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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For some reason, the reason I will never volunteer to run a con website again comes to mind… 🙂
rule one of graphic arts/coding: never work for free, Don’t have to charge em a lot (i mean i’d do it for 1-5% over cost which is a major pay cut) but NEVER WORK FOR FREE!
because if you charge them they won’t ask for the stupid/impossible
And they’ll recall you exist. I was once asked to do a website, set up the whole framework, and asked the chairman et al for content. Bupkis for two months followed by a phone call “Hey, I just found someone to run the website!” He’d completely forgotten about the whole thing… So I said “that’s nice”, scrubbed the protosite, and never offered to do one for that con again.
This would be a good way to maybe ask Unagi Con to pay some of Bork Con’s lost cash.
By the way, now that you mention it he has showed up. It’s kind of funny because he was always a background character and now he is in a pickle and oddly enough at the mercy of Lynn.