- Joined
- Jan 24, 2015
Guys PLEASE stop calling John rich and out of touch just because he owns multiple luxury cars and pinball machines. In actuality he is an unemployed incel so in fact he is an everyman just like YOU!
Brianna Wu / John Walker Flynt - "Biggest Victim of Gamergate," Failed Game Developer, Failed Congressional Candidate
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fuckidunno
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- May 24, 2019
I think that's the one on the pinside pinball forum where he bitched he only wanted to hear praise for the limited edition he got.
IIRC he got moderated for that
- Joined
- Oct 20, 2020
I inherited one and man it's a complicated beast that I do not want to try to figure out. I took a stab at it once, but the ladder diagram is taller than me and I don't understand the logic behind how everything works. It wasn't worth the headache to sort myself (and I have a degree in Electrical Engineering, so I'm better equipped than most for the task) so I had someone else do it.
It took about 2 hours before I filed pinball machine repair under "Shit I don't want to figure out". I'm pretty sure John doesn't know how to do it either
Most people can't afford a $400 emergency, much less drop $6k on a toy car and however much else on the inflated prices the parts cost.
fuckidunno
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- May 24, 2019
sound like you might have had an old EM one (I've had a couple) - they are real similar to relay computers
they can be pretty challenging , esp as they age and reed switches can start kind of permaoxidizing (ah the joys of burnishing with a dollar bill ), , escapements for counters wear etc etc
like Ghostse was talking about - in some ways , even though they are complex the new ones can be easier to diagnose with sensors feeding into microcontrol (instead of discrete electromechanical logic), optical sensors (instead of dicey contacts)
I did see John had to ask on pinside about switch basics like last year...of course, he's a universal expert now. He probably learned pinball repair while Frank was busy with OCIP as a 2L...oh wait!
Sonichu-choo trainwreck
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Oct 16, 2019
LOL, another subject where random kiwifarmers probably know more abt John's hobby than John does.
He can buy a little product familiarity with Frank's credit card, but as far as the actual working knowledge
well, that would require work and not being the instant expert. neither one of those is something John can stomach
He can buy a little product familiarity with Frank's credit card, but as far as the actual working knowledge
well, that would require work and not being the instant expert. neither one of those is something John can stomach
- Joined
- Dec 31, 2018
That guy has no clue what he's talking about, these are investments that are only going to go up in value and then John's going to be able to cash in through the high demand.
Exactly like the above tweet where John provides the smart financial advice of dropping $6000 on a used Porsche, putting unknown hours of labor and parts into it so it can sit and accrue in value.
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
Hah, I remember John trying to justify his conspicuous consumption as an investment. Luckily, there's a wealth of information to debunk that assertion. Here's the current value of his $20k pinball machine as listed on Pinside:
Over the course of a single year, it's already lost a fifth of its value. While I doubt it's going to drop off a cliff, it's also unlikely to go above that initial $20k asking price for a long time.
That's not to say that there isn't a market for pinball collectors, nor that the value of a machine won't go up over time. As an example, here are a couple of graphs from some older tables I picked out at semi-random, the World Cup '94 table and the Indiana Jones table from 1993:
The prices did indeed go up over the time period that Pinside has tracked, about quadruple from start to finish, but note that it took these machines thirty years to reach this point. That's decades of ensuring they're being properly maintained, sinking God knows how much time and effort and money, or alternatively getting a broken machine for cheap and spending even more to get it back into working order. And hell, that's assuming you have a table that collectors would actually want. You'd have been far better off investing in something that gives actual returns over three decades instead of trying to turn a profit on a fucking pinball machine.
In short, do not trust John for financial advice. Or anything else, for that matter.
- Joined
- Jan 24, 2015
Another groundbreaking week of incisive political punditry.
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2017
From pinball friend:
If store them in a good environment (little temp/humidity fluxuations, low humidity) and as long as its not a more modern table, even if a table broke as long as you don't do anything to break it further you can mothball pinball tables and not pay an inordinate amount to get them back online - basically 2 years or 12 years, you just need to pay whatever the repair cost will be + whatever a full servicing will run.
but that's if you're a soulless wendigo who just has them sitting around and don't play them regularly.
My friend had self-intervention about pinball hording, and went from "Less than 20 but closer to that than I should have been" tables to I believe 5, but he says he makes sure to play them at least an hour a month -if he doesn't, he trades it for a new table (which even if traded with no cash exchanging hands is still usually $500-1000 in getting the things transported)
He compared owning pinball machines to owning boats: only morons expect to turn a raw profit even without factoring in maintenance.
But he said it was better than owning a boat, because "Boat owners only are happy the day they buy it and the day they sell it; but every time your get your table serviced its like buying it all over again!"
Also some blah blah blah where as long as there aren't any wonky gimmick parts involved, if you get tables of the same vintage +-15 years or so (and even better if you have ones from the same manufacturer) as long as you don't abuse them the maintenance delta between one table and five is negliable. Basically if the usual service can be done in one visit, you can usually negotiate a "one-price-for-all".
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
I trust John to provide retardation and lulz consistently.
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
Thanks for the info, I learn so much from the farms. Makes sense that it's not insanely expensive to keep a machine maintained, but still too much to turn a profit. You mentioned that the cost doesn't vary much "as long as it's not a more modern table." Earlier you said that modern tables, while easier to diagnose problems, also require specialized parts from the manufacturer, so I'm assuming that's what you were referring to, yes?
Speaking of hoarding, I think John's probably running into space limits, as shown in the pics of his game room he's posted to his Pinside page:
Five tables crammed together on one wall, three on another, and then two more just standing in the middle of the room. Maybe he could squeeze one more in there, but otherwise he'd have to start shoving these in other rooms. I know he's got nothing else that actually takes up his time since his "job" is just a LARP, but even so, I personally couldn't imagine dedicating enough time to each of ten different machines to make it worth owning that many. Admittedly, I'm not a pinball fanatic so maybe I just don't get it, but even if I did think I'd want my own machine, I don't think I could justify more than one.
And since I was asking earlier about the difference between modern and older tables, it's worth noting that the majority of John's collection came out in the last five years:
Going off of Pinside's value estimates, I was correct, John has indeed spent about $100k on fucking pinball machines. Fucking ridiculous.
- Joined
- Jan 24, 2015
Not enough big-tittied anime college girls to hold your attention I guess?
He said ugliest, John, not deadliest, and something tells me that His Holiness may have a point on this one.
He said ugliest, John, not deadliest, and something tells me that His Holiness may have a point on this one.
- Joined
- Dec 31, 2018
Uh, doesn't John spend half his time on Twitter advocating for World War III?
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2021
I wonder if he really did spend every Saturday for years wrenching? (Believable)
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2017
Looks I was unclear:
It costs a non-negliable amount of money to maintain a playable table regardless of vintage. Its not crippling but to the level of looking back over 20 years and realizing you could have bought a car with what you paid your service guy.
As my friend sperged:
"Classic" tables, which is almost anything before the 1980s.
"Vintage" tables, which are after 1980 but (to over simplify) don't contain PCBs with surface mounts (or ones that a human could work on without a microscope) so around 2000, but some tables from 90s don't qualify and some from fairly late into 00's do.
and "Modern" tables are anything with modern PCB integrated components.
(there is a lot more shit to be said about table operations and gimmicks and number of players in the market, but for the context of running costs, that's the important distinction)
If a table (especially Classic or Vintage table) breaks, as long as you unplug it and just let it sit, and as long as its in a place where the local ambient conditions won't make the parts decay/corrode/warp, it doesn't matter much if you have it repaired the next day or the next decade it'll cost about the same to get the machine back to playable. If you let it sit much longer than a year you'll need to have a yearly service done on it, but that's normal; If a contact is going corrode, it'll still end up corroding, capacitors might still explode, something else might fall out of spec, but those parts were going to do that whether the machine was running or not.
Its not like a car where if you have it sitting in the garage for 5 years you have to do a lot of extra work to bring it back. If money is tight, as long as you aren't running it you can just defer maintenance with barely any penalty.
Where you see the real horrorshows that cost new table money to have repaired is either it sat in some storage unit in orlando and shit warped, or someone decided to keep running the table despite the ozone smell and the fact the left side lights kept flickering everytime they started a new game.
(That or they tried to do maintenance themselves and really assed it up)
The somewhat exception to this is Modern tables can sometimes develop problems if mothballed due to the modern components (and in general being more complex). There are more tiny things to corrode (mainly capacitors), usually more "gimmicks", and... pre-internet tables were basically built to industrial specifications because they were working machines and you couldn't just order a 5-gallon bucket of 220ohms from china for a tenner and have it show up next week. Electonic bits were sometimes hard to come by and more expensive so if your table had a high failure rate of components you were going to be out of business quickly. You also weren't going to lose business if you charged and extra $100 on a $5,000 table because you used better parts.
Modern tables are not build to those specs (partly just because the old tables had to be over engineered to ensure they met specs) and with the collector market being a thing cutting 5-10% on costs can matter now. They just really aren't designed to sit unpowered for long periods.
The real issue with a mothballed table, even a classic/vintage one, is that if its not playable or hasn't been played in a long time, there might be a bunch of aging components waiting to fail and you won't know. If a table gets regular play, you can see issues coming before they become an actual problem - bumpers might not be as responsive, lights might flicker, etc. When you pull a table out of mothballs, even if everything powers on and runs right, you won't know if there's an impending failure.
What I'm talking about with difference in maintenance is...
So he had I believe it was a Lord of the Rings table - very complex, with movie clips and lots of things that would pop out of table - and he said was able to run that through a quarterly component & function check because the machine would do things like check to make sure the table was level, that various sub assemblies for mechanical parts were working to spec (or would run them and be like "Did gollum appear and then disappear and is the table segment flush and smooth, y/n"). But when he had one of the control boards develop a problem with a motor sensor, he had to order up a whole replacement assembly.
Vs. Some pulpy Buck Rogers knock-off themed one from the 80s where his guy did a yearly maintenance and was in there for over an hour testing a fuckton of leads, but when he saw something out of spec and traced it back, he just pulled out the solder gun and replaced a couple of thirty-cent parts and everything was back to where it should be.
He also had some issue with the table where he thought for sure the board was starting to warp, but really had opened it up to change a bulb and just didn't close it up exactly flush due to something sticking. What he thought was going to be an expensive repair was solved with a little oiling, but the service trip to get the board looked at was over a hundo. That was something the LotR table would have caught in a self-check.
A little more on the collector market, which is a "working arcade" - and by that I mean an arcade in a mall/shopping district that is run for profit and targets mostly teens - doesn't really do pinball anymore because of the maintenance costs. You see them in upscale arcades that are either dedicated to pinball or otherwise adults with scratch ("barcades"). This is a fairly large market but not what it was upto even the 90s when 'working arcades' would have at least 2-3 tables. This is why you see runs for tables in the hundreds or maybe thousand or a touch over.
So private individuals ordering tables make up an outsized share of the market, and when you are going direct to consumer, they aren't looking to turn a profit so you have to factor in costs.
What killed pinball for the working arcade was maintenance costs and the standardization of video cabinet hardware. to tl;dr in the 80s you needed to have a guy who knew how to work a multimeter for every machine in the arcade, so as long as the table hardware wasn't physically damaged the same guy who would solder up Asteroid could put new contacts on Buck Rogers. As Arcade cabinets moved to basically just be computers in a big box, it was cheaper to just order a new mainboard and only need to pay a booger-eater who could plug/unplug cables vs. paying a guy who could actually service electronic parts. (Actually it wasn't so much that it was cheaper it was that the guys who could actually do electronic work were in fairly short supply but its easy to find booger-eaters)
- Joined
- Jan 24, 2015
Islams vs Trannies: Whoever Wins, We Lose
Also John, shitposting in the comments section is not "being in the New York Times".
Also John, shitposting in the comments section is not "being in the New York Times".
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
You definitely aren't now, thank you for the extensive write-up! My takeaway with regards to John is that he's charged headlong into a rather expensive hobby (especially with ten machines to take care of), and now it's a question of whether he'll actually keep up with maintenance properly or end up paying a lot more for it in the long run when shit goes wrong.
Just pointless speculation on my part, but I don't think Johnny's bought a Porsche with Frank's money anytime recently. One wonders if he got into pinball collecting because Frank finally put his foot down on letting him get more cars only to let them sit around gathering dust. At least it's something they can both enjoy, but damn, it's ridiculous that they can drop six figures on pinball of all things and not even flinch at the cost. Man of the people, John Walker Flynt.
At least John doesn't have to worry too much about burglars, since most of their valuables are way too bulky to steal.
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2017
You have it right.
This is almost exactly like his porsche habit - expensive high-dollar-entry cost with high maintenance that John likely doesn't pay or defers until it sucks the value out of the already non-appreciating toys.
I have hope that these are actually getting maintained. He's got 10 and no "classics"; everything is at least from the nineties, and his two 90s tables (ST:TNG and Twilight Zone) are popular high-run tables so it should be standard internals. Its not like cars where each on gets its own time on the rack; if you got 10 machines, you just have the tech come out every year or so to check them and because its 10 machines it ends up being fairly cheap on per-machine basis ("$200 to have the guys just show up?!" vs "$20 per table to have the guy show up") and again, if you get a agreement going with a local or regional guy, you can really save.
(i.e. my friend doesn't have a local, the guy works for a place that services a few counties; he'll get a call "hey, I have my guys nearby working a call, want them do your service? I'll drop the site-fee since they're already there")
When he takes pictures is likely the only time those machines get powered on anymore. The real issue that a lot of people don't factor in with the home arcade is noise. Tables are loud. even if you disconnected the speakers, there is a physical component of the bumpers and flippers and steel balls rolling. Now, when everyone in the house is doing something loud, like having a party or whatever, you barely notice. But if someone is trying to read a book, that shit can get distracting.
My friend used to have his arcade in the attic and this resulted in he and his wife ended up having a huge fight that resulted in them buying a new house that had a guest house that he turned into his arcade - which also solved the issue of environmental controls where he has a dehumidifier that drains into the plumbing.
The potential issue is he has them in his basement in Massacheuttus. The machines should be OK on temp because the fact they are in a basement should level out the temps. The first issue is humidity - basements tend to not just get humid but have humidity swings. Humidity that bounces is worse than just high humidity because the wood components will swell and then shrink at different rates. It can also be bad in basements in the winter or summer because often basements are uninsulated/lightly insulated concrete. But maybe that's not an issue in that area, or john has humidity control (even if its just proper ventilation)
But even if that's the case, he's one foundation crack during spring thaw or one burst pipe ANYWHERE in the house from an event that would make backing his porsche into a bollard look like peanuts.
Anywya, I'll stop giving you 3rd hand pinsperg now.
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2022
If someone wasn't an expert ~excavateuresse~ then why would a woman own an expensive excavator? That's John's logic. Sort of like Yaniv's reasoning where him simply being in possession of a tampon made him a genuine woman. Why else would he have a tampon/MacPro/Most expensive Linus Screwdriver?
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2022
I could see a modern It version updated and centered around that. Including kids asking "uhm, Mrs. Wu, why does it look like nothing belongs in this room?"Speaking of hoarding, I think John's probably running into space limits, as shown in the pics of his game room he's posted to his Pinside page:
