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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.
So a lot of you know that I have a Patreon. If you didn’t, uh… you do now? I originally launched it for my comics, but it kind of transitioned to being mostly focused on my Witchcraft podcast years ago — because that’s where I had extra content I could give folks — but it’s overall just for “me” in general.
Anyways.
My goal for the last year has been to increase the “value” for Patreon patrons, with all paid tiers getting access to a copy of Super Awesome Action Heroes, and the five dollar and ten dollar tiers getting access to my novels (at different times — the five dollar tier patrons get them on a year delay).
For a while I had been doing Patreon exclusive “vlogs,” but those didn’t last just because I literally ran out of things to say in them. I mean, I’m boring. The only eventful stuff in my life is the eventful stuff happening to all of us right now. Back in April, I think I came up with something fun that I’ve now done two months in a row.
And that’s record reaction videos to episodes of The Pagan Invasion.
You see, for the April episode of BS-Free Witchcraft I did an episode on the structure of Satanic Panic propaganda, and used the first episode of 1991’s The Pagan Invasion as the example to illustrate my points. For that episode I needed to, obviously, rewatch that first episode for research.
Rather than just watch it in private though, I recorded my rewatch as a commentary and reaction video and posted it as a Patreon exclusive video. And even though the podcast has moved on from the topic, folks asked me to react to episode two… so I did that last week. I fully intend to review the whole series on my Patreon now, and each one of my videos ends up being like two hours long. I don’t know if I’ll get a chance to do one every month, but I plan to get through the whole series.
Honestly I’m not sure why I didn’t think of doing something like this before.
So yeah, we’re doing fun stuff there. Oh, also, before I forget to say something — July is the annual Q&A episode of BS-Free Witchcraft, and I need listener questions. If you have something you want me to respond to on the show, just send it in via the show’s contact form by July 11th 2025.
With the spring weather, I’ve been able to take walks at night again. It’s not much, just a two and a half mile loop, but it feels good to clear my head at the end of the day.
Throughout most of my life I’ve always found peace in a good walk. To have nothing but my thoughts for thirty minutes to an hour while my body moves on its own is something that I need, and I tend to forget that when I don’t do it for a while.
It’s when I most feel like myself.
It’s strange, but when I do it I sometimes feel like my physical self doesn’t exist. That I’m just thought in that moment. Other times, it’s the opposite and I feel most connected to my body and it to the world around me. We’re getting into some weird shit here, I know — but it’s also true.
I don’t know if there was really a point to this ramble. Sometimes I’m reminded of who I used to be, and I realize how much of that isn’t and still is who I am now. And I feel like it’s only when I’m on walks like that where I truly can assess that kind of thing.
Or maybe I’m just talking out of my ass, who knows.
I feel like I’ve been falling behind on a lot of my creative projects lately, and I’m trying to get back on track. Progress is happening, but not at the rate I’d like it to. Sometimes my brain is like that I guess, and you can’t squeeze water from a stone. But stuff will get done, and I’ll see this stuff through.
In the meanwhile, I’ll just put one foot in front of the other.
Before I get started here, I want to be very clear — I will never use Generative AI images in any of my public creative projects. Any comic I write will be drawn by an artist (myself or someone else), every piece of official art for my non visual stuff (books and podcasts) will be created by a person. While I have used Generative AI images in thumbnails historically, I stopped that practice years ago after I learned more. The existing generative AI models for creating image and videos like Sora run on stealing copyrighted materials and use so much energy that they’re incredibly bad for the environment.
So let’s have that level set before we go forward and anyone gets mad at me for doing something I haven’t done and will never do.
But I’m going to admit to something here — it’s fun to play around with image generators to create fake photos of things that don’t exist. Like it’s fun to make a “photo” of your personal RPG characters. You can commission an artist for a drawing, and I find trying to recreate that kind of art with AI to be gross.
But it’s almost impossible to find someone able to make a perfect simulacrum of a photograph of your Halfling Thief drinking at a rooftop bar in Chicago. Like you could definitely do it — but as a person who literally COULD do that kind of photo manipulation work myself, the number of hours I’d have to spend on stock photo websites, morgue file, and doing original shoots is fairly prohibitive. There’s a reason I draw the original art for Stormwood instead of going down that route.
But all of that said, I don’t think it’s ethical to share those images publicly once I’ve made them.
First off, I don’t know where that training data came from. I can’t be sure that I’m not spreading something that was based on stolen work. Like in my own work I might test something out with a stock photo I haven’t paid for, but I make sure I go out and buy it before I put it out to the public. Not doing so is, in my opinion, theft. With that in mind, how can I see these images I’ve created any other way? I don’t know where the sources were scraped from.
(I know generative AI doesn’t directly use the elements of images from its training data, as it works from refining noise until it resembles the description of the image — but I feel like we’re still in the spirit here.)
So until one of these models can promise that every single element in its training data has been ethically sourced, I feel like we’re dancing that line and I’m not comfortable posting it even in situations where I would make no profit from sharing it.
Secondly, there is the environmental concern. Right now AI companies are shoving this stuff into everything they can. This ends up using a ton of resources, and it’s being subsidized by investors. Like until a lot of this gets fixed, I don’t feel good encouraging the use of AI.
In an ideal world, this would be a fun toy and I could guiltlessly share its output the way I would a meme.
But it’s not, and I hate it.
This is the sixth year that we’ve done this, and it’s just… nice? We spend the day sitting and staring at the lake from the porch in our nice reclining lawn chairs, and then when the sun goes down we watch old TV shows we have on Bluray and DVD.
Last night we finally finished our rewatch of the old British sitcom As Time Goes By. We literally started doing it years ago, but have only been watching episodes while on vacation, so it’s obviously taken some time to get through them all. Tonight we’ll start on Monarch of the Glen, and I expect it will take another three or four years to get through all of that and move onto something else.
Probably Hamish MacBeth, Ballykissangel, or Northern Exposure.
It’s just nice to be peaceful for a week. To let the mind rest for some time. I’ve been getting some writing done, but for the most part I’m just enjoying not having to think about a lot of my daily stresses. Internet coverage is spotty here, so I can’t even spend a ton of time online.
It’s pretty great.
Right now though, I’m going to put this laptop away, get out a good book, and read it on the porch while we stare at the lake. Life is pretty amazing sometimes when we are able to find the little moments of quiet in the storm.
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