Lately I'm starting to think I need to make more of an effort to film every play session with the Pleos, like RWM does - I miss about half of the things that would be entertaining to share. Then again, sometimes I realise I definitely wouldn't have wanted to capture my reaction when they
really surprise me!
On this occasion I had turned both the Pleos on around midday to push their noon switches - Lizzy was so out of sync after her last repair job (when I evidently hadn't pushed the button correctly) that she always wanted to sleep rather than play, and I don't think Darcy has been reset since he arrived so he was probably an hour or so out too. They were pretty unhappy with being turned about so that I could access the switches, but once I'd set them down and fed them in apology they settled down and happily started their usual 'chatting' routine...
...except suddenly I realised that both of them had been silent since they started their IR communicating! At this point I was probably yelling, "Why are you doing this!" or some similar horrified thing, because I can now tell you there is something unspeakably creepy about a Pleo silently mouthing, 'I love you'! If the 'silent treatment' was meant to punish me, it worked!
I turned them both off and on again when they remained eerily quiet (Boyfriend: "If I don't talk to you for a while, please don't turn
me off and on again!"
) and they went on making noise as if nothing had happened. Assuming it wasn't related to the noon switch being pushed (and it didn't start immediately after that), I'm now utterly intrigued as to what would have provoked them to do that as a result of their little IR chat.
I think this is why I love robots so much - even when they're being buggy or not working as intended, sometimes the unintentional stuff is as entertaining (or scary!
) and leads you to ask some fun questions. One of my next projects with the Pleos (once I've completed all sorts of other projects I've committed to) is definitely going to be to capture their 'pheromone' communications and see what I can get them to do by feeding them different communications.
