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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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Can you say Awkward?
My dad brought me to my first convention, and wants to come with me to conventions again. In all honesty my dad really is the “Cool Dad” for fellow geeks, so I guess I may never understand.
MY DAD’S -DEAD-!! *sob* *sob* …okay, he seriously is, but it was years ago.
I think Anime would have confused him, but he liked Star Trek.
Mom took my brother and I to a couple of Conventions back when we couldn’t drive ourselves. She found them weird, but accepted she had weird kids. Enough stuff around she didn’t get bored.
I had my dad *staff* my convention.
Wow I don’t really want to talk about my dad cause I have a variety things to say about him. He’s accepted my geekiness now but growing he was a prick about it. He had his own interests mainly airplanes(having a private pilot’s license and all) and deer hunting. Plus he’s done lot in the last 10 years to break my family apart.
Wow, Trae, looking at this comic and Sarah’s model sheet, I’m very impressed at your ability to get so much expression out of a stick figure.
It’s the way I’ve designed her eyes. The smaller eyes and the eyebrows give her a lot more flexibility in expressions. Sarah is an expressive, extroverted character — so I needed her to have a range. Contrast that with Ruth — Ruth is always in a state of calm, even when stressed out. She’s much more introverted, so she emotes quietly. Because of that, her eyes never really change. In fact, she almost never smiles.
I do think about these things when I design the characters. 🙂
I’m probably going to be unconsciously examining the other characters’ eyebrows from now on… 😀
Early characters who I wanted to do more with their eyes are like Lynn, Veronica and Megan — where the brow is integrated. Awesome Roy was the first to get separate eyebrows (to go with his dot eyes).
Scrappy and Barnes both have eyebrows, but you can’t always see Barnes’s because of his hair. Random other characters, like Marcus, do too — I just can’t remember off the top of my head.
Between my wife and I, we have 5 kids. We’ve been taking 4 of them to conventions for the past 5 years. We’re also on staff for our local con and have roped a couple of them onto staff, as well.