Hacker Cinema
BattleBots
2015 · TV series · 43 min episodes · 9 seasons
Created by Greg Munson, Edward P. Roski
BattleBots promises to wow viewers with next generation robots—bigger, faster and stronger than ever before. The show will focus on the design and build of each robot, the bot builder backstories, their intense pursuit of the championship and the spectacle of the event.
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6 comments on Hacker News
I hadn't thought about BattleBots in 20(?) years, until I recently showed the current season (the Golden Bolt tournament, aka "BattleBots 2015 Season 7" for some reason) to my son. It's good entertainment and a pretty solid show: the robot fighting is good, the whole thing is deliberately set up in the style of a boxing match (which works really well), everything is accessible to a younger or casual fan, and the robots and robot teams are the stars of it all. It's way better than I remembered. It's still got plenty of filler, but they only have so many minutes of robots fighting to fill the timeslot, so what can you do?
First, ruthless pruning.
Second, subscription rotation. My family wants to watch the Battlebots season. We have subscribed to Discovery+ since that's the only place it is. While it's on Discovery+, we're catching up on the other shows we're interested in. We will be cancelling our subscription when we're done. Perhaps some other thing will pop up, perhaps not. Oh, hey, that reminds me, now that the Superbowl is done, I'm done with Peacock... {click click click} OK, that's cancelled. (Seriously. Literally just cancelled it because you reminded me of it.)
Third, some things I just won't subscribe to. I've been building my MP3 collection since I got my first CD in something like 1995. I've never gone subscription and at this point I almost can't, in the sense that I would lose too much. Lately I've been building up my Plex system rather than get too stuck on movie streaming. It's nominally more expensive, even, but it's mine, and I'm in full control of the cost rather than a monthly subscription.
The best way to avoid being trapped (or feeling trapped) by a service is to never start using it. My plan for the "metaverse", for instance, is to not. Consequently, I will never face a choice between leaving them in disgust but losing all my friends and high scores and purchased content and all the other stuff I didn't actually own, or feeling forced to compromise my principles and stay on a service that takes my money and does things I don't like with it.
I selectively break this rule but only for stuff that I know in advance I don't care if I lose. We've purchased some video from Amazon Video, but I only do that for stuff I am very confident we're only going to watch once. I only subscribe to things I know I don't care if I lose, because it isn't even just the control aspect. Something like "Oku", I don't know what that is, I've never heard of it, will it even be there in six months? Will the feature you love get "upgraded" out of existence? I just don't trust these things, and it's not because I'm just a generic old man shouting at clouds to get off my lawn, it's from experience. I've outlasted a lot of these services already. I've lost track of the amount of "content" I've added to my "watch later" list only for it not to be there when I'm ready. I'd rather just own things I can stick on my automatically-backed-up partition and be done with it.
Are you sure? When I used to watch Battlebots on Discovery channel it was basically 6 minutes of action wrapped in 10 minutes of fluff and 15 minutes of ads. Discovery Magazine had 3 sections per half-hour; comparatively speaking any science channel in YT will have way more content, and a lot of it really good for specialized audiences. Travel YT are way more up-to-date and useful than TV travel documentaries used to be.
There's a ton of really good Youtube channels, and the level of information density is astounding.
I can't read the article, but I listened to Adam Savage's podcast where he talked to one of the principles of BattleBots. He described the steps they had to go through to run/film during CoVid- it included dedicated compliances personnel, with continual enforcement and daily testing. So my guess is that the film company is facing a higher set of standards, and is allowed to operate because it does so.
I'd recognized him from Battlebots since his robot Deadblow was a finalist from season 1, the final episode[0] starts with a short intro from Grant that shows his fun perspective brought to the table on Mythbusters. The entire Mythbusters team surely inspired the next generation of scientists and engineers with a can-do mentality.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTDrwWCJqAo
You all might notice YC alum Marc DeVidts of Double Robotics on Battlebots (Ice Wave).
I was the builder of Bite Force, which you can see in the final episode this Sunday. I was the mechanical engineer at Double for there first year when we were just a few employees, great founders and friends!