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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Heh, wowwwwww this arc is a huge piece of deja vu for me. Been where Terence is, been where the others are too. This rarely works out well unless someone snaps out of the “Things used to work fine, why you no do them fine go do things!” mindset and takes the extra time to get the new person really read in. Too many years of having people you can just tell to go get stuffs done without much explication tends to make many a mighty edifice sway in the wind when you don’t have those people to lean on anymore. Question is, do people realize this and take corrective action, or shout at the new folks while the house burns. If this was an entirely realistic con portrayal – I’d suspect option B honestly. Seeing as how this is a comic, and people sometimes try to act like sensible humans I’m going to vote A.
Actually I’ve been where they are and one of the things every new staffer needs to learn is to ask for help, as almost noone will think about that possibility. Of course, a real concom will not give a newcommer a hugely important impossible task to see how they’d handle it, but people with potential will get tasks that are out of their scope or comfort zone, just to see how good are they at handling them and if they actually get the thought of asking for help. A team needs to work like a team in the way that every member should be comfortable enough to ask for help and not just become abrasive and hostile.