The Clearwater University Student Center exterior image (which we’ve seen several times) started as a photo of a UW Lacrosse building (Street View Link) that was then modified to expand to having a second floor, add windows to said second floor, and a couple of other tweaks.
I was going for “generic college building from the mid-20th century” – so I don’t know if you’re recognizing it from the Lacrosse, WI campus OR if I’ve just massively succeeded in creating the most generic college building ever 😛
So it was literally more than twenty years ago that I first put one of my dumbest creations on the internet: The Steven Seagal Movie Generator.
Like I seriously publicly launched that dumb thing back in 2004, and for those of you who were unaware, it assembles a title, cast and plot of a fake Steven Seagal movie from elements of his (real) bad films.
I honestly got the idea from a former-friend, who in high school wrote a comedic piece about how you could mash up the titles of Seagal films in the weird underground "newspaper" that got handed out for a few years. But I took it a few steps further, and made a whole thing.
Mostly it just sat there though, a thing I made once and never went back to. I followed it up with the Sci-Fi Channel Movie Generator (later retitled the Syfy Movie Generator) in 2008. I spent more time on that one, doing a later design update that made the "Syfy" movies show up on a fake DVD back cover.
But the Steven Seagal generator just sort of sat there, untouched.
And Steven Seagal kept making (terrible) movies with (predictable) titles. Like a lot. But the generator still only spat out movies culled from the nineties and early 2000s, ignoring all of his new stuff. There was a whole library of awful movies that just weren't in there, and it made the generator feel less relevant.
So, uh, I went and did something about that today.
First off, I redesigned the page. Now it looks like the back of a VHS tape box. Then I loaded the elements of about twenty-five additional films into the generator. And that was harder than I thought it would be, since some of the films are so obscure that they're not well documented. I literally had to do some deep research to figure out a lot of the basic plot details that are now in the generator.
But I did it.
And it's done.
And the generator is now fully loaded.
It's still useless and dumb, though.
About the Comic
UnCONventional is a comic that ran from December 2009 to December 2019 about the staff of a small town anime convention and their lives. This is a complete online archive of the comic.
And exactly how many meetings have you been to this year, ‘President’ Perry?
Oh, there you are, Perry.
That building looks awfully familiar…
The Clearwater University Student Center exterior image (which we’ve seen several times) started as a photo of a UW Lacrosse building (Street View Link) that was then modified to expand to having a second floor, add windows to said second floor, and a couple of other tweaks.
I was going for “generic college building from the mid-20th century” – so I don’t know if you’re recognizing it from the Lacrosse, WI campus OR if I’ve just massively succeeded in creating the most generic college building ever 😛
To me it looks a heck of a lot like the local middle school… and a fair bit like the high school… really, square brick buildings all sorta look alike.
On the subject of the comics to follow, Dis gunna b good