A few days ago, an email arrived on my doorstep as SRL crew, from an SRL fan and robotics society magistrate. Asking for help wrangling the Robot Olympics, he wasn’t specific with details as to what he might want me to do, and while I tire painfully of people endlessly asking if SRL is like Robot Wars or Battlebots (which these folks founded), I felt like I needed to see what this world was like, outside of the glimpses I’ve caught flipping around on the TV. I regularly work on and run large (I mean LARGE) scale remote-controlled robot machines for SRL, and have for the past eight years. Aside form the irritation many SRL folks have about commercialized genres copying us (and for good reason — we’ve been ripped off beyond belief, had our images repeatedly used without our permission, etc.), I wanted to support the robotics community, and inform myself about developments in the art. So I said, "sure" and cryptically was told to show up tonight (Friday; it’s after midnight as I write) for a cocktail. Strange, but okay.
So I went down to the lovely Herbst Pavilion on the waterfront and walked into a giant spectacle — robots from an inch in diameter to ones three feet across (mind you, these were still small, tiny and cheek-pinching cute compared to SRL bots). Bleachers, competition rings of all sizes, from teeny-tiny to steel cages walled in with Plexiglas. And lots of competitors, from age ten to at least sixty, families and their robots, older women and their bots, and it was very cool indeed. Even cooler, when I found a familiar face, I was handed a badge, complete with a picture of me stolen from my website, and told I was to be a competition judge. A judge? After eight years of war-zone style SRL shows… sure, I can be a judge. So tomorrow, staring at 10am, I get to see robots from all over the world strut their stuff and rate them on aggression and destruction. This is way cool.
After the cocktail mixer, which was really Budweiser and Costco snacks, I was all set to meet a few pals from SFSI at 26 Mix, a Mission bar I never go to but tonight was the night that the furries were taking it over in a semi-surprise attack called Guerilla Fur Bar. There is a Guerilla Queer Bar that I’ve heard of, where queer folks go in groups to typically straight bars to have fun and just "be visible" and this was the furry version — hell, no I can’t miss something like that. Except everyone I was supposed to meet flaked, and the few people I knew at the Robolympics mixer didn’t want to go — so I went alone. And let me tell you, walking into a bar full of people dressed like bunnies, tigers, raccoons, zebras and (?) is one of the funnest things to do, ever. Bunnies were hopping on the dance floor. Kitty girls sipped cocktails and flirted. Some just had ears on, but a few had entire suits that were the real deal — and they had to drink their beer from bottles to get through their large costume mouths. Even the bartender was a bunny, and I did worry about his ears catching on fire every time he leaned too close to a candle to reach under the bar. I sipped a cosmo and watched the whole thing, pondering flammability of costumes, thinking they must be really sweaty on the dance floor, wondering if they really had sex in their outfits. I saw someone with just a set of ears on and thought, "they’re not a *real* furrie — I wonder how many are real ones or just fashion furries." Then I realized — who am I to say who’s really a furrie, or not? I sipped my drink, enjoyed all the happy drunken furries, and came home to my little cat, who has no idea that he’s really a furrie.
