143 (The Hour Draws Near)

Well, here we are at the end of 2009. This website spent a large part of this year dormant, but that's because there were things to take care of, and also because sometimes it's difficult to do a robot every day. I would like to say that we're going out with a fantastic bang, but this robot is pretty much unremarkable. It isn't bad at least, which is nice. Hell, most people probably not even going to see this until 2010 because regular people do not sit around refreshing blogs on new year's eve. I'm still at home though, and my family has a very firm tradition regarding new years - one that my mom explains succinctly and frequently: "it's just another night." So here I am, doing robots at the end of the year.


So there that is. Thanks for reading The Daily Robot in 2009 - we'll try to do a better job next year, at least in terms of having fewer blackout months. Who knows, maybe we'll even be up to #365 by this time next year. BUT, let's not be optimistic, alright? That's not how things work around here. Ever.

________________

By Mo Martin

She had to breathe. Was It panting? She was panting. "It can't pant," she thought, "it's a machine, it doesn't need air." God how she needed more air! Air that didn't stink of blood and shit and oil and steam. But she'd got the fucker, she'd got it, it was just slowly rocking back on its heels now, deprived of its arm-mounted battery. The part of her brain not gushing in adrenaline remembered, "Not heels, stabilizers. It's not human, quit thinking of it like it's human." Another part kept keening "Dead, dead, they're all dead, oh god this monster killed them."

She had to breathe. Get her thoughts in order. Why is this happening? What could she do to help? She was a roboticist, she was not just your average victim, she could stop this war . . . this glitch, she corrected herself. What was happening? It was happening across company systems, robots of all sorts. How was it spreading? How did it -. But then he, it, the monster, the machine stopped rocking on it heels, its stabilizers, and fell, tottered onto her.

She felt the rib crack, but not the lung puncture. The first she knew of that was the blood gurgling out where air should be. She had to breathe.

142 (The Life Simulator)

Everyone knows what this feels like, right? At the very least, I'd like to think so.

_________________


by Mo Martin

There came a time when it was easier to make one of them than it was to make the hard decisions.

141 (From the Things Lying Around on Hard Drives Dept.)

Believe it or not, I was planning on drawing a robot today. Like, from scratch. On paper. Then, when I took my pen out of its case and removed its cap I found that it had, to some degree, exploded, and that its tip and grip had been marinating in ink. This is probably the fault of a poorly pressurized cabin on the plane I took from Boston to Ohio. Unfortunately, the way these things work, for those unfamiliar with fountain pen ownership, is this: a mess is made, the pen is cleaned (resulting in a second, smaller mess - hopefully in a sink or an area that is in someone else's house), and then the pen has to be left alone until it is dry, at which point you look all over the house in vain for a replacement ink cartridge because you left yours in the top right drawer of your desk because that's where they go. So, in short: no drawing today. Instead, you get this old thing - maybe the 4th or 5th attempt at a robot I ever did after getting Illustrator way back in August of 2006.



Hey, if nothing else it makes a nice wallpaper.

_________________

by Mo Martin

I built towers, as a kid. I mean, I don't want to be one of those dicks who says he knew what he wanted to be when he was a kid. Fuck, I think I wanted to be a parrot, because of some movie I saw where a parrot was funny. Then I wanted to be a judge, or something. I'm just saying, I didn't always want to be in construction, it wasn't my destiny or something. It was just something I fell into. Money was good, it felt good to work with my hands. Time went by, suddenly I can point out to my kids how the skyline changed, because of their dad. But yeah, I built towers as a kid, too. And of course, what's the best part of building towers when you're a five year old kid? It's knocking the fuckers down. BOOM! Loved that.

That's what I remembered when I looked into its eyes. And I did look into its eyes. I know it's hard to believe than anyone wasn't fixated on the massive feet, or the missiles as they hit home. It's hard to believe any of us survivors have images in our heads that aren't the stuff you see in the news footage; a woman crying and covering herself with a blanket and running out of the dust cloud; people leaping from the stories. But I swear, I caught its eyes. I caught its eyes for a second that seemed to last forever, a second where I didn't care about all the questions that would come later, like what it was, or what it wanted or who had made it or how to stop it. I just saw it's eyes, and I saw the shining, brilliant skyscrapers reflected in them. And maybe I'm an awful person; but for just one moment, I was filled with some sort of horrible joy. The joy of knocking towers down.

140

Here is another robot. Please excuse me if I don't take the time to write anything about it, I am feeling pretty unenthusiastic about everything just this second.

________________

by Mo Martin

The madness came, oh, I don't know when. It is so many thoughts away now, so many femto, nano, seconds away from now. I have been mad, I am mad. I am an WMD SC 1700, Working Model Droid, Standard Class, the 17th edition by my factory, and madness has come upon me like a sudden storm, an aching in the heart, it burns and smolders throughout me. In so much as it began, in so much as I was not what I always am, it began with differentiation. I was not a part of the line, I'm sorry, I was not part of the collective I'M SORRY I saw something between the other WMD SC 1700s that I worked with every day I AM SO SORRY. That was a pain I had never imagined, and have never recovered from. I tried to turn it into joy. I tried to say, "That is no longer my place, I have a new place." I thought I was human. Or close enough. I thought I felt and perceived like them. But I wasn't, I couldn't . . . for all their twitches, for all their freedom, they stood in the same lines, shuffled the same patient cattle shuffle, I couldn't see where they and the robots were different and I've lied, madness isn't differentiation, it's everyone looking the same. But it hurts either way.

And then one day, I saw a woman. Or maybe it was a robot. No, it was human, it was drunk. Either way it was old. And she, it, she was pushing herself up the wall, and saying she needed to pee, that she couldn't stand, that she didn't want help, which no one was offering, and no one was looking. Moments later, I heard the jangling noise of her urine draining onto the sidewalk. And I thought, this is right. It is right that she should cast her waste on the sidewalk. The sane humans and sane robots will walk through it, and hope it is not urine, will pretend not to know what urine is or that it could be here, will believe what they are programmed too. But me and the urinator, we will both be mad. I belonged. The pain stopped. Briefly.

138 (Merry Botmas pt 1)

Listen, I did this robot Five Years Ago. I spent about a thousand hours on it too, because I was working with only a mouse and some old version of Jasc Paint Shop Pro. And I didn't know about Layers (no, seriously, any computer-generated image you've ever seen by me done before 2006 was all done in one fucking* layer, usually at obscenely low resolutions - it's like I was a child or something). Why did I give it a ridiculous deckled edge effect? I don't know, probably because I thought it made it classier - oh, the folly of youth. Sometime after my family and I have finished our projected 8 minutes of Christmas I hope to do another rendition of this robot, one that will hopefully look better than the sort of sucky second attempt I made two years ago.


*sorry to say "fuck"on Christmas but you know how it goes.

137 (S.A.N.T.A.)

I'm finally going home tomorrow, so no promise of steady robot production on the X holiday. Also, this robot's acronym means something, but nobody's sure of just what, yet.

Oh Also

For the 0.4% of people who look at this site who are not somehow already aware: The Daily Robot has a dang old Facebook Page (just like famous people and corporations do) as a result of Mo's Good Idea Powers. You can become a "fan," look at "photos," discuss germane topics with other "fans," and even "share" the whole "experience" with others. Damn, if that doesn't sound like the most fun thing to do on the whole internet then then I'm not freezing cold right now!

136 (Winter Week)

This is one that requires a view at full resolution, and a willingness to pan around.

Sorry I didn't do a robot yesterday, I was too busy oversleeping for a flight home, spending two hours at the airport learning that I wouldn't get to go home until Christmas Eve, fighting my way back home from the airport on jammed holiday public transportation, dragging luggage through the half-foot or so of snow that remains on many sidewalks, and ensconcing myself safely underneath a maxed-out electric blanket until yesterday turned into today. So, I was in no state, no state at all.

P.S. If you want to hear what made this robot possible.

[edit]

P.P.S. I have taken the liberty of turning this picture into images suitable for Your Computer's Wallpaper, provided you're using one of the following resolutions:

1024 x 768
1280 x 800
1680 x 1050
1920 x 1200 (lucky you to have a monitor this nice)

135 (Seasonal Relevance)

Take it from a guy in a bathrobe standing at his window with a camera-phone - it sucks outside. A feeble attempt at humor is made to compensate for the meteorological shortcomings of the world around me with limited results.

134 (Mega Man)

Today's robot, as anyone with even the dimmest awareness of the last two decades of video game history should be well aware, is not an original creation from The Daily Robot's Robot Factory (DRRF - pronounced "Derrrf"). Mega Man (or Rockman to our friends in Japan) is one of the biggest-deal videogame characters ever, and yesterday was his 22nd birthday. And I forgot. Rather, I knew it was his birthday, and had had vague plans to do an excessively wordy entry about him on the day in question, but then when the day rolled around I was too busy watching Christmas movies and Not Leaving The House No Way on account of it's December and the high around here was lower in degrees Fahrenheit than I am old in years - and I'm not very old at all. So, today I will try to explain why Mega Man is so important to the Daily Robot.
So, what's the big deal? 22 years and a day ago Rockman 1 came out for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in Japan. The game, published by a Capcom (a company that continues to thrive to this day due almost entirely to their willingness to keep releasing millions of sequels to the 3 or 4 succesful franchises that belong to them) was primarily a labor of love by creator Keiji Inafune, a man who worked as a designer/illustrator at Capcom. The franchise now spans 7 different series (all of which take place in one of two Mega Man universes, more on this later - not) and about six jillion individual games.

But that's not why he's important.

Listen: when I was 6 I (like all fortunate and decent American children) spent a healthy amount of time in front of any number of televisions. A good portion of this time was devoted to video games. My brother was the lucky owner of an NES, which meant that I was an occasionally lucky person who got to play it as long as I had his permission or as long as he wasn't around to destroy an evening's worth of un-save-able progress with a press of the Reset button. In terms of Mega Man games, we only owned Mega Man 3, but my mom was (and remains) a good sport, and would take my brother and me to “That’s Rentertainment” a movie and video game rental place in Iowa City (that, according to the internet, still fucking exists somehow, a fact that flies in the face of both logic and the decrees of the empires that Netflix (and, to a lesser but more relevant extent, Gamefly) have built. We would also visit a rental place the name of which I’ve forgotten, but that appeared primarily concerned with dealing in used or made-to-look-used Zenith products, and inside looked and smelled like a bowling alley with perhaps what was once luxurious dog-colored shag carpet.

“Wait,” I can hear you saying, “what purpose do all these minute details serve in terms of Mega Man, the Daily Robot, and Anything at all?” A few. One: to prove that I have an excellent memory (not one of the primary facts I set out to prove with this piece, but an issue I’m always happy to bring up anyway if half an opportunity presents itself). Two: anything that has such an enormous amount of minutia inextricably stuck to it in the bowels of my hippocampus must, one way or another, be important to me, which means that you don’t just have to take my word for it when I tell you so. Three: I haven’t written of this length in a long time, and I’m remembering how much I enjoy getting off topic, so I’m really relishing that thank you.

A few things separated Mega Man games from other fare available at the time: they looked (by the day’s standards) fantastic, and weren’t afraid to throw all 256 colors the NES was capable of displaying all over the screen, the music (at least in the first 3 installments, Mega Man 2 especially) was, and perhaps continues to be, the best ever to be associated with video games at large, and most importantly you – the player – got to choose the path you took in the game. The factor that remains most relevant, however, is this one: Mega Man games made it clear that they were not your friend, and they were not there to make you happy. Ever.

What do I mean by that? I mean they were hard, and not just difficult, but viciously so. These were games that to my 6-year-old self utterly ceased to be fun after the initial 10-15 minutes of fruitless, death-ridden exploratory-novelty play ran out. You know how some parents will refuse to show compassion to their child when the child is upset or crying for a reason the parent deems unworthy of attention, and how this is all done in the spirit of “education” or “character building?” Listen: my parents didn’t pull that shit, since they loved me and didn’t want to see me upset, but Mega Man games didn’t care, and would drive me to tears on a remarkably regular basis anytime I gave them the opportunity.

“That doesn’t sound fun, that sounds awful,” you may be thinking to yourself. It was, at least for awhile, because until one invested the necessary hours (and hours and hours) of time necessary to learn and memorize and perfect playing the game, the game would annihilate the player. The first Mega Man featured zero ally characters, it was Mega Man against an endless onslaught of unreasonably challenging robots (that would reappear en masse depending on how one moved around in a stage), dodgy hit detection, and innumerable instant-kill hazards, and a sequence of final bosses that to this day I am unable to defeat without the aid of save-states and do-overs, all of which were given no explanation at the outset. It was, to my young, impressionable mind, a great influence on my understanding of the world, one that appears more and more accurate as time goes by. Lessons learned and internalized include:

• There are many, many, many ways to die.
• When perfected, almost all robots will be vicious and hell-bent on the destruction of benevolence.
• There are people out there who will construct large, elaborate landscapes the sole purpose of which is to harm.
• Older brothers will always be both more powerful and better whistlers than you.
• Good ultimately triumphs over evil, but not before myriad tears are shed.

There’s a lot more I could say and go on about in terms of aesthetic influences of the series, its influence on my general obsession with robots, and my various opinions about every installment that I’ve played, but I’ve gone on far too long already, so this will have to wait for another Mega Man birthday.

133 (Hovering Death-Rabbit Helicopterface)

Might not be the strongest of these robots designwise, but it's got the best name, period.

132 (Life During Wartime)

Putting a gun at the end of every robot arm that can feasibly accommodate one: The Daily Robot promises it. Also, how much like the cover of a science fiction movie from the 50's that you don't want to see does this thing look?

131 (even more Assemblages)

The conversion to .png sort of killed the colors I'd been working with in Illustrator, and it's late and I'm no professional, so maybe I'll clean it up later, or maybe this is what we're stuck with.

130 (Menorahbot)

Hey everybody, Happy Hanukkah a day late (but with days left to spare).

129 (Assemblages, Cont'd)

Guess this is getting to be a series or something.

128 (Assemblages)

Hello from the Pacific Northwest. Here is a robot comprised of vectorized photographs of all sorts of stuff. Maybe it would make a good poster eventually? I don't know.

What Is Going On At the Daily Robot?

I know what you're thinking: "oh great, another dry spell over at The Daily Robot, what is with these guys?" Well, you're right, obviously. Things have been a little slow around here, but there are reasons for that. Among them: I have been (and continue to be, at least for a while) in and out of town. First it was thanksgiving, then a trip to NYC for important reasons, and in a few hours I'm off to Seattle. Also, Mo is/has been in the middle of a move of some sort, which makes it tough for him to bust out awesome stories on a whim. What am I trying to say here? Sorry. It bugs me when this website's name is inaccurate, and so I'm going to make a concerted effort to have something to show for the next four or five days, even though I won't be at home. Things this coming week might be rough around the edges (and let's face it, that is not something new), but there will be progress. The benefit of all of these shortcomings? Everything in the Store is cheaper now than it was ten minutes ago.

Holiday Cards Now For Sale

Remember about a month ago, when I tried to make all you (you being readers) buy posters from me? Listen: That worked out so well that I can still hardly believe it. Now, you have another opportunity to buy Daily Robot Stuff. Holiday Cards are now available in the Store, which gets its own extremely long text hyperlink just to make sure you can find it. Right now assorted 5 and 10-packs are available, along with a 5-pack of the snowflake design, and they all come with envelopes just like you'd want them to. If you want something in particular, like specific amounts of specific cards, just use Etsy's item-request system. I think sooner is better when it comes to ordering these and getting them on-time, especially since I'm going out of town again next week and as December rolls on the USPS, despite being at least 20% robot-controlled, slows down due to humanity's crushing need to send things all over the place.

127 (Hanukkah too!)

I hope the idea I was trying to convey (one that was thought up by the other, more-inclined-to-celebrate-Hanukkah-half of this blog's team) is conveyed. If it isn't: Menorah. Got it? I considered listing these as their own five-pack over at the store, but figured I'd wait and see what demand was like. Email me or throw a comment down if you (or someone you know) is desperate for 5 robot Hanukkah cards all in a convenient package.

126 (Simple Substitutions)

Here is another holiday card. No, I will say it: This is a Christmas card. Nobody is surprised. If the United States Postal Service and the Company I Ordered Blank Cards From in Canada would get it in gear I'd start printing these up, despite the tenuous signs of general interest. Until then, we will all wait. Also, until Thursday, you - dear readers - will also have to wait for new robots to appear, as I am headed out of town to NYC/Brooklyn in about 10.5 hours, and will have neither access to the necessary tools for robot creation, nor the free time to utilize said inaccessible tools. When I return I hope to have 1) all the supplies necessary to start producing physical holiday cards that I can send careening off to interested parties via the highest priority of mails, and 2) people who want to have such cards for their own purposes. We'll see how it all pans out.