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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Run. Run now. Run fast.
Resign before you become an enabler.
Had something similar happen at a meeting. 4 hours of heated debate over an expense on some stage lights. And a newbie staffer finally pipes up: “How many of those lights do you need? I’ve got 4 of them in the truck right now that I was about to take to Goodwill.”
I’m not sure what’s wrong with them but I really hope it’s not contagious.
When I was at Marvel Comics, in the mailroom, I learned how to set type. I was then a typesetter for about 20 years before losing my last job to a takeover and liquidation. I remember at one point, the typesetter AT Marvel (the guy who taught me) talked about the time they were discussing updating from the Compuwriter IV (OLD school typesetting) to a Compugraphic CTRonic (100% digital). Someone suggested they just get RID of the typesetting department and replace it with a terminal where they would lease computer time on a mainframe. They debated this for two hours before someone crunched the numbers and discovered the the mainframe leasing would cost MORE than just updating the equipment and getting supplies!