Welcome back to BattleBots Update. I have prepared for your enjoyment an event report. Can you believe it’s been three whole years since the last time I wrote one of these? I can’t, but it has. BattleBots 2019 was the last time I wrote up an event report to aimlessly ramble on about my trip experience at a robot combat event. This time it’s not BattleBots but Robotica, a “revival” of sorts of the old TLC show that was held in Houston, TX the weekend of July 16th & 17th. I’ll talk about the whole “revival” thing in a bit but basically all you need to know about this event is that in a matter of minutes it was lovingly (I think) renamed to “ElamGames” by competitors who chose the new name after the event organizer, Mark Elam. I don’t think Mark was amused by the nickname because when I asked he was all “I don’t have time to get annoyed with every little thing” so I was like “okay then” and didn’t force the subject.
But you guys know these event reports usually start out with how the trip begins, and that starts in Corpus Christi, TX.
THE OPEN ROAD
Avalanche
Houston is close enough to where I live that I can reasonably make a drive out there; it’s only about three to four hours away depending on things like traffic and how fast I feel like driving. Things got off to an awkward start though because the first thing I did was fill up at the gas pump and here’s where I need to point out something very important: I was not driving my own vehicle to this show. You see, I’ve owned the truck I have for 16 years. The vehicle is only 17 years old. For the majority of its existence it’s been mine and those of you who know a thing or two about cars should probably have guessed by now what kinds of problems a near two decade old vehicle might have. Most importantly the AC stopped working in it and that’s going to cost $1,700 to fix and like hell do I have that kind of money so I was looking at potentially driving a hot box to Houston and I don’t mean “hot box” as a funny weed 420 joke. You know how hot it gets in your car when you park it in the sun? Yeah, picture that internal temperature for the whole fucking ride and if you turn on the “AC” it just blows hot air at you because fuck you.
Instead of taking my own vehicle my father let me borrow his truck for the weekend because at least his has a working air conditioner. He owns a larger truck than I do because his is used for work. That means it has a bigger gas tank. That means it costs more to fill up. It was near empty when I left on Thursday morning and filling up the ~22 gallon tank cost me about $75 goddamned dollars. For comparison even in Joe Biden’s Amazing Clusterfuck it still only costs me about $45 to fill up my tank. Then again I don’t have as good fuel economy as my dad’s truck so I guess everything ultimately balances out in the end. There’s just a certain pang that comes with watching the gas pump numbers go past “the usual” and just keep escalating even if I wind up paying that much in the end anyways.
Slammo
I start all of my road trips with the exact same ritual. At the same gas station I top off at I go inside to order two bean, cheese, and rice breakfast tacos. Back when I was in college like 12-15 years ago (holy fuck) this was my bread and butter. I’d swing by the gas station on my way onto campus and pick up just one taco because they used to make them a lot bigger before the capitalism shrink ray blasted the kitchen. I also grab an energy drink, usually in a flavor I’ve never tried before, and something else non-caffienated to sip on once I’ve finished the Monster or whatever it is I bought. That’s enough to keep me going for the whole drive and then some without fail. I intentionally don’t get breakfast at the gas station on a whim because it keeps the routine special in a sense. Yeah I’m just talking about a tortilla smeared with refried beans but god damn it let me have this one thing.
Driving was dicey at first because I wasn’t taking my own vehicle; like I said, I borrowed my father’s truck for the trip. Once you’ve driven a vehicle long enough you know how it “feels”. You and the machine become one. You know exactly how it handles. You know how much space you have (or need) to make a turn or to park somewhere. Your ass just sits right in the seat, even. Everything is just a well-oiled machine. When you get a rental or you drive someone else’s ride that whole sense of oneness is thrown off. I don’t know how close I am to anything and here I am going 75 MPH down a busy highway pretending like I’m not about to have a panic attack over not being able to tell where my front fucking bumper is. Don’t even get me started on parking this beast because I just went with the path of least resistance and parked in the back of any lot I pulled into because fuck risking it and potentially dinging someone’s car when I’m not even on the insurance policy.
I arrived at the hotel, checked in, and dropped my things off. Then it was time to do whatever I wanted to do because I had the rest of Thursday to myself.
RAINY DAYS AND THURSDAYS
Happy Catter
In Texas’ larger cities you can find retail chains such as Game Over Video Games and Half Price Books. There’s actually a Half Price where I live but since every store is dependent upon customer trade-ins no two stores really have the same inventory. The only video game stores around here are GameStops and I’m not giving them my business; I’ve been around to watch GameStop buy up their competition and run their business into the gutter by doing dumb shit like getting into the NFT market. No fucking thank you, GameStop. Not only that I used to work for a GameStop when I was in high school so I’ve seen how the sausage is made and it ain’t pretty. Fuck GameStop with a rusty rake.
My first stop was at one of the local Game Over locations in Houston. My GPS found one about three miles away so I cruised on over to it and had to finagle a parking spot right in front of the store with a truck way bigger than mine. I can safely say I did it without hitting the car next to me. Go me. I went in to browse the store but unfortunately I think I’ve genuinely mined out all of the shit tier video games that go into my “this would be hilarious to stream someday” collection. Now I’m shopping as a collector so that means my attention is focused to the stuff they keep behind the glass counters. That also means the prices of these games is a lot higher because looking for a copy of Mega Man 5 means you’re going to pay a hell of a lot more for it than you would if you were searching for, I don’t know, fucking Rock Band: Aerosmith or something. (Fun fact: Several years ago at the Classic Game Fest in Austin, TX I saw Game Over’s booth and they were selling copies of that game for $1. Complete in box. They couldn’t give that shit away.)
I actually found something I wanted though, Taito Legends 1 + 2 for PlayStation 2. I love anthology releases of arcade games because how the fuck else are you going to play them? I still haven’t figured out the MAME emulator for the past 20 years and I’m not about to go out and buy a dedicated Puzzle Bobble arcade cabinet so I can lose and get mad any time I want. The price was about $60 which is fair considering what the games together go for on eBay. I could’ve saved myself like five bucks if I ordered them online but I’m not going to sweat over that much money.
I am responsible with my money.
It started to rain unfortunately and that put a damper on my plans because I wasn’t comfortable driving around Houston in the rain. If you’ve never been to Houston the city is a fucking trash heap when it comes to its roads. I’ve been driving to Houston for years now and the highway is always “under construction” and parts of it are closed off or lanes are sectioned out and all sorts of other random crap. It’s a nightmare. Poor visibility due to rain and me not having my own vehicle just added up to me accepting my losses and going to get something for dinner. Besides, I’d just spent $60 on video games so it’s not like I was dying to spend any more money on crap I probably don’t really need.
Lately I’ve been having a craving for Chinese food so I looked up the nearest restaurant and it turns out there was a buffet literally down the street. I decided to go check it out. I parked in the back of the lot again and walked through the rain like a fucking moron only to be let down by subpar food and gross sushi. The only sushi they had that I’d fuck with was tempura shrimp and avocado because the rest all had nasty fucking cream cheese as a filler and I don’t eat that garbage. Cream cheese belongs in the fucking trash, not on my sushi. The rest of the buffet food was nothing to write home about, yet here I am writing about how bad it was so I guess the joke is ultimately on me. The “hot red pepper chicken” just tasted like regular ass chicken and the sauce on the beef and broccoli was so watered down that it didn’t stick to anything nor did it taste like anything. Basically I wanted Chinese food and sushi and I got fucked.
WELCOME TO COMICPALOOZA
I hate the art on this con badge.
It’s now Friday. As I’m sure you’re probably aware Robotica was being held as part of the larger Comicpalooza event happening in a convention center whose name I don’t think I ever actually looked up. I just gleaned the street address from the robotcombatevents.com page, dropped that into my GPS, and just drove there. There was so much signage and shit that I didn’t commit any of this to memory. I’m driving around downtown Houston trying to find a place to park do you think I’m going to pay attention to the sign that says “Welcome to the Go Fuck Yourself Convention Center”?
Parking was miserable. If I knew my way around downtown Houston better I’m certain I could’ve found a better rate but the only lot I could easily get to was $30 to park. Yeah, thirty fucking dollars. That’s highway robbery, but the lot owners know you’re going to pay it so I went to the self service machine and bought a ticket and just ate the cost. This rate was just for Friday, however. When I showed back up on Saturday – the day the convention started proper – the lot price had jumped up to $40. I don’t know if they’re ever going to see this, but I will never forget you, Lam Parking Inc. I hope whoever is in charge of your parking rates stubs their baby toe really bad on the edge of a coffee table. I hope their toenail splits open and regrows badly as an ingrown nail. I hope the impact of kicking the table with their foot breaks the tiny little bones of their baby toe and splays it out to the side like a broken finger. Fuck you.
Overhaul
Saturday was the first day of the convention and I woke up bright and early to get there on time. That’s when I noticed the lot price had jumped up to $40. On my way in I knew I’d be getting ready to walk into a veritable freak show because wandering around outside was a non-binary person dressed in a “very provocative way”. I don’t know the correct term to use to describe this person without being unintentionally offensive so I’m going to say “assigned female at birth” and hope that gets me through the rest of this paragraph without trouble. They were wearing approximately knee-high black boots, black panties, a black fishnet body suit, and black tape across their nipples. Come on. Don’t dress like that at a convention. There are children present. Seriously. If you want to dress that way to attend an 18+ panel or go to a private room party that’s one thing but you can’t just wear that in public. A convention is not an excuse.
And before you all go “gee Draco ragging on enby people how forward thinking of you” let me continue onward and say there was also a cisgendered male who had to have been in his late forties wearing literally nothing but a fucking Tarzan loincloth. No shirt. No shoes. No pants. Nothing. Just a fucking loincloth. That’s equally as bad if not potentially worse. I don’t care what your gender is or is not or whatever, I will always give the stink eye to people who think they can show an obscene amount of skin and get away with it under the guise of “cosplay” or whatever. The only thing you’re cosplaying is a train wreck.
There were plenty of other reasonable cosplayers however, though I didn’t really pay them much attention because I was busy doing my own thing. I saw a lot of Spidermen and Deadpools though presumably because you can just go to Party City and buy a one size fits most body suit of those characters and call it a day. Laziest fucking cosplay on the planet by a mile.
THE HEAVYWEIGHTS
NUEMATIK
Turnout for the event was good I guess? We had a lot of insect class robots and I was in charge of hosting the beetleweight show where we had something like 25 participants. I don’t know how many ant and fairyweights we had but I know there were a ton of them. 12 and 30 pounders were kind of a rarity unfortunately and there were only like 5 or 6 of them in each class, maybe less than that I’m not sure. As for heavyweights though there was about 10 by my count. You’ve already seen photos of them dotting this article because I really didn’t take a whole lot of pictures while I was at Comicpalooza, but I’d like to give you all a run down of who was there.
No doubt one of the big draws to the show was BattleBots’ Mad Catter, participating here as Happy Catter due to BattleBots licensing issues with robot names. Glad to see that’s still a thing in the Year of Our Lord 2022. You might be wondering “but Draco this is a sportsman class because the arena is dogshit and Mad Catter has a spinning blade what happened with that?” Well, the spinning disc of Mad Catter was replaced with a tire. The idea here is that the spinning tire would still get purchase on opponents and flip them over digging in without causing any damage. This is allowed as per sportsman rules. The robot also had its lifting arm attachment ready to go so it was still offensive in that manner. I got to see a grand total of one of Mad Catter’s fights because I was too busy doing my own thing but the robot seemed to get caught in the floor seams pretty easily. It also ripped two of its own goddamned tires off of their hubs during safety testing. More like Bad Catter.
Orly is the punchline to the “we have Tentomushi at home” meme format. It’s literally Tentomushi except with a turtle sandbox instead of a ladybug. Also there’s no weapon hidden under the sandbox dome this is purely a control bot. I believe this robot’s drive system was salvaged from a power chair because those wheels are screaming “fat person in a Walmart scooter” at me. It’s probably hard to tell from the picture but sticking out of the front of Orly are two thin flat forks. These forks scrape along the ground to get underneath opponents and then they can rotate vertically so they snag other robots. It’s an interesting idea but they look hella fragile and I don’t think you’d be surprised to hear that the lifters were eventually removed after one of them broke (I think).
Lil Pip Resurrected
Craig Danby attended this event and he brought with him Slammo. For some reason the robot is still named “Slammo” despite competing in BattleBots with that exact same name. Maybe Craig just doesn’t give a shit about contracts or whatever. The balls on this guy I swear. You all know Slammo, it’s “THE suplex bot” according to Craig. It’s also a Craig robot meaning none of that matters because the minute a camera is pointed at it the robot stops working. Case in point I believe Slammo suffered a minor battery meltdown at one point during the event. Remember there are no spinners at Robotica this was purely Slammo trying to grapple onto someone and then shitting itself immediately. It’s the robot equivalent of throwing out your back trying to lift a sofa. Slammo still finished in second place though so at least Craig did something right. Congratulations on your little plaque.
Lil Pip is a heavyweight robot that last competed at Robogames some 4 or 5 years ago. Since then the robot has just been sitting in a state of disassembly because the guy who was in charge of hosting Robogames fucked off and abandoned the event and stopped doing it. This left a lot of competitors like Lil Pip with nowhere to go because BattleBots wouldn’t accept them. Lil Pip’s team heard about Robotica and decided to go all in and they revived their heavyweight as “Lil Pip Resurrected”. It’s basically a four wheel drive wedge with a front hinged lifting arm. Think Free Shipping just with a lifter that goes in the opposite direction. This robot arrived as a work in progress as the photo shows but the team finished their build at the event and were able to get into the ring at least a couple of times before breaking down and forfeiting the rest of their matches.
I’m sure you all remember Dragon Slayer from BattleBots. It’s the vertical spinner that I cheered on with the sardonic catchphrase “there’s a lot of bad dragons out there, kill them all”. Jordan Neal and his crew actually built another heavyweight first that didn’t get accepted into BattleBots. This robot was called Piranha and was an octagonal robot with two wheels and a big ass chunk of spinning steel on its front end. Its weapon reminded me of Black Dragon where it’s like a big block of solid metal spinning god knows how fast. That weapon had to be removed to comply with safety regulations so in its place were two toothless spinning discs. I could’ve sworn Jordan told me he was swapping out the drum spinner with two big saw blades but whatever. Toothless spinning discs are sure to be a real hit too. I’m not being sarcastic at all. Piranha also arrived incomplete. I held the loading bay door open for the team as they carted in Piranha in parts and watched them assemble it in the pits.
NEUMATIK battles Avalanche. (Photo by Team WAR? EZ!)
Team Toad is a robot combat team that people fear is on its way out. Michael “Fuzzy” Mauldin has been competing since the second season of the show (on Comedy Central) meaning he’s been in the game for 20+ years. He’s also getting up there in age and starting to waver on his eagerness to continue participating in the sport. You can’t blame the guy. He just wants to chillax on his farm and spend the rest of his Lycos money on six packs of beer and fishing gear probably. Team Toad still showed up to Robotica and with them they brought Avalanche, a robot that has literally been sitting in the workshop untouched for at least a decade. Its giant snowplow is still missing a chunk out of it from where Last Rites (Tombstone) smashed the shit out of it at Robogames so many years ago. Avalanche is a lot like Team Toad’s Frostbite except rather than have a static snowplow weapon this one can rotate around the robot’s chassis 360 degrees.
Overhaul, the “1-10 wonder” from BattleBots arrived as a demo bot for display while Charles Guan competed with Sadbot, an older build of Overhaul with its clamping mechanism replaced with a lifting spike. Sadbot was renamed to “Deferred Maintenance” for Robotica for reasons only Charles knows. I don’t know which Overhaul became Deferred Maintenance (or if it’s technically even an Overhaul to begin with) but the robot looks more like a testing bench for spare parts than an actual competitor. It has an armored barrier around its perimeter but up top there’s not a whole lot of protection going on. Then again there aren’t any hammer bots here so I guess that’s not a problem but still, someone like Slammo could potentially bite down with its grapplers and yank something loose in the process. Deferred Maintenance was clearly brought just to pad out the numbers so be prepared to pick up your jaw from the floor when I tell you that this robot finished in first fucking place overall in the heavyweight class. Charles then took Overhaul off of its display stand, put it in the arena with Deferred Maintenance, and proceeded to whack it with a folding chair WWE style for three straight minutes.
spiky boi
BattleBots hopefuls Team Horizon were in attendance and brought along their WIP of Horizon renamed to “Rizon” just for Robotica. This team hasn’t even been accepted into BattleBots yet and they’re already using a fucking alias for their robot. Horizon is a robot kind of like Bloodsport if Bloodsport’s weapon was a spinning bar that in turn had spinning discs at either end. Rizon showed up with a 2×4 mounted on its central weapon axle with a large grinding disc mounted directly onto a Magmotor at either end of it. I see the team attended the Chrome Fly school of weapon design. Brilliant. Rizon fought in one match against Avalanche where Avalanche basically slammed Rizon into the wall and knocked its discs off. The impact broke Rizon’s drive system and the robot was counted out. After this fight I’m fuzzy on the details but I believe Rizon’s team couldn’t activate their robot’s master power switch so they just flipped the robot upside down and unplugged its batteries directly since the robot also didn’t have a baseplate on. Apparently this pissed off one of the event coordinators and the robot was disqualified from participating any further at Robotica. They traveled in from as far as California to get one fight and then DQ’ed over a “safety violation”. The robot’s 2×4 wound up in the trash by the end of the show.
We go from talking about a robot armed with a spinning 2×4 to one that’s made almost entirely out of wood. Tiger Plywood is a bot from Team Allennella that I swear has to be a joke because it’s literally just a giant fuck off skate ramp made out of plywood with a couple of NPC chair motors sitting at its rear. The front of the wedge was lined with sheets of metal to scrape the floor. During safety testing Tiger Plywood hit a seam on the floor and visibly fucked up one of the metal sheets. What in god’s name are you people expecting to see happen when you collide with another fucking robot? Tiger Plywood wound up collecting a ton of free wins due to forfeits and disqualifications and this inflated its win/loss record. This fucking thing wound up finishing fourth overall. Not a podium finish but still high enough to get a plaque. In Tiger Plywood’s last fight Slammo manhandled it and shredded the plywood ramp, beating the robot so badly that Tiger Plywood overheated and caught fire just after the fight went to the judges.
Finally the last robot to compete was NUEMATIK from the same builders who brought WAR-EZ to BattleBots a couple seasons ago. I actually didn’t get to see this robot compete but I did somehow get a picture of it. It basically looks a lot like Lil Pip to the point where I confused the two for the same dumb robot but there are a couple of things that differentiate the robots. I just didn’t really pay attention so I didn’t see them at first glance. NUEMATIK’s weapon is a pneumatic flipping arm as its name might suggest. From what I gathered NUEMATIK fought only a couple of times beating Tiger Plywood and losing to Avalanche. NUEMATIK is also listed as having beaten Rizon in the final loop of the round robin tournament. By that point NUEMATIK had forfeited the rest of its fights because it was too damaged to continue so I guess a forfeit is still stronger than a disqualification so the robot got one last win to its name without ever having to enter the arena. Work smarter, not harder.
CHINA CALLING
Tiger Plywood
Earlier in this article I mentioned how I’d been craving Chinese food. I expressed my disdain with an Asian buffet I went to that had shitty food and even shittier sushi on offer. Not every buffet is a knockout, that’s the gamble you take as someone unfamiliar with the neighborhood. I’ll know for next time not to go to Silver Garden or whatever it was called. I’d recognize it if I saw it again, it had a very distinct facade. I bring that up again because the buffet did nothing to scratch that itch. If anything it just made it worse by being bad because few things are more depressing than bad Chinese food. This is stuff that’s supposed to be one click away from soul food, it has to be good otherwise what’s the point in eating all those calories?
As I left the venue on Friday night I passed by a restaurant called China Garden. I was floored, it looked like a generic Chinese restaurant. Exactly what I was looking for. Unfortunately I couldn’t just pull in because if you’re unfamiliar with downtown Texas cities they’re laid out in the most infuriating fucking way imaginable. Every other street is a one way street pointing the opposite direction as the last. The restaurant was there on the right but the street it was on was one way only going left. I couldn’t just turn right and pull in because then I’d be doing the grandma thing of driving into oncoming traffic. I thought about the logistics of going down an extra street and then doubling back and going two more streets down and then turning back around but just explaining it has me confused again. Point is I couldn’t make it there on Friday without aimlessly getting lost in one way streets for 20 minutes so I just made a mental note of China Garden’s existence and decided I’d go there on Saturday.
ANIME CARS SO KAWAII DESU
I made good on my promise to myself and easily made it to the restaurant the following day by going down an extra street before making my turn so I’d be able to catch the parking lot on my way down. There are two kinds of Chinese restaurants out there and the problem is you’ll never know which one you get until you receive the menus. There’s the hole in the wall places that’ll serve you five scoops of rice and a pound of meat for eight bucks and then there’s the establishments that try to be “upper crust” and ritzy and because both of these restaurant varieties look exactly the same on the inside that’s why you have to wait until you get the menu and see how much everything costs. I should’ve known I was asking for trouble eating somewhere in downtown Houston but from the outside everything looked like it checked out. Then I saw that the Mongolian beef cost eighteen fucking dollars.
My heart sank. This was one of the restaurants that try to appeal to white people with money to blow. I might as well have punched “PF Chang’s” into my GPS and told them to kick me in the balls instead of serving me any food because that’s what I was getting. I still ordered something and the food was great. I can’t complain about the quality of the food, but I will complain about the portion size. I got one shitty little spherical lump of fried rice and maybe enough beef to fill a soda can with. Remember I haven’t eaten at all since breakfast. All I’ve had to eat so far was a stupid Texas-shaped waffle from the hotel’s continental breakfast. That was at 8:30am; it was now approaching 9:00pm. I was hungry enough to eat the whole fucking cow and all I got was a handful of food for my troubles.
Thanks for nothing, Houston.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Got to meet my waifu again.
Overall I think it would be safe to call Robotica 2022 a “learning experience” for everyone involved. I don’t know how much experience the event organizers have in putting on a robot combat event for large robots but I guess it could’ve been worse. Having an arena freighted in from Florida couldn’t have been cheap so I know the expenses to run the show were probably fairly great. The dinky little arena for the beetleweights (sponsored by a company described as “an NFT start-up” what a joy) cost approximately $8,000 to build and it didn’t even have any hazards in it so if the little arena was in the upper range of four figures having a truck driver hired just to transport one big arena was likely ludicrous.
Not all competitors had their convention passes comped to them. Only the heavyweight builders. That’s kind of lame because the insect class teams usually brought one robot for each class meaning they were going to be busy the whole time and wouldn’t have a chance to wander around and look at stuff at the con. The weekend pass they bought – which I think cost somewhere close to a hundred fucking dollars – was basically an unavoidable expense that they got nothing out of. Luckily a sponsor stepped in to cover all of the entry fees for each class because otherwise I could see some teams getting real pissed off about having to double dip and pay to enter their robots and then pay again just to get in the goddamned door. That’s the problem with hosting an event at a venue like a convention; you’ll get an audience but there’s just a lot of red tape and hoops to jump through. You’d have a harder time pulling a crowd at a smaller venue but at least your applicants wouldn’t have to drop a Benjamin just to get in.
Orly
Volunteers weren’t fed at the show. I’ve been in the convention circuit since the 2000’s so I’ve seen a lot of shit and I know from experience that the number one way to ensure your volunteers don’t return for next year is to not provide for them this year. I got into trouble one year when I was making the rounds as a stand-up comedian because I went into the green room and ate some of the catered sandwiches that were in there. I left with a half-eaten sandwich and the volunteer checking badges at the door, who’d been there all fucking day, commented that the sandwich looked good. I asked him if he’d eaten at all today and he said the volunteers weren’t fed. I asked him if he wanted a sandwich. I went back into the green room and brought him and the other badge people each a sandwich and a drink. Word of this got back to the EO who got upset at me for doing what he refused to do for his volunteers. I never went back to that convention as a performer again. The official word from the Robotica staff was that competitors would be responsible for their own meals. Apparently this extended to volunteers as well. The only places to eat at a convention center are the on-location restaurants and like fucking hell am I going to pay convention prices for food. Chick-Fil-A had a kiosk at the center as well but I don’t support bigots. They’re lucky I didn’t sneak behind their counter and wipe my ass with all of their nasty chicken patties. Even if I did no one would be able to tell the difference.
I guess the only thing that really ate at me was the god awful parking situation because that was an unavoidable $110 that just vaporized out of my bank account all because Robotica was held at a convention center in downtown Houston. Also I think Mark genuinely believes this is a bona fide revival of the TLC show Robotica. The one hosted by Ahmet Zappa. Bro that show had a figure eight race track and a big ass obstacle course with a sand pit and a giant see-saw. You’ve got an arena that was built 20 years ago, chopped in half, and shipped in from Florida. Let’s not jump the gun here.
If Robotica would validate my parking I’d definitely return for 2023 if it were held at Comicpalooza again. If not I’d have to think about it. Remember, I paid $90 in gas to get here and my hotel stay cost me another $300 just about. I haven’t even stepped in the front door yet and I’ve already spent $400. Drop on the cost of parking and now we’ve exceeded $500. That’s not an insignificant amount of money to me; if I didn’t have a meager savings to draw from I don’t think I’d have been able to afford to make the trip! Writing bad jokes for websites no one’s ever heard of doesn’t exactly reel in the big bucks.
For those of you wondering how the fights went I believe the videos will be posted to the Houston Area Combat Robotics YouTube channel in the coming weeks. The official word from the EO’s is that they have all the footage now and it’s up to them to edit it down into the fight videos and get them posted. That job’s been delegated to the right people. Thankfully it’s not me who has to edit the videos because I hate editing videos. I’d much rather prefer to just be the guy who commentates the fights and call it a day and that’s exactly what I was responsible for doing. Feedback from my role is that I did a fantastic job and that’s encouraging to hear. Even Craig Danby stopped by to watch a few fights and praised my skills. He also encouraged the posting of this article despite the fast turnaround time.
All in all I enjoyed the event and had a good time. It was hectic but having been out of the loop for a couple of years it was enjoyable to see another event again. That’s going to be a wrap on BattleBots Update this week. If you’d like to help support this project you can do so with a contribution via Patreon or Ko-Fi. (Thanks to Patreon you all basically helped me pay for the $110 “fuck me in the ass” parking over the weekend.) You can grab some BBU drip on Redbubble, and be sure to follow BattleBots Update on Facebook for everything else!
See you next week!
– Draco