This is the Blockade Podcast with your hosts, Chris and Jared. You are listening to the Blockade Podcast. I am your host, Chris Frebus, a.k.a. Shut Your Trash. Joining me as always, my co-host, Jared Morgan. G'day, Chris. How's things this week? Hot as hell. It's starting to get warm here, and I've had air conditioning people come out and give me quotes on new AC. So for the time being still, it's no AC in the house. So, yeah, it's a little on the warm side. And I've had a busy week myself, but I'll talk about that later because, you know, how I love to get off on those tangents. But a tangent that we started before we even started this podcast, our good friend Xenia came in and said hello. He was going to listen to the podcast, and instead we're dragging him in. So welcome, Xenia. Hello, Astrid. So what we were starting to mention about was Farsight released, and I thought this was on Steam only, the new UI, fully integrated. There's no going back to the old UI, so love it or hate it, this is what you got. That's right, so learn to love it. And then we found out that the Android beta, which Jared was holding his tongue fiercely last week, not trying to say anything, even though he was foaming at the mouth. Gagging. Right, exactly. Zane just told us that it's live on Android. So we're going to delve into the first new user interface for the Pinball Arcade. All right. So the only reason why I knew it was live is because Zania did a post on the forum. I actually saw one yesterday about someone commenting about the UI. So I went, hang on a second. I don't recognize you as a beta tester. Why are you commenting about this here in the public forum? Because I thought that it hadn't been released yet. And in the beta testing thread, not thread, in the beta testing group on Google+, I was going, oh, so when are we going to expect this? Have we got another week of bake time on this or what's going on? And then all of a sudden, Xenia's post comes up with a big laundry list of bugs and issues with the UI, which we've kind of raised in the beta. And I went, right, so it looks like it's GA'd. Thanks for the heads up. No, I should point out that, A, me and Jared had been a part of knowledge about the new UI for, what is it, going on two years? Yeah, something like that. Something like that. A lot of the questions about functionality and whatever came from those initial talks. So I will say on my half, I'm a bit biased towards what the functionality of the new UI is because a lot of it was things that I specifically hoped would get put in and others that also commented and said, hey, we should have these put in. Now, whether it was implemented to the best of the ability that we wanted to see it, that's up for debate and whatever. The actual UI testing came to Steam probably about four, maybe five months ago. And in that initial state, it was rough, but we kept on seeing progress happen. And all the way to the point where two newsletters ago they said that they were going to release it like the following week. And I thought, oh, yeah, we're right there. It's good enough to be released. And then it didn't get released. and stayed in beta for another two months here on Steam. It just got released on Steam. I checked it out, and there are some things that it's regressed on. So that's kind of a bad sign. And then Jared was testing on Android, and yeah. We've had it for about a week and a bit, I think, if I could go back to Google. Let's just call it a week. Sure. A bit longer, maybe. and it was a little rough when we first got it, but as I said last week, it was beta. I was expecting improvements to be made as time goes by. And for the record, there has been a lot of stuff fixed from what we saw in version one to what is actually version three in the beta at the moment. So there have been fixes. Some of them were pretty major, but the real issue is there was a number of things that I was hoping this new beta would fix and most of it revolves around limitations of strings in the user interface so the labels that we get on all the buttons and stuff like that. One of the major issues with the old UI was the fact that when you translate those buttons and you try and jam the translations in they always overflow the text box field and it's just i thought here's a great opportunity to improve that for the new ui but it seems like that just hasn't happened and i just don't get that it's just bizarre maybe it's something they're going to be planning to do in the future i know that that this release isn't the last like update that we're going to get on the ui there's going to be probably a lot more iterations following as they catch up with um all the the feedback that we've given him to date. Let's bring in Zing and have him kind of, since he wasn't a part of any of these betas, unless you were part of the Steam one. I don't know if you were part of the Steam one or not. But why don't you just kind of run through, when you popped this thing open, what struck you about it? Yeah, I mean, first thing is I'm quite happy for having this grid view, which is very nice. So it's a bit quicker to select tables. On the other hand, I find it a bit difficult to get some tables identified with the icon because the text is so small or anything, making it difficult to identify at one spot what table am I looking for. I had some problems exiting the table or the program itself. So I was playing a game and trying to get out. And when you say get out, you mean, okay, so you finished that particular game. Normally it would say continue. You push continue. If you didn't want to play that game anymore, you'd hit the back button, and it would exit that table and go into the main list of tables, correct? Yeah. But that's still working. Okay. Leaving the program as a whole is difficult. So I was still in the table grid. That's where you end when you finish the table. And then I was, hmm, no exit button. Okay, that's not new. I mean, we never had an exit button. We always used the back button in the past. So I went to the back button. Nothing happened. Really nothing. No response. It's bizarre. I pressed the home button on the tablet, the home button, and yeah, it exited, but the program is still in the memory. Right. So what I found out after a few tries is in the title bar, you have a home button as well. If you press this first and then press the back button, then you get out of the table, which is weird. Yeah. So you actually press the, it's the one that looks like a house. Yes, exactly. So the actual house, yeah. So the little house icon, and then that'll actually let you back out of the app completely. So on Steam, up in the upper left corner, they have what looks like a digital power button. Yeah. If you push that, it brings up a box that says, are you sure you want to exit? And then you push yes, and then Ed Boon, it closes the program. So there's not that digital power button on the Android? No, it is not. Okay. No. I was quite surprised to find it on the Steam version, where it's maybe easier to get out of the game, but not have it on Android. Well, that was one of the things on the... Initially, one of the problems on Steam was that... I'm using a PS4 controller to play. What normally is the back button, it often wouldn't take you back or more importantly, it wouldn't put the cursor over the button that was putting you back. So you kept on having to go back to your, to your mouse or your game pad. Or in the case of the PS4 controller, you can actually, you know, it's got a touch pad right on top of the controller. So you'd have to drag the cursor over the button and then push the X button to activate it. And so I've made a post of saying, Hey, how about making it so that if you push your back button, And just like Jared had pointed out that X always take you forward. I was like your circle button or I guess on the Xbox controllers, the B button should always take you back. And if I keep on. Yeah, if I keep on pushing that, it should take me completely out of the program. And so eventually that is what took place. They made it so I don't have to ever use the mouse, except for I have found one instance now where that is indeed the case. and this is where the reversion happens somehow with the UI going live, and that's when entering your initials. A little box pops up that says select, and it's got an arrow to the left and an arrow to the right. And, you know, normally when you're selecting to enter your initials, you're using the flipper buttons, and that's, you know, would scroll through everything, and then you use the X button to select that thing. Well, now if you push the flipper buttons, that acts as an actual pushing the X and it selects it. So the only way to enter your initials is very bizarre. So the only way to enter the initials now, I believe, is via mouse pushes. But that wasn't the case the last time that I played in the beta. So I don't know what the heck happened that they reverted it. makes me worried that there's other things within the UI that somehow maybe went backwards. Because I truly thought the Steam version was ready to rock and roll. Yeah, very bizarre. I had the public beta of the Steam version already a few months ago. It was so pretty much unusable that I just went straight back to the old UI and said, well, I will wait until it's finally released. And it was, as you already mentioned, it was already announced into newsletters saying, hey, next week, live on Steam. Yeah. It was like the movie The Money Pit. You probably know that from Tom Jim Hanks. When it's ready, yeah, in two weeks. Right. That's what I felt like. Yeah. Yeah. And the last newsletter, they didn't mention it at all. and said, okay, it will take some more time. And now all of a sudden it is released. So this is where me and Jared kind of go into our theorizing mode, and that is why release something fully ready? Because Chris is locked up. So the question was, so why do they release something that isn't ready for prime time? and I just don't know why they would bother doing that. It seems like a bit of a strange thing to do. This was, in my opinion, nowhere near ready for release. It really, what I think they needed to do would have been keep the beta open and then start developing Indy 500, which surely is the next table, based on the clue, in parallel with it and actually give us a bit more bake time on the UI and let us get some more feedback in about it. But I don't think the feedback is the issue. I mean, you probably gave a lot of feedback in the beta already. We did. A lot. With all other tables which are being released as well. And I know that from the forum threads saying, hey, this was already mentioned in the beta and it has not been changed. But we know that Farsight is you get to get out the tables every month. So I kind of understand that not all issues are fixed then. But there was, in my opinion, no reason to push out the new UI. So the only thing I can imagine is they have other projects to work on in the next weeks. in the next weeks. So they had to push it out. Yeah. I mean, the other thing that could have happened is that they might actually have to, as far as development goes, what they might have to do is if they're working on something like this, they actually have to release this first before they can start developing on the Indy 500 game. So it might actually be something they can't actually, because if you're in a development model, if you're using something like revision control, they'd have to have a branch for the new UI and a branch for Indy 500. and try to merge those two in and not get conflicts would be pretty hard to do on something as complex as Pinball Arcade. So they probably just have to go, right, we've got to start development on 8500. We just have to get this out there. Yeah, especially what I found out when I downloaded the new version of Pinball Arcade on Android, that every table needs to be re-downloaded. So, yes, all 60 of them. Yeah, yeah. And I think at that point, I'm quite glad I don't have season five yet. So, yeah, it's terrible. So they are 11 tables less. So you might be right. There might be something which they are developing already for Indy 500. and if they wanted to go with the old UI, then they might have needed to develop that for Indy 500 for the old UI and for the new UI a bit later. That's right. As you rightly say, that would have just been double effort, which they really can't afford to do with all the projects they've got on. Because at the same time, And they'd obviously be developing something to do with the Stern app as well. So they've got that floating around in there as well. And they've got the new UI trying to roll it out to more platforms. And then they've got probably a whole lot of internal stuff they're doing as well. So it starts to all back up, doesn't it? Yeah, exactly. And as I said, they released the Stern pinball for the, what was it, for the Oculus? Oculus VR. Yeah. There apparently exclusive video with Oculus VR for Samsung And once that over don know exactly when that going to be but once that over we'll actually start to see it coming out on other platforms, which will be good. I actually was diving into that actually as an aside. I was having a look at the Oculus, sort of how you develop a game for Oculus, just because it's sort of interesting. Apparently one of the requirements is that the game on the Gear VR, which is the Samsung one, you must be able to play it using the headset controls. Because there's little buttons on the side of the headset that you use to just basically navigate around like a basic menu. But if games are released on it, they have to be able to be played in some way using it. So from what I've heard with the Gear, with Pinball Arcade, with Steam on Pinball Arcade, you can play the game with just those controls. but wonderful yeah that's absolutely what i want yeah it's a beautiful user experience but again that's not the only way you play what they have to do is you're going to be able to play it so to meet that requirement um if you press the little button on the controller you double flip so you can play that game i'll madly double flip the double clicking on your on your little headset yeah it's it's great but that of course that's not how it's designed to use like the the guys at fast side have actually put full controller support so the the oculus um gear vr system comes with a like a compatible controller as well that all just works on samsung so if you've got that you get a full like console experience as far as like controlling things you know the shoulder buttons are the flippers and you've got like analog tilting and all the good stuff that you'd expect so it was just it's one of those minimum requirement things that you've got to have but after that yeah you wouldn't ever want to play with it like that although i can see some hardcore people out there going you know what i don't need no sticking controller i'm going to play this i'm going to play this with my headset and i'm going to be awesome yeah wonderful but no not many of those people i think that would be a bit of an edge case I'm playing, as you already know, I'm playing on Android and on Steam. On Android, I actually play without controller, which is quite challenging if you're used to a controller. When the Steam version was released and I played it with a controller, I almost instantly defeated all my own high scores on Android. Oh, yeah. Because it was so much easier to play. But I still don't want to use the tablet with a controller. I still think that's why I have a tablet, just to have the tablet and nothing else attached to it. Yeah. So you can just take it with you. You know you don't need to actually carry any accessories with you if you're going out with it. Exactly. Yeah. I'm a bit like that with the Shield tablet. For those who don't know about the Shield tablet, it comes with a dedicated controller that you can buy, and it's really good. It's a Wi-Fi direct controller rather than Bluetooth, which means that it will actually stream the audio directly to the controller. So, for example, you could have your tablet connected to your TV and then be sitting 10 meters away with your headphones plugged into your controller and it's zero latency on the sound. It's really good. So I will always play Pimple Arcade with the controller for the main reason that tilting on it is far more subtle than on the tablet. That's the main reason why I'm not as good because nudging is... It will trigger tilts. Yeah, it will definitely trigger tilts if you use the digital nudging. Yeah, either that or, I mean, I use digital nudging on the controller as well. It works. I'm perfectly fine with it. But you need to move the thumb quite way up on the tablet just to get to that. And that's a timing issue then. It is. and it's not really the only other way they could do it is do what zacharia did and ask homework did and implement swipe nudging which allows you to anywhere if it detects a swipe rather than a tap it will just trigger a tilt motion and that does work okay uh it's still not as intuitive as a controller but once you get used to like deprogramming your brain and going okay to tilt, I actually need to swipe rather than tap. It actually becomes pretty good from what I've heard. I need to try that because I have Zachary Pinball on Android, but I wasn't aware of that. Yeah, well, they've got two. They've actually got Accelerometer and Swipe, so you can sort of use both, and they're both tunable, so if you want it to only tilt a little bit when you swipe, like say, you know, in the heat of the moment you're playing a game, it's about to go down the outlane, the ball's about to go down the outlane, and you go, oh, swipe, and you do it really fast just as a reflex action, you can actually tune the sensitivity of the swipe, so it will only just move it a little bit rather than moving it a lot and tilting. So it's pretty good. It works quite well. Yeah, I definitely need to try that because although I like Zachariah Pinball on Android, I'm not a huge fan. So from time to time I play it, but for me it might be my old tablet. It seems to be a bit sluggish, not very responsive. I get a bit of delays. I think you do have to, if you've got an older device, the Zacharia app on Android is pretty unforgiving. Like it will really, it's actually almost like a benchmark app. If you turn everything up to maximum graphical shininess and you don't have one of the latest devices, it'll start to lag. Even my Shield tablet starts to chug a little bit if I've got everything turned up to the full, like everything's super reflective, everything's got particles floating around. It seems to be the particles on that, the particle setting that really causes the performance issue. I don't know why. But reflections tend to make your device heat up a fair bit and make it slow down. So, yeah, it's all about just finding the right balance between, like, graphical settings and performance. You'll find that if you turn the glass off as well, that actually takes a lot of the processing runaway too because it doesn't need to render the reflections on the glass. Yeah. So it seems that reflections and reflective surfaces are the things that make your device chug a little bit. So, yeah, you've seen they're coming out on Steam too, hey? They're going to be releasing on Steam. Actually, I played it today on Steam. Yeah. Is it good on Steam? It's good, but still I have some issues with the ball not running really smoothly. it's a bit lagging well it's still in green light I mean there's a lot of things which can still change but at the moment it's not like I would buy it sounds like we're talking about hi I'm back time to wrap up the show for those to recap what we were talking about I don't need a recap I'll just futz into this and figure it out later Zechariah on Steam yeah I just downloaded it to see what it felt like and I just caught what Zany was saying and I agree I had some ball jumps some little weird lags I didn't to me the ball is I don't want to say floaty but it feels like a beady it doesn't have much weight it also was now I've only played the one table and unfortunately And unfortunately, in this free play mode, it doesn't let you tweak any of the settings. Oh, okay. See, that's where the secret is, right? Apparently. Yeah, it is. It lets you look at the settings, right? Yeah. To which it's almost a little bit, to me, it's a little bit intimidating because now it becomes. There's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of settings and it's now fitting into your custom taste. Yeah. And I feel that the version that we get should be the optimized, this is as close to pinball as it really is. But I know, Jared, you said with playing it on Android that it took some tweaking to get it to feel the way you wanted it to feel. That's right. There's a couple of threads in the Ask Homework subforum where people have just been experimenting with tweaking the physics and the coil strength. You can tweak the coil strength. It's that configurable. I mean, that's wonderful. but it becomes it's why I kind of stopped playing certain sport video games it stopped being fun it now became well you're tuning and then I go well how is that supposed to be competitive then to somebody else I don't know yeah I mean you already have the issue when you have I don't know which version bronze or silver or gold but at some point I think it's bronze version already you can select to have five balls. So if you go to the leaderboard on Android, it doesn't matter. I mean, there's no distinction between a five ball and a three ball game. Every other setting, I play with larger flippers because otherwise the ball drains for me too fast. And that's not competitive at all. Yeah, and it's like I don't know. Like I said, it felt like a beady kind of. There wasn't enough weight. In certain parts of the table, it felt like there was weight, and then in other parts of the table, it wasn't. And then I was noticing just on capturing the ball on the lower, basically the machine that's free to play is called Time Machine. And so it's a double flip arrangement on both left and right sides. So on the closest to the drain flipper, I had the ball in a catch, and as soon as I dropped the flipper to flip it, that ball came screaming down. There was no slow, random speed to roll. It's automatically full speed rolling down. I was like, well, that's really bizarre for a feeling. And then the other thing was the flipper gap was minuscule. I mean, basically, there's enough room for the ball to go through between the two flippers, and that's it. It's not a larger size gap. And I was having this insanely long ball time because it didn't seem like the outlanes. It's possible to drain in an outlane, but, I mean, it's rare. I mean, it's really rare. There's actually two settings. There's two settings. So you can have simulation and arcade. You must have actually folded it to, I think, the demo where you can't change anything. Yeah, so arcade is the narrow flippers. Simulation is the wider flipper gap. So if you want a more real experience, go for simulation. Well, that's odd because I would think arcade is what you would play in an arcade. Now, arcade, generally speaking in video games, arcade is usually like, hey, this is like a more forgiving mode, so anyone who walks up to the game can play it, but simulation is more hardcore. Okay. In this case, yeah. It's a bit taken from racing games. You have racing simulation, which are pretty unforgiving for every mistake you do, and You have arcade racing games where you can bump other cars, crash into the boundaries and everything, and you still will be able to continue. Okay. Interesting. Yeah, maybe I'll have to try it on simulation, though, if that's even open to us. I don't know. I'm surprised that simulation is not the default setting. because I thought on Android it was. Yeah, that's bizarre, isn't it? Because that is what you would want to see. I think, from my perspective on Zachariah, simulation really does present the game in the best light. It's a great way to play the game on simulation. And most people will switch Arcade off very quickly and start to then customize the settings. So, yeah, I agree. One thing I did... What I'm really happy to say... I was just going to say what I'm really happy to see is that it's finally on Steam because I know a lot of people in the community have been gagging for it to be on Steam. So it's great to see that they actually were successful in their Indiegogo campaign and just got it out there. I'm quite curious about the pricing. Do you remember the pricing for the gold? I think it's $40. Yeah. Yeah, it was about... Because it's $10 for bronze. It's $10 for bronze. I think silver is either 20 or 30, and I believe the gold was 40, and I got you everything. Yeah. I think on Android at the time, because you've got to remember this has been out for, correct me if I'm wrong, about a year now on Android. Feels like it. So I think at the time they offered a discount sort of for gold. I mean, the pricing tiers are pretty low anyhow for each of the things, but for full unlock on gold, I think I ended up paying about 30 Australian at the time. So, yeah, it was a little bit cheaper. I think it was quite cheaper for me on Android, and I was quite surprised to see it here in Europe. I think about 45 euros for the gold version. Oh, yes. And I thought, well, is it really worth it for me? I'm not 100% sure. Yeah, you know, because, like, for me, I don't play it a lot either, but I'm really happy that I paid the $30. It's strange. Like, I will not play it every day, but I will go back to it occasionally and have a flip on it, and I don't regret any of that $30. Yeah, same for me. Yeah, it's weird, eh? Yeah, I don't think it's an extraordinary price that they're asking. There's a lot of tables you get for that money. You do get a lot of tables, but like I said, I just wish that on that one table that it was fully unlocked. So you could really – because that's the thing that would sell me more on the game. Because I'm really curious – because I have – most people have never played a Zachariah table. I have played a few. I have zero nostalgia for them. So to me, it's more about, okay, let me see what you're capable of in virtual pinball. Let me see how it compares to other things. and I really want to experiment. I want to play with the lighting. I want to play with the physics. I want to really see what it's all about because that to me is what would convince me to pony up the money because otherwise it's just these random tables that I have zero connection to. That's true. I'm a bit disappointed on that aspect because it doesn't let me do a true comparison. As you said it would be some kind of advertising and some time of some way way of um letting the people decide whether it something they would like to see yeah that right like like uh you have uh with uh uh in pinball arcade with uh tales of vr8 been nice i think you get the pro version already now included since not forever, but at some time they changed it. And so you could look what is possible with it. Yeah, I think you're right, Chris, and I definitely agree with you as well, Zaini, that if you're going to give someone a trial, make it completely open. And I think, Chris, it might be worthwhile you actually just making a comment or both of you guys making a comment in Steam and just mentioning that as an opportunity for them to actually get more, potentially more sales because people might just go, at the time, the real big thing about the Gold Pack was that you get every single table released from now until eternity, basically, in that app. And at the time they were doing it, they only had about 15 tables out when it actually hit Androids. Buying that Gold Pack was like a really good insurance to actually get all the tables. and you knew you were going to get everything. It was really quite a good deal. So I think now that pretty much all the tables have been released for it, they don't actually have any more Zachariah tables. If the gold pack has some sort of, like, if that gold tier is sort of suggesting that's actually a feature of the gold, then it's not really a feature anymore. and that might sway people's decision about what tier they actually need to buy because, yeah, it may not be a thing anymore. But I don't know how they worded the tier pricing in Steam, so I couldn't really comment on that. And then speaking of, as we were speaking about UIs, the Zachary UI, I don't exactly think that's anything to write home about either. I mean, especially when you get into the tweaking a physics menu or whatever. Like I said, it's just this wash of information and it's a bit overwhelming. It's pretty full on. You can at some point, you can scroll downwards for pages to get to all the settings and sometimes it's very difficult to find out what it really does. It's a good five scrolls to get all the way down while you're in game. The thing is that this is the thing I really don't understand. In a couple of versions before, like maybe six months ago, that UI thing was actually a lot smaller and the font was a lot smaller, which made a huge difference to how you navigated it because it wasn't as many scrolls. You could fit more info in. And I don't know why they made it so hugely big and chunky because I really don't think it was necessary. Most mobile devices that you have now can display text both small and clearly. so I don't really understand why it needed to be so huge well other than that and again I don't know what it's like on the mobile I just know what it's like on Steam but a lot of these things have a slider on them too so if it's a case of you're pushing that particular tab and then you need to be also able to slide it maybe your fingers are too big and so that's why they made them bigger then you have more of a scroll for those with chunky fingers chunky fingers have not on four-inch screens, you know. Yeah, that's a good point. That could have actually been a usability thing. Yeah, that's what I would think. I never had a problem. I never actually had a problem fine-tuning it with my big chunky fingers. So I never really had a problem, but some people may have, and I guess that's a good accessibility feature to have in the app. Cater for the, I guess, the lowest common denominator for users. Okay. All right. Well, that's about the extent of pinball talk that I think that we had planned today. Warning. The following contains little to no actual talk about pinball. I'm going to pivot into my world, which is everybody's favorite subject. Yeah, and I can see that the clicks are happening right now. Everybody's tuning out. Before we launch into that, thanks very much for joining us today, Zania, and having a chat about the new UI and about Zachary here. and filling in the gap while I dealt with my computer. That was very useful, actually. Working around the technical issues. So, yeah, thanks for joining us, mate. It was quite funny because I was just seeing the message on the screen, hey, the podcast will start soon. And I just went in. So, yeah, thanks for having me and it was a pleasure to be here. Awesome. We'll talk to you again, man. See you later, Mike. So, yeah, if anybody's wondering, this is what happens if you follow us on Blab, at the Follow the Blockade. You'll get messages saying we're going live. If you follow us on Twitter, you'll get messages saying we're going live. And then you can be like Xenia there, and sometimes we go, hey, you got information that we want to put up on the air? Let's come on in. Have a chat. Yeah. Have a chat. Who knows how long it will last? Because sometimes we keep you a long time. yeah so uh i was gonna say you would ask earlier what my week was like um yeah it started with my brother and his family coming in from oklahoma and me being able to have a chat with him and finished with uh me and my family going on vacation up to the sequoia national park and going to Yosemite National Park. All right. That would be lovely. Yes. So I'm going to start with the vacation portion and work backwards. I titled this podcast, The Stupidity of Intelligence, and that relates directly to my brother. Okay. Let's hear about this. This is going to be interesting. So maybe no more invites to the Christmas at your brother's place, potentially. Let's just – I'll get into it. We've all got those family members, right? He's one of those. So, yeah, we went up to – now, Jared, I don't know how familiar you are with California National Parks. I'm sure very limited, if any. A little bit limited, but for those people who are not in the U.S., give us a bit of a geographical explanation. Right. So California has a rather large mountain range called the Sierra Nevadas, and within that mountain range near the center of california is a national park called sequoia national park sequoias are the world's largest trees yes they are very very very very round um and within the national park i was gonna say they're a little bit like uh the there's a new zealand tree that's also massive as well um called the rimu i think and it's huge as well very big Yeah, so sequoias are not tall. They're fat. And, yeah, no, the circumference of them is just huge. I mean, just absolutely massive. And they call them the, like the forest sometimes is referred to as the force of giants and stuff like that. And it's literally, you're driving, and John Youssi a lot of redwoods, and, you know, redwoods are very tall, and John Youssi a lot of pine trees. And then you just see these massive hulks, just like you'll see one. and you're you suddenly realize how small all these other trees are right so the the highlight in sequoia is they have the world's largest tree which is called general sherman and it is one of these things where you stand near it and you just feel tiny you can't believe how tiny you are and these trees are like 3,500 years old. Right. Okay. Ancient trees. Ancient trees. It's one of those things where you just kind of go, so when Christ was walking this earth, these trees were still over 1,000 years old. Wow. Yeah. It kind of puts it into perspective in terms of timelines, you know? Yeah. That's very old trees. Very, very. So that was what was really, it was quite impressive to walk through this forest. We went to a cave called Crystal Cave, which had all sorts of stalactites and stalagmites in it, so that was pretty cool. And we climbed on top of this rock called Morro Rock, which does 300 feet of elevation and a quarter mile of stairs. Yes, it's a… Exactly, right? My wife was worried that when we did the trip, she's like, oh, but when am I going to get my workout in? I'm like, you're going to get your workout. Trust me. At an elevation of 6,500 feet. The air is thin and it's good times. To say the least, that night in the hotel, we dropped like rocks. It was wonderful. I also got to, with my new car, it was a road trip. I got to drive lovely four and a half hours or whatever to just get to the that national park and then uh so the way his hotel and then the next day drove another two hours to get to yosemite now yosemite um have you ever seen do you know the photographer ansel adams uh no i don't okay he's a very famous photographer black and white photographer uh took pictures back in the 1930s i believe um yosemite was one of his key uh things he photographed. And they kind of say it's impossible to take a bad photo in Yosemite. It looks beautiful. It's stunning, and it's just got these massive, sheer granite rock faces and beautiful, beautiful waterfalls. And the most impressive thing about this whole thing was you drive through a tunnel that is probably a half mile long. I mean, it's a long, long, long tunnel. And as soon as you emerge from the tunnel, it's this postcard view of the valley, the two El Capitan and Half Dome, which are very famous for rock climbers, and this waterfall called Bridal Falls. I mean, your jaw just drops, and every single car just pulls over immediately and has to take photos. I mean, it's quite stunning. as an aside I think I've now realized the naming conventions on Mac because you just said two names there so one of the previous Mac releases was Yosemite directly after that was El Capitan so it was the update to Yosemite so there you go well and pretty much due west of Yosemite maybe a little bit north is Palo Alto So I mean, it makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Silicon Valley right there. So what I didn't count on with Yosemite is apparently it's exceedingly popular. Really? Who would have thought? You know, we had we had no problem driving around Sequoia and finding parking. And, you know, there was people, but it wasn't overcrowded or whatever. um well we start our day a little bit later uh and didn't get you to see somebody until noon yeah there was no parking anywhere i mean like cars everywhere yeah and when we finally got into the actual valley where you can park uh driving around driving around driving around i went to one parking lot there was absolutely nothing people were double parking and you just I see people wandering around everywhere. And I'm like, oh my gosh, this is horrible. All these people. I wish they'd go away. No, what the heck? Go on my vacation. Why do I have to come mid-June? And so I kid you not, we got down into the valley portion at 1230. I did not find a parking spot until 230. You're two hours driving around. Two hours. And now, it's not just me driving around in circles. No, it was a case where at one point I was at an intersection where they had park rangers guiding traffic. For 10 minutes I sat there before they finally let my lane move. And my lane moved right into another lane of traffic that then I had to sit through. And there's not really, I mean, I have a map. I had never been there. I didn't know where anything was. I was just looking for some place to park and get out so that we could wander around. And finally I was like, you know what, I've had enough of this. We've seen things from the view, but this is ridiculous. We're not finding parking. We don't want to be able to hike around. Let's just leave. I was on my way exiting that I found a parking spot. So did you actually go, all right, we'll stop? We stopped, and then I was able to go look at the Yosemite Falls, which is what they call a double waterfall. So it waterfalls into a pool, which then has another waterfall. And it was, again, absolutely stunning. you feel completely tiny and insignificant when you're next to these things and the water's just coming down because where it comes up from is probably a good 3,000 feet above you. It's glacial fit, isn't it? Exactly. It's like, yeah, it's all Jon Snow fit. It's just one of those things where you watch the water fall, fall, fall, and then it just turns to mist before it ever hits. and then it lands into that other pool and then now you've got the other waterfall coming down. It was absolutely stunning. The low light of the trip was what happened next. We went to a it was called America's Best Value Inn. I'm of the mindset of hey, if I'm just going to be going someplace to sleep, I'm not there to relax at the hotel. I don't really care that much about it. I'm not concerned about the amenities. I just need a good bed, sleep. I'm going to wake up in the morning, have some breakfast, and then leave. So I can care less about anything else. Right. So why should I pay $120 a night for something that – Like I'm not going to be in for most of the day. Exactly. So I found this thing online on a booking site, and it was $45. I went, Ed Boon, awesome. That's perfect for what we need. Yeah, sometimes you get what you pay for. Yeah. So the first sign that it was a bad news was that, yes, it says it's an inn. Turns out it's really a motel, motel being where you park your car right in front of your room and the door is right there. So expectations lowered right off the bat. Open the door. Nice smell. Yeah, I had to air that out for about a half an hour. Look at the bed. You can already see the lumps before even touching it. Yeah, that's not too good. The entire time the mantra going through my head is only for one night, only for one night. That's pretty bad when you have to keep on re-saying that mantra over and over again to get yourself through it. Yeah, you know, the TV that they have on the stand there, it's, you know, a tube style TV, standard definition. Wow. CRT, manufacturer date on the back, 2003. hey way to keep your hotel current um again i'm not there to watch tv but that doesn't you know come on yeah um then you actually sit on the bed and you can hear every single spring oh dear um and you can feel a lot of them too in a hotel you think that one of the main things you want to get right is a bed even if it a budget hotel right just keep the beds in good order because that what you pay for really The beds and the sheets which I can say were probably like 150 thread count because they were scratchy as hell So then it's getting close to time to go to sleep, and my wife finds a flea. Now, my wife gets bit by any insect that's within 50 feet. she's delicious so in the morning she awoke to have two bites so that was fantastic I had an absolutely crappy night's sleep because of the ishiness go to take a shower in the morning and first had to make sure that the roach that was in the tub drained down the drain so your room actually came with pets as well came with pets, yes grabbed the towel off the rack and I'm like, why is this towel so dang small? It was like itty-bitty, and it was even... It was more like a flannel. It was more like a flannel than a towel. It was more like the towel that you'd throw down in front of the bathtub to wipe your feet off on. Yeah, and it was even scratchier than the sheets. At that point, I was like, we need to get the hell out of here now. Give someone a list of all the stocks. Right. Jared, your mic is going wonky again if you want to unplug and put it back in. There we go. To fix the problem, you copy the URL, you completely exit it out of the Blab session, and you come back in again. That's a feature. Wonderful. That's a feature, not a bug. Still in beta. Exactly. So you got the heck out of Dodge. Well, I didn't quite get the heck out of Dodge. Yeah, so I went to go check out the free continental breakfast, and it consisted of some Fruit Loops, some white bread, not bagels or muffins for toasting, and make-it-yourself waffles. And I was just like, yeah, this isn't sounding good. I get back into the room, and my wife goes, hey, did you check out the picture that's, you know, framed picture that's above the bed? And I went, no, and I look at it. Yeah, pressed between the glass and the picture itself, it's a dead moth in another's approach. Okay. Well, so, yeah, so I was like waiting now. I go to check out, and so I pull the car around front to the lobby. Just as I'm about to get out of my car, a bird flies over and completely craps all over my car. I'm like, thank you very much. That was wonderful. It pretty much was just a good sayonara to this location. That's terrible. So, yeah, it is. It was terrible. It was just like, okay, between not being able to get out of my car in Yosemite the day before and then having this absolutely horrible night. Yeah, let's get back to home. It sounds like Ramsey's Hotel Hill. Warning, the following contains little to no actual talk about pinball. So, okay, so my brother and his family, my brother, he's an intelligent guy. Okay, he is. He's smart. But he's also one of these people that is never, ever, ever, ever, ever wrong. So it makes talking to him very difficult because if you are of a different opinion than him, you're never going to make him change his opinion. And for that reason, among many others, we don't talk but maybe once a year. And usually it consists of me calling him and then listening to him talk for an hour before me finally saying, OK, I got to go. So, he and his family came. This is the first time I've seen him in probably five, six years. And over the course of conversations, conversation starts drifting over towards renewable energy. My brother being in Oklahoma and having that middle America mindset, which is Trump, yeah! Yeah, he's one of these climate change deniers. and uh so the topic kind of moved into uh these wind turbines you know what i'm talking about the giant wind turbines and i was saying you know how you know hey aren't these things a good thing because they give us energy they don't burn coal it's you know all nice and wonderful and so of course he hits me with the typical oh yeah but in order to manufacture these things you got to burn all this coal to give you the parts and isn't that even worse and you're like oh my gosh you know come off that. But then he starts talking about how in Oklahoma they've had this increase in earthquakes. They now have more earthquakes in California. I can't believe it. And it's these 3.0 so they're minor tremors. But the frequency of them is just a ton. And so he goes on to say that there's also been an increase of these wind turbines being put up. And a correlation has been made that as wind turbines have come up, more and more things have happened. And the reason for this is the sheer pressure of all the wind pushing against these turbines. The turbines are pushing on the Earth and adjusting the Earth's core, and that's what's causing these earthquakes. Wow. And I'm sitting there thinking, you are nuts because the earth's core is not like it's 100 feet below the surface of the ground. It's a insane set. It's like, come on! Surprised he hasn't said, well, not only do they cause earthquakes, but they also cause cancer as well because of the frequency waves coming out of them. And... No, and... And, like I said, My brother is intelligent because, I mean, he's a sports trainer. He's had to go through medical studies, and he's not a doctor, but he still has had to go through plenty and plenty of this stuff. So book smart, yes. But, again, he's also one of these people that is, I believe this, and I'm going to believe anybody that says this stuff too, right? So I decided to look this up because he did mention fracking, and he has no problem with fracking. Well, it turns out most of Oklahoma has no problem with fracking. And when I mentioned, oh, yeah, there's that problem of groundwater contamination, oh, no, there's not an issue of that. I'm like, really? Because I can swear to God that's what's happening in Flint, Michigan. But anyway, again, climate denier, so therefore, hey, big oil. Because it doesn't happen, so it doesn't. Right. So like I said, there's no arguing, so I just kind of let it be. and was like, why don't we shift this into sports? Because then at least I can have a conversation of rationality with you. So I just looked up today. I decided, you know what? I feel this is a total amount of BS, and I'm going to prove it. So I typed in to Google about these wind farms and earthquakes. I found one article. It came from a blog. Now, this blogger in Oklahoma is pro-fracking. Right. Now, the thing is, is with all the people that are anti-fracking, they have been saying that fracking is causing earthquakes in Oklahoma specifically. But it's not a direct scientific link. There's not a way to specifically tie them together. It's just this correlation of, hey, as fracking has gone on, so have earthquakes. So this guy wrote a satirical piece saying that it was the wind farms, basically pointing out the fact that you can't prove it with the wind farms. they've been popping up, so of earthquakes, it's the exact same thing with the fracking. There's no correlation. But unfortunately, whatever my brother read, because it probably got picked up by some other news site in Oklahoma, and my brother being my brother, went, Ed Boon, proof! Yeah! And goes and now spreads it as the gospel of this is what is happening. Yes. Never bothered once to Google it. And like I said, when I Googled wind farms, earthquakes in Oklahoma, one article. That's it. And it was clear as day that it's satirical. But if it's on the internet, it's true. It must be true, right? So, I just find it incredible when you have smart people that just do not use their intelligence in the least. John Youssi it all the time. Yeah, it's almost like logic and intelligence don't always meet up, and it's a crying shame. Yeah. Wow. That sounds like an interesting – so that was part of the trip itself, or was that sort of separate? Well, they came from Oklahoma to visit Southern California, and it had to be basically coerced to find a time for my sister and I to meet up with his family and my parents. Right. because had it not been for my mom actually saying that he was coming to town, I would have never known. Right. So that's sort of relative. Yeah. Yeah. You know, when, like I said, I'm not going to get into it, but it's one of these things where the person that you grew up with moves away and suddenly becomes a person that you have no clue who this person is. You kind of go, what happened? happened i knew you for 24 years and you're very different now yeah you're very different yeah okay um very very strange yeah it's it's very odd oh geez i just looked at the time and it's like about well an hour with you know maybe taking away 10 minutes with technical difficulties but 10 minutes of technical difficulties but i did want to where where i was kind of going with this stupidity of intelligence is it kind of brings it back to farsight and there you lie they're they're an intelligent bunch of people but why they make boneheaded mistakes like putting out things that aren't ready for prime time is beyond me i i can't fathom it i understand that it's well we hate having the online pressure for people going well you promised it out so we need to put it out there because then you put it out there and everybody goes what this is what we've been waiting two years for you know these are the sort of things this is a commentary that's happening out there at the moment you know i'm looking in the thread at the moment that's out there on the forum and it's you know they're using the words catastrophe and just other very emotive words which you kind of expect if John Youssi what has been released and it's a real shame because yeah earlier in the show we were talking about why don't they just it might be that they had to release this first before they could start developing indie 500 right but there might have been some sort of like waterfall model they needed to follow there you know they might not have been able to like have everything running in parallel um and that's okay but i guess they have to they're committed to releasing a thing every month so if this was holding up that then i guess they had to do that but the the other thing too is they could have actually had this in a beta stream and then not promoted it to GA, because in Android, you can actually have two streams running. I'm using my hands here, which will mean nothing to you if you're listening to this after the fact, but you can have one stream as beta and one stream as GA, and they can actually go like this. They can actually shift and you can actually release the beta stream all the time and get the GA stream clean and just control your releases quite atomically in the Android development console. So if they wanted to do that, It would have been a little bit of extra work. They would have had to actually sort of have a branch for the UI and then a branch for the tables. But at the same time, one of the things that Zania brought up is that we have to actually on Android now update all 60 tables as part of this release. So that's killing me down here in Australia because our internet's so crap. So I have to now download 60 tables or... Because the update tables functionality has been kind of a little bit broken for a little while now. It doesn't really work that well, and I thought this was just a byproduct of that. But no, everyone is being faced with this problem. And, well, talk about hitting the servers. It's going to be an interesting time as everyone pulls down all the things from all the CDN nodes across the world. Have fun with that, ladies and gentlemen. Good times, good times. Hey, before we go, wishing all the fathers out there a happy Father's Day. Yeah, except for Australia because we don't celebrate it down here around now. So, no. Really? Father's Day is later in the year, I think. So, closer to your summer. So, around September, I think. Interesting. Oh, and Zane is popping in and saying not in Germany either. So, I guess it's just here in America. Father's Day is September, which technically is the start of spring in Australia. So it used to be a spring thing. Okay. Okay. Interesting. All right. Oh, and Cassano says that Father's Day is not official at all. Vaterstag. It probably isn't even called that. This is my pigeon German. I'm trying to do a terrible job at it. Vat a tag. Okay. Vat a tag. Vat a tag. Oh, that's pretty close. That's as good. Yeah. Okay, well, fine. So for us in America, Happy Father's Day. For the rest of the world, screw you. It's nice to celebrate your father's day. All right. Sounds like a good time to exit. It does. Hey, why don't you go ahead, like we said earlier, follow us on Blab. If you've been on Blab, then you'll know when we're coming on. Just look for Blockade. otherwise follow us on Twitter the show is at blockade myself I am at shut your traps that guy across the earth he's at Jared Morgz and then there is always those t-shirts that we love to promote that nobody's buying buy a shirt buy a shirt represent.com forward slash blockade dash shirt choose your color celebrate the podcast that it is. All right, gang, uh, we're out of here and we shall talk again next week. Uh, hopefully more information about the UI will, uh, become available. Maybe there'll be some changes and, uh, we'll hit it as always. All right. Until then. Amigos. Adios. Wizardamusement.com. The West Coast leader in classic pinball. makers of custom pinball shooter rods and buyer specifications swap out your standard ball plunger with something themed to your specific table installs in less than 5 minutes with no custom tools even if you don't own a table looks great as a pinball memento to admire prices start at $39 but mention Blockhead Podcast and receive 10% off your order wizardamusement.com sales, restoration, customization don't forget to leave a review on itunes or your favorite podcast hosting service that is delivered to you can't prove unless you tell us how now stop listening and place it in ball