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.
![Nerd & Tie[dot]Social Forums](https://www.nerdandtie.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/natsocial-nicepreview-square-300x300.png)
Now see, that’s why I like Sarah – always thinking. Get murdered AFTER you spend your money at the con, please.
And she’s generous…he’s not going to be spending money at HER table, so she’s letting him spend it at other tables. Also, she’s so polite about it, merely offering it as an optional modification of his daily schedule.
This is how customer service should be done. Were I a con-goer who happened to overhear this conversation, I would be very tempted to go buy a couple buttons from her.
I understand his frustrations at not finding what he’s looking for among the vendors’ wares; but neither his tact or animus
You ever watched a vendor table for a while? That kind of crap is sadly not entirely uncommon. Cons draw some people with interesting gaps in their social skills, sadly enough. Doesn’t make it make sense, no – but I understand it happening quite well. Some people are just looking for someone to at least metaphorically yell at – the actual issue involved is tangentially important at the absolute best. You get a lot of nascent “I paid for this… I can act like a jackhole! For once I can be that annoying guy instead of being the target.” goofballs.
This is not just a con thing. Plenty of people seem to think that all retail workers are robots who should be happy to clean up spills or get yelled at for stuff completely out of their control. Empathy, sadly, seems to be a lost art.