Back on my smashing bullshit, now that I’ve charged up with an overstrength creatine dose (actually, I rearranged my doses so I take all 5 in the morning instead of 3/2 now that I won’t wake up in such a pit at bottom) my limiting factor now isn’t any of the muscles specific to this motion – helper muscles to aim the swing, forearm to hold on and tilt the head up, even waist and thigh to stabilize my base – but the more general and capacious chest muscles raising an 11 pound weight at the end of what between arms and handle is a 7-foot fulcrum
The ‘chrome’ designs pioneered by illustrators like Hajime Sorayama (Sexy Robot
from 1984, for example) tended to be more in vogue at this time (or
just…a hot girl, who is apparently a robot, trust me bro), you don’t
see designs like this too commonly until later (ask resident
robo-fetishist/animator expert @canmom for details on that timeline).
After a challenge like that how can I refuse? Although the question is ‘when did robots get muscles’, this turned into something of a historical survey of robot designs from the 80s on with a throughline of biomimesis.
(Originally this was just going to be an excuse to talk about Ghost in the Shell… but I gotta be thorough.)
Traditionally, robots have been made of hard, rigid shapes. Even very human-like androids, like the Terminator.
At some point, softer, more biological components started to slide in. Artificial muscles in particular. Nowadays, if you want to depict a fearsomely high-tech robot, it might look more like this…
So I ended up wondering - how did this happen, what were the precursors, when did robots get ripped? And that led deeper. And deeper.
You might not be all that surprised that I like pinball. It’s a pointless, fruitless contraption of annoying sounds and bright lights, with a bunch of half-broken metal inside. That’s more or less the crown prosecutor’s description of me from last spring. I heard they spent like a day in a whole-office brainstorming session just to come up with that one, but I digress.
The point of pinball is, like all great human endeavours, to rack up an arbitrary score by playing the game. To this extent, you pay money for a limited number of chances. A better writer than me could make this some sort of metaphor on life itself, but I’m not going to resort to that kind of trickery. No, I want to talk about actual pinball.
Here’s the thing about a game that mostly consists of bouncing a steel ball into stationary objects, which trigger sensors and relays. That stuff breaks down, and it breaks down all the time. Although you may imagine all mechanical objects as existing in a perfect state of repair and a zero-percent-humidity vacuum, the real world is completely filthy. Dirt and hair get into things. Grease reacts with the plastics and becomes some kind of nightmare tar that has to be removed with industrial paint-stripping equipment. Screws pop out. The playfield flakes off and warps. Complex electronics seize up somewhere deep inside and begin to act, in the words of Alan Turing, “fucking haunted.”
So that means that the operator of a pinball machine has to be constantly maintaining it. Keeping an eye on all the bumpers. Being good enough to play it and hit all the features, check to make sure the multi-ball bonus works. This is the kind of thing that I like to do, but unfortunately I was born a couple years too late to become full-time employed maintaining pinball machines across America, driving a $500 Plymouth Barracuda, seeding secret second and third families whenever I find a small town that I particularly liked. Instead, I get to look at my friends’ pinball machines and go: that looks bad. You should replace that part. And then they say: I can’t, because nobody makes that part anymore. And then I spend a year meticulously constructing an exact replica of that part, only for the next thing in line to break.
All this is to say that pinball is keeping me from doing even basic maintenance on my fleet of terrible cars, which I’m sure is appreciated by the citizenry at large. Stick that in your ass and smoke it, Your Worship.
judas was probably like “jesus has pulled off so many wacky things, he’ll get out of this one lickity split, and i get three shiny coins out of it, too”
Yeah, I did a lot of smashing yesterday and I’m not feeling it in my shoulders or arms today at all, I guess I’ve finally developed them to suit (and my limiting factor is now general energy generation)
Oh also spent a lot of the afternoon staring closely at my backyard to notice slightly different shades and shapes of green, or more likely the tiny white flower of bittercress plants and snipe them before they can go to seed
It’s tedious and repetitive, but it pays off, after two years doing this for purple deadnettle I’m seeing only very isolated sprouts this year for stuff that apparently stayed in the seed bank for 3
Also clearing like 6 of the broadest and roughest-bladed, leggiest, or just badly shaped grass species, it helps that mowed-short grass seed mostly doesn’t travel that far so even if something survived to set seed previously there’s just a patch of special interest around there to focus on and I don’t need to go hunting all across the yards for rogues (though I can pretty readily distinguish between at least 20 grass species on sight – I can’t say “oh that’s #16”, but I’m like “oh, that’s one of those shorter-habited non-creeping non-bunchgrasses with more but thinner blades so it really cultivates moisture down there, but not the one that’s really more yellow-green towards the base or the one that feels fluffy”
