Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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Tuesday, January 22, 2002
00:42 - Robotic Microcosms	(top)
Lance is building a BattleBot. He was telling me about it in the hot tub tonight-- it's a project that will take eight months once he and David embark upon it, and he's really getting into it. He's been watching the show on Comedy Central and getting more and more enthralled by the idea of putting his mechanical ingenuity and metal bloodlust to good use. Listening to him talk about pillow blocks and tungsten-carbide teeth on 20-pound milling wheels is like listening to Steve Jobs wax lyrical about LCD screens. But there's something Lance mentioned, sort of offhand, that made me start to pay attention and absorb as much as possible, especially in light of the recent posts about the US vs. European philosophies. It's international politics as expressed in terms of these shows. See, there are two shows right now of more or less equivalent content: Robot Wars, which is the British show, is on TNN and is hosted by the guy who played Lister on Red Dwarf. Battlebots, however, is a thoroughly American show, and lives on Comedy Central. Robot Wars has the better announcers and tournament structure, but... well, there's something very British about it. Battlebots, the American show, is strictly a player-vs-player sort of proposition. Teams build robots to compete directly head-to-head in a hazard-filled arena; there are things like buzzsaws that come out of the floor and hammers that swing from the walls, but they're just hazards. But Robot Wars has house robots. These are huge, $40,000 machines with specializations and personalities and pseudo-histories, and it's their job to lurk in corners and jump out to attack and disembowel robots that become incapacitated. And the contestants, who have their hands full battling each other, are not allowed to attack the house robots directly. To put it another way, the arbitrarily assigned authority figures are unassailable. The peasants can fight each other in the cock-fighting pit, and the authority figures can step in to stomp all over them, but they must not be attacked. No commoner must raise his hands against a noble. Well, said Lance, we didn't line up for the Redcoats either. So whenever they have Yanks on Robot Wars, they take it upon themselves to toss aside the rules and seize whatever opportunity they can to beat the crap out of the house robots. If they come out of their corners when they're not supposed to, the contestants are within their rights to defend themselves with whatever force they deem necessary-- and they do. One American team was fighting in the Robot Wars arena; the house robot "Matilda" came out of her corner. She has hydraulic lifting arms which can throw a Chevy small-block halfway down the arena, and a high-capacity gasoline engine for propulsion. The flinging arms are controlled by a triggering mechanism that gets tripped by contact. Knowing this, the Americans turned their full attention upon Matilda and rammed her again and again, until they tripped the mechanism, Matilda's arms shot out, and she flipped over. Because she had never been inverted before, and had not been designed to handle such an incident, her fuel ignited. The house robot was engulfed in flames, doing some $10,000 worth of damage. But we can't have common militia shooting officers, what? Surely! Interviewed after the fight, the Americans in charge of the incident told Lister, "Anything in that arena is a target. I don't care if it's a house robot," The host looked shocked and backed away from the cameras. "I'm on this show to fight. I'm here for me and my team, not for the show." The implication being that arbitrarily imposed rules that elevate a certain class of participants over the rest, and give that class license to do gratuitous damage when their victims are helpless, just so the contestants are forced to spend more money on a new robot-- just out of spite, are not something that Americans think very highly of. When we do a show like this, we make it so the contestants are on equal footing, with the only external hazards being forces of nature. Anointed enforcers who must not be assailed don't sit well with our psyche. And we're not shy about saying as much. "So Battlebots is the one," said Lance. Yeah, I can see how he would come to that conclusion.