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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I had this terrible feeling they were going to end up stranded on the side of the road. Mind you, we don’t know yet that the gas station is open, but still.
Y’know, I’ve never understood how people end up off the side of the road. I mean, all you have to do is slow down. And if it’s still not safe, you pull off.
Lo and behold though, any time I have to drive in bad weather (especially on the stretch of I65 between Chicago and Lafayette, IN where I live) I see half a dozen cars in the ditch.
What I</ don’t understand is how people end up on the side of the road when the weather isn’t all that bad. Then again, these are probably the same people who are eager to pass me when I’m doing around 55 in a 45 mph zone…
First, I love the action in the last panel.
Second, ending up in the ditch is very very easy. All you have to do is hit a patch while driving too fast. A slick patch, a non-slick patch, a patch of hard snow, a patch of gravel, doesn’t matter. And ‘too fast’ doesn’t always mean fast. 10mph can be too fast in some situations.
After my wife and I bought our current car, when we got the first snowfall of the year I drove out to a local parking lot that hadn’t been plowed yet and purposefully did my best to lose control to see how the car felt and reacted in those conditions. Losing momentary control isn’t the problem — it’s not knowing how to recover.
This is true.