Hooray for everybody who tweaked and moved and lit and served stuff. It was a fab show. I also got to help bust up my first belligerent guest altercation (girl's gotta have a hobby).

Slug! The dog that controlled the machine by EEG was our Beloved Slug, dead of the bloat these last three years. He was a good dog, always game for being Kal's lovely assistant, but would always run off and hide when he'd had his limit. I believe he was Rudy Jr's dog, or maybe Jay Broemmel, I could never quite figure it out. . .

Mark, thank you for you devotion to your daughters.
Who knows what I might have been if my dad had taken me to the Monster truck shows when I begged? (and begged. And pleased. And whimpered.)

Here's to small girls who will some day take over the world.

Falco a big deal over there? For heaven's sake he only has a staircase. . .thanks for bringing more recognition to this most singular of artists. Amadeus indeed.

Hooboy. This is a heck of a topic amongst my people. We have a post about it up here.

"A robot that tugs at the heartstrings and engenders feelings of protectiveness and adoration is really just extremely good coding and product design. But it’s just one step removed from a marionette. With the marionette, you see the puppeteer. With a robot, the puppeteer wrote some code and put it on a chip. You don’t see the programmer like you do the puppeteer, but the robot has no more real feelings than the wooden marionette. If you burn a marionette, no one complains that you’re killing a living thing (sure, you might be destroying a great piece of art, but it’s not a life form.) Robots like Pleo shift the materials from wood and string to silicon and plastic, but beyond that, they’re the same. Which is in no way to say that they’re not valuable as human companions, or that you shouldn’t get them. We at SuicideBots love marionettes. We love puppet shows. We love robots. We just don’t think that when they act hurt, should we as humans respond as though they actually are hurt."

Let the synthetic textured skinlike substance fly.