I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the team.
Am I the only one who shed a little tear of happiness when the robot fans did the wave?
Long story short, it turned out my Vegas Robohooker was actually being driven by a guy called Ted from Des Moines. We still swap Christmas Cards…
The Boston Red Sox fanbot they built went into “kill” mode pretty much the moment they flipped the switch. The Yankees fanbot is stuck in a praise/condemn Derek Jeter infinite loop.
Rather than pretend to be enthusiastic enough to attend the game, just write an APP THAT PRETENDS TO CHEER FOR YOU.
That would work in the USA.
Robots are why there’s no crying in baseball.
Replace the audience with robots. Then replace the players with robots. Then replace the TV viewers with robots as well, and free the people to actually do something useful instead of watching baseball.
And once tested on baseball, do the same with soccer. And hockey. Pretty please!
Wow, you’re so advanced and intellectual to not care about sports, I’m super impressed.
These things are just begging to be hacked. Think of the possibilities!
Yeah, I would have guessed you don’t even need to be Korean or in Korea to download the app and become a fan. And then just write a script to cheer randomly.
I’m fine with robot fans, but those obnoxious noisemaker banger things are well beyond the pale. It’s baseball, not college basketball fer chrissakes. What next, vuvuzelas?
“Great, he’s kicked the ball. Now the balls’ over there. That man has it now. That’s an interesting development. Maybe he’ll kick the ball. He has indeed, and apparently that deserves a round of applause.”
– Maurice Moss
What makes me wonder (and irritates me as well) is why somebody publicly stating his disinterest in (say) metallurgy can get away with it more than easily while somebody stating disinterest in spectator sports gets scorned. At the same time nobody is cramming metallurgy down to everybody else’s throats and making it impossible to avoid.
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When do you ever see anyone feeling the need to make a declaration of indifference to metallurgy? Is that one of those weird Jehovah’s Witness things?
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“Cramming it down our throats” is the same weirdly suggestive language that homophobes use to describe the Pride Parade, or even gays holding hands. Nobody is cramming anything down your throat (as far as I know) any more than any other public aspect of culture. Are buses cramming mass transit down your throat? Is the newspaper forcing you to be aware of current events? Do greengrocers offend you with their salacious displays of plump round fruits and vegetables?
It’s pretty easy to ignore things that don’t interest you. Step one is to not read articles about those things. Step two, in case you failed at the first one, is to not comment on those articles.
Happens routinely in the parallel universe where metallurgy news take the last third of what passes as TV/radio news.
Also happened to me when I was talking somewhere about steel microstructures.
Okay, which public aspect of culture (except celebrities and that’s something just a notch less bad than sports) take a third or more of all the news content?
No, because they usually don’t plaster soccer-ball logos on difficult-to-remove heatshrink wraps on said groceries. The soft-drink vendors, on the other hand…
Works for me. There’s loads of crap that I’m not interested in and really don’t care about. Quite a lot of it is very popular. So I just go do something else instead. 
But it can also be a quite lot of fun finding out what other people see in things you dislike, if you’ve got the right mindset for doing that. I’ve picked up a few new interests from looking at stuff without prejudice.
Never thought I’d ever like playing golf, listening to country music or watching professional wrestling but turns out all those can be a lot of fun.
Works for me e.g. with baseball, as my local culture pretty much ignores it so can I without special effort.
Some aspects of sports medicine are fun. The doping and the related biochemistry. Some training regimens. With car racing there are even more - the engines, fuels, lubricants…
…And then the mainstream culture comes, surgically removes everything that’s even remotely fun, and leaves bland pablum of all-the-same-looking names and scores and seen-one-seen-them-all ultraimportant realtime broadcasts.
Meh.
Whatev.
I’m guessing there must be a human filter to the comments. In the UK this sort of technology would open the flood gates on a torrent of filth… as does pretty much anything that allows us to reach out to the world.
