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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At one point while volunteering, I was pressed on to take a GoH to a dinner event, held at a restaurant a mile offsite.
When I say “At one point”, I mean my first year attending the con, in a city I’d never been in before, in a small no-frills car with no air conditioning, without owning a GPS. Thankfully for all involved I wasn’t an axe murderer or an idiot, and we made it there and back just fine.
All our GoHs now have Limo service from the airport (not that expensive, really) which has a proven track record: It’s surprisingly affordable, makes quite an impression to start the convention, and is always on-time and prompt for pick-ups.
…and only once was the limo driver unable to find the gigantic downtown convention center, which is someone else’s story to tell.
My old con (and my new con) were/are held in a town an hour’s drive from the nearest airport, so limo service was never really an option.
It was always “who has a car that isn’t embarrassing to look at”
An hour away from airports is pretty ouch, yup. Ours is 20 minutes, which means that you may have to rely on ‘fan with a van’.
Still, Limo service is worth considering. One year, our Guest of Honor (Bill Holbrook) and his daughter arrived at the airport ready to be picked up. His daughter spotted the limo driver with a “Holbrook” sign, and said “Daddy, is that for us?”
Bill replied with “No sweetie, that’s for important people.”
And then the limo driver said “Mr. Holbrook, for Anthrocon?”
His daughter didn;t stop bouncing all trip.
I have heard the unable to find convention center story. And must say from con staff point of view it is kind of funny
Actually, there WAS a local airport a few miles away, but we boycotted it due to the airlines treatment of our very first voice actor guest.
It was embarrassing to drive guests the 1.5 hours it took to get to the con site, but there were benefits as well. All my passengers were from the Dallas/Houston area and I pulled over on a lonely country interchange in western WI (with their permission) so they could see what stars looked like away from any city lights.
Actually, it was that AND we were able to beat the plane to the Twin Cities via car…