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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Having once lost a venue two weeks out and being on staff of a con that we moved to an open working airport. This seems so much easier.
When your con is broke, ‘Almost nothing” is the right cost.
In this situation I’d perhaps have the “Mini-Bork One Day Con” at the Expo Center with the goal of fundraising, and then plan the real con at a real hotel.
At the least go do a walkthrough. Maybe it’s not as bad as you think it is. (Granted, maybe it’s worse). At this point, they shouldn’t ignore any options.
I have a feeling that I know where the con will end up…
Having seen what emerges when you move the shelves of a grocery store that’ve been there a while… it could be nasty.
I’m trying to imagine a converted grocery store into convention center and I just can’t, it always ends up way too small. If Bork Con is expecting less than 250 people it might work, but Bork Con seemed to be pretty successful before so I can’t see that.
Seriously though, how would there be more than 2 or 3 rooms in a converted grocery store?
There was a con that did this a year or two ago. You don’t really get rooms, you’d have to put up pole & drape.
poorly converted store? {flashes back to early X-Cons in Oconomowoc} Now that I think about it, X-Con landed there as a result of the Astor Disaster. “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”