. After that, for two days straight, my son Hayden, my oldest son, the Hay dude, got to hang out with all of his old buddies. He got to shoot a music video with one of his old buddies, Duane, who's a rapper. I don't know if he wants me to tag that or post it, but I might consider putting it up on Pimble Nerd's podcast Facebook page. I'm sorry I haven't been posting that much lately. I've been super busy between new dogs, my collectibles company, getting ready for nationals, provincials, podcasting, being a father, being a stay-at-home dad, being a house hussy. When I get off here, I'm still going to get the house cleaned. I'm still going to go do all the other stuff, walk the dogs, feed the dogs. I'm getting ready. We have a new table. Actually, I've expanded to four tables at the largest collectibles show. If you live in and around Halifax, please make sure you come out this Saturday, 9 to 1 p.m. at the old Sears blah, blah, blah outlet store. It's at the mall in Bedford. Just look it up. Look up AMG or message me or go on to Cosmic Collectibles Go. I'll be there posting and doing a live stream video, but we've expanded to four tables. Danielle will now be running not only the comic books table while I run the sports card and Pokemon table. Hopefully Hayden or Owen come to help with buying Pokemon, because that can get quite busy. But we have a new one that Danielle's running, which is all old-school VHS. So if you absolutely love VHS videos, hit me up before this Saturday. I will give you rock-bottom prices with basically free shipping. If you're buying, I'll say like five to ten of them. I got a mad score. I was up in the middle of nowhere coming home, and I found an old vintage store that had them at five times less than eBay. So, for instance, I'm looking at right now a Toy Story one. I don't know for sure if it's sealed, like never been opened because the plastic's gone, but like the Walt Disney sticker on the side has never been opened. So that one's in my $10 pile, even though this exact one in this condition would sell for $30 to $40 on eBay. So if you happen to love Disney movies especially or any collect 90s VHSs or anything, message me and I'll tell you about what stuff I have there. But anyways, let's go back to it. The most important thing I did was bond with my son. Because we left as, I would say, father and son. We came back as still father and son, but also friends. By the end of the trip, he even told me that he didn't dislike, tragically, my favorite band of all time, as much. We didn't make much headway on the Beaches or some of my other modern bands he doesn't love as much, which is totally fine. But I have came around quite a bit on some of the bands that he actually likes and loves. and I think that we have this new mutual respect for each other. My guy who's never driven outside of Moncton or Halifax, I would say they're like a 3 or a 4 out of 10 tricky to drive in, he had to drive through Milwaukee, as Alice Cooper would call it, or you might know it as Milwaukee, where Owens, little Orby Jr.'s favorite team, the Milwaukee Bucks, Yontas Antetokounmpo, ah, I can't say his last name, Giannis, Giannis, Giannis A., I suck at last names, I'm sorry to everyone's last name I butchered today, I met so many cool people there but the main thing was Hayden and I bonded like we never have before, feel like we have a closer bond I feel like we're, you know what that you know between like 18 and 22 or even 23, 24 if you're really immature like Orby maybe it took you until 25 but somewhere you start to have like this new found respect for your parents where you're like wow, you actually had to go through a lot of stuff and sacrifice a lot of stuff for all the hard work you did for me I can kind of respect that and they treat you like a person more so than a parent by the end of our trip that was very apparent if you let me have that that dad joke but alas yeah I pissed off Dalton Eli I probably annoyed Adam Becker I don't think I annoyed Adam Becker that bad because he did hop in for a selfie for me which I hope to include all the people that I got selfies with I know Ian Hare were back in the day even said make sure that you know like you have to photo credit if you're going to make money off Pimble Nerds podcast trading cards you have to have a photo credit. So I did go out of my way to actually make sure, oh, the coffee is here. Fresh coffee beans. Thank you. Fresh coffee's here. No, the dog started barking, thankfully. But so I did, you know, I probably lost my train of thought there. But wow, I had a great time on the trip. Hayden and I bonded like we never have before. I know that that was all made possible by Ryan Berry and everyone else who donated even a penny. I'm going to say the names quickly, and then I am going to tell you about my little pinball crush. And then I'm going to sing for you. I know Zach many, okay? My voice is all effed up. It's not going to be that good. But this is the one song that got Hayden and I motivated as we got to a new town or as we left a town or the next morning when we had to drive. It was like my favorite song that's halfway between his. I'm more into indie rock like MGMT. He's more into rap like Kid Cudi. They have one song together. You might have heard it at the start of the show. I'm going to attempt, I won't call it rap. I'm going to talk quickly like a white dude. I'm going to talk quickly. White guys can rap. We've got Mac Miller. We've got Eminem. White guys can rap. Wouldn't it be great to have a rap album? I am so sorry for that beep beep sound. It's like the one time a week or a month that you'd ever hear that here. Alas, my pinball crush. Nobody cares. Nobody knows. People in the poor man's tribe already know and are probably annoyed with me by it, and I'm sorry to all of those of you who are. I was kind of just joking around, but I'm half serious. I'm not going to lie. My new pinball crush is Don. Don of Don's Pinball Podcast. And yeah, it's a bit of a man crush. I'm not normally into the dudes. I did a test. I'm like 94% straight, guys. Like 6% gay, that's like, that's under the average. Like, that's pretty low. That's like, you'd have to be on an island like at least five years before you switch teams, probably. I might cuddle before that, especially if the guy looked like Don, but I always kind of thought Don was really cool. That's why I went on episode 100 with him. That's why I was the first pinball podcaster to interview him. What I love about Don is he's just like literally authentic to a fault, sort of like me. He might say things you don't like. He's a little bit off the cuff. He maybe doesn't edit as much as some other pinball podcasts that record for three hours. You only hear a half an hour show or something. You know, he doesn't do that much editing, but he does bring you an authentic, real live view. Now, I know he is working with Spooky Pinball and stuff, and he's even said some stuff about pinball adventures in the past that I pulled a little Tim the Toolman with and went, huh? Are you sure? But, you know, we're not always going to agree on everything, but man, I agree with Don on like 90% of stuff. I feel like he's the more intelligent version of me. I always wanted to be a, my mom always said I should be a doctor or a lawyer because I did have, believe it or not, good grades when I was paying attention in younger years before I basically became a a degenerate in school and just like skateboarded and smoked weed and smoked ciggies and chugged beer and like just partied my ass off and was known for like throwing rad parties, not really for getting straight A's. But had I stuck to it, like Don, he's kind of like my brother from an American mother because he loves skateboarding. He loves dressing up. He encouraged other people to dress up. And I always kind of liked Don, but that first second I saw Don doing the live stream while wearing Willy Wonka? Wow. We even had Chris the Pinter, formerly one of the only people ever to purposely get rid of his poor man's tribe number. I don't know whatever that tribe number is, but we should probably just give it to Don, to be honest, because when Don dressed up, wow, he looked beautiful. He looked wonderful. I feel like if Willy Wonka had a beard, he'd look identical to Don. Seriously, like Don is... Don was like... Okay, Cary Hardy went live like three or four times for like half an hour. Don went live every two hours. So he set an alarm at nighttime and every two hours he got up and live streamed for an hour. I think by the final live stream, the people in the shower were like, Don, enough already. Stop live streaming. We don't need to see what you had for dinner last night in the toilet. It's too much. No, I'm just kidding. But seriously, there was so many awesome, crazy, fun, interesting, wild, attractive, outgoing, great pinball players with awesome skills that I met that they all could have been my pinball crushes. It could have been Ray Day. It could have been Rachel. Like, come on. She, well, wow, she's incredible. Actually, after she destroyed me, I always thought Rachel was good, but like, I wondered between the two of us, we played in tournaments, if I would be slightly better, she would be slightly better. Her ranking's way higher, everything else is way higher, but I thought, maybe, maybe, maybe, you know, maybe if Rachel came and played all my pins at my local arcade, I'd maybe do half as good as her. But she destroyed me in every pinball tournament we played at Lumberjack Johnny, she destroyed me. Every time I, okay, the first night she let me have one game on Doctor Who, but she was just trying to be nice, I feel like, right? So, but no, I had so many people there I was crushing on, like, seriously, Escher, for Escher to, in a completely platonic way, I am 100% loyal to my wonderful wife, who, we had some rocky moments when I came back, because you know, she's thinking, like, wow, you better be damn well appreciative, I've been running the homestead, I've been feeding the chickens, I've been taking care of the dogs, I've been, well wait, we didn't have two dogs yet then, that was like two days later, but she's been thinking like, I've been holding down the fort, I've been doing all your dishes you're supposed to do house hussy, I've been making all your meals you're supposed to be making, I've been doing all the parenting that you do most of, you know, I do most of the disciplining, believe it or not Danielle's a little bit more reserved and calm and cool and collected, which someone as, you know, obscenely hyperactive as me would need, of course but she basically was like thinking I should be super grateful and I'm coming back going, well, I was a C-grade level celebrity the whole time I was there. Like, how come you aren't, like, blowing smoke up my ass for being able to raise $1,200? And she's probably going, because you still spent $2,400 of her money. I'm going, yeah, okay, I know. So the good news was I had been in talks the whole time I was gone about selling my Guardians of the Galaxy. And because I immediately went, like, $2,000 under on my board, that meant I could not only go to no trips this year, it meant I couldn't do F-all, really, as far as even local stuff. and thank you, thank you, thank you to my guy out of Halifax. Oh my God, why the names keep, I must be over 40. Dan? No. What is his name? The awesome dude, I forget his name and I'm so sorry, but he bought my Guardians of Galaxy. He also traded me a couple thousand dollars worth of sports, not that much, like maybe $1,200, $1,500 worth of sports cards. So he gave me what I think is a very fair price, the two or three sports cards. There was only two or three cards that were worth more than like 25, well, two that were worth more than 25 bucks. Those two I'm probably going to fire off to PSA for grading. The one was a really cool card, but like I think even after grading, it's only going to be a $60 to $80 card, maybe $100. The other one, the Don Mattingly Rookie, I'll probably just sell raw for like $20 to $25. All the other ones, though, tons of like $5 cards for my table, $10 cards. The main thing is I wanted it sold. There was no one biting it, buying it here, even though I mentioned it on so many podcasts. So I could immediately take the differential of the nearly seven grand he gave me for the pinball machine. And yes, I did lose some money on it, and I'm okay with that. First of all, they announced that they were going to be rerunning Guardians after I bought it. And second of all, you know, I did put like close to a thousand plays on it, so it's not worth as much. Third of all, I didn't do any maintenance on it once. There was two Janos Kiss that were, you know, needed changed. Other than that, wow. If you're going to buy any machine, and maybe this is because I haven't owned like a Bally Williams or a Deep Root, I haven't owned an American pinball or a Spooky. But if you're going to buy a machine and put 1,000 plays on it, even a machine that already is at 3,000 plays, you want it to be a Stern Pro because nothing broke on it. I had one stuck ball once that I had to open it for, and that was it. I never had a trough issue. I never had a single solitary issue with Guardians of the Galaxy since last August until I sold it last week. And immediately I got to take all of that money, and though I did really want to buy, a buddy of mine out of Prince Edward Island, I think near Charlottetown, is selling his Walking Dead. I would love to buy it. I unfortunately can't because I was almost three grand below. I had to put that on my board, which thankfully got me above almost at three and a half grand. Now, in the last week, I've paid for my Ontario Open, and there's several tournaments of that. It's going to be at the Church of the Silver Ball. I think they call it Maple Pinball now in Mississauga. Teolis is running it, so Jeff Teolis is going to be there running it. There's several tournaments. There's lots of Whoppers to be had. If you live in Buffalo, if you live in Detroit, even Chicago, it's not that far. Just drive through Canada to get there. Well, you'd have to. I think Chicago, like Ray Day, like, I don't know, everybody else that was in and around Wisconsin, if you want to hang out with Orby, come hang out for four or five days. Even get a hold of me. Might be able to split a room. Most likely, if you're a male. If you're a female, that's probably not a great option. but if you're a dude who's coming in from that area and you don't mind spooning no I'm just kidding in a platonic way you want to have one of the two queen size beds let's split a hotel I'm trying to talk to my buddy Matt but he might be going back to London each night I want to party it up in and around Mississauga I actually have my friend Ashley and Matt live there they would probably just give me a free bed to be honest good message though I haven't stayed with them for a while though I mean I think most people if I tell them hey, whenever you come out to the Maritimes, you can stay with me, that causes them to think like, all right, this is legitimately like, you know, I could maybe do this. I could maybe see myself letting Orby like stay with me or hang out with me because of the fact that he's going to be very good, very good about, you know, repaying the favor. Like Ryan Barry and Kimba from Phantom Till Pinball, make sure you go support them. They're my gold level sponsor. Make sure you go check out Fast Pinball. Like them on Facebook if you haven't. if you go onto their website pastpinball.com and click on the videos and you scroll down to like the second video they'll actually talk a little bit about and I don't know how relevant or old it is the second video down I really liked it was explaining kind of like this is from the pin devcon 2023 talks that was at the northwest pinball and arcade show last year so it's probably pretty relevant but it's like it's called hardware tracking your pinball machine sorry hardware hacking your pinball machine with Fast Pinball. So go check out that video. That's really cool. I checked that out. I enjoyed that. Fast Pinball is going to be getting some sponsorships from here on out. Of course, everybody else who sponsored, I'm going to be checking them out as well. I do want to go read. Next thing I'm going to be watching, even though I have tons of pinball podcasts to listen to, I'm really excited to hear. I'm trying to go into this with a fresh, I do like the Translite artwork, I'll say that, on the Berrios BBQ. I'm going to try to do a top five rad and one bad. Not, and this isn't even why, part of the reason why I have such a crush on Don is because he's authentic. He's real. He's excited. You get to follow his entire pinball journey. I really do think when you listen to his podcast, go back and listen to his podcast. He really tries to do what I'm trying to do, which is critical but kind. He tries to be open and honest. Hey, maybe this isn't my favorite pin. Maybe I didn't own it for too long. I think he's bought and sold every single brand who's stern in the last year, right? So if anyone has a good opinion on how good these things work out of box, it's got to be Don. I think he owns, like, doesn't he own two of the new Spookys? Doesn't he own Texas Chainsaw Massacre? And then just for fun, he put one Looney Tunes on each side of it, just for fun, so, like, him and his wife could play Looney Tunes at the same time. No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. There was a distro guy out of Halifax who bought two Avengers LEs because he didn't like it when his wife was playing when he wanted to be playing or something, so they could both play at once. And I was like, that's wild, bro. I don't have that kind of money. But no, go over to Loser Kid and listen to episode 133 with Barry O's Barbecue with Steven Bowden and David Fix. I'm really excited to hear them both chat about it. Steven Bowden I've always had an immense amount of respect for because I do think he's straight up one of the best commentators on planet Earth. I know that he's one of the best players. He's consistently been in the top 25, if not maybe the top 50, ever since I've got into pinball. I love watching him play. He plays with style and panache and pizzazz. Even some of the top players are kind of boring. to, I don't want to say like, okay, the new old Orby would have said boring. The new Orby would say like, they're so gosh darn accurate that it's not that fun to watch someone hit the same ramp 19 times or just ramp out left, right, left, right, left, right. Or they're just, they're so analytical thinking they don't really wear their heart on their sleeves. You can't tell if they're mad because they had a bad ball or they're happy because they had a good ball. I prefer to watch those. I like, I was huge into tennis growing up. You're like, is that a skateboarder who loves tennis? Yes. I was a junior ranked in Ontario I broke into the top 1,000 at one point. Jerome, who actually went to the Olympics for Canada, I managed to get an ace on him one time hitting over, I think my best ever, I was able to hit around 130 and be fairly accurate. That's 130 kilometers an hour, not miles, probably around 90 miles an hour or something like that. I will say this, oh my God, Wisconsin, scary as shit to drive in. In three days of driving through Canada, I saw less cops in my first half an hour in Wisconsin. Whatever that town is north, oh my God, When you cross from northern Michigan or whatever that state is there down into Wisconsin, holy frick balls, all the cars are like zombies doing exactly the speed limit. Like apparently there they don't even let you go like one over. Escher's dad got pulled over. I heard him say this on the commentary. He got pulled over doing like four miles an hour over. That is bullshit. That's within 10%. When you're driving in a 40 or a 50 and you're going four over, that means you're within 10%. 10%. Even all the big car companies, as a driving instructor, they've admitted to us, they're not perfectly calibrated, especially cars with high miles or kilometers on them. You're going to see them being within 10%. So you could think you're doing 50% exactly, and you could get pulled over and you could say, sorry, you're doing 54%. But apparently, Wisconsin, they don't even have one mile an hour grace. That's a bunch of bullshit. That's a police state. The police should be there to make you feel more safe. The police should make you feel like, okay, the police presence here is making me feel like I don't need to have my own gun because they have them. And really, honestly, there it felt like a lot of people had guns. That was scaring me a little bit. Especially when you're at the mall and there's like drop boxes for your guns and stuff. I'm like, that's a new thing. We don't have anywhere in Canada where y'all can walk around with a gun. I think like during hunting season, it's allowed to be like locked in the back of your truck. But like there's just people walking around the states with guns. And like the guy at the shoe store, like I could see his gun and I was like, whoa, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Anyways, anyways, I guess I'm just a bit, I'm a bit of a wimp. I guess I'm, I guess I'm, in Canada version, in Canada terms, I'm completely unwoke. In American terms, I'm woke. So it really depends where your benchmark politics are. But like, for me, it was a little bit trippy to see it. It was almost like, really, you're going to go walk out at nighttime, go walk through downtown Green Bay without a gun? Really? I was like, yeah, you're going to go to Lansing and Detroit and Chicago without a gun? Yeah. You're going to drive in the area where basically by you buying a Toyota Corolla, you made my whole family be homeless and live under a bridge because you couldn't just go buy a Ford that needed to be fixed and repaired daily? F you, Orby. It was like, oh, my God, I've never felt so Canadian. And then I came home and I was like, oh, yeah, wait, I'm not just Canadian. I'm Maritaini. I'm a little Maritaini. I'm a little East Coasty now because I could not handle driving on the 401, driving on the 403, driving in Niagara, driving everywhere else there. Now, when I got back to Ontario, I partied like a rock star with my best friend, Melvis, because unfortunately, shout out to Robert Ray. Robert Ray, you never know. Robert Ray, unfortunately, his stepfather passed away the day before I came back, so he needed me really to be there for him, slash drink a shit ton of beer with him, and I did that. Then the next night, he needed a night off because, you know, just family stuff and whatever. the next night, I hung out with one of my best men, Travis, good old T-man, got to see Travis, hang out with him, and Aaron, that was great, but of course, he hadn't seen me in like four years, so he's like, Orby, you gotta, okay, he didn't call me Orby, I don't think he's ever listened to one episode of the podcast, he's like, Albert, you better stay up and party like a rock star, so even though he's like a head chef at like London Life and London Ontario there, he still stayed up with me until like 4 a.m., in fact, Hayden got back from partying with his buddies at like two, and was like, come on, Dad, you gotta have another beer, and I'm like, oh, your daddy's liver's, like, limping along after partying for, like, nine days straight, daddy's liver and kidneys need a break, and boy, was I wrong, because the next day, I got up, and I had the greasiest, grossest food I've ever had in my life, I had, which you shouldn't eat this very often, which I don't very often, but I kept seeing commercials for it, and we used to live in a town with, like, 10 Little Caesars pizzas, uh, pizza, pizza, so I end up getting the, uh, hot and ready, but it's, like, half garlic sticks and half pizza and Hayden was so hungover and tired he didn't want to eat any so I started you know when you're absentmindedly going to town on a pizza or garlic sticks you're dipping them that really yum marinara sauce and you kind of forget how many you've had well I had way way way way way too many and wow it was delicious but all of a sudden out of nowhere my pancreas literally my pancreas started on fire a couple minutes later I had to pull the car over it burned all the way from my top right rib cage right now if you go into google and just say like where is your pancreas and you look at the image, you'll see it starts like underneath, I don't know, like that area basically there. And I had got mad, mad, mad alcoholic pancreatitis. If you eat something, if you're a male over 40 and you party like a rock star and then you eat something kind of unhealthy, it happens to a lot of people a lot of the time. And it definitely happened to me. And what happened is I got severe alcoholic pancreatitis. That's just like, that's just like what happened. And it's fine, but I needed to be very careful. I needed to eat really healthy, which I did. And let's make sure that this thing is working here. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. It's coming. So I had an incredible time. I'm forever in debt to pinball. I had a wonderful time. Thanks for everyone who supported me. I don't want to be a negative Nancy Debbie downer anymore in pinball. If I'm not in a total positive mood, I won't even record. What that means for you is you're not going to hear maybe as many shows from me, but at the same time, I want to support pinball the way pinball supported me and pinball people have supported me. Pinball has became probably my favorite thing I've ever done in my life. I don't really believe in heaven, but let's say I go up there and it's the dude, because I'm an ordained Judas priest. He would look straight at me and he would say, my guy, what was the coolest thing you ever did on my planet? And I would have to tell him it was traveling with my son on a life-changing road trip, 6,400 kilometers. No, 64,000. No, 6,400 kilometers, 90 hours in the car, stayed at like 10 different people's houses. I was stuck in Ontario for an extra day or two till my body felt good enough. I completely stopped drinking at that point. I even went to Fork River with all of the London, Ontario people and I didn't even have a single beer. I even went out for dinner and didn't have a single beer. I was a DD. I had a great time. I didn't tell them how much pain I was in. They probably saw me continually leaning over. They probably could tell I was in a bad mood. I was trying to like empty and squeeze out, you know, my things so I felt better. Oh my God, I've talked way too long. All right, guys, I'm only going to one minute of it. Until next time, remember to eat, sleep, and breathe pinball. And if anyone ever questions my commitment to pinball, tell them Orby did 12 days on the road traveling literally twice as far or twice as long as anyone else did by car. Not as far as the Alaska guy, but, you know, in a car. So, if anyone ever questions my commitment to pinball, they can go frickin' F themselves, because I love pinball. I will never, ever, ever do 12 days in a car again, but I love pinball, and I love you, and until next time, remember to eat, sleep, and breathe pinball. And I'll live my life getting out of here People told me so my role, I'm gonna fuck that I'm gonna do just what I want, looking ahead, no turning back If I fall, if I die, know I lived it to the fullest If I fall, if I die, know I lived in this some bullets I'm on the pursuit of happiness And I know everything that's shining Oh, it's gonna be okay I'll be fine once I get it I'll be good