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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Is this the disaster con you’ve been talking about doing or is that still coming?
I’m saving that particular storyline for Chapter Seven.
I saw this kind of train wreck happen at TWO conventions in Los Angeles. One of them rented a big chunk of the same space that Anime Expo uses, but barely promoted the con. The big draws were celebrity concerts and a film festival, but they didn’t actually make sure their tech worked for the film festival, or that they had an audience for the concerts. It was painful to watch, but I got my admission for half-price through an online coupon, so I got my money’s worth and more.
The other con, the convention chair insisted on doing the publicity himself, then had a family emergency, so nothing got into the media until the first day of the con. At THAT con, the registration system didn’t work, and they had no backup plan, not even lined paper. So they let the few people who showed up in for free on the first day of the con, which turned out to be the only day I could go.
Reminds me of one that occured here in Omaha not more than 3 or 4 years ago.
Advertised this one huge guest and a whole lot of little guests no one cared or knew about in the Omaha Metro, decided to host at THE biggest venue in the state, stated that they had over 3,000 attendees where seasoned staffers of other cons estimated that it was probably closer to 600…
Yep, me knows the feels.
I’ve just spent the last two days or so reading through the archive and I’ve really enjoyed the story so far. Looking forward to adding this to my regular reads.
This reminds me of how, in the Eighties, Spirt Of Light would rely primarily on word of mouth to promote their conventions. Never mind that by the time word of mouth reaches anyone in regards to a three day event, said event tends to be over, especially in those pre-internet days.