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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…though, given what the rest of the convention will smell like by that point, I’m sure sure how much it will help.
It’s important for the staff room to remain a refuge. The VGR is a lost cause
Thats why we gave our volunteers traffic cone yellow vests……and named them the bees.
True story, Lynn. True story.
Taking a shower always helps.
Showers help, and so do washing machines, which most hotels have. For some reason, they are very seldom used.
I’d also like to think that while it’s 90 outside, it’s cooler in the convention hall… but I know that’s not always the case.
Basic rule – if you have gofers crashing in the Gofer Hole, make sure the room has showers and lots and lots of towels AND that there’s time for everybody to use them before they get going in the morning. Your sense of smell will love you for it.
We don’t make our volunteers wear T-shirts.. except for security.
Sunday night at the staff dinner, there’s a reason I don’t sit with security.. (>_>)
I once attended the volunteer meeting at a Free Software conference. (These are only *slightly* geeky, so most people do know about showers and changing clothes, plus no cosplay… So not smelly in general.) They said everyone is getting *two* shirts — because the conference lasts more than one day…