Current Post On Trae’s Blog:
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.
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Grin – haven’t drawn THAT duty since I took up working Con Ops. Possibly our busiest time, even just fielding “can we leave this here?” requests by people who should know better…
We always ran feedback in a separate room. I don’t think I ever saw more than 25 people. Once closing ceremony ended, we started tearing stuff down.
I’m always a little amazed how few people stay for the feedback panel.
And how many of those have one single issue they want to spend the whole panel talking about.
The feedback session is with the con chair and the vice con chair aka next year’s chair. Usually it’s not that full, but everyone present decides they want to monologue.
I really want to see how Veronica deals with monologuers.
Sadly we won’t get to see that this year, as I have to wrap up the con on Thursday.
Because next week is November.
We used to fun comments after closing ceremony, and it wqas routinely 50% “Your con is the best con ever” despite us politely telling people If you had a wonderful time, great, but we want to hear what we could improve on.”
Eventually, we just had an online comment page because we wanted to pack up after Closing ceremonies and get to the staff dinner and the boozings. Works good, we think.
Not to mention, if there are a lot of people waiting to comment, some might not get their chance to make a legitimate criticism because too many people ahead of them wasted time with praise and talking about how many years they’ve been attending.
Unless, of course, they want to praise Otakon’s Classic Video track.
Wasn’t present (or even on the ConCom thank Ghu) the time a convention which shall be left nameless because it was a looooong time ago had enough visible-to-attendees screwups that bard Leslie Fish turned up at the gripe session with a song about the lot and started singing. I’ve heard the song. Oh dear…