The Chronicles of Crosarth – A Steampunk Adventure

So I talked about it briefly in my entry earlier this week, but when I was in Wauwatosa last weekend to see family, we went out to dinner on Sunday night. Because it was Sunday, options were a bit more limited, so we ended up somewhere none of us had ever eaten at before: Buckatabon Tavern & Supper Club.

Now, if you know me, I’m a sucker for a supper club. I’ve spent my whole life going to various supper clubs across Northern Wisconsin, and the idea of a new place recreating that vibe in the Milwaukee suburbs sounded appealing. But here’s the thing… this place is not a supper club.

Sure they have a relish tray on the menu (which has disappeared from most current operating supper clubs, but what the heck), but you’re going to pay $15 for it. Most real supper clubs will provide at least a soup or salad with an entree (and in some cases, like the Fireside in Rhinelander, both), but you’ll be paying extra for that experience.

There isn’t even a French Onion Soup on the menu.

And look, the place is decorated in a kitschy way that somehow sits between the now-shuttered Al Gen in Rhinelander and maybe the Clearview Supper Club in St Germain, and the staff was friendly… it’s just not a supper club.

And the thing is, if it hadn’t advertised itself as a supper club, I might have liked it. The food was mostly good, but it wasn’t perfect — my burger was excellent, but several of my family members ordered their steaks medium rare and had them show up almost well. The broccolini that came with the pecan crusted trout was just… not good. All of it could be forgiven for just being a busy night, since it was Father’s Day.

But they promised a supper club.

And it wasn’t.

Like this is the Epcot version of a supper club — it looks a lot like the thing, but it’s all surface and in the end you’re spending way more money than if you had just traveled to the real deal. I wanted to like this place, I really did. But it just misses the whole point of the thing it’s trying to be.

I liked the pride stuff at the bar though. As a queer person it did make me feel relatively safe there.

I just wish it had been a supper club.

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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.

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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.

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