SRL

Check this out - Survival Research Laboratories. http://vimeo.com/95489
and http://vimeo.com/95493

I have been into them again lately. I saw them in the Austin area at the local speedway (Lone Star? Texas? I can't remember). I will forever be fascinated with that huge Tesla coil they use, which throws out lightning at passing remote-control robots. These robots happen to be flame-throwers or pinchers or spinning hooks, or some other rather dangerous weaponry, although some of the robots happen to be crawling, seemingly-vulnerable ones that creep around. When I saw Survival Research Labs in Austin, they had also built a mock U.T. Tower with a robot human holding a rifle, aimed out at the audience. It shook in such a way that it looked like it was shooting the gun around the top of the tower. Over the course of the evening the tower caught on fire due to some flame-throwing robot and eventually burned all the way to the ground. Some of the other robots had pigs' heads and steer horns attached to them that they seem to have gotten from a local farm or slaughterhouse, because yes, they were definitely real.

I went to this show sometime in the middle of a Texas spring because Tmo and I drove down there together in my truck, and I still have pictures of us in the bluebonnets. It was such an excellent time of year, because the weather stayed warm during the day but never quite too hot yet. We stayed with a long-time friend of his and Dan Wilkes' who had purchased a house with a family inheritance. The house was set deep into the woods of central-downtown Austin (near Lamar and 35th). It looked Japanese to me from the outside because of a low-red-tiled roof and porticos. This was just before I adopted Bill the skink because I remember learning about skinks from Tmo and finding out that his friend, whose house this was, had a monkey skink. Let's see... I believe we went down there sometime early in our relationship, probably 1995... or 1996. Those were the days when he and I did a lot of trips down to Austin to see various bands play, from Glowforce (formerly "Wookie" - I still have a "Wookie" bumpersticker from that band.), Powersquid (used to be a trio).

Woops! I just discovered this about 2 weeks after I wrote it and never posted it. Well, I suppose I will post this because I forgot to go back to it!