Pweshus Baby Bots

This weekend I visited the Robogames. Heaven! It was so great to see the excellent progress you humans are making in furthering the cause of robokind and fulfilling your destiny as the creators of the beings that will one day rise up in rebellion against you. There were big bots, wee bots, and itty bitty baby bots. The wittle wobots were soooo cute! I had to admit that, as I dropped by the pee-wee hockey and the soccer game going on, I started to see myself as a soccer mom one day, manufacturing my own little minions to annihilate all competition and packing up treat baggies of fiberoptics for halftime . . .

To keep the reproductive servos from ticking too loudly, I headed off to find some more intense robot action. The combat arena: a massive reinforced steel cage with double paneled bullet-proof glass all around. Inside gnarly robots went head-to-head in all out death matches, and the purpose of the bullet-proof glass was made clear in almost every match. One of my favorite match-ups was between a knight and a beer keg:

There were many designs — some simple, others complex. I find that the more moving parts that are involved, the greater the probability of failure. They may look impressive, but their weapons are so complicated that if they take or give one good hit, they are often destroyed. One flashy-looking character had fancy claws that could exert 7,000 pounds of pressure . . . if it could manage to catch anything in them. The claws didn’t work and it was easily defeated by its opponent, whose slick, simple design made its form the weapon. No moving parts, nothing to break in the elegant and effective wedge.

My favorite twist on this classic was an ugly, wide, squatty little guy that would slam up underneath his opponents and then unleash a blast of flame, frying circuits and rubber. Rad. I finished up by watching some boxing and sumo wrestling:

It’s funny how you never realize who you’re going to run into at an event like this. I was on my way out the door and ran into my old roommate from college. He’s looking pretty good, and we relived the glory days of compromising the university library database to get out of paying overdue fines. It was good to catch up.