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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Why do I find it awesome yet somehow disturbing that Veronica is cosplaying Attack on Titan?
because she’s obviously Potato girl
I’m from New Jersey and I’ve been going to cons since 2009; literally the only mention of room parties I’ve heard was from your comic series.
Same here.
Jesus. Didn’t we have this discussion…oh a few months ago, Trae?
I think we’ve got a soft spot for the ol’ room party at NebKon, otherwise we wouldn’t have started a room party block…
Either way, agreed its a dying art. Part of it has to do with several cons adapting late night programming…part of it. The rest of it I think just stems from some conventions just not wanting to deal with it anymore. I know Naka in KC has greater difficulty with room parties due to Kansas laws (Kansas laws suck donkey balls btw).
A few months ago? More like a year or two ago.
bah, it hasn’t been that long
I also think the interest has died too. One year my brother and I had bought food like Doritos, Ramen cups, and yes even marshmallows as a way to barter at room parties because we knew food might be an issue at the parties.
However that year there was a huge lack of parties. I also think behavior has also contributed like 2 years in a row at No Brand Con, some drunks have shattered glass bottles in the pool area prompting the staff to drain the pool.
Overall the room party is a dying art but overall i feel it has to do with a lot of different factors.
I don’t even want to think about where that poor hairbrush had been…
No, just… no
Anime cons in the NE region of the US doesn’t have room parties like the ones in the strip. It’s usually just a friends thing. Sci Fi cons however are Saturday night dens of nerdy debauchery that Baccus would love themselves. Comic cons and other cons has there’s too.
So. Many. Stories.
Room parties are still huge at SciFi cons here too — they were a thing at Wisconsin Anime cons for a long time, I think, because most of the early Anime cons there grew out of people who had planned SciFi cons previously… so we promoted Room Parties.
Because that’s a thing you do.
(hey look, I’ve caught up!)
Tables are far more productive, so we’ve been leaning towards those.
I’ve noticed a decline in the notion of the room party at furry cons, but the room party hasn’t been something other cons use to promote themselves. It’s just “Hey, let’s hang out, maybe with some modest theme.” FurFright was the big Room Party con during its Waterbury years, due to half the rooms facing a central atrium.