And as the nail sunk in the cloud...

Sitting out on the porch during the first rainstorm we’ve had after a nearly a month of 95-100 degree highs this spring. It feels good. It feels necessary for some reason. It’s been a rough month. They all seem rough these days, don’t they?

Nicole made me some genmaicha to bring out here. I’m a very fortunate gents.

Today I Learned: Marie-Therese, the daughter of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, was the (disputed) Queen-Consort of France for 20 minutes in August of 1830. We were watching Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and I did a little googling to see what became of the kids. Marie-Therese, the eldest child, lived quite an interesting life that was probably a good deal more eventful than her mother’s. Apparently, and it is not impossible that I’m not fully following the bouncing ball here, royalists would periodically try to restore the monarchy and prop up some fellow claiming to be Marie-Therese’s brother (both of her brothers died young) and she would inevitably be involved in some fashion.

Anyway, the thought of someone holding an office for 20 minutes or so is the sort of thing that interests me and I thought y’all might find it interesting as well.

I did get a little joy today from an unexpected source. I saw that Sunderland A.F.C. were promoted from League One in England (which is, inexplicably, the third highest level of English football) and I thought of an old friend who has remained a loyal Black Cats supportor. I shot off an email and he responded almost immediately, which delighted me no end. Weird little connections like that are disproportionately delightful, aren’t they?

We visited my mother for her birthday last weekend. I’m not gong to lie: She looks Old. That’s to be expected as, in point of fact, she is old, but it’s still….I’m proud of her. She’s still learnng things, still changing her mind, and still muddling through trying to do right under the assumption that, if people just do the right thing, then things will work out.

She adores Nicole, which speaks well of the both of them.

You can’t tell by reading, but I just stopped typing for ten minutes thinking about mom. She’s a good egg. A lot of what I like about myself came directly from her.

We are, all things considered, relatively well off. I’m employed, insured, and we can make ends meet even if there isn’t quite so much slack in the rope as there was a few years ago. I can only imagine how bad some people are feeling the rising price of everything right now.

Just like with the people who get the disease, COVID is going to have serious long-term affects on the nation and, specifically, the economy. I don’t have any idea how to fix any of this; when so many of the links in the chain break at the same time, even trained experts struggle to come up with solutions. I can say that diminished buying power plus food supply chain shortages are a recipe for Very Bad Things (side note: Perhaps the biggest problem the Louis XVI faced was inflation brought on by deregulation and poor harvests. Weird how relevant that feels now).

All this and the fact that the pandemic hasn’t been resolved in any meaningful way (unless you find “just declaring it’s over because you’re tired of it” meaningful) makes me very nervous. This doesn’t end well.

I have quite a bit more on my mind, but the rain is nice and I’m no longer in the mood to grip. Tomorrow is the last day of the Premier League season, so I’m getting up early(ish) one last time and really ought to be hitting the hay. Goodnight all, and I hope things are good in your neck of the woods tonight.

-RK

Short but (sorta) Sweet

Hey everyone (my beloved handful o’ folks)! It’s been quite the year/month/week/day already hasn’t it? I won’t try to recap the last six weeks. They’ve been a lot. They’ve been a lot and then some. Work has been whelming, I’ve seen so very many doctors (largely preventative/precautionary stuff), Nicole had to take a trip for family stuff, Nicole came back. It really feels as though an entire year has been crammed into a few months. Here’s hoping things unwindulax a little in the summer.

Today I Learned: You know those round things you see on the Buddha’s head in all those statues? I always assumed they were a very specific hairstyle. I was wrong.

Those are snails shells. I had no idea. They are known as the 108 snail martyrs. I won’t spoil the story, but it’s a good one. I’ll certainly never look at the statues the same way again.

Anyway, after all of the busy, busy weeks of April and March, I just wanted to remind everyone to feel grateful for what’s good in your life. Odds are pretty good you deserve those good things, but that doesn’t mean you can feel gratitude. Besides, “deserving” is no guarantee of “having.”

Small snail on a big leaf of lettuce in the garden.

Nicole planed a garden to provide a home for the baby snails we have in our tank that we can’t keep. Here’s the first one we saw on a big piece of leaf of lettuce in the middle of the garden.

That all for now. I hope everything is going well for you, and that you’re in a place where you can appreciate it.

-RK

Post

Ever have one of those weeks where every day feels like it’s own week?

In addition to work being at one of those crescendos you get when a bunch of big moving pieces trying to all fit into a tiny time window, things outside of work have been…dramatic? That would have been nice. Sometimes, it’s like Ciaran says: “Dull is best.”

“Oh Ridley, don’t be such a downer. You don’t want dull!”

I beg to differ. Let’s start with the procedure I had this week. A common thing, but not entirely inconsequential as it involved a couple of days of prep, a severely restricted diet, and a little general anesthesia. If you read the last post, you know we were/are having plumbing difficulties. Prep for this particular procedure and plumbing difficulties are a bad, bad combination.

To add a little spice to the mix, a truck damaged the only gas line leading into town, meaning that the entire area had no heat. In Texas, that’s not normally a big deal, but we were seeing temperatures in the 30s (outside) and mid-50s (inside). This was unpleasant.

Yesterday, we finally got an answer as to the source of our plumbing difficulties: The folks who flipped this house cut one very important corner when putting in the shower. When you merge a shower drain into the main drainpipe, a responsible plumber would put in a t-joint and everything would be fine. If you were lazy and irresponsible, you would just drill a hole in the drain pipe and run a pipe from the shower down into it. Doing it the lazy way meant that there was a length of pipe running across the drain and that length of pipe collected paper and such and eventually clogged.

Also, word to the wise: Shitty construction is NOT covered by home warranties.

We have temporary relief at the cost of our shower, so yay! We can use toilets and wash dishes again. That’s a huge win. But, the fix is going to be pricey, so significantly less yay.

The good news is that the procedure, which was strictly a routine thing and not prompted by any specific concerns, went swimmingly. No problems were discovered, so it’ll be another decade before I have to do this again. For folks approaching 50 and facing their first encounter with this procedure, I can tell you from experience: The prep is far, far worse than the procedure itself.

So, we have most of our plumbing, heat has been restored, and a Thing I Was Dreading is in the rear view mirror. Ah well, that’s what therapy is for, right?

There’s more going on, but there are stories that are not mine to tell. It’s just a very sad time in too many ways. So, I hope this finds you well and that you’re safe and warm and generally in a good place right now. That’s all I got.

-RK

Pre

Strange times, no?

I’ve been burying myself in distractions and avoiding starting things for the last couple of months. This is partially due to the world being in quite a state in a way that seems to be affecting pretty much everyone I encounter. My attention span can be measured with a stop watch. It’s a general malaise tugging at me, and, quite likely, you’re feeling it too even if you might be reacting differently.

There have been some more specific things as well. It turns out that plumbing is a very important feature in a modern, or at least semi-modern, home. When it goes bad, it can go very, very bad indeed. Things are coming out of places that they are manifestly not meant to come out of. Some very disturbing things are coming out of some of the least-appropriate places and no I will not be getting more specific.

Here’s a bit of advice to anyone looking to purchase an older home: Be absolutely certain that you have a drain clean-out. I didn’t know what one was, and I wish someone had warned me. It turns out that, if you don’t have one, the things your home warranty will cover are extremely limited. The good news is that we have one now. The not-so-good news is that, one emptied saving account later, we have a clean-out but we still have the aforementioned problems.

Our plumber is stumped, which does not fill one with great confidence. This is a problem, as is likely, nay, certain, that I will be in need of stout plumbing in the coming days. The next 48 hours promise to be interesting.

Oh, and the situation in Europe is not filling me with hope. I won’t pretend to know the best way for the United States to navigate what looks like a series of “lesser of two evils” choices. I just don’t know enough and don’t have it in me to balance one set of lives against others. But…I have become aware of some very obvious propaganda being spread by people who should know better. I’m not going to be naming names, but I’m disappointed. I just want this to resolve without a world war and with Ukraine’s sovereignty intact and as little loss of life as possible. I’m not sure that those options are on the table, but I can hope.

This is a bummer of a post, I know. Honestly, there’s a lot more, but the other stories are not mine to tell so I’ll just leave it at that. I hope I can get through my bits, can resolve what is in my power to resolve, can survive what isn’t, and can help the people folks who are going through it.

-RK

P.S. It’s not all bad. there have been a lot of good things in my life over the last few weeks, and I’ll get to those. My head’s just not there right now.

G.O.A.T.

One of the things that never fails to excite me is hearing some new (at least new to me) music that gets under my skin in ways I wasn’t expecting. This used to be a pretty regular experience for me, particularly in the 1989-91 and 2003-06 eras, but I’m not quite the consumer of new music I was so it’s been a while.

And then I clicked on Polyphia’s “G.O.A.T.”

I didn’t know what to expect but I can assure you I didn’t expect this. I’m not a big fan of “musicianship for the sake of musicianship,” but that’s not what this is. The musicianship is absolutely off the charts, but it’s catchy as hell, it’s a really unusual mixture of genres and techniques, and the composition is masterful.

That said, I didn’t really have the vocabulary or the experience to describe it. So, now fully committed to exploring the rabbit hole, I started watching reaction videos. I watched a lot of reaction videos. I find it kind of comforting that a lot of the people doing these videos have the same reaction and the same struggles with coming up with suitable words. Here’s one of the better examples by Chase Carneson:

I cannot tell you how many of the videos start with “I’ve never heard of them before, but they call their song ‘Greatest of All-Time'. We’ll see about that…” and then stopping the video after the opening guitar lick and saying “I was not prepared for this. Wow.”

What gets really interesting is seeing the different descriptions vary based on where the video maker is coming from. The guitarists are obviously just blown away by Tim Henson but they often struggle with what are unfamiliar rhythmic elements. On the other hand, the drummers tend to be all over the bass and drums and call out the trap music elements immediately. The producers are fascinated by all of the production and engineering elements that seem very out of the hard rock element but fit perfection.

My personal point of reference would probably be early-80s King Crimson with Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew, Tony Levin, and Bill Bruford. There are similarities: The wild mix of guitar techniques, the clean tones, the incredibly tight playing, and the non-traditional song structures. It falls short as an analogy. Polyphia’s approach to incorporating production, samples, hip-hop, and whatever else is unlike anything else I’m aware of.

There really isn’t a vocabulary to describe this kind of cross-genre virtuosity. They seem to be not so much breaking the rules of what you can do so much as…ignoring them? Acting as though the rules don’t exist. It’s not so much rebellious in the way punk is/was/was supposed to have been and more like Neo at the end of The Matrix just realizing that the boundaries don’t exist.

That might seem like hyperbole for less than four minutes of music but I’ve spent a lot of time with this song over the last month or so and I just start giggling every time I hear it. I’m still loving watching YouTube reviewers see it for the first time and try to describe it. At the end of the day, it wouldn’t matter if the song wasn’t great and, not gonna lie, it gets stuck in my head for days at a time.

So, yeah. I’ve been a little obsessed. I wanted to share, and I needed to get some of this down on (not exactly) paper. This song has opened my ears to quite a few newer bands playing in this neighborhood: Animals as Leaders, Yvette Young and Covet, Sarah Longfield, and Ichika Nito (plus, of course, more Polyphia songs too). I’m not even a guitar guy, but…man, it feels good to hear stuff that excites me. I hope you enjoy it too.

-RK

Capybara Encounter

A couple of weeks ago, we got to meet capybaras.

I’m just going to pause for a moment to let that one sink in. If you know anything about me or, even better, you know anything about my wife, then you know that capybaras are a sort of platonic ideal animal for us. (Side note: I’ve found I am drawn more and more to gentle creatures: Snails, capybaras, sloths, turtles, etc. I’m not sure if this is a function of getting older or just refining my tastes as there are too many variables for me to be certain.) They’re beautiful, they’re peaceful, they get along with every other creature if the photos are to believes (except for jaguars, piranhas, and, of course, pelicans), and they’re good comrades.

Unlike in countries like, say, Japan, where capybaras are accorded the proper level of respect, our neck of the woods doesn’t offer many opportunities to do meet-and-greets with the noble carpincho. Nicole got a recording of Fred the capybara at the Dallas Zoo for my birthday. I dropped by to visit when I was in town, but alas, Fred is only available for his public on specific days. There’s a minor zoo nearby that has one capy, but…it’s not a great situation.

So, imagine my surprise when I “discovered” that the Austin Zoo not only had three capybaras but that they offered the opportunity to hand-feed them for half an hour. “Discovered” is in quotations marks on account of the fact that a friend called this to my attention three years ago and I completely forget. That is a very me thing to do. So, I scheduled a meetup on the first available weekend and marked the calendar.

Before I get into the event, I’d like to give huge kudos to the Austin Zoo, a place I never visited when I lived there. Not only was it a great experience, but I was glad to learn that they are a rescue zoo. The animals are, by and large, surrendered by people who can’t care for them and they aren’t bred in captivity. The goal is to give these animals the best possible life they can if they can’t be returned to the wild.

And no one can side-eye like a capybara.

So, enough stalling. What is it like to meet a capybara? Well, let’s start by saying that these three were semi-wild. They’re not nearly as comfortable around people as the ones at the Nagasaki Bio Park. They’re very skittish and cautious. But, when the zookeeper led us inside the cage with a big bucket of leaf lettuce, they wandered over from the sunning area by the pond. One slowly approached and, after no small amount of side-eyeing, took the lettuce from my hand.

But, before long, all three were literally eating out of our hands. Enthusiastically eating, to be more precise. Diego, Enrique, and Olivia all warmed to us and gave us their undivided attention. A word to the wise: Be careful reaching below their line of sight. I dropped a piece of lettuce and tried to pick it up and scared Diego a bit. He jumped slightly and had to re-evaluate the situation before coming back to continue with his lunch.

Now, while they are ever so gentle to other creatures, they can get a little feisty with each other. Olivia and Enrique had a little spat over a particularly delectable leaf and Oliva, the head of the group, would not brook any challenge to her choice of victuals.

Spoiler alert: They made up.

I should probably note at this point that I’ve never seen Nicole look so happy. I mean, can you blame her? So…what else? Their fur, which we were not allowed to touch, is rough like coconut and not nearly as pervasive as it looks. You can see their skin, which resembles fish scales, through almost any patch. Their teeth are too ludicrously large to be scary. They can move their lips independently like ungulates, which took a little getting used to. They came very close to us, close enough that our hands touched their noses when we were feeding them, but we were never in any danger of a bite.

Lauren, the zookeeper, said that there were two kinds of people who did the encounter. The kind who didn’t know anything at all about capys and the people who were obsessed with them. She sussed out which we were immediately but still hand plenty of good info on ‘em to share. She said that, normally, after eating, they vacated the area immediately. We were fortunate in that they chose to just plop down and start resting in a ring around us rather than going back to their sunny spot.

The best bit, though? They were so peaceful. They had peace in excess. The exuded peace. It was uncanny. I don’t think I’ve ever met a mood-altering animal before but I felt happy, energetic, and (this sounds so dorky) cleansed after meeting them.

So, if you’re interested in capybaras, this is an absolutely fabulous way to meet them. They’re extremely well cared for, they have a lot of space, their own ponds, trees, and folks who seem to genuinely care about them. I can’t recommend it highly enough, but that won’t stop me from trying.

-RK

P.S. When they were forming their ring around us and about to drop to the ground, we heard them chirping!

Oh. Em. Gee.

Diego is ready for his closeup. The gloves are as much to protect the animals as anything.

How Tipped Minimum Wage Works

I’m seeing quite a few discussions on social media regarding wages that are below minimum wage in the United States. I’m glad this is getting a lot of attention, but it’s raising more questions and spawning incomplete and incorrect answers. I have some experience with this and thought it might be helpful to share what I know.

For the purposes of examples, I’m going to use the national minimum wage ($7.25), but it works the same way for all sub-minimum wage tipped employees. I’ve been working in this space for 35 years now, so I may gloss over some things that need explaining because I’m just so used to them, so please bear with me.

Here’s how it works:

1. The minimum wage is $7.25/hour. All employees must be paid $7.25 an hour at a minimum.

2. There is something called a “tip credit” that employers are allowed to claim for tipped employees. In most cases, this is an amount of $5.12 per hour. What this means is that the employer can claim that $5.12 an hour worth of an employee’s tips aren’t really tips, they’re wages paid by the employer.

3. To get to $7.25 an hour, the employers must pay $2.13 an hour in addition to the $5.12 an hour tip credit. So, while the employer is effectively paying $2.13 an hour, they are administratively paying $7.25 an hour and meeting minimum wage requirements.

4. Overtime for subminimum wage is weird. The “time and a half” is not $2.13 times 1.5. ($3.20 an hour). It’s $7.25 * 1.5 = 10.88 - 5.12 (tip credit) = $5.76/hour. This is one of the reasons that the distinction between tip credit and a flat $2.13 an hour wage matters. It also affects things like paid vacation, sick pay, etc. If your restaurant is just paying time and a half on a subminimum wage, they are absolutely breaking the law.

5. If an employee does not make $5.12 an hour in tips, the difference must be made up in paid wages by the employer. If the employee only makes (or claims) $4.00 an hour in tips, the employer must add another $1.12 an hour in wages. Employers hate doing this and will usually find a way to get rid of employees who do this.

6. Now, in addition to tip employees being paid at a subminimum wage, there are also indirectly tipped employees and the same rules apply to them. Indirectly tipped employees are employees who are given are paid a portion of the directly tipped employees tips. Jobs within restaurants that qualify to be indirectly tipped are (traditionally) hosts, bussers, food runners, and bartenders (who are directly tipped as well).

7. This one’s a bit technical. There were guidelines for the maximum percentage of a directly tipped employee’s tips that they could be forced to pay to indirectly tipped employees. In Texas, this was 15% of their tips (see section 3b of the Texas Workforce Commission document on Tip Pooling/Tip Sharing). So, let’s do a little math here. I worked 5 hours and I made $50 in tips. My restaurant requires that I contribute 15% of my tips to the indirectly tipped employees, so I pay $7.50 into the tip pool. We’re good, right?

Not quite. The TWC document notes:

However, only those tips that are in excess of tips used for tip credit…may be taken for a pool.

Remember, the tip credit taken by the restaurant means that $5.12/hour of my “tips” are classified as “wages” instead. So, $25.60 (5 hours times $5.12) should be subtracted from my tips before calculating what I contribute to the tip pool. I only made $24.40 in tips, so I should be contributing $3.66. I am actually contributing THIRTY-ONE PERCENT OF THE TIPS I RECEIVED ($7.50 divided by $24.40) TO INDIRECTLY TIPPED EMPLOYEES.

8, There are (or were, in some states) limits to how much non-tipped work a tipped employee can do and still be classified as a tipped employee. This is to prevent employers from using people being paid subminimum wage to do maintenance and cleaning work for most of their shift, knowing that they’d make enough in tips to bring their take for the day above $7.25 an hour. The limit is/was normally 20% of their hours and you had best believe that employers milked this for all it was worth. It’s called “sidework” and it’s pretty unethical.

9. Unfortunately, from 2016-2020, a lot of these guidelines and laws in 7 and 8 were weakened, the interpretations changed, and enforcement of the remaining rules was not pursued. The 15% maximum tip percentage and 20% maximum not-tipped work guidelines are effectively dead in many states.

10. The net here is that tipping and subminimum wage should just be done away with. The practice of tipping is extremely problematic for a number of reasons: It’s racist, it’s sexist, it’s an administrative nightmare that encourages fraud. So when you’re dining out, know this:

* Your server is likely making less than minimum wage as a base wage.

* Much of their time at this wage is spent doing things that don’t generate tips.

* They are forced to share the tips you think you are giving directly to them with the other employees.

This whole thing is stupid, too. If tip credit and subminimum wage were outlawed tomorrow, every restaurant could raise their prices by 20%, which would be no net change to their patrons since they wouldn’t be tipping, and could pay their employees exactly what they were making before with the additional money. There’s literally no change to the outcome except that there’s a lot less administration and now the managers control how their employees are paid instead of the customers.

So, that’s how it all works. Let me know if you have any questions on this. I know it’s complicated and I know I probably assumed that some of this information was more generally known than it is.

-RK

Five Years

The obvious Bowie song link would be wildly inappropriate here, but don’t think I wasn’t tempted.

Five years ago last Friday, Nicole and I were married. It was both a blessing, in that we got to have a party with a lot of great friends, and a formality, in that we’d been permanently bonded in an informal sense long before the event. Thanks to all of you who were there and those who wished us well from a distance as it wasn’t the largest affair. It was a lovely day and commemorating its anniversary is the most important holiday on my calendar.

A tiny kitten protected by a huge stuffed tiger

Of course, he seems to have been well-protected…

This year, I took a week off (mostly, because you never really leave work these days) and we got as far off the grid as we can and still remain near enough to visit the kitten because what kind of a person doesn’t go visit kittens?

Nicole found a place in Fentress, Texas and, if you’ve never heard of Fentress, you’re not alone. It’s only 30 miles from here, but it might as well be on another planet. It’s a little resort/camping place called Wahwahtaysee on the banks of the San Marcos river on a big patch of farmland in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

That it to say, it suited our needs perfectly.

Our room was an absurdly large “tent” well worthy of the quotation marks as the walls were wooden and only the top was three layers of canvas. Gorgeous bathroom with a big tub and bigger shower, galley kitchen, comfy bed, living room area, and one of the most over-the-top grilling patios I’ve ever seen, featuring both a gas and charcoal grill.

tent interior

There ought to be a word for “glamorous camping” but I can’t think of anything that doesn’t sound douchy AF.

Freed from having to interact with any other humans, either in person or online, we did what came naturally: We relaxed.

moon through the trees

We grilled, obviously, drank a little, napped a lot, read, chilled, and, of course, missed the kitten. We also saw stars, although not as many as we had expected as the full moon was pretty greedy with regards to the light.

The tents came with golf carts which, well, the percentage of the grounds where the carts could go was awfully small. The interesting bits down by the river required navigating trails that were off-limits for the carts, or at least for drivers with my skill. . We made due with taking it off the trail and into a recently plowed field and sitting on the back bench as the sun went down

The second-best sunset we saw. We were a little too enthralled with the first to pull out our cameras.

What else do people of our age and maturity do when on vacation in the middle of nowhere? Nicole brought bubbles and they were magnificent.

soap bubbles on grass

What else? Well, the outdoor shower was fantastic. There was more wildlife than we expected. We assumed we’d see deer, armadillos, spiders (oh so many spiders), and birds. What we did not expect was to be awakened in the wee hours by a mountain lion. We only heard it, and if you’ve never heard one, I can assure you that there is no mistaking it. Wooden walls were very, very welcome at that point.

Friday was our anniversary night and decided to celebrate it with…lobster rolls, which seemed appropriate as we had a lobster roll truck at our wedding. We hit up Little Em’s in San Antonio which has an extremely limited menu but it also had exactly what we wanted. It’s been years since we’ve been to a fancy restaurant, but they had a lovely patio and it didn’t seem particularly risky.

If it was risky, it was worth it. Holy smokes, the lobster rolls were fantastic, just absolutely fresh and loaded with, well, lobster. The tuna appetizer was perfect, and the service was great. Oh, and the people watching? It’s in the King William district of San Antonio, so the people watching was very on point and I’m not just saying that because a dude tried to parallel park his sports car across the street from us and gave up after trying for literally ten minutes.

So, wow. Five years that flew by like minutes. Ten years together now, which also seems impossibly long considering how short it seems. My big takeaway here? Find yourself someone you really love being with and make sure you have chances to have some quality, uninterrupted time with them because, from my point of view, there’s nothing better.

-RK

What we have here...

…is not a shortage of workers. We have a shortage of jobs in these United States of America. Now, I’m going to use a definition of “job” that has fallen out of favor, but it’s certainly in line with historical usage: A “job” is paid work that provides a good living in a standard 40-hour workweek. That’s the minimum standard for a “job.” Anything else is a hobby, a side hustle, or some such thing.

Now, since I mentioned the word “minimum,” this is when I should bring up “minimum wage.” If your upbringing was anything like mine, you were probably taught that minimum wage was never meant to be a living wage; it existed to provide work for teenagers and other people who apparently did not need and/or deserve a living wage.

This is, of course, absolutely false.

Minimum wage was supposed to have been a good living wage from the very beginning. Here’s what the father of the minimum wage had to say about labor during his first term:

“In my Inaugural, I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By “business” I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages, I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living. Throughout industry, the change from starvation wages and starvation employment to living wages and sustained employment can, in large part, be made by an industrial covenant to which all employers shall subscribe.”
— President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933

I would say that, while we can argue about the specifics of what constitutes “living wages,” I think the intent is pretty clear. The bare minimum any business should pay any employee is a living wage. I threw in the bit about the 40 hour work week because it’s the only way you get parity with the different classes of workers described in Roosevelt’s statement. In addition, companies have become altogether too dependent on abusing workers who are exempt from overtime:

Fun fact: It is illegal to do volunteer work for your employer. Working extended hours for no additional pay isn’t illegal, even though it’s the same thing. This needs to stop. That brings us to “living wage, 40 hour work week.” That’s a “job.”

Now, it may shock you to discover that there are many, many “jobs” that do not meet either-or, in many cases, both of these two standards. The minimum wage is nowhere near a living wage and, speaking from experience, getting into triple-digit hours during a crunch isn’t unheard of. Not only do people pay a massive physical toll for doing this, but it is, in essence, volunteering free labor to your company and keeping them from having to hire two more people, depressing wages, and taking away jobs.

You might ask yourself “Well if these people are not receiving a living wage, how come they are, you know, living?” That’s an excellent question! There’s no one answer for it. In some cases, it really is a case of teenagers working nights and weekends for spending money. In others, they’re working multiple, full-time jobs, which is deeply problematic.

Most people who live on sub-living wages receive assistance. That means that government money (“muh tax dollars!”) is keeping these folks afloat. Or, to put a finer point on it, the government is subsidizing company profits by allowing them to pay a sub-living wage to their employees. Let me restate it for emphasis: Any company paying less than a living wage making its profits off of government subsidies.

This brings me to another point: Your employer is your employer, not your family or your friend. You and your co-workers are a cost to the company. Companies try to minimize costs because, you know, capitalism. There’s nothing uniquely sinister about a company trying to pay you as little as possible, trying to get as many free hours from you as they can, or replacing you when it’s cost-effective to do so. The whole system is set up that way. In fact, each company should do all those things in order to remain a company.

They probably shouldn’t be so open about how much they enjoy it as this guy, though. This guy is an idiot and he’s wrong about how they treat dogs in the military, too.

So what was my point? My point was that, with assistance actually going to people and not just businesses during this pandemic, workers are able to eschew low-wage, dangerous jobs (look up the COVID rates for restaurant cooks when you have a sec; it’s too depressing for me to link) and hold out for jobs that pay a living wage. I don’t blame anyone who does this. No business has a right to cheap, sub-living-wage labor.

Now, it’s been pointed out to me that there is no actual need for as many workers as currently exist. This is true. It’s also been mentioned that this model of sustenance being based on work is a crappy way to organize society and this is also true. But, I’m just trying to color within the lines for once. There’s really no way to make capitalism “work.” I’m just trying to highlight the fact that it has been badly corrupted over the last forty years and suggest that going back to the original concept behind minimum wage would make a bad thing better.

So, happy Labor Day, y’all.


Bass YouTube is Best YouTube

So, what have I been up to while this place was collecting cobwebs? Mostly house things, a lot of medical stuff, no small amount of avoiding doing stuff I’m supposed to do, and, when there was time, I watched a lot of YouTube, which is something I’ve never done before.

I’ve been missing out.

I’ve been complaining for years about the lack of a la carte television and I’ve known the whole time that you can find pretty much anything you want on YouTube, but I never it together. Nicole, on the other hand, has been on this forever and I suspect she thinks it’s cute that I’m just now coming around. Not for the first time, if I’m being honest.

Anyway, I wanted to share some of the channels that I’ve found to be the most fun.

Music and, most importantly, bass:
Adam Neely: Adam’s channel was my gateway to music YouTube. He’s a pretty theory heavy dude, but I find him informative and funny and he’s a heck of a communicator. He’s one of the proponents of bass guitar as the greatest instrument and that’s a bit I can’t help but respect. As much as I enjoyed the chugga chugga choo choo episode, I’d start with The Worst Jazz Solo of All Time.

Davie504: With almost 10m subscribers, Davie504 isn’t terribly obscure, but if you’re not familiar with him, this is your wake-up call. He’s an incredibly silly Italian bassist who is aces at creating a character, staying in character, and making terrific videos. You’d think the joke would wear thin, but it hasn’t yet for me. Oh, and kind of surprisingly, he can really play, too. I’d start with Can I Play the Top Basslines of All Times?

Samuraiguitarist: Easily my favorite Canadian country guitarist. Sammy G is at his best when talking about gear and technique, which is a nice break from some of the more theory-heavy channels I watch. He’s near the top of the list of “YouTube personalities I think I’d enjoy in real life.” Start with Testing Gimmicky Guitar Gadgets.

12Tone: Speaking of theory-heavy, this is one of the best channels out there for making music theory interesting and fun. His deal is making doodles that go along with what he’s talking about and there are all kinds of neat Easter eggs in them. He gets a little salty sometimes too, which is a lot of fun. If you’re into that sort of thing, go check out: Why Ben Shapiro Is Wrong About Rap.

Espen Kraft: Espen Kraft IS the 80s. He’ll tell you as much, too. He’s a musician/producer/gearhead after my own heart and he lives for making 80s style music with 80s gear. It’s great fun if you remember the 80s, which is something I most definitely do. While if it were me, I’d go straight to him talking about my beloved DW-8000, maybe start with 10 Iconic Synth Sounds.

Bad Gear: This channel is by far the most formulaic, but it’s a great formula: He reviews the most hated audio gear of the past. It ticks all the boxes: A discussion of why the gear is reviled, a demo of it, a couple of song featuring it, pros, cons, and, as always, a conclusion. The Bad Gear- Akai Tom Cat - The Better Rhythm Wolf??? episode is one of my favorites.

Blanc et Noir vie: Mostly gear talk, but with some jazz and electronica and just a very pleasant vibe. His production is fab and there are some great stories about mysterious, almost mythical gear that never came out. The Great Synth Mysteries Ep. 4: Whatever Happened to the Linndrum II is a great place to start.

My favorite thing about music YouTube is watching these folks interact and reference each other. I watch a lot of music YouTube. Other good ones;


Simon The Magpie: Gear hacker who has more imagination than is good for him.
Look Mum No Computer: You do NOT want to see the Furby organ…
ixi music: Local artist’s deep dive into Nine Inch Nails. Very, very deep dive into it.
The 8-Bit Guy: Texas guy who works with old home keyboards and computers.
Sonicstate: Good channel. Needs more PWM.
Jorb: Another gear guy. Kindred spirit.
Syntaur: Local synth parts/sales place. Carlos is a great guy.
Alamo Music Audio Lab: Local music store’s channel.

Educational and Related Channels:

Insider: There’s a lot to love here. What I’m binging right now are the “How Real Is It?” videos, where experts go over how well movies and TV shows portray their specialist subject. I started with the Master Pickpocket Breaks Down 12 Pocketing Tricks In Movies and found myself just watching everything that came after.

The LockPickingLawyer: This channel is, if you hadn’t guessed, more about the lock picking than the lawyering. Mostly, he demonstrates how shockingly easy it is for him to pick most popular, well-reviewed locks. There are some bad locks out there, folks. This one’s my favorite: Locksmith Says My Videos Are BS… Loses $75 (Maybe).

Vox: OK, so, I have a distant relationship to Vox media but no money changes hands so that’s all the disclosure I’m up for. Anyway, it’s Vox. They overproduce the crap out of their videos, but there’s some good stuff in there. Start with How a recording-studio mishap shaped ‘80s music. P.S. Prince totally stole from Phil Collins, much more so than the other way around.

Other Fun, Mostly Wholesome Stuff:

The Fish Whisperer: A guy with a fish tank on his farm befriends the animals. That’s about it. But, honestly, what more do you need? Here’s Turtles Love Pizza.

Capybara Donguri: Capybaras are perfect. You cannot have too many of them in your life. There are no bad capybara vidoes. Wait…there is one. Don’t watch that one. Watch Capybaras Are Natural Actors; They Have Such Expressive Faces and Body Language instead.

Timotainment: Do you like surrealism? Sure you do. You’ve seen memes based on this ‘un. Stonks. Pile. Angery. All classics.

Screen Rant: Just go there for the Pitch Meetings. Ryan has it down to an art and they are both a lot of fun and very insightful criticism. I’ve had friends tell me how bad certain movies were, sent them the Pitch Meeting for the film, and their response is “Yes, exactly! That’s what I was trying to say!” This is how I avoided, say, Alien Covenant for example.

There are more, of course, but that’s enough for now I figure. I hope someone finds something they like on there. Or, at least, doesn’t completely lose what little respect they had for me.

-RK




Surrender

I give up. I’m just coming back to Squarespace. It finally occurred to me that Wordpress would never import my backlog in a format I was happy with and that retained some of the weird stuff that was integral to a few of my posts. It was going to take a ton of work to get something close, there would still be problems, and I was going to spend more time maintaining it than I lost re-writing posts I lost due to Squarespace not having an undo, autosave, or save and continue.

Really, all that was driving me at that point was spite. Spite is a poor motivation for doing something, so I think I’d rather just write here and deal with it.

So, what’s been going on? It’s very “Facts of Life” around here, in that we are taking both the good and the bad and now I hope that song is stuck in your head. We have a leak in our roof that is going to set us back a bit. The weather has been, for want of a better word, stupid. Does it normally rain every week (or day!) from May to the end of July in Texas? No. Not it does not.

On the plus side of the ledger, Nicole fell in love with a kitten. Meet baby Ramza:

This cat tree has seen some things.

This cat tree has seen some things.

She saw his photo at the shelter’s site and couldn’t sleep until she met him. He jumped into her arms almost immediately (in part perhaps because the shelter staff were determining whether or not he was ready for the required surgery and the way they tested him was not gentle). She had to wait until he recovered from the surgery and she was on pins and needles waiting to until he’d recovered enough to adopt. Shelters, for obvious reasons, tend to be “first come/first serve.” So, she went a day earlier than she’d been told and that proved wise as she returned home with a tiny orange ball of fur she named Ramza Charles Soyuncu.

It’s been a tough few months for these dusty old bones. We had a lovely date night in New Braunfels that ended badly. Crossing the street between crosswalks, the heel came unglued from my boots and my feet went out from under me in almost cartoonish fashion. I tried to scramble upright without realizing the cause of my fall and fell a couple more times in front of (slowly) oncoming traffic. I finally got across, crawling, scrambling, I don’t remember. I broke a bone in my wrist trying to catch the fall and my muscles, such as they are, were aching.

In addition, I later tripped over the lid of a trash bin I was about to wash (pushing it at a low angle with the lid open, in case you’re interested in the mechanics) and fell head-first into the bin. I managed to catch a previously-broken toe on the corner of a storage bin and that sucker is in bad shape.

The worst, though, is that my skin symptoms came back. Awful red dots started spreading on my elbows, shoulder, forearms, and shins, just like they did before I started injecting mouse proteins (and that is as strange to write as it sounds). It was very a very “Flowers for Algernon” mood around here. So, I called my dermo and I’m seeing her on Friday. The good news is that the topical treatments seem to have it under control and receding, but I still need to find out if the drugs are just not going to be as effective or if this was a one-off.

A one-off is a reasonable possibility. Adopting a kitten has led to countless small (and several more-than-small) wounds appearing all over me. Turns out kittens are sharp. Who knew? There are other new environmental factors that could be contributing as well, and, to be honest, I’ve been less diligent about wearing only the most hippie-approved clothing on the planet. There’s a real chance that the mouse proteins still work just as well, but I’ve just been asking to much of ‘em.

Other than that, I’m doing great.

I’ve missed this. Sorry for the “old guy talks about his health” post, but I wanted to warm up the fingers a little before I talked about the stuff that’s filling me with joy these days. I’d rather write poorly about my complaints. Overall, things are good, but this week has been full of panic and foreboding because if the drugs stop working, then it could be pretty bad.

I hope y’all are holding up and doing well. More soon. I promise.

-RK

What will we do when there are no jobs?

I watched CGP Grey’s "Humans Need Not Apply” again the other night and I was struck by how on-the-nose it was and, worryingly, remains. Haven’t seen it or just want to remind yourself of the anxiety? Here ya go:

The gist, for those of you who haven’t seen it and don’t want to, is that your job is going to be automated out of existence. Yes, yours, and that job is not going to be replaced by a new, better job because that would defeat the whole purpose of automation. The fail state of capitalism is here.

As an aside, I continue to find it amusing that this fail state was anticipated almost comically early in the cycle. Adam Smith published An Inquiry no the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776. This book is, rightly or wrongly, regarded as the cornerstone of capitalism (it’s also the second-most cited book in the social sciences, behind only Marx’s Das Kapital, which is also amusing, but I double-digress). Anyway, the counter argument was made most strikingly in 1779 when Ned Ludd supposedly smashed two knitting frames and inspiring the Luddites to rage against the machines that were taking their jobs. Three whole year separated the events.

Where was I? Ah, yes, the jobs are going to be gone. People will be unemployable. In theory, this would leave us with a society where there is abundance for all, people would be free to pursue whatever interests them, and…oh, who am I kidding? I assume everyone (anyone?) reading this recognizes that this won’t happen.

Since 1973, increases in productivity (in the United States, at least) have not “trickled down” to the people doing the work. This is by design. The owner of a company invests in automation to cut their costs, and there’s no reason to expect them to share the gains from automation with their reduced workforce. In fact, on a macro scale, you would expect the opposite.

As an example, imagine the typing pool in movie 9 To 5. There are forty or so dedicated typists in the room in the film, and that was an accurate reflection of offices in that era. Now, there might be, at most, one person handling handling the administrative tasks that used to take an entire room of typists. So, your payroll is now 1/40th of what it was, right? Not so fast: You now have 40 people competing for that one job which is the sort of thing that drives wages even lower.

There are plenty of other examples but the point is that, under the current economic system, we are not moving in a direction that will prepare us for when the job loss due to automation hits reaches critical levels (assuming it hasn’t already). There simply isn’t enough need for human labor to provide a living wage for everyone. There are not going to be new jobs created to change that fact.

So what do we do? The bottom line is that sustenance based on work is no longer a viable model. Well, it could be made to work, but that’s a monstrous scenario and we’re not going to spend any time on it. Higher wages won’t fix it since you have to have a job to receive a wage. This is going to require a bigger change in our economic system than we’ve ever seen.

Is any country prepared? I don’t think so. Some are have made more progress than others. A robust social safety net is a start, but it’s only just that. It’s going to require a willingness to shackle capitalism and an openness to global frameworks.

Which is to say, the United States is almost uniquely positioned not to be able to react to this crisis. The social safety net is weak, there’s an almost religious adherence to the idea of capitalism, and “American exceptionalism” is going to mix poorly with globalism.

Or maybe it just isn’t fixable. I’m not an economist as you may have already gleaned from my facile explanation, so it may be there’s nothing that will rescue us from the worst-case scenarios. That’s not a comforting thought, but in some ways it’s better than the crash being avoidable had we only heeded a warning raised in 1779.


This was a good cat

Here’s a content warning: This is about the loss of a pet. It isn’t graphic, but it’s still what it is.







This is Win:

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His full name is “Winjamin Failclaw,” but we called him “Win” most of the time, or “Mr. Failclaw” if we were cross with him. We got him at the “Austin Kitty Limits” adoption event something like 11-12 years ago, so we don’t know the age exactly. Probably somewhere between 17-20.. His ears suggested that he had not led the easiest of lives, and we adopted him he was recovering from a wound in his leg.

Speaking of ears, when we met him at the event, he was giving me a really evil stare. I decided I wanted to get to know him, so I asked to have his cage unlocked. I presented my hand and he rubbed up against it and insisted that I scratch one of his ears.

For forty-five minutes.

So, obviously, he chose me rather than the other way around.

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Mr. Failclaw was quite the defiant fellow in the early days of living with us. His favorite place to be was wherever we did not want him to be. We rented a condo that had a balcony adjoining our neighbors’. Bum leg and all, he managed to jump over the wall and plop down on the opposite side of their balcony. When we called him, he just stared defiantly. We were at a loss until Nicole remembered his weakness: The laser.

The laser was his favorite thing and just the sound of the chain on it jingling would bringing him running. So, Nicole grabbed it and jingled it in front of him. His ears perked up immediately and he dashed over to be with us. And, by “be with us",” I mean “chase the red dot.”

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One of Win’s greatest virtues was his ability to stay between Nicole’s cats, the beautiful Tricksie (on the ground) and the naughty Red Velvet (on the bench). We were concerned when we combined our households as cats don’t always get on well. This was certainly the case with Tricksie and Red Velvet. Win, however, was the missing ingredient. He would play with Red Velvet to keep her occupied and he would leave Tricksie alone, so everyone was happy.

He was also a fierce defender of his people. Any disturbance outside would bring him running to get between us and the evil garbage truck or kids on skateboards or whatever was making the noise. This continued even as he got older and after his vision went. I knew he was getting old when I got his laser out and he came running because of the sound, but he couldn’t see the light at all.

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He got more affectionate as he got older, too. He took to sleeping on my chest during the day, which was a bit awkward for work, but still sweet. He slept between my pillow and Nicole’s He spent more time with her than I’d ever known him to. Maybe it was the secret song she’d sing to him. I don’t know, as I never got to hear it.

He was, however, still as adventurous as ever. He developed a fine caterwaul for letting us know he wanted to go outside. He couldn’t see a thing, mind you, but he was not about to let that slow him down as he explored our back yard in what I presume was great detail.

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My boy was old, though, and he struggled with issues related to his heart and his kidneys. A special diet and daily medicines kept him spry up until just a few days ago. When it happened, it happened fast as is usually the case when these organs are involved. We tried everything the vet offered up and we would have kept going, but he was ready to go. He was at home and comfortable.

He was the best cat. So gentle, so affectionate, so…just good. I hope he felt safe and happy and loved and I hope the life we gave him was worthy of what he gave back to us.

Here’s my boy just last week. Believe it or not, he has bones.

Here’s my boy just last week. Believe it or not, he has bones.

One of the early photos, and still one of my favorites. He loved getting between the window and the slatted blinds. Also, I really dislike slatted blinds.

One of the early photos, and still one of my favorites. He loved getting between the window and the slatted blinds. Also, I really dislike slatted blinds.

He’d come in and sleep in my office next to me for hours at a time. The closer to a perfect circle, the more relaxed.

He’d come in and sleep in my office next to me for hours at a time. The closer to a perfect circle, the more relaxed.

This was my boy. I loved him very much.

This was my boy. I loved him very much.

This is 55

Let’s start the birthday post by talking about Nicole. Nicole is a big believer that, if you’re not doing something to make memories, you’re just wasting time. She’s pretty awesome that way. So, she booked us a room at the Hotel Havana last weekend and that is absolutely the best way to lower my emotional temperature. Of all the places I’ve spent the night, that one’s probably my favorite. We almost never stay in the same room twice and it’s still magical.

Not our room this time, but it’s probably my favorite of the ones where we’ve stayed.

Not our room this time, but it’s probably my favorite of the ones where we’ve stayed.

Yesterday, we had real restaurant food for the first time in ages. Went up to San Marcos, got some curbside from Torchy’s, and ate in a park and oh my stars and garters it was good. It’s been over a year since I’ve had their tacos and it was nearly tear-inducing. She also got me a journal to destroy (yes, really) and a blueberry bush which I planted outside my office. I truly, madly, deeply, love blueberries.

This weekend, we’re going to do a day trip out to Castroville to check out the “Little Alsace of Texas" which I’m sure will be fun no matter what it turns out to be. Is there a “Little Lorraine of Texas” nearby? Do they refer to their courthouse as “Little Strossburig?” OK, I’ll stop now. Anyway, to say I’ve been pampered would be an understatement.

And she’s says, ominously, “That’s not all.”

At the risk of being vague (rather, “being quite explicitly vague”), there was some work news yesterday as well. It was the sort of news that sounds really bad but isn’t. My understanding is that I’m OK and will continue to be so for the time being. That’s good, because I’m in a situation where I’m working from home and have enough autonomy that, even with a heavy workload, I’m not compelled to look elsewhere.

To make it even more vague, I have an analogy I like to use in cases like this. Demand for a product or service is like a body of water. It must be truly vast to support the really big fish, but once the puddle become an ocean, the big fish will dominate and the smaller ones will struggle to survive. But, should the waters recede, the big fish will be the ones to die out while the smaller ones will be able to thrive.

Book and record stores are a perfect example of this. While there was a huge demand for in-person purchases of books and music, the big chains took over. Local stores struggled and most failed. But, as soon as the demand diminished (or, really, moved online), the big chains no longer had enough water to survive while the local joint that made it through the tougher times did well. Borders and Sound Warehouse are gone; Book People and Waterloo are still there.

I’ve been playing with the musical toys a good deal lately and I’ve made quite a few breakthroughs.. They’ve all come on the “production” side as opposed to the “composition” side, but it’s always exciting to learn some new trick. Recording MIDI data into the DAW was a big one, mapping the drum sounds from an 80s drum machine to a newer sequencer was fun and shockingly easy. I just found that there’s a firmware upgrade from the Volca Sample that increases its capabilities and loaded it up last nigh. Wow…huge difference. Just all kinds of neat little things that get me excited to go play in that sandbox again.

I know I’m going to sound crazy saying this because I’m me, but…I have enough goodies? I really can’t think of anything else I need or even want. I do this when I’m writing too. I’ll say “I’ll sit down and do it when I have X, or when Y is done,.” Heck, I’m pretty sure I do it with my job, too. At some point, I just have to make myself do it. I’m not even dreading it, I’m just easily distracted.

On the other hand, I could probably do a gear list. That’d be fun, right?

I reckon 55 is a milestone age of some sort, so that seems a good a reason as any for a bit of a reset.

Maybe not “reset,” but a little spring cleaning maybe? I culled a lot of angry accounts from my Twitter feed. You know the kind, I bet: The kind of accounts that just invite outrage in one direction or the other. I’m an absolute sucker for a heated argument so removing the temptation has been a very good thing indeed.

I’m just trying not to get into arguments. It’s not like I’m going to convince anyone, anyway. But…when someone is spreading disinformation about, say, COVID, leaving that stuff unchallenged feels wrong. So, the goal is to find the balance where I’m challenging the information without it turning into a war.

I bring this up because, the day before my birthday, I came across a dude doing exactly that, spreading falsehoods about the efficacy of masks. It was standard troll stuff, just a lot of dumb statements worded in a way to try to draw a reaction. Nothing new or clever and certainly nothing accurate. My first temptation was to go in guns blazing. I wanted to do that, but I held off, countered his info, and muted him.

There’s no adrenaline rush that comes from that, but I think it does make the quality of my life fractionally better, so yay? I’ve also resurrected my RSS list and I’m pleased to find that most of the folks I was reading before are still going. I’m going to do a bit of pruning and add some new ones, but I feel like this will be a much better experience than doomscrolling Twitter for hours.

Not an especially high bar, huh?

So, say “Hello” to 55.

So, say “Hello” to 55.

Thanks for sticking with me.

-RK

Battlebots Season 5 Episode 6: Now THAT'S what I'm talking about

It has been called to my attention that I do not adequately inform the reader that there will be spoilers in the following text, so please, let there be no mistake: I will absolutely spoil this episode starting with the next paragraph.

As if to make up for last week’s debacle, this turned out to be one of the most entertaining fight cards in the history of the show. Yeah, it was that good. There were a couple of duds, but even those had their moments. Let’s get down to it, boppers!

Fight 1: Rotator v. Valkyrie

This one promised to be wild, as both bots opted for similar configurations. Rotator went with a low bar spinner on the front and a big armored wedge on the back. It was slightly different than the one they used to beat Tombstone, as they needed to save a little weight to use the 30 lb. bar instead of the 20 lb. version. Valkyrie, as always, went with a low-mounted spinner, although they unveiled a new weapon, a three-pronged almost star-shaped affair.

Victor Soto kept Rotator’s armored backside aimed at Valkyrie as much as possible, working on the theory that Valkyrie would eventually run out of steam or injure itself. That was a pretty reasonable bet, but it didn’t happen this time. Both bots’ weapons kept going for almost the entire three minutes, meaning that there was an unprecedented number of hits and there was a constant stream of sparks in the battlebox.

Rotator had the early edge, getting under Valkyrie and causing it’s weapon to strike the box, but as the fight wore on, Valkyrie got cagier and managed to keep its wheels on the floor and started landing even bigger hits than it was taking. Eventually, the entire back wedge and right side of Rotator were torn off, while Valkyrie’s left armor plate was badly beaten.

It was three full minutes of hit after hit after hit and it was exactly the kind of fight everyone hoped for but no one expected. The judges unanimously called it for Valkyrie, leaving Leanne Cushing’s bot at 2-0 while Rotator fell to 1-2 with its only win coming against Tombstone.

Winner: Valkyrie (Unanimous decision)

Fight 2: Extinguisher v. Gigabyte

This fight featured two bots that just didn’t work at all in their first bout. The big question here was: Would Extinguisher be able to absorb a few blows to send Gigabyte’s full-body spinner flying into the wall and let it knock itself out?

The answer was a resounding “no.”

Extinguisher’s drive didn’t seem quite right, and the lack of mobility allowed Gigabyte to get to the center of the arena and pick its spots. The first couple of hits didn’t seem to do much, but the third bent Extinguisher’s hammer into an unrecognizable shape, ending any hope the fire engine-themed bot had of using its weapon.

It didn’t matter, though, as it something had been knocked loose inside it and it just sort of stopped moving while Gigabyte was hovering menacingly on the off chance Extinguisher got it back together.

Winner: Gigabyte (Knockout)

Fight 3: Slap Box v. Sharko

Another battle of 0-1 bots, this turned out to be a hell of a fight. Slap Box came in 0-1, but losing to Tombstone in your debut fight is nothing to be ashamed of and it held up better than anyone expected. Sharko lost a decision to Smee(etc.) in a really lousy fight between two bots that didn’t really have any way to hurt each other.

I’m not 100% sure what Sharko’s weapon can do. It’s a “biter,” a control bot, with the nose raised, but I think it’s also meant to flip the other bot by raising its nose. It can also spin tremendously fast and whip its tail, which isn’t terribly effective, but it looks cool. Anyway, we got see Sharko get an early “bite” on Slap Box and drive it around the arena a little without doing any real damage.

Sharko clamped down for a second time, this time grabbing Slap Box’s flipping arm, and Slap Box just lifted the arm and carried Sharko around before delivering a suplex. Again, it wasn’t tremendously damaging, but it was really cool to watch.

Sharko’s motor gave out and Slap Box got the well-deserved win by KO. Sharko captain and driver Ed Robinson immediately came over to congratulate team Slap Box on their first win and the suplex, demonstrating the kind of “love of the sport over just winning and losing” that you love to see.

Winner: Slap Box (Knockout)

Fight 4: Madcatter v. Malice

This was the fight I was looking forward to the most, as both bots came in at 2-0 and both, particularly Madcatter, had moments of looking like real contenders against all my expectations. Malice was still more about potential as its terrifying weapon hadn’t really been brought to bear.

Madcatter went with their flipper configuration instead of the vertical spinner, which was probably a good idea as I don’t think it would have survived contact with Malice’s horizontal drum. They set up as a flipper for this one, and it turned out to a better call than they could have anticipated.

The opening exchanges were all Madcatter as its superior mobility allowed it to get to the side of Malice and send Malice flying. Then, just like with Red Devil a few years back, Malice got knocked up into the air and it landed on it’s backside with no wheels touching the ground.

Madcatter was content to let its opponent struggle to right itself and the judge counted Malice out. It was a little disappointing to see the fight end this way, but you couldn’t really argue with Madcatter taking advantage of the fact that their foe couldn’t right itself.

Winner: Maddcatter (Knockout)

Fight 5: Atom #94 v. Tantrum

Yet another matchup of 0-1 bots, both of whom were the architects of their own demise in the first fight. Atom #94 couldn’t drive at all against Big Dill, and Tantrum’s batteries ran out too early in their first fight. The Atom #94 team felt they’d solved their drive problem, and Tantrum showed up without its signature fists but with more batteries, which was a good tradeoff.

Atom #94 still looked sluggish, but it got the first hit of the fight, knocking tantrum across the box. But, sluggish is not a good thing to be against a bot as quick as Tantrum and the little angry orange bot’s weapon was working for a change (and sounding eerily like Minotaur’s drum), and pretty soon it was Atom #94 that was being sent flying.

Tantrum finally got it’s first win as Atom #94’s drive gave out. Honestly, it was probably for the best that they stopped working as Tantrum was sitting right next to them with their weapon fully spun up. It was nice to see this fan favorite get a win and in such convincing fashion as well.

Winner: Tantrum (Knockout)

Fight 6: Pain Train v. Smeeee(etc.)

Pain Train came into this one at 0-1 after failing to move at all in their fight (dammit, I should have said “after the train failed to leave the station…gotta work on that). Smee(etc.) won a very unconvincing fight against Sharko so it was 1-0 but there was no real sense of whether or not the gimmick would work. The gimmick, for those of you just joining us, is that Smee(etc.) is a 14’ wide bot with small spinning bars on each. The idea is that other bots will get enveloped by the articulated center wedge, leaving the bars to attack their wheels.

This was not a classic fight. Pain Train struggled to move, and Smee(etc.) just always looks like it’s struggling whether it is or not. Pain Train did manage to tear off some of the plastic letters on the armored wedge before finally showing just enough control to get to Smee(etc.)’s right side and tear off one of the spinning bars.

Smee(etc.) then managed to go weapon to weapon against Pain Train and Pain Train’s weapon just fell off. It was now a somewhat-mobile push bot against whatever the hell Smee(etc.) is. There was some contact over the last minute, but no damage whatsoever. The judges gave the win to Pain Train which might have been mildly controversial if either of these bots were contenders.

Winner: Pain Train (Split decision)

Fight 7: Uppercut v. Sawblaze

Ah, the main event! And what a narrative, too. Uppercut’s Alex Hattori spent time as a member of Jamisonn Go’s Sawblaze team. Both bots came in at 1-0, although the wins were of vastly different quality opponents. Sawblaze absolutely took Whiplash apart in their first match which is no mean feat. Uppercut beat Gemini in their first fight, which can be pretty much taken for granted, but the speed and ease with which they did so was terrifying.

This always looked like it was going to come down to driving. If the bots’ weapons went head to head, Uppercut had a huge advantage. But, if Sawblaze could outflank the unwieldy Uppercut, Sawblaze would probably take the W. What happened, then, was not what anyone expected. Sawblaze had a momentary lapse of concentration and exposed its side to Uppercut. Moments later, Sawblaze was bouncing off the lexan walls of the arena.

The blow seemed to rob Sawblaze of its mobility, and without the ability to outmaneuver its opponent, Sawblaze was a sitting duck. In an incredible moment, Uppercut managed to hit Sawblaze’s fuel tank for their flamethrowing and…boom! Explosion! Uppercut landed blow after blow and it was over very quickly. Uppercut did to Sawblaze what Sawblaze did to Whiplash and I’m not sure anyone expected such a decisive KO in this one.

Winner: Uppercut (Knockout)

And that’s that for episode 6. A lot of good fights and one absolutely legendary one. If you watch only episode this season, I strongly recommend you make it this one.

Battlebots Season 5 Episode 5: What the hell was that?

Spoilers follow. If you don’t wanna know what happened, you don’t wanna read this . I mean, you may not want me to read this anyway, but I thought I should let you know about the spoilers just in case.

So, about last week…I wrote a pretty mediocre recap of the action and then my cat jumped on my keyboard. Thanks to Squarespace’s baffling decision not to implement an autosave feature, the whole post was lost and, frankly, wasn’t worth re-writing. Let’s move on.

Fight 1: Black Dragon v. Claw Viper

A couple of 1-0 bots squared off in the opening fight. Claw Viper had the more impressive win, showing tremendous mobility against HiJinx. Black Dragon’s win was a little more controversial, a split decision over Kraken that wasn’t especially convincing.

Claw Viper performed their customary box rush which was rendered ineffective by Black Dragon lining up at a diagonal and immediately moving out of the way. Claw Viper bumped into the wall, but unfortunately for them, Black Dragon’s drive and weapon were actually working this time around and the Brazillian spinner got a couple of good hits.

The hits didn’t do anything flashy, but Claw Viper just sort of stopped working. “Not working” is enough to start a countdown and that’s what happened. Pretty impressive win for Black Dragon, which is good, because it wouldn’t be Battlebots without a bot from Brazil in the tournament.

Winner: Black Dragon (Knockout)

Fight 2: JackPot v. Ghost Raptor

The low-budget rookie JackPot came in on the back of a win over SubZero, while Ghost Raptor was 0-1 after getting knocked out by Shatter. I didn’t really want to see either of this bots lose, what with JackPot having a compelling backstory and Ghost Raptor coming back after a four year layoff looking like Cherno Alpha in Pacific Rim.

The bots went weapon to weapon right off the bat and this didn’t go well for Ghost Raptor. JackPot’s giant spinning disc knocked Ghost Raptor’s spinning bar clean off the top of the bot. Ghost Raptor gamely attempted to do some shoving and lifting, but every time it got int he way of JackPot’s weapon, the floor got littered with bits of Ghost Raptor.

One hit split Ghost Raptor in half, and that, as they say, was that. I don’t know how JackPot will fare against a top-tier bot, but this was a very impressive win.

Winner: JackPot (Knockout)

Fight 3: Grabot v. SubZero

This was the maiden fight for Ben Davidson’s Grabot, a grappler of some sort, featuring a couple of “hands” and some chain thingies. It looked complicated. SubZero was coming off a lost to JackPot and, honestly, years and years of losses.

Grabot sort of limped out of the gate and SubZero, possibly not able to believe it’s luck, dove in and flipped Grabot on its back.

Grabot does not have a self-righting mechanism.

So, SubZero spent the next few minutes tossing Grabot around until the flipper rang out of gas but by then, Grabot was done. The cool looking grapple things never came into play, which was disappointing, but it was nice to see SubZero finally get a win.

Winner: SubZero (Knockout I think, maybe it was a unanimous decision, I can’t remember)

Fight 4: HUGE! v. Hydra

This is the fight everyone is talking about and for all the wrong reasons. This was probably the worst fight I’ve ever seen in Battlebots and I’m a little surprised they aired it. HUGE! came in at 0-1 having lost an epic battle against Mammoth. Hydra was 1-0 after taking a split-decision against Witch Doctor.

If you’ve been around Battlebots for a while, you probably remember the famous Ghost Raptor/Icewave fight where underdog Ghost Raptor mounted a pole with a V on the front in place of their spinning bar. They used it to keep Icewave at bay, eventually flipping the horizontal spinner bot and knocking it out.

Hydra’s Jake Ewert, having seen HUGE! dismantle Bronco last year, decided to take this to an extreme and mounted a giant C-shaped bar to the front of his bot. His strategy was to negate both robots’ weapons, force HUGE! into a corner, and just collect the win.

If that sounds like a boring, chickenshit strategy, you got it exactly right. HUGE! kept trying to get around or through the safety bar but could only make a little minor contact with Hydra. Hydra just patiently corralled HUGE! into the corner and sat there. The referee told him to back off and he refused until he was threatened with…whatever action a referee can take.

That was the whole fight. What total garbage. The judges gave the fight to Hydra. I’m not sure what the thinking was. Neither bot did any damage. Hydra had total control but precisely zero aggression (actually, you could argue negative aggression). How do you judge a fight like that?

To make it worse, Ewert was a complete dick about the whole thing. I’m team whoever-is-fighting-Hydra from here on out. It’s an amazing bot, easily the best flipper I’ve ever seen, but if he’s too scared to fight? Screw him. The folks at Battlebots weren’t amused, either:

Winner: Hydra (unanimous decision)

Fight 5: Aegis v. Fusion

This marked the first fight for Chris Sparzo’s Aegis, a Kevlar-armored, shield-shaped flipper. Fusion came in at 0-1 after having failed to do much of anything in it’s first fight. Still, Fusion is a Team Whyachi bot, so you’d have to think it was a heavy favorite, especially as Kevlar seemed an extremely curious choice for armor.

Literally nothing happened for the first 15 seconds of the fight. Both bots came out of their square and…did nothing. Finally, Fusion’s weapons came online and Aegis was left to wonder what might have been had they attacked when their foe was helpless.

As it happened, Aegis actually got a good run at Fusion, but they fired their flipper too early, leaving them utterly helpless. Fusion ripped open the sides of the defenseless bot and kept attacking even as the count was going because they could, I guess.

Winner: Aegis (Knockout)

Fight 6: Big Dill v. Lock-Jaw

Both of these bots came in at 1-0 thanks to victories over hapless opponents. Big Dill actually worked pretty well in their win over Atom #94, but Lock-Jaw sputtered badly in their fight, but since it was against Captain Shredderator, they had the luxury of just waiting for their opponent to knock itself out.

Neither bot really impressed, but it’s always a pleasure to watch Donald Hutson drive Lock-Jaw. He got his bot flipped over early on, but it didn’t make a lot of difference. He bent one of Big Dill’s lifting forks and very nearly knocked ‘em out, but the pickle bot managed to get moving and see out the match.

It was more entertaining than I made it sound, as there were sparks a-plenty, but neither bot packed the punch to really put the other to the sword and that’s not a good sign for Lock-Jaw.

Winner: Lock-Jaw (unanimous decision)

Fight 7: Witch Doctor v. Kraken

Both of these bots came in at 0-1 after suffering split-decision defeats to Hydra (Witch Doctor) and Black Dragon (Kraken). It’s a little strange to see the main event be a battle of winless robots, but in this case, it made sense: Witch Doctor was a finalist last year and Kraken has made unbelievable strides from being a hopeless gimmick bot to a pretty strong control bot.

The two went head to head immediately, and you’d think that that would have favored Witch Doctor. However, just like in the fight against Hydra, the weapon system let them down. One of the two discs broke and the bot was now unbalanced and couldn’t spin the weapon at full speed.

Kraken spent most of the match biting into one or another part of Witch Doctor and running them around the box. From time to time, Witch Doctor would get their weapon going and managed to rip off some of Kraken’s armor. Kraken responded by tearing a belt off of Witch Doctor.

This was a really good fight and it went to the judges, who all agreed on the winner and I think they got the call right: A huge upset for Kraken.

Winner: Kraken (unanimous decision)

Obviously, the HUGE! v. Hydra fight was the big talking point here. People have been saying this was nothing new, that it was essentially the same as the Ghost Raptor/Icewave fight and Beta/Rotator tussle. Neither of those comparisons really hold water though: Ghost Raptor won by knockout after all and Beta charged headlong into their opponent which certainly qualifies as “aggression.” This was just anti-fighting and it was egregious enough that the rules will be changed so we won’t be subjected to this B.S. again next year.

Battlebots Season 5 Episode 3: A Little Controversy To Go With The Carnage

Hey, you! You like spoilers? Good! Read on! If not, then scram! I’m literally going to spoil the entire show starting with the next paragraph, so if you don’t want to know what happened, get outta here!


Alrighty, welcome to fight night 3 of season 5! The first two shows were heavy on brutal action and light on judges decisions. That’s not the case the time. Will it be “Duck was robbed” redux? You’ll just have to read on and find out.

Fight 1: Copperhead v. Gigabyte

Zach Goff’s Copperhead is probably the closest thing the fans will get to seeing Minotaur this year. It’s a 2-wheel drum spinner that hits hard enough to, well, we’ll get to that. John Mladenik’s Gigabyte is the Mother of All Full Body Spinners, a big, inverted wok with lots of bits mounted on the sides to smack you with. The only prediction I made for this one was that it wasn’t going to the judges.

It didn’t go to the judges.

Copperhead looks much the same, but the motor is definitely more impressive even if it doesn’t make the hornet-swarm buzz of Minotaur. The two bots spun up quickly and met in the middle of the arena. The self-righting bar on Gigabyte popped off almost immediately, apparently affecting their driving and allowing Copperhead to back them into a corner. A full-body spinner does not want to be backed into a corner.

The next few seconds were marked primarily by Gigabyte bouncing off the sides of the arena. Copperhead had some time to spin up and hit Gigabyte hard enough to remote the shell from the body. My guess is that the self-righting bar was probably structurally important because that really shouldn’t have happened. The Copperhead folks were nice enough not to clobber Gigabytes exposed innards ad the judge counted the decapitated bot out.

Winner: Copperhead (Knockout)

Fight 2: SubZero v. JackPot

Logan Davis is at the helm of Team SubZero this year. It’s a flipper that is best known for being able to take absurd amounts of damage as opposed to dealing it out. JackPot, driven by Jeff Waters, is a four wheel vertical spinner with two unusually large bars making it a sort of mini-HUGE. Interesting.

The bots came out and met head on, with SubZero getting under JackPot and driving it around the arena. It seemed like a good time to use that flipper, but it never fired for some reason. JackPot was struggling to move in any meaningful way and couldn’t do a lot with the weapon except when it was riding on top of SubZero and whacking the top of the bot.

It would have been interesting to see this one go three minutes to see how the judges would have called it, as SubZero was in complete control of the match but the primary weapon wasn’t work (note: this is foreshadowing). Eventually, SubZero’s motor gave out or it got hung up on an obstacle (it was hard to tell which) and it just stopped moving, giving JackPot the win in its first fight.

Winner: JackPot (Knockout)

Fight 3: Gemini v. Uppercut

Oh, Gemini. Ace Shelander’s multi-bot, a pair of 125 lb. bar spinners, looks good on paper but it’s had serious problems in the arena. Alex Hattori’s Uppercut debuted last year and had a shockingly good run for a new bot. It’s an unusual vertical spinner, with a single “fist” and a counterweight, so there’s only one “side” to the weapon and, of course, it hits up instead of down.

There’s no way I can make this recap a longer one. Gemini split to try to flank Uppercut, but Uppercut just went after the left bot and punted it twenty feet across the arena and over the wall. It turned, faced the other bot, and split it in two with one hit. Game over. After the match, Chris Rose asked Hattori about the fight and he just grinned and said “My bot is fun.” Yeah, it sure is.

Winner: Uppercut (Knockout)

Fight 4: Rotator v. BETA

Victor Soto’s Rotator is a contender for the Giant Nut. It’s a well-armored bot that can mount weapons on either end and Victor is a fantastic driver, as he showed when he dismantled Tombstone last year. This is the first time we’ve seen John Reid’s BETA in a while. It’s the apex hammer bot, really hard to hurt, and it can actually cause a little damage with the hammer (which, for a hammer bot, is really impressive).

The bots came out of the gate quickly and BETA just started pushing Rotator around. BETA had a huge armored wedge on it and Rotator couldn’t do a thing about. BETA just drove around shoving Rotator into the wall over and over. On the other hand, Rotator had a top-mounted disc spinner and the idea was that if the hammer hit it, the hammer would take more damage than their bot. The BETA folks agreed, and never fired the weapon.

So, it was essentially a wedge bot pushing around a spinner that couldn’t do anything about it. Eventually, BETA shoved Rotator into a corner and the the spinner bot bounced off the wall and into BETA’s hammer, knocking the head of the hammer off. That was literally the only big “hit” of the fight and BETA immediately resumed shoving Rotator around.

This one went to the judges and it was…not a popular decision. The judges split 2-1 in favor of BETA. I won’t get too deeply into Battlebots lore here, but, in order to discourage wedge bots, the scoring rules are heavily weighted in favor of bots that use their primary weapon. You can get 5 points for doing damage with your weapon, 3 points for aggression (and aggression with the weapon is favored), and 3 points for control of the match.

Was this the correct decision? I think so, but it was tight. The only damage that was done was one hit by Rotator when it was bouncing around and on one wheel, and the rules state that the only damage that counts is damage inflicted by “…deliberate, controlled action,” and it would be a real stretch to say that was the case. On the other hand, BETA absolutely dominated the other two categories. Rotator might as well have been immobile for how easily BETA pushed it around. This wasn’t DUCK v. Bombshell part 2: Bombshell landed some massive hits with its weapon.

The result also passes the eyeball test: Watching that fight, there was only one bot in it. Team Rotator reacted to their one hit like that hit would guarantee a judges decision and a lot of people agreed with that take. Is getting knocked around for three minutes but getting in one hit enough to win the fight? Should it be enough to win the fight? I don’t know. But, to my eyes, the better bot won.

This video will probably be taken down, but it’s a good watch if you can still see it.

Winner: BETA (Split decision)

Fight 5: Tantrum v. Valkyrie

I was rooting for both of these bots. Aren Hill’s Tantrum has made huge strides from the days when it was a cute, but utterly ineffective flipper bot. The “punch spinner” idea, where they launch a spinning drum into the opponent, is really interesting and I hope they continue to refine it. Leanne Cushing’s Valkyrie looks like it should be a top-ten bot: It’s a low, horizontal spinner that can hit really hard, and the low, armored body is tough to damage. It just hasn’t been as reliable as it need to be up to this point.

This one turned out to be a pretty good fight. Valkyrie was well on top early on, getting in several blows with their 65 lb. disc. But, as is often the case for this bot, the spinner stopped working and Tantrum went on the attack. Every now and again, the little puncher bot was able to get under Valkyrie and sparks flew. Actually, there were a lot of sparks in this match, even if there weren’t too many big hits.

Valkyrie was dazed and it looked as though Tantrum might take the W, but the drive stopped working and an it wouldn’t move anymore. I’m glad to see Valkyrie get off to a good start, but sad to see Tantrum take the loss when they were this close to a win.

Winner: Valkyrie (Knockout)

Fight 6: Big Dill v. Atom #94

Two rookies facing off in this one !mmanuel Carrillo’s Big Dill, which just invites all kinds of terrible puns and Kenny Rose tried to use them all, is a lifter with unusually long forks. Atom #94 (Plutonium, for those of you who don’t want to look it up), captained by Yash Deshmukh, is a vertical disc spinner of the Hypershock/Witch Doctor body type, so it looked like it could do some damage.

Unfortunately Atom #94 struggled with movement right out of the box. It just sort of wiggled around without any speed or direction, which is catnip to a lifter bot. Big Dill was able to pick the exact spot to make contact and just started carrying Atom #94 around the arena like a cat that was presenting a captured bird to its owner.

Big Dill wasn’t able to get Atom #94 out of the arena, and eventually, the forks got caught in the other bot’s weapon belt and the fight had to be stopped and sent to the judges. This was an easy one for them.

Winner: Big Dill (Unanimous decision)

Fight 7: Hypershock v. Gruff

What a fantastic matchup for the headliner, although I did comment to Nicole that the matchup was kind of unfavorable for both bots. Will Bales’ Hypershock is one of the fastest, most powerful, and best-driven bots in the tournament although it has had serious trouble finishing fights. Sam McAmis’ Gruff is the polar opposite: It may be the most rugged, reliable bot out there, but as a lifter (albeit a lifter with a scary torch, too), it’s not the biggest offensive threat.

It turns out the immovable object has the advantage over the unstoppable force, or at least it did last night. Hypershock dashed out of the box and tried to find somewhere to hit Gruff that wasn’t armored, but, failing that, just smacked it a couple of times. Gruff was able to function primarily as a ram, but it did manage to lift Hypershock and turn on the heaters and after that? Hypershock was cooked.

Winner: Gruff (Knockout)

For me, the quality of the fights wasn’t quite as high as it had been over the first two episodes, but we got a lot of drama, and that was certainly interesting. With a lot of rookie bots this year, you’re always going to get a mixed bag. Any time there’s a new bot, my thought is that the best you can hope for is that it will work. Not win, not even compete, but just do the things it’s supposed to do: move, attack, dodge, etc. If you can do that, you’re doing it right.

That’s it for episode 3. It occurs to me that the bot I’m not interested in seeing, Chomp, hasn’t fought yet. Surely next week, right?

Battlebots Season 5 Episode 2: Clash of the (literal) Titans

If you don’t want spoilers, pray make haste and depart this page as there will be almost nothing that isn’t a spoiler. Seriously. Hie thee away! Get thee to a nunnery! All that stuff. Shoo!

OK, with that out of the way, welcome to my take on Fight Night 2 of Battlebots this season. It was another two-hour episode that featured less action per minute of broadcast than an NFL football game. I get that they need to pay the bills, but this feels excessive.

Fight 1: Shatter! v. Ghost Raptor

Just like last week, we started off with an enticing fight. This one featured Adam Wrigley’s Shatter! facing off against Chuck Pitzer’s Ghost Raptor. Shatter! debuted last year and, for a hammer bot, it was really interesting, featuring ablative armor and unusual wheels. It didn’t perform especially well, but you got the sense they’d learn from those defeats. Ghost Raptor is an older bot that’s taken several years off, but it still looks competitive. It features a top-mounted bar spinner on an articulated mount, allowing it to change the angle of attack and do some lifting.

Shatter! box-rushed Ghost Raptor because that’s what you do against spinners and everyone knows it. The hammer scored a couple of early hits and it looks like a much more threatening weapon than it did last year, when the head actually fell off one time. Ghost Raptor was dazed by the early blows and attempted to out-maneuver Shatter!, which wasn’t going to happen, and to push the hammer bot around, which did. But, the damage from those early hits was too much and Ghost Raptor just stopped moving. Wrigley explained afterwards that, based on what he could see, there was no shock absorption between the spinner and the internals, so mashing the spinning bar could knock stuff loose on the inside. It looked like that was exactly what happened. I like the way this guy thinks.

Winner: Shatter! (Knockout)

Fight 2: Ribbot v. Tracer

Last year, David Jin’s Ribbot, covered in frog-shaped green foam, looked like one of those ridiculous gimmick bots like Royale with Cheese that was fun to look at but served little function other than a punching bag. After they walloped End Game, you kind of had to take them seriously. This was the first year competing for Jason Woods’ Tracer, but he’s been in the pits for ten years so it’s not like he was a newbie. The concept behind Tracer seemed to be “Duck, but with a vertical bar spinner.” The bot was built to be indestructible first and damaging second.

Ribbot, a Swiss Army bot, came out with their undercutter, a low mounted disc spinner. Ribbot tried to get around the side of Tracer, but Tracer was more maneuverable than they had expected and they wound up going weapon-to-weapon. After a nervy couple of seconds, both bots were back at it. Ribbot swung around and caught tracer on left side of their front shield, flipping their opponent on its back. In theory, Tracer could self-right by using the spinner, but that almost never works and such was the case here as the little green frog that could claimed another victim.

Winner: Ribbot (Knockout)

Fight 3: Kraken v. Black Dragon

Fun fight, this one. This is the third year for Matthew Spurk’s Kraken, a bot that barely competed the first time out but improved mightily in their second year. It’s a control bot with huge front jaws and a couple of teeth. Gabriel Telles brought Black Dragon back for a second year. It’s not a revolutionary bot; it’s a vertical spinner, but last year it showed a good combination of power, reliability and quickness on it’s way to the Final 16.

Kraken performed an immediate box rush because, duh, and was able to get Black Dragon in its jaws almost immediately. However, Black Dragon went with their lightest spinners, a pair of vertical discs instead of the drum they usually use, and they did this in order to increase their top armor. This mean that, while Kraken could hold Black Dragon, it couldn’t really damage it.

Kraken did manage to burn a belt off of Black Dragon, but most of the damage was done to Kraken’s teeth (later, tooth) when the two of them came together. The other issue Kraken had was that it couldn’t get Black Dragon’s back wheels off the ground, so even when the Brazilian bot was clamped, it could still push Kraken around the box.

This one went the distance and, honestly, I could see it go either way. Black Dragon did a little more damage, but Kraken exhibited more control The judges were split, but Black Dragon was declared the winner.

Winner: Black Dragon (Spit decision)

Fight 4: HUGE v. Mammoth

This fight right here is why you should watch Battlebots. HUGE made a, um, huge splash when it debuted because it was so much bigger than the other bots. It’s a giant vertical bar spinner mounted between two wagon wheels. It looks like a joke, but it most certainly is not and it has clobbered some very good bots (ask Bronco). Ricky Willems saw HUGE and said “Hold my beer” and built Mammoth, a bot that stands 6’4” and shovels opponents out of the box.

This fight was nuts. The two of them came together right off the bat. Mammoth smacked HUGE, but HUGE’s spinner flipped Mammoth completely off the ground, bending its weapon in the process. This happened several times and somehow, both bots survived and landed on their wheels. I’ve never seen anything like it.

It looked like HUGE had this one under control, or, at least, like it was going to be the only bot able to do any damage. But, while the big spinner bot is surprisingly nimble, it doesn’t have great traction. Eventually, Mammoth was able to get HUGE into the corner and prevent it from getting its weapon up to speed and squared up for another hit. The big shovel/lifter/spinner on Mammoth kept whacking HUGE and eventually got one of HUGE’s wheels out of the box and that was that.

In the post-fight breakdown, Willems showed just how much damage he’d taken: Both structural support bars had holes in them and HUGE missed knocking his weapon chain off by less than half an inch. It was an incredibly close, incredibly entertaining fight.

Winner: Mammoth (Knockout)

Fight 5: HiJinx v. Claw Viper

It was a battle of veteran rookies as Jen Herchenroeder brought her undercutter bar spinner HiJinx to face Kevin Milczewski’s Claw Viper. Both captains have been on pit crews for years, so while the bots were new, they folks knew what they were doing. Claw Viper is a control bot with absolutely crazy speed and agility, so HiJinx was loaded with it’s smallest spinning bar to try to get the weapon up to speed as quickly as possible.

The fight opened with a box rush by Claw Viper and , while they didn’t exactly make great contact, the speed was genuinely breathtaking. They say it can go from 0-20 in half a second and I’d believe it. HiJinx managed to get the bar up to speed but it’s not the most nimble of bots so they struggled to get the weapon into position to hurt Claw Viper.

Claw Viper, on the other hand, kept dashing around and smacking into the weapon with their wedge and that worked pretty well. Pretty soon, HiJinx’s weapon was spinning, but the bot itself wasn’t moving anymore. The judge counted them out and that was that.

Winner: Claw Viper (Knockout)

Fight 6: Extinguisher v. Perfect Phoenix

Jonathan Flaacke’s Extinguisher, a hammer bot, wasn’t especially effective last year, showing the offensive power of Blacksmith and the reliability of Captain Shredderator (those aren’t compliments). He’s improved both shortcomings. Juli Johnson’s Perfect Phoenix, driven by 11 year old Tyler Nguyen, is a rebirth of the old bot Brutality. It’s a horizontal blade spinner and a very low-profile body.

Extinguisher opened the fight with the obligatory box rush, and Perfect Phoenix dodged it and got a good smack on Extinguisher’s defensive wedge. Whatever updates Flaacke made, they weren’t enough because that one hit rendered his bot immobile.

Winner: Perfect Phoenix (Knockout)

Fight 7: Witch Doctor v. HYDRA

Welcome to the main event! Andre Gellatly’s Witch Doctor, last season’s runner-up, and Jake Ewert’s HYDRA, the bot that wrested the flipper crown from Bronco last year. These are two legit great bots , both of which will expect to go deep in the tournament.

On paper, I thought this was a tough matchup for Witch Doctor. The bot excels at doing crazy damage and getting out of tight situations, but there have been reliability issues in the past. HYDRA is just an incredibly low, flat flipper that maneuvers well, is tough to damage, and can fire its weapon more often that most of its ilk.

The two of them went head to head right off the bat and Witch Doctor was launched ten feet into the air (and, remember, these are 250 pound bots). Not only did it keep on chugging, but the self-righting mechanism looked a lot more dependable than it has in the past.

This set the pattern: Witch Doctor would charge, maybe take a bite of Hydra, and then get launched. Early on, something in Witch Doctor became unbalanced (a lost drive belt?) and it started wobbling badly, but it was otherwise unhurt. The two bots came together multiple times, with Witch Doctor catching air at least ten times, but HYDRA was taking some blows to the side and it’s weirdly flat back section that just screams “attack me here!”

Witch Doctor started smoking and HYDRA was struggling to move. It got caught up on the floor and couldn’t show any forward movement, so the judge started the countdown. As soon as it started, HYDRA was able to shake itself loose. Neither bot had any punch left in it, and it went to the judges.

Honestly, this one could have gone either way. Both bots dished out and took a lot of punishment and kept on going.. The judges split on it, HYDRA won, and I think it was just about the right decision.

Winner: HYDRA (Split decision)

When your biggest complaint is the number of commercials, it’s a pretty great fight night. Two fights went to the judges and they were both split decisions, both very close in my opinion, but I wouldn’t say anyone was robbed. If you look for highlights, make sure you check out the HUGE/Mammoth fight because that was truly one for the ages.

Battlebots Season 5, Episode 1: And so we return and begin again

Well, the greatest sport known to humanity is back and…it’s wow. I’m not going to say that Battlebots will be the best thing that happens in 2020, but I’m not going to say it won’t be. The format is essentially the same: Two 250 pound robots bashing each other until one of them is too damaged to continue or three minutes pass. There are a couple of new wrinkles. Robots without wheels can be a lot bigger (500 pounds, I think), there’s no audience, and they’ve upgraded the hazards inside the battlebox so they’re presumably more than just nuisances. Other than that? It’s Battlebots. What more do you want?


There will be spoilers here. There will be so many spoilers. There will be very little that is not spoiler. If you don’t want to know how the fights turned out, you are in the wrong place.

OK, now that we’re clear, let’s go over the fights in this 2 hour season opener!

Fight 1: Sawblaze v. Whiplash

This promised to be a heck of a fight. Jamison Go’s Sawblaze made the quarterfinals last year and Jeff Vasquez’ Whiplash made the semifinals. Go and Vasquez are two of the best drivers around and their bots are among the most reliable and maneuverable, although neither of them are huge hitters. Or, at least, they weren’t last year.

Sawblaze somehow got lower to the ground than last year, and the dustpan forks on the front of it pushed Whiplash around for most of the early going. Whiplash got in a couple of hits with their articulated spinner, but they never really squared up on Sawblaze and, even after taking out one of their opponents’ tires, couldn’t win the shoving match.

Last year, Sawblaze introduced a new type of weapon: The hammer-saw. Instead of just using a sawblade on an arm that swung down on the top of their foes, they added some weight to the blade and swung the it with a great deal more force. It had never been especially destructive, but this time, with Whiplash pinned against the screws, Sawblaze brought the weapon down and split the top armor plate. Something important (and probably expensive) broke in Whiplash as it was rendered immobile and counted out.

Winner: Sawblaze (knockout)

Fight 2: MatCatter v. Fusion

I had MadCatter figured as a sacrificial lamb for the new bot from Team Whyachi. Fusion is a combination spinner; horizontal on one side and vertical on the other. The Ewert family had been pretty successful introducing new bots (check out Hydra last year), and Fusion looked like a good one. Meanwhile, Madcatter looked like…a cat. A cat with a vertical spinner and a kind of goofy paw-lifter device, but still…it didn’t look like it could live up to Martin Mason’s enthusiasm (not that anything could).

MadCatter performed the mother of all box rushes, sprinting across the box and bopping Fusion before either of them could get their spinners up to speed. The initial hit seemed to take all the speed out of MadCatter, but Fusion wasn’t exactly running rings around them.

In fact, it was MadCatter that was clearly on top, picking its spots, getting under Fusion, and delivering hits and trying fruitlessly to flip the other bot. The cat wasn’t doing a lot, but it was the only bot doing anything. Fusion was struggling mightily with things like “going in a straight line” and eventually started smoking, which is often a precursor to stopping entirely. That was the case here and the bot I thought was just there to provide an opponent won a pretty convincing victory.

Winner: MadCatter (knockout)

Fight 3: Axe Backwards v. Malice

Speaking of sacrificial lambs: Kurt Durjan’s Axe Backwards. This genuinely interesting looking bot, a full-body vertical spinner, has been dissected by some very ordinary bots and just destroyed by some of the good ones. Malice, driven by rookie Bunny Sauriol, was an unknown quantity, but the 65 pound horizontal drum spinner looked menacing enough to make me think the newbie would make short work of Axe Backwards.

Kurt taunted Bunny during the countdown, but once the fight started, the roles reversed immediately. A single hit effectively ended Axe Backwards as a mobile piece of machinery. Malice could have just pounded Axe Backwards to a pulp, but after getting in a couple more shots, she backed off and let the referee count out the flaming wreck of little plastic-y axes.

Winner: Malice (knockout)

Fight 4: Bloodsport v. Skorpios

Justin Marple’s Bloodsport had an impressive debut last year, albeit against some seriously inept bots (thankfully, the multi-bot trend has almost completely died out). Zach Lyttle’s Skorpios went a long way in the tournament last year largely by being very well-driven and very hard to hurt, but without doing much in the way of damage.

I had Skorpios as the favorite based on what I saw of Bloodsport last year, but this year’s version is a very different bot. The horizontal lawnmower blade was replaced by a spinning disk which was clever, because Skorpios’ already weak weapon was never going to get through it without destroying it’s own saw. This proved to be the case, as the first time Skorpios brought the saw down, it was bent and rendered ineffective almost immediately.

Bloodsport also surprised me by managed to get under Skorpios, something that very few bots have managed. There were no huge hits, but it was a death by a thousand cuts as Bloodsport took apart Skorpios’ front wedge and kept pounding the underside of one of the lowest bots around. Eventually, Skorpios just stopped moving and that has traditionally been something that was very difficult to achieve. Impressive.

Winner: Bloodsport (knockout)

Fight 5: Captain Shredderator v. Lock-Jaw

Brian Nave’s Captain Shredderator has been around forever now, and very little has changed. It’s a brutal full body spinner that can do tremendous damage to an opponent while doing as much, or more, damage to itself. There was a lot of talk pre-match about how he’d simplified the bot to try to make it more reliable. In the other corner was another known quantity: Donald Hutson’s Lock-Jaw. It looked pretty much the same as always, but apparently, this was a ground-up rebuild.

I figured Lock-Jaw had this one in the bag on theory that betting on the bot that won’t beat itself is usually a good bet. But, the Captain came out swinging and knocked half of the back wedge off of Lock-Jaw right off the bat. Meanwhile, Lock-Jaw kept getting its front forks stuck in the killsaw slots because it always does that and why would you try to fix a problem like that oh my god it is so frustrating.

Lock-Jaw wasn’t moving to well, but Shredderator did the Shredderator thing of getting a big hit and coming off worse than its opponent. The Captain started smoking and eventually couldn’t move. The post-match piece blamed it on a small piece of wire that caused the brakes to engage constantly and burned out the motors. Sigh.

Winner: Lock-Jaw (knockout)

Fight 6: Rusty v. Sporkinok

This fight featured a couple of rookies and I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that neither of them make the knockout stages. Lilith Sprect’s Sporkinok is a Swiss Army bot that can be configured with either a hammer or a lifter. She went with the lifter this time, which, while disappointing from a “I like to see things hit each other” standpoint, made sense. Rusty, the brainchild of David Eaton was very steampunk looking assemblage of parts found on the farm, featuring a very short ranged hammer-spike device and what looked like an Ikea mixing bowl on it’s “head.”

Neither bot maneuvered well at all, so the “box rush” was more of a drunken stagger. Sporkinok get on the side of Rusty and flipped him over and that looked to have been that. I’m not exactly sure how, but Rusty somehow managed to self-right and start deploying the hammer-spike thingie.

It’s hard to know for sure if Rusty ever landed any blows and, if so, what they did, but two of Sporkinok’s wheels appeared to lock up. The immobile bot was counted out and the barely mobile Rusty got the win.

Winner: Rusty (knockout)

Fight 7: Sharko v. Smeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

These were, if nothing else, two of the more interesting bots on the card. Edward Robinson’s Sharko was an upgrade to last year’s Sharkoprion, a bot assembled out of, among other things, wheelchair parts. Instead of the world’s least-used vertical disk spinner, they opted for an impressive looking crusher in the jaws of the shark. Smee (add as many “e” as you like; I’m done) is a really unique design. It’s 14’ long and basically just a series of wedges with a small horizontal spinner on each end. The idea is that it’ll make contact with the opponent and then the sides will wrap around and eat their tires.

This wasn’t a great fight, but that was most because the bots were poorly matched. Sharko was never going to get its jaws on Smee, and Smee couldn’t really get around the enormous Sharko and, even if it could, Sharko’s wheels were too big and solid to damage.

The fight consisted mostly of Sharko spinning around and whippings its tail while Smee was slooooowly chewing its tires. I’m eager to see how either of these bots fare against more conventional opponents, but this match just didn’t work. This one went the distance, and Smee won since “a little damage” is better than “no damage whatsoever.”

Winner: Smee (unanimous decision)

Fight 8: End Game v. Tombstone

This was the main event, and for good reason. Ray Billings’ Tombstone is not just one of the most entertaining bots; it’s also one of the best and Ray really enjoys his overdog status. Nick Mabey’s End Game came over from New Zealand two years ago to a lot of hype, but reliability (and a torn-up battlebox) have prevented them from quite living up to it. These were two incredibly destructive bots and it as a near-certainty that it wouldn’t go the distance.

It did not go the distance.

The opening exchanges were explosive but largely even as the bots went weapon-to-weapon right off the bat. There was the sense that one big hit to anything but a weapon would end the fight quickly and, wouldn’t you know it? That’s pretty much how it went down.

End Game got a good hit that put Tombstone off-balance and drove it into the screws. One of the Tombstone’s wheels got stuck, leaving the King of Kinetic Energy a sitting duck. End Game moved in and blasted Tombstone over the screws and out of the arena for a very quick and decisive win.

Winner: End Game (knockout)

Well, that had a little of everything, didn’t it? Fireballs, upsets, close fights, not at all close fights, comically inept bots. With 7 knockouts in 8 fights, there weren’t even any “Duck was robbed” moments where the judges made a baffling decision.

I wouldn’t call it a legendary episode, but it was a very good one and if the rest of the season can keep it going, this is going to be a lot of fun.

Finding a place to stop for a while

I’m writing today from my home office. I haven’t been able to say that since…2001? In any case, it’s been a while and it’s nice not to be dragging Nicole to work with me and making her put up with whatever stress I’m feeling. My blind kitty has adjusted marvelously and he’s sleeping in his bed next to my desk. This isn’t bad.

So, let me briefly go over how we got here. This summer, during the lockdown, our cashflow was actually pretty good since we weren’t (and still aren’t) going anywhere near restaurants. We figured that we needed a bigger place than the one bedroom apartment we were in if I was going to be working from home for the foreseeable future. We started looking at two bedroom apartments and the lighbulb lit up. “We can’t afford to live here, but what if we bought a house close to here, close enough that I could come into town a few times a week?

Was our credit good enough? Could we afford it? Were there any places nearby where we would be happy living? At the time we started looking, the answers were “no,” “no,” and “who knows?” But, with decent cashflow, we were making inroads on the credit. We started looking at some of the towns around here and found some that would work (and many more that wouldn’t-anything requiring that I get on the interstate wasn’t going to work).

Then we found a place we really liked and everything to a lot more real. We decided to cash in our savings, get our credit card usage under control, and make sure we had enough on hand for putting a chunk down and then moving. It takes a while for the credit reporting places to show the changes and, in that time, we missed out on the place we’d found (we dubbed it “The Parsonage” because it was between a church and a library and had no neighbors at all…sigh).

Back to the drawing board. Unfortunately, a lot of other people were having the same thoughts we were and prices were going up at a crazy rate. We found some great places in bad locations, so lousy places in good locations, and some great places in great location that were just out of our range. It was getting frustrating as it felt like the window was closing.

But then (and I can’t believe I’m starting a paragraph with “but then…”), Nicole found a house that had been listed an hour earlier. She set up a showing for the next day and then told me “I found it.” Sure enough, she had: A house in a town we liked that had a style we loved and at a price we could swing. We met the realtor at the house and within about 5 minutes we were ready to make an offer. It was a good thing we didn’t wait as there were several offers on the first day, but ours was accepted, so…huzzah!

The next bit is crazy. We were pre-approved for the amount, but we now had to get down to locking in an interest rate and…holy smokes, interest rates are nothing right now. I do not have what anyone would mistake for good credit and we still came in south of 3 percent. We started giggling because that was beyond our wildest hopes (with the caveat that we have few wild hopes regarding percentages).

And here we are, a month later, and we’re in the place and it feels pretty great. We got incredibly lucky in that a lot of dominoes fell precisely where we needed them to to make this work. The long and the short of it is that we’ll be paying substantially less on our mortgage than we were paying in rent on our one bedroom apartment.

We got really lucky.

After a crazy, awful, frustrating, scary year, we seem to have landed no only on our feet but in a better life as well. Things could have been very different. I am not particularly deft with money (those of you who know me well may enjoy your chuckle at the degree to which I am understating things) and I was afraid that I had permanently locked myself into renting. It can be cheaper to own, but you have to be able to save money to buy and it’s hard to do that when you’re renting…it’s a hell of a treadmill.

I’ll leave with this: If you have an opportunity and urge to buy, or you are in a position to refinance, now is a great time to do so. I’d never paid much attention to interest rates (see above paragraph) but apparently they’re as low now as they’ve been in the last fifty years.

A very generic picture of the back yard and some beautiful sunlight.

A very generic picture of the back yard and some beautiful sunlight.


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