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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Sorry, Lynn, you’re only allowed to complete that word if it’s scribbled on.
Lots of little purchases? An anime DVD generally runs in the $10 to $50 range…
“Transactions”, not necessarily “purchases”… Moving $100 to a Paypal account would be a transaction. The questions being “who”, “why?”, and how it all went unnoticed?
Ruth just took over as treasurer. Who was the previous one? Even if they didn’t embezzle, they fell down on the job not catching it sooner.
Agreed, whoever was previous treasurer needs to be contacted ASAP.
Maybe the previous treasurer was investing in many Nigerian Princes to try help Bork Con obtain a huge fortune so that way they can have the biggest convention in the Midwest plus money to afford lawyers in case a lawsuit ever broke out so that way the con isnt out if business.
Not necessarily a Nigerian prince, it could be a permanently broke friend the treasurer was loaning money to. “Dude, I’m a bit short this week, can you give me $50 until Friday?” “Dude, I just got fired, can you cover my rent until I get a new job?” “Dude, I promise I’ll pay you back, I just need $50 for work boots for the new job and I don’t get paid for 2 weeks.” Suddenly it’s 6 months and 5 grand later and the guy is no closer to paying you back than he was when you started.
Wait a minute…
Little transactions?
MICROpayments?
They’ve been robbed by Scott McCloud!
“Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.” Albany AnthroCon was almost scuttled after its first year when a bookkeeping error left it short of funds to pay artists for Art Show sales after other bills were paid first. (The chairman at the time thought he had more money than he did.) After that the Art Show funds were kept in a separate bank account. Staff and others lent the con money to finish paying the artists that year, and were repaid within two years.
Many conventions make errors, even the big ones. Maybe it is an error.