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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Bwahahaha…
this brought tears to my eyes.. so funny
Stop laughing for a minute? No. No, they cannot.
That’s hilarious… why I am laughing so much
I feel there is a Sailor Stars joke there I should be getting, but I don’t.
It’s not so much a reference as me trying to come up with something ridiculous and weird that someone’s probably actually done.
There was an entrant in the ConFrancisco masquerade in ’93 who dressed as a Transformer (which one is lost to me now); it was made of cardboard and very little else. As the MC intoned the words “completely indestructible,” half the back fell off. (I ran into one of the other entrants at a party later that evening, who said the guy literally stuffed it all into a garbage bag when he came offstage.)
At No Brand Con a few years there were 3 Transformers who made their costumes from cardboard too but they painted their boxes with special paint that hardened the cardboard too. Anyways their cosplay was so fragile and it was very heavy they didn’t even get on the stage for the contest. They actually were somewhat forced into the contest because it was that good that they were almost certain they would win and I think they got a good prize too.
At Worldcon 2006, there was an Optimus Prime that failed to get on stage. And it was already in the wings. I think the problem, though, was getting the “pants” (legs) on.
Phil Foglio was MC, and he ran out of “stretch” so bad he resorted to a “Roll out the Barrel” sign-along with the audience while the crew figured out how to get the failed costume out of the way of the next entry.
Ask any long time fan about why Westercon etc. masquerades have a “no peanut butter” rule… it’s hard to find ANYTHING weird enough that it hasn’t happened. (That and if you’ve got a fluttery costume do NOT stand in front of an entry with wires on the front of their shirt – in my case it was a Westworld android after his chest exploded, and I had a sash cape. We came thaaat close to having to be a joint entry…)