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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Yeah. As someone of Hispanic decent visiting up north that was fun trying to learn on the German names lol. And trying to watch all the yanks pronounce my last name!
Amazing how easily an ethnic name can trip you up, even if you think you’re ready for them. But Polish names seem to do it deliberately.
Or if you’re prepared for the wrong ethnicity. I knew an Indian kid named Tejas(Tay-jis) once. He lived in an area with a huge Hispanic influence. Literally everyone assumed it was Tay-has when they met him, even after he said it.
This was something I greatly appreciated with David Vincent, who MC’d Sakura-Con’s Closing Ceremonies this year. He made a point to meet with our cultural performers before the ceremonies to make sure he had the pronunciations correct.
One joy at Registration was people with a badge name of something like “Tigerfoxxx”. Your name would immediately be “Tiger Fox ecks ecks.” Every time.
I recall the time that David Gerrold was MCing a costume contest and was visited with so many unpronounceable character names (and NO phonetic breakdown) he finally gave up and started introducing people as “Fred. From the planet Fred”. No idea what the balance was between annoyed and amused on the part of the entries. 🙂