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The Infinite Loop of PrtScLanditude (finally posted!)
(I finally posted it. Here goes nothing...)
(By the way,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pathvain_aelien and ellaina02, I added a few things after the proofreading)
What's sad is that recently-- Well, okay, not that recently, due to the long amount of time it took to write this entry, have it proofread, and continue to worry about whether or not it makes sense even after I had it proofread. But last October, I was hit with a realization similar to Character 15's, and I'm not even a randomly generated webcomic character.
Remember how back then, I was all "Oh snot, Ours Will You 1-Up is probably an Internet meme somewhere because it's a Google search suggestion, whereas PrtSc Land isn't"? (For those of you new here, OWY1U is my backwards lyrics site that's currently down for a redesign that I procrastinate for months at a time, and PSL is a [depending on who you ask other thanpathvain_aelien, ellaina02 or forgetmenotcj, anywhere from somewhat dumb to completely horrible] webcomic I used to write that I've mentioned much more often than OWY1U, which is why it's scary that OWY1U became a suggestion first.)
In the comments of that post,adawnrae brought to my attention (completely by accident) something really depressing:
OWY1U is just PSL all over again.
Just look at all these parallels between the two - or even between unrelated things that happened around the time I was interested in each!
(the LJ-spoiler tag that used to be here because I used it as a regular LJ-cut said: "What?!?! PRTSC LAND is evolving!! PRTSC LAND evolved into an OURS WILL YOU 1-UP!")
But that's not all! I can name many other ideas I've had over the years that either turned out to not be as awesome as I originally thought, or have the potential to end up that way considering how OWY1U isn't much better than PSL. Here is background on them all (including more on PSL and OWY1U):
Various inventions
From 2nd to 4th (or maybe 5th) grade, I came up with several ideas for inventions and would mention some of them fairly often, but I never felt like I wanted to put forth the effort to actually make any of them. Which is good because most, if not all of them, were dumb for at least one of the following reasons:
- It's completely ridiculous and couldn't exist in real life, like my would-be-infamous-if-I'd-mentioned-it-online-before-I-decided-it-was-ridiculous idea of a Starman T-shirt that functions as an actual Starman.
- Copyright infringement; for instance, at one point I wanted to make my own handheld version of Super Mario World (which, coincidentally, Nintendo did later wind up sorta making in the form of Super Mario Advance 2).
- It already exists; for instance, I wanted to make a portable device that had games, e-mail, Internet access, etc., but what I didn't know was that there's already laptops. (I was actually thinking more like a phone-sized device at the time, but that, too, would eventually exist as smartphones without my intervention.)
Various stick figure comics unnamed as a whole
Surprising as it is, PrtSc Land was not the first lame comic I wrote and tried to show to everyone I saw. It's just the first lame webcomic I wrote and tried to show to everyone I saw.
In 5th grade, 2 of my classmates sometimes doodled comics with stick figures, inspiring me to do the same. Unfortunately, mine made a lot less sense than theirs and weren't very funny, yet I almost continually drew them on dry-erase boards and held them up (or, after fifth grade, occasionally I drew some at home and put them on my door). There were two main recurring themes, even though not all comics fit under one of them:
1) Surfing in unusual ways or with unusual results. I got this idea from just one surfing-related comic the others drew that actually made more sense than all of mine combined.
2) Putting cans into recycling boxes with the same sort of unusual things happening. I started doing these because my class decorated recycling bags or something in class for Earth Day, and I liked doing this so much that I kept doing them whenever it was close to Earth Day. (Or even when it wasn't, a couple of times.)
I was introduced to Homestar Runner when I was in 6th grade, and I liked how clicking on certain words would show something related to whatever was clicked. So in 6th and 7th grade (and part of 8th, until PSL took over), while writing notes or doing homework, I'd sometimes think up and draw comics that were related to whatever was mentioned in my notes/homework (and then pretend that if my life were a web cartoon, clicking on a certain phrase in the text would bring up whatever I drew in the same way).
Example: one of the questions on a history quiz or one of the answer choices mentioned how it took a long time to get anywhere by ship or something like that, so near that, I drew a ship (except it looked more like a boat with a flag on it) with two people saying "Are we there yet?" "No." "Are we there yet?" "No."
A few of these comics (such as the one I just mentioned) were actually funny enough for my teachers to like them, but in retrospect, I'm glad my mom crossed them out whenever she saw them.
(the LJ-spoiler tag that used to be here because I used it as a regular LJ-cut said: "Quote of the Week (warning: so rambly that not even P_A or E02 could condense it any)")
Quote of the Week
Seeing the Quote of the Week feature on Homestar Runner, which featured a different sound clip from the cartoons every week, inspired me to do my own QOTW for real life.
Every week, I would tape a sheet of paper (don't worry, I tried to reuse the same piece of paper as much as possible) with a quote handwritten on it to my window or wall or desk or wherever I felt it was the most visible at the time.
Obviously there were no sound clips, it being just a piece of paper and all, but I was satisfied with just writing down a different "funny" (well, alright, a few were actually funny) quote that someone (including myself) had said that week every Friday (since I put up the first one on 2-4-05, which was a Friday) and adding the previous one to the list of old quotes on an ever-growing stack of QOTW archive pages I taped below it.
This idea had the potential to actually make complete sense, had I not made several bad decisions along the way.
First of all, while this never became an actual problem, I never asked anyone for permission to use their quotes untilpathvain_aelien told me after at least 21 weeks that I should. Even after that, I only ever asked for permission to use her quotes.
Secondly, after a while, I started taking a notepad around with me pretty much everywhere to write down quotes to choose from later. This must have seemed pretty strange to some people.
Lastly, like PrtSc Land, I made obscure references to the QOTW in all the wrong places. In addition to mentioning the QOTW notepad sometimes, I made quite a few obscure mentions of the QOTW (as well as the first version of PSL) in my English homework and computer class. For English class, while I did have the common sense to (as far as I remember) leave such references out of my big essays and safely store them inan electromagnetic field Schrödinger's cat's box my vocabulary homework and daily English journal, the references were still pretty strange. One time, my teacher completely had no idea what the sail (or what the dilly-o, as I said during the time of the first version of PSL) I was talking about in a vocabulary paragraph until she read my explanations about the QOTW on the back of it.
As for the journal entries, I'll just talk about my dumbest one. See, my teacher, upon hearing me complain about not being able to think of anything to write about, suggested writing about what I'd do if I were to discover a new planet. So I wrote that I'd set up my QOTW and PrtSc Land there for any aliens who happen to be there, and also happen to be as airheaded as I was at the time, to enjoy.
And to think that I was in 8th and/or 9th grade.
As for computer class, one year I was in a Visual C# "class" (and no, I did not put that in quotes to make it a programming-related pun), but since I was the only one there, it wasn't very structured and there weren't any grades. All I had was a C# textbook and software (there were supposed to be the example problems given in the textbook, but those didn't come with the CD for some reason), so I pretty much got to blow off that class period by making whatever random programs I wanted to make. I ended up trying to make a QOTW memory match game even though the fact that my classmates' computer class was being taught in the same computer lab should have made me think, "Maybe it's not such a good idea to put stuff these people said into a game that they'll be able to see if they look at your computer screen during this class..." Fortunately, as far as I know, none of them actually noticed.
I even mentioned the QOTW in a few PrtSc Land strips. Of course, this wasn't nearly as bad an idea as all of my QOTW-rambling at school; nevertheless, many of the QOTW references in PSL were still pretty strange, so I'm glad I got rid of them for the online version. A few of these references were not stupid and merely featured the QOTW as a background element whenever a scene took place in my room (though I guess you could say that that's still a bad idea if the current quote is completely unrelated to the strip and the "camera" is zoomed in enough for me to write the actual quote instead of squiggles or a big "QOTW"), but the rest were just plain dumb.
Example: A fortune I got on Neopets from the Island Mystic mentioned radioactive faeries. This prompted me to take a screenshot of that and make a strip with a Radioactive Faerie character who had various random radioactivity-caused mutations; one such mutation was two giant copies of the QOTW page, complete with the "iconic" pieces of tape and the letters "QOTW", for wings. I am so glad I changed those to checkered wings for the first online version and even gladder I scrapped her altogether for the second.
I could go on and on, but this should be enough proof that I was the weirdest person in the observable universe back then.
For a while, I had another Quote of the Week, or a "Quote of the (insert time measurement here)", in my signature on the SmackJeeves forum, which I would change every time I saw a quote I deemed worthy of it. This was inspired by the fact that some SJ users did the same thing anyway, only they didn't call it the Quote of the anything and didn't put a backwards lyric instead of a forum quote like I did once.
Since my "Quote of the (insert time measurement here)" wasn't actually as bad of an idea as the original QOTW because I didn't start talking about it all over the forum, and the only reason I quit updating it is because I quit PrtSc Land, I'm considering starting yet another Quote of the Week on my LJ profile, as follows:
- The sort of quotes that will have the opportunity to make it in will pretty much be a mix of the type of quotes that could make it into my original and SJ QOTWs, the H*R QOTW, and some unofficial QOTWs on various Homestar Runner Wiki users' userpages (i.e. some quotes are made funnier by intentionally misattributing them [but then having a note with the real attribution], like HRW users did by attributing user quotes to H*R characters).
- I'll allow people to request that I remove a quote if I happen to put it there and they don't want it there. That shouldn't be much of a problem since I'll stick to things that are said publicly or ask for permission if I want to use something that isn't.
PrtSc Land
I started PSL offline back in 2006 (I sent it topathvain_aelien, ellaina02, and forgetmenotcj via ICQ) and wasn't even called PrtSc Land; until the online version that began in late 2007, it was only known as "my screenshots" or "my funny screenshots". Some remnants of that time still remain on LiveJournal.
Most of the first strips were screenshots of Neopets, ICQ, or error messages with jokes written/drawn on them, using the same sort of jokes that I drew in the stick figure comics when they were like Homestar Runner easter eggs. It got to the point where it could have a screenshot of pretty much anything I was into and/or comics involving Neopets, Homestar Runner, Mario, AdventureQuest, Garfield (though just once), Fuzzy McFluffenstein, Club Penguin, Invader Zim, Dido, Enya, Celine Dion, Paris Hilton (really), and/or a few original characters based on text found in screenshots, such as the Radioactive Faerie that I mentioned while rambling about the QOTW. The first time I drew such a comic, I actually drew Illusen pretty well compared to my stick figure comics, so naturally, I fell for the fallacy that this meant that my drawings were necessarily good.
Like with the QOTW, I referenced it in quite a few places where it wouldn't make sense, even before it was online. Generally, if I was dumb enough to make an obscure QOTW reference in a given place, I was also dumb enough to make an obscure PSL reference there. I never actually thought about putting it online until I went to Camp El Tesoro one year (I think this was before I had a LJ) and mentioned the basic premise of PrtSc L-- er, "funny screenshots" to one of my cabin buddies and he suggested putting it online. For a while, I was reluctant to do so because a) since I wasn't sure if fair use was as fair as I was hoping it was (which, it turns out, it will be until something similar to SOPA/PIPA/ACTA gets passed), I thought that the owners of all the works referenced might sue me for it, b) there were quite a few strips that just didn't make sense whatsoever, and c) to understand certain strips, one must read certain other strips or long, rambly explanations first, so I'd have to find a way to make it so that you can't read certain strips unless you've read the prerequisites.
I ended up deleting as many strips as I could that were either not very funny or didn't make sense on first sight and redrawing all the rest. This left only about 50 out of 456 the first time I put PSL online. When people said it still was poorly-drawn or didn't make any sense, I revamped it again and ended up leaving only 13 of the original strips. I also added a "new plot introduction that's actually halfway decent" (i.e., a plot introduction that actually makes less sense and the only good thing about it is that, the three characters I wasn't too lazy to hand-draw actually turned out fairly well-drawn, aside from being talking heads and copied and pasted every time they appeared in another hand-drawn panel), attempting to re-introduce Dido and Enya (whose portrayal as rivals for no reason was made into the actual plot), as well as several other characters who appeared only in strips that had ended up rejected. Unfortunately, this meant that instead of rambling in an attempt to explain strips, I ended up rambling to explain why there aren't so many (like I'm doing right now), so it still wasn't well-received.
After that, I considered starting over once more and making the comic entirely about Dido and Enya hating each other for no reason with the other characters taking sides, getting rid of the other strips entirely just to guarantee that people will know that the comic is no longer like those. That never happened, though, because I didn't feel creative enough and because I started being interested in backwards music instead. I did put a few miscellaneous screenshots on my LiveJournal every now and then, and I eventually went back and tagged most of these as New PrtSc Land due to their similarity to the original concept of PSL, but nonetheless, NPSL isn't really a new version of PSL.
As I've mentioned a few times, I'm thinking of rerunning the 1st and 3rd versions (I don't have the 2nd anymore) on LiveJournal - with all the QOTW references, all the unfunny jokes, all the not making any sense, etc. - alongside new versions that are much better-drawn (considering how the last few strips of the third version turned out, there's hope if I keep myself from getting lazy and using sprites) and make fun of the old ones. I sure hope I'm actually able to come up with a unique way to make fun of every stupidity and not make new stupid mistakes along the way. That, and I think it'll be more interesting if it actually has a plot (that's better than "On the red corner, Dido and some random characters that I'm guessing would like her more than Enya! And on the blue corner, vice versa!"), either throughout or after the remade comics, and in fact have an idea for a new plot and a few ideas of how to implement it, but I don't think I'd be able to flesh any of them out enough without asking pathvain_aelien, ellaina02 and/or forgetmenotcj for help (and thus spoiling the ending for at least one of the only three people who has more than a 10% chance of reading it).
Plus, whatever I do, if I want to draw it better than any of the first three versions, I'd probably have to do it almost two years in advance, which means if I get any constructive criticism, I wouldn't be able to take advice from it for years.
And also, the fact that PSL was poorly-drawn hasn't kept me from making userpics in the first style for the anniversary of PSL and considering replacing my regular userpics with those for PSL Day...
Ours Will You 1-Up
Not much to say about it. It was pretty much just a website where I posted backwards lyrics to music I have (and didn't take requests, much to the annoyance of anyone who liked a song I didn't have, as I'd seen when I first tried to kick off this idea as a SmackJeeves forum thread).
I self-promoted it in some of the same sort of places that I would promote PSL, but not as many, although I did overuse lots of backwards lyrics-related inside jokes in places where they're guaranteed not to be understood. You think my occasional "holy whole hand dealer" or "what the sail" nowadays is annoying and that these two userpics are weird? Imagine what it was like when I said those phrases much more often, didn't realize "WTCN" might look like "what the Chuck Norris" (look, I even have a Wikipedia link this time!) to people who don't know it means "what the cattle note", and also said "what the beat coping gnat" and "what the noose mug Yoshi" a couple of times! (The phrasing of this paragraph is too similar to that of my "You think PSL is poorly-drawn now? Look at what it USED to look like!" comments. Go figure.)
However, the biggest thing that didn't make much sense about the site itself before I took it down was certain words I decided to censor in the backwards lyrics that would be better off uncensored (or vice versa).
In fact, I still am not quite sure whether to have censored and uncensored versions, or what to censor, etc., which is why I took it down - I needed some time to sort it out and apply the new censoring rules. That would have been a great idea if the page I replaced the home page with clearly explained that it was a backwards lyric site and did not start out with inside jokes based on backwards lyrics that obviously wouldn't be understood by new readers. (What was I thinking?) I'm still unsure as to whether to make the site private until I'm ready or replace the error page with one that isn't exactly as stupid as PrtSc Land. Whichever I do, I need to do it VERY quickly before someone does completely misunderstand OWY1U and make an Internet meme based on their misunderstanding. Especially since P_A told me one time about a shirt that, if I remember correctly, has a 1-Up Mushroom with the words "Will me 1-Up?" or something underneath...
And I'm also unsure about whether or not to take song requests; while it'll have more of an audience that way, I'll probably get lots of requests for songs that have been controversial because of supposed backmasked satanic messages or whatever. That would be missing the point, because the point is to put the backwards lyrics for any songs and not just controversial ones. Unless I only take requests from my LJ friends or make this a collaborative project between all of us or something...
Dream art galleries and cast lists
One day back when I was a more frequent poster to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
_dreams_, I decided to add artwork and cast lists to ALL the dreams I posted! This was a pretty pointless idea, because the only things I ended up drawing (or spriting, because I got lazy and mainly stuck to Super Mario World dreams) are things that can pretty much be imagined exactly just from the text. I mean, everyone who's seen a CD at some point in their life can guess what two CDs appearing out of thin air would look like! I could have at least drawn what was actually on the front of those CDs to make it interesting, but NOOO, I was too lazy to even draw what I vaguely remember of the CD designs.
Illustrating dreams isn't that bad of an idea in and of itself, though, so I haven't refrained from making a 7:97 userpic and, much more recently, a /crazymegavideo/ userpic (which isn't even uploaded as an actual LJ userpic yet). Problem is, some of the frames of /crazymegavideo/ being waterlogged in that one look kind of like PSL style no matter how I try and edit it (her body does, anyway), so now I'm worried that my drawing ability has regressed. The animation isn't that smooth either. I blame my PSL-styled userpics.
Also, a dream that I had after I got rid of the original art galleries (warning: one of the things in the list I mention later in that entry is kinda awkward, so try to only read the full dreams in that entry) has a drawing of something that I initially thought couldn't be explained well in words, thus making the artwork concept seem actually useful until I realized I could've just said "the Tetris block was hovering in midair just below the nail rather than actually being nailed". Oh well...at least people know the Tetris block in my dream was orange? And a J Block? :P
Finally, as I've mentioned, I plan to add artwork to certain entries in my glossary of Matt1993isms, including drawings of characters from my dreams. For example, it gets tedious to say that /tensen/ looks like "a way more human version of the Jolly Dumple" (and I never even explained that the only features he actually shares with the Jolly Dumple are the hat, skin tone, and sometimes the tongue!), so this time, drawing artwork might actually be useful.
As for the cast lists, those are pointless because you can pretty much figure out who appears in a dream just by reading my description of it (excluding scenes I leave out because they're too weird, of course). I was quite surprised to recently discover that some of my old posts in _dreams_, after all these years, STILL had cast lists that I accidentally left there, presumably weirding everyone out until I finally removed them. :O
Caaaaast (in order of appearaaaaance): Meeeee, Mariooooo/Enyaaaaa, some girls dressed as Neopian faer--
Aah! A-jibblie jibblie jibblie jibblie jibblie jibblie...
April Fool's pranks
I can't even do an April Fool's prank here without overanalyzing my ability to make sense. For 2010, I attempted to emulate this, but I didn't really have enough time to finish it properly, and even if I had, it would've been too long to post.
For 2011, I attempted to write an April Fool's prank claiming that not only was there finally an Enya concert, but I just happened to find a front-row ticket to it, get Enya's autograph there, and save her from a burning building. At the time, it seemed to make more sense than my 2010 prank, but now it seems to make less and less sense every time I think about it. The fact that I kept referring to an airport without ever clarifying that I intended for the concert in my story to be in the same place as a Celine Dion concert I went to in 2009 is probably the least of my worries.
Moya's Space Log
For my birthday in 2010, I received Super Mario Galaxy 2 and a Moya Brennan CD, and, while typing an entry about everything I received, realized that it felt weird to mention Mario and Moya in the same entry whereas PSL, OWY1U, and my weird dreams have, over time, made this not true of Mario and Enya.
This gave me an idea for a drabble where Mario, Luigi, Enya, and Moya all work together in SMG2 and only Moya questions the logic, and I wantedpathvain_aelien to write me one since she'd been wanting to write me a birthday drabble, but then I decided to attempt to write it myself as a full story for NaNoWriMo. Although I only managed to write 7,813 words out of 25,000 (I was doing the Youth Writer's Program) and "Team Brennario" only got the first Power Star, continuing this definitely has more potential than some of the other things on this list.
However, there are still some reasons it might not:
- Considering that it's just Super Mario Galaxy 2 written in text with Enya and Moya thrown in, it's one of the least creative fanfics out there.
- The writing gets tedious and not very interesting whenever there's nothing new for Moya to question and just fairly long stretches of the same game elements.
- Even though I don't self-promote it the way I have with PSL or OWY1U, I still tried to explain it a few times in_dreams_.
- Enya and Moya being part Yoshi in the story is yet another OWY1U reference made while OWY1U is still down.
- It might be mistaken for me actually making fun of the Mario series for not making sense, even though I'm trying for a parody of people who often make fun of the Mario series for not making sense. If that makes sense. (After all, I can't even tell whether http://cartoonoveranalyzations.com/ is serious about their statements about cartoons or whether they're parodying people who make fun of cartoons that way!)
- Sometimes, the division between MSL and unrelated parts of my entries aren't that clear. That, or Moya's doing homework and traversing the Mario world at the same time.
- Any references to it don't make a lot of sense right now, since halfway through NaNoWriMo, I decided that I might be cluttering everyone's friends pages with all my MSL posts, made a custom friends group for its readers, and only just now made it public again. (Well, "just now" is relative due to the amount of time I procrastinated posting this, but still.)
- Due to my not being Enya, Moya, or any of their friends or family, I don't think I'm portraying them very well. I mean, the whole "Enya accepts Mario logic while Moya questions it, regardless of what they'd think about the games in real life, and they're both part Yoshi thanks to that backwards lyric..." sort of thing is fine, since it's not Mario or, um, real-world canon anyhow and it's the driving force behind the story, but I want all other aspects of their personalities to sound like they would in real life. And, well, they probably don't.
- Sometimes I forget to make Moya question some aspect of the Mario universe whenever she comes across it for the first time.
Despite all of this, if I want to remake PSL, I'd have to finish this first so that I can make it and the PSL remake part of the same canon like I hope to do.
Posts about Schrödinger's Enya
If Schrödinger's Enya really is Enya (and, to a lesser extent, if she isn't), the best way to show what every post I've ever made that includes the phrase "Schrödinger's Enya" and/or her username (including this one) must look like from her point of view is with an edited version of xkcd comic #231 with some help from #919 and colors pulled from two other xkcds:
My submissions to Square Root of Minus Garfield and Lightning Made of Owls
Okay, I haven't actually submitted (or even drawn) anything for either of these collaborative comics yet, but I've been thinking about doing so. Problem is, I worry that my ideas might turn out the same way all of these other things (except possibly Moya's Space Log and less possibly Ours Will You 1-Up) have. Square Root of Minus Garfield shouldn't be much of a problem since all they do is mess around with Garfield comicsand throw stones out of a glass house in the general direction of an adamantine house by criticizing Jim Davis for using the same strip twice occasionally when they've used the same strips loads of times and some of them are fans of Dinosaur Comics which almost always uses the same artwork and who knows how many times mezzacotta (the comic) reuses strips and I'll stop ranting now, but Lightning Made of Owls requires me to have unique comic ideas, even if the characters are already created.
Luckily, I have mysteriously become creative enough to think of a new LMOO idea at least once every week (and then get distracted by it all day)...but will I always be mysteriously more creative than usual? And what if all my ideas for both SROMG and LMOO are already done by the time I start working on them? (Strips similar to some of my SROMG ideas have already been made! And how long until someone else takes the LMOO script that I really want to make into a comic and makes it before I do?) And since quite a few of my LMOO ideas come solely from me thinking of objects that come in different colors and imagining what might happen if the LMOO cast became the corresponding-colored objects (since you're allowed to draw the characters as whatever you want as long as they retain identifying features), can I consider those ideas truly creative? And, if not, will I have plenty of other ideas? (Actually, I have come up with more ideas that way lately, but for how long?) And is it even creative to use someone else's characters in the first place? And, even though it doesn't really matter in LMOO, as pointed out earlier, am I actually capable of drawing as well as I'd like yet? And will I ever stop beginning sentences with "and" and ending them with question marks?
Sideways Compatible
As I've (partially) mentioned here before, I'm still thinking about writing a new webcomic. What I didn't mention is its title or premise, since I previously didn't want to give too much away (but might as well now, especially since there were no real spoilers at all):
I got the idea whenpathvain_aelien wanted to play Mario Kart Wii with me one day back when we still played it often and, not having a Wii Wheel, she jokingly said she'd use her iPod instead. That gave me the idea to write a comic about what could happen if various items are used as various other items. I even thought about taking suggestions for pairs of items and try to come up with unpredictable outcomes for each idea. Like PSL, pretty much any characters from fandoms I like would have been able to make an appearance in SC, although it would mainly star OWY1U characters. (This is why there's a miniature Wænya labeled "new idea for a webcomic" depicted in my brain in my post explaining creative tumors vortexes.) So, naturally, I'd have to wait until OWY1U is back up before I start SC.
Considering that I don't have as many ideas for Sideways Compatible as I have for other stuff (even if I take suggestions, I might not be able to come up with anything for them), I'm less likely to go through with this, but I have another idea: What if I make all of my SC ideas into LMOO strips? I wouldn't get to flesh out the personalities of OWY1U characters, but combining my SC and LMOO ideas, I might fare better in LMOO! Or I might not, considering how everything from my invention ideas to OWY1U has turned out.
----
To put it into perspective, here's a timeline of all of these:
So basically, I can't make anything that's the slightest bit creative without having to have people proofread it just to be more than 50% sure it makes sense. I can't even write an entry complaining about this depressing fact without having to have people proofread it just to be more than 50% sure it won't offend everyone, from all over the universe, from every period in history, everyone.
I mean, I wanted to post it very soon after my realization, especially since it wouldn't have seemed as out-of-place while (the LJ-spoiler tag that used to be here said "blah blah blah blah blah blah blah....") I was still so depressed about this situation that I constantly felt empty inside about it. (And by "feeling empty inside", I mean that I felt the way Mario does in this Super Mario Bros. hack. Which is actually pretty bad for a feeling for which the best description mentions Mario.) But it still took a really long time just to make a few edited images, one animated userpic, and a graph! I did actually finish back in February rather than just now, but still!
Granted, the latter two do have a semi-decent amount of work put in, but I still didn't even hand-draw anything. I guess new sprites sorta count, but most of them still use edits of older sprites as a base and/or aren't that detailed.
I also didn't:
- explain anything here concisely (The part about the Quote of the Week alone is at least five or six times longer than my longest author comment from PrtSc Land!)
- use motion blurs in that graph
- manage to keep the graph from looking cluttered
- add anything past January 2012 to the graph after I uploaded it but before I finally posted this entry
- draw seven different-colored 3D PrtSc keys in less than three hours (even with some help from Irfanview and 3D Anaglyph Maker rather than just MS Paint)
- manage to draw three coordinate-transformed Garfield sprites without messing up two of the faces
- give /crazymegavideo/ decent-looking speech bubbles, or
- manage to keep /crazymegavideo/ from looking PSL-styled in my new userpic.
With this in mind, how will the new PSL, the MSL artwork, the glossary artwork, my LMOO comics, or even my redesign of Wænya and design of new OWY1U characters turn out? Remember, I didn't even get to check my LJ friends page in a while because of this, my college homework, and working on my program to prioritize everything! :(
Rant about the inevitable part of this entry that doesn't make sense
(By the way,
pathvain_aelien and ellaina02, I added a few things after the proofreading)What's sad is that recently-- Well, okay, not that recently, due to the long amount of time it took to write this entry, have it proofread, and continue to worry about whether or not it makes sense even after I had it proofread. But last October, I was hit with a realization similar to Character 15's, and I'm not even a randomly generated webcomic character.
Remember how back then, I was all "Oh snot, Ours Will You 1-Up is probably an Internet meme somewhere because it's a Google search suggestion, whereas PrtSc Land isn't"? (For those of you new here, OWY1U is my backwards lyrics site that's currently down for a redesign that I procrastinate for months at a time, and PSL is a [depending on who you ask other than
pathvain_aelien, ellaina02 or forgetmenotcj, anywhere from somewhat dumb to completely horrible] webcomic I used to write that I've mentioned much more often than OWY1U, which is why it's scary that OWY1U became a suggestion first.)In the comments of that post,
adawnrae brought to my attention (completely by accident) something really depressing:OWY1U is just PSL all over again.
Just look at all these parallels between the two - or even between unrelated things that happened around the time I was interested in each!
(the LJ-spoiler tag that used to be here because I used it as a regular LJ-cut said: "What?!?! PRTSC LAND is evolving!! PRTSC LAND evolved into an OURS WILL YOU 1-UP!")
| PrtSc Land | Ours Will You 1-Up |
|---|---|
| PSL began as an offline hobby that I only shared with a few friends/family members | OWY1U began as an offline hobby that I only shared with a few friends/family members |
| Online PSL was started on accident. It's a funny story: one guy at school was discussing what must have been a scene in some video or movie he saw, as at one point he said "and then she blows up", which reminded me of a PSL (well, at the time, "Funny Screenshots" or "Funny Screenshots and Other Type Images") strip in which an air faerie from Neopets, who had previously drank 2,000 slushies in a previous strip, explodes from drinking one more. (Yyyyeah. What's even sadder than the fact that I made that strip is the fact that I can think of at least 25 strips from version 1 off the top of my head that might have been even dumber than that...) Any rational person would hear his mention of "and then she blows up" and simply assume it's a reference to one of various violent video games in which it's possible to run over various civilians who somehow explode whenever they get run over. For that matter, maybe he has the same weird fetish I do, opening up the possibility of it being one of at least 394 YouTube results for "inflating woman". Being the weirdo I was, though, I automatically assumed that he had, in fact, seen the PSL strip that I was reminded of - either through reading my mind or due to someone tapping into the ICQ file transfers while I sent strips to my original fans and putting them online without my permission. (Hey, I said I was weird!) So, I decided to put PSL online right away just so, if the latter were true, I'd have a slight chance of getting proper credit before it became popular. Which it didn't, because as it turned out, PSL clearly wasn't worth hacking ICQ file transfers for. | Online OWY1U was started on accident... ...but not as funny a story as the online PSL's beginning. Until I was given an assignment to make a site with Google Sites, I was only thinking about maybe starting a backwards lyric site. This is why it's on Google Sites and not LiveJournal (or even FreeWebs, where I originally thought of putting such a site - and where I orignally thought of putting PSL, too). |
| PSL featured: - Dido - Enya - Celine Dion and characters from: - Neopets - Homestar Runner - Garfield (only offline version, and even then only ever by virtue of Garfield being in the background of a screenshot save for one strip where he asks why this is so) - Mario - Invader Zim - Kirby (only online version) Plus other stuff that's not referenced in OWY1U, but still, 9 fandoms in common! | OWY1U featured backwards: - Dido - Enya - Celine Dion - "Mario Twins" by Gröûp X (among other songs) Many of the backwards lyrics (including those not mentioned above) sound like they reference: - Dido - Enya - Celine Dion - Neopets - Homestar Runner - Garfield - Mario - Invader Zim - Kirby (again, plus other fandoms) |
| PSL had a few original characters inspired by phrases that I took screenshots of; it is impossible to describe any one of them concisely | OWY1U has an original character, Wænya (that should be pronounced "wah-en-yuh", in case screen readers read it differently), inspired by the fact that it sounds like that name is mentioned in one backwards song and "Wænya" sounds like a rival to Enya in the same way Wario and Waluigi are to Mario and Luigi (which is difficult to explain concisely to people who haven't played Mario games...well, I suppose I could give some MarioWiki links). In addition, I have ideas for three more backwards lyric-inspired characters to design if I ever get OWY1U back up. |
| When I was into PSL, I shamelessly promoted it EVERYWHERE, online or in real life | When I was into OWY1U, I shamelessly promoted it a few places online, but not as bad as PSL (which is why it's so scary that OWY1U became a Google search suggestion first) |
| PSL readers could earn virtual credits called "Cameo Tokens" by answering questions such as "Two Cameo Tokens if you can guess who will find [item name removed because I'm rambling enough already] before he/she does" or finding mistakes in the comic for me to fix. (One person even got .9 Cameo Tokens [yes, they came in fractions] for insulting my drawing style just because one thing they said inspired a running gag that I wanted to work into PSL, even though I never actually did!) If someone earned ten Cameo Tokens, they could use them to make a cameo appearance in the comic. Naturally, only pathvain_aelien ever used hers. I think she was also the only person to even get up to 10 Cameo Tokens at all. | At one point, I was considering drawing an illustration based on one backwards lyric from each song on OWY1U, and I was thinking about possibly bringing Cameo Tokens back for this (i.e. I would have come up with random contests for Cameo Tokens on LiveJournal, and you'd be able to use them to cameo in one of the backwards lyric illustrations). One such dumb contest idea actually made it into a post in _dreams_... :O |
| Any attempt by me at explaining PSL (including this post) automatically becomes rambling, so the SmackJeeves community kept thinking that all of the strips were screenshots/badly-drawn/sprite comics | Any attempt by me at explaining OWY1U (including this post) automatically becomes rambling, so adawnrae ended up describing it as "a Google sites page with some peculiar graphics, featuring a character called Waenya [sic]" because she wasn't sure if what she saw was actually the site I'm talking about |
| While I wrote PSL, I had a tendency to say a lot of stupid things on the SmackJeeves forum and Homestar Runner Wiki Forum, to the point where I felt like I'd made everyone at the SJ forum hate me (especially moderator cutething).When I started a thread about how my inability to make sense was due to my autism, I got a lot of negative feedback from members with Asperger's that took offense because they were fully capable of making sense and that I made it seem like everyone on the spectrum was that way. This made me feel even worse about myself, and I made one of the worst decisions I ever made: saying that I was "considering considering considering considering considering considering suicide" while, despite feeling depressed, not actually considering suicide at all. This made people finally tell me that I was an alright person, but I still think they were only saying it because of the whole suicide thing. | Once adawnrae's replies to my entry about OWY1U being a search suggestion inadvertently made me realize that OWY1U is just another PrtSc Land, I started thinking about stupid things I've said on LJ and started feeling like I had alienated most members of several LJ communities, especially asperger. Granted, OWY1U isn't hosted in any LJ community, but still, I did mention OWY1U a few times in _dreams_ and I think once in asperger and maybe autism, and I did start feeling this way after discussing OWY1U. The whole SmackJeeves Forum thing was also reenacted recently in asperger. I mentioned that I felt like I'd alienated the whole community with my stupid comments (though I didn't say anything about suicide this time), and some of old_cutter_john's replies were somewhat less than reassuring (although this time I'm smart enough to realize that he probably doesn't mean it personally). "To be perfectly honest, as a moderator, when I see you, I expect to have to work." Work as in explain to me why yet another argument I gave is completely invalid? "You'll gradually learn how not to alienate people." So I am alienating people after all? :(Then, of course, there were the Forbidden Comment Threads, and while I didn't start those and they were about an entirely different subject, it reminded me a lot about the SJ incident. |
| I rarely go back to PSL anymore because I'm afraid of seeing comments that people might have left in the meantime, which prevents me from going back and taking it down or explaining that I'm not gonna continue it or something, which means people will continue to misunderstand it, etc. | I rarely go back to OWY1U anymore because I'm afraid of seeing hateful comments that people might have put as their "name" or "e-mail address" on the form where you sign up to be notified if and when OWY1U returns, even though the last time I went there (which was quite recently, at least as of when I started writing this entry), no one had. Therefore, I still have yet to change the home page so that it makes sense without prior knowledge of the backwards lyrics that were on the site, which means there's more opportunities for people to misinterpret it. |
| I'm thinking about doing yet another revamp of PSL for the 10th or 15th or {5n : n is an integer}th anniversary, but unlike the other revamps, this version will make fun of all the inconsistencies, unfunny jokes, predictable jokes, unintentional subtext, etc. If you're a Homestar Runner fan who understands how to cancel out factors, think of it as PrtSc Land × Strongest Man in the World toon ÷ Strongest Man in the World book × Where My Hat is At? toon ÷ Where My Hat is At? book. | I'm still thinking about getting OWY1U back up eventually. |
| I still ramble about PSL a lot, such as here (I'm the anonymous poster) and this very entry. | I still ramble about OWY1U a lot, such as my post about it being a search suggestion and this very entry. |
| PSL's demise was possibly predicted by my "author cancelled" dream (Yes, believe it or not, there's actually an origin to that phrase!), which, if you assume "author" means "webcomic author", almost makes sense. | A dream I haven't mentioned elsewhere on LJ yet might have predicted OWY1U's possible eventual demise. In the dream, a "video" (actually just a picture, I think) of Wænya was somehow uploaded to YouTube (I don't remember whether I put it there in the dream or someone else did), and all of the comments were ratings on a scale of up to 10.0 for some reason. All of the ratings were between 1.0 and 1.9 (and one of these was followed by "this is bad i know"), except for one that was somewhere from 8.0 to 8.9 and followed by a LOT of different happy emoticons. I bet I can guess who that comment represents. Unless it's someone else. |
But that's not all! I can name many other ideas I've had over the years that either turned out to not be as awesome as I originally thought, or have the potential to end up that way considering how OWY1U isn't much better than PSL. Here is background on them all (including more on PSL and OWY1U):
Various inventions
From 2nd to 4th (or maybe 5th) grade, I came up with several ideas for inventions and would mention some of them fairly often, but I never felt like I wanted to put forth the effort to actually make any of them. Which is good because most, if not all of them, were dumb for at least one of the following reasons:
- It's completely ridiculous and couldn't exist in real life, like my would-be-infamous-if-I'd-mentioned-it-online-before-I-decided-it-was-ridiculous idea of a Starman T-shirt that functions as an actual Starman.
- Copyright infringement; for instance, at one point I wanted to make my own handheld version of Super Mario World (which, coincidentally, Nintendo did later wind up sorta making in the form of Super Mario Advance 2).
- It already exists; for instance, I wanted to make a portable device that had games, e-mail, Internet access, etc., but what I didn't know was that there's already laptops. (I was actually thinking more like a phone-sized device at the time, but that, too, would eventually exist as smartphones without my intervention.)
Various stick figure comics unnamed as a whole
Surprising as it is, PrtSc Land was not the first lame comic I wrote and tried to show to everyone I saw. It's just the first lame webcomic I wrote and tried to show to everyone I saw.
In 5th grade, 2 of my classmates sometimes doodled comics with stick figures, inspiring me to do the same. Unfortunately, mine made a lot less sense than theirs and weren't very funny, yet I almost continually drew them on dry-erase boards and held them up (or, after fifth grade, occasionally I drew some at home and put them on my door). There were two main recurring themes, even though not all comics fit under one of them:
1) Surfing in unusual ways or with unusual results. I got this idea from just one surfing-related comic the others drew that actually made more sense than all of mine combined.
2) Putting cans into recycling boxes with the same sort of unusual things happening. I started doing these because my class decorated recycling bags or something in class for Earth Day, and I liked doing this so much that I kept doing them whenever it was close to Earth Day. (Or even when it wasn't, a couple of times.)
I was introduced to Homestar Runner when I was in 6th grade, and I liked how clicking on certain words would show something related to whatever was clicked. So in 6th and 7th grade (and part of 8th, until PSL took over), while writing notes or doing homework, I'd sometimes think up and draw comics that were related to whatever was mentioned in my notes/homework (and then pretend that if my life were a web cartoon, clicking on a certain phrase in the text would bring up whatever I drew in the same way).
Example: one of the questions on a history quiz or one of the answer choices mentioned how it took a long time to get anywhere by ship or something like that, so near that, I drew a ship (except it looked more like a boat with a flag on it) with two people saying "Are we there yet?" "No." "Are we there yet?" "No."
A few of these comics (such as the one I just mentioned) were actually funny enough for my teachers to like them, but in retrospect, I'm glad my mom crossed them out whenever she saw them.
(the LJ-spoiler tag that used to be here because I used it as a regular LJ-cut said: "Quote of the Week (warning: so rambly that not even P_A or E02 could condense it any)")
Quote of the Week
Seeing the Quote of the Week feature on Homestar Runner, which featured a different sound clip from the cartoons every week, inspired me to do my own QOTW for real life.
Every week, I would tape a sheet of paper (don't worry, I tried to reuse the same piece of paper as much as possible) with a quote handwritten on it to my window or wall or desk or wherever I felt it was the most visible at the time.
Obviously there were no sound clips, it being just a piece of paper and all, but I was satisfied with just writing down a different "funny" (well, alright, a few were actually funny) quote that someone (including myself) had said that week every Friday (since I put up the first one on 2-4-05, which was a Friday) and adding the previous one to the list of old quotes on an ever-growing stack of QOTW archive pages I taped below it.
This idea had the potential to actually make complete sense, had I not made several bad decisions along the way.
First of all, while this never became an actual problem, I never asked anyone for permission to use their quotes until
pathvain_aelien told me after at least 21 weeks that I should. Even after that, I only ever asked for permission to use her quotes.Secondly, after a while, I started taking a notepad around with me pretty much everywhere to write down quotes to choose from later. This must have seemed pretty strange to some people.
Lastly, like PrtSc Land, I made obscure references to the QOTW in all the wrong places. In addition to mentioning the QOTW notepad sometimes, I made quite a few obscure mentions of the QOTW (as well as the first version of PSL) in my English homework and computer class. For English class, while I did have the common sense to (as far as I remember) leave such references out of my big essays and safely store them in
As for the journal entries, I'll just talk about my dumbest one. See, my teacher, upon hearing me complain about not being able to think of anything to write about, suggested writing about what I'd do if I were to discover a new planet. So I wrote that I'd set up my QOTW and PrtSc Land there for any aliens who happen to be there, and also happen to be as airheaded as I was at the time, to enjoy.
And to think that I was in 8th and/or 9th grade.
As for computer class, one year I was in a Visual C# "class" (and no, I did not put that in quotes to make it a programming-related pun), but since I was the only one there, it wasn't very structured and there weren't any grades. All I had was a C# textbook and software (there were supposed to be the example problems given in the textbook, but those didn't come with the CD for some reason), so I pretty much got to blow off that class period by making whatever random programs I wanted to make. I ended up trying to make a QOTW memory match game even though the fact that my classmates' computer class was being taught in the same computer lab should have made me think, "Maybe it's not such a good idea to put stuff these people said into a game that they'll be able to see if they look at your computer screen during this class..." Fortunately, as far as I know, none of them actually noticed.
I even mentioned the QOTW in a few PrtSc Land strips. Of course, this wasn't nearly as bad an idea as all of my QOTW-rambling at school; nevertheless, many of the QOTW references in PSL were still pretty strange, so I'm glad I got rid of them for the online version. A few of these references were not stupid and merely featured the QOTW as a background element whenever a scene took place in my room (though I guess you could say that that's still a bad idea if the current quote is completely unrelated to the strip and the "camera" is zoomed in enough for me to write the actual quote instead of squiggles or a big "QOTW"), but the rest were just plain dumb.
Example: A fortune I got on Neopets from the Island Mystic mentioned radioactive faeries. This prompted me to take a screenshot of that and make a strip with a Radioactive Faerie character who had various random radioactivity-caused mutations; one such mutation was two giant copies of the QOTW page, complete with the "iconic" pieces of tape and the letters "QOTW", for wings. I am so glad I changed those to checkered wings for the first online version and even gladder I scrapped her altogether for the second.
I could go on and on, but this should be enough proof that I was the weirdest person in the observable universe back then.
For a while, I had another Quote of the Week, or a "Quote of the (insert time measurement here)", in my signature on the SmackJeeves forum, which I would change every time I saw a quote I deemed worthy of it. This was inspired by the fact that some SJ users did the same thing anyway, only they didn't call it the Quote of the anything and didn't put a backwards lyric instead of a forum quote like I did once.
Since my "Quote of the (insert time measurement here)" wasn't actually as bad of an idea as the original QOTW because I didn't start talking about it all over the forum, and the only reason I quit updating it is because I quit PrtSc Land, I'm considering starting yet another Quote of the Week on my LJ profile, as follows:
- The sort of quotes that will have the opportunity to make it in will pretty much be a mix of the type of quotes that could make it into my original and SJ QOTWs, the H*R QOTW, and some unofficial QOTWs on various Homestar Runner Wiki users' userpages (i.e. some quotes are made funnier by intentionally misattributing them [but then having a note with the real attribution], like HRW users did by attributing user quotes to H*R characters).
- I'll allow people to request that I remove a quote if I happen to put it there and they don't want it there. That shouldn't be much of a problem since I'll stick to things that are said publicly or ask for permission if I want to use something that isn't.
PrtSc Land
I started PSL offline back in 2006 (I sent it to
pathvain_aelien, ellaina02, and forgetmenotcj via ICQ) and wasn't even called PrtSc Land; until the online version that began in late 2007, it was only known as "my screenshots" or "my funny screenshots". Some remnants of that time still remain on LiveJournal.Most of the first strips were screenshots of Neopets, ICQ, or error messages with jokes written/drawn on them, using the same sort of jokes that I drew in the stick figure comics when they were like Homestar Runner easter eggs. It got to the point where it could have a screenshot of pretty much anything I was into and/or comics involving Neopets, Homestar Runner, Mario, AdventureQuest, Garfield (though just once), Fuzzy McFluffenstein, Club Penguin, Invader Zim, Dido, Enya, Celine Dion, Paris Hilton (really), and/or a few original characters based on text found in screenshots, such as the Radioactive Faerie that I mentioned while rambling about the QOTW. The first time I drew such a comic, I actually drew Illusen pretty well compared to my stick figure comics, so naturally, I fell for the fallacy that this meant that my drawings were necessarily good.
Like with the QOTW, I referenced it in quite a few places where it wouldn't make sense, even before it was online. Generally, if I was dumb enough to make an obscure QOTW reference in a given place, I was also dumb enough to make an obscure PSL reference there. I never actually thought about putting it online until I went to Camp El Tesoro one year (I think this was before I had a LJ) and mentioned the basic premise of PrtSc L-- er, "funny screenshots" to one of my cabin buddies and he suggested putting it online. For a while, I was reluctant to do so because a) since I wasn't sure if fair use was as fair as I was hoping it was (which, it turns out, it will be until something similar to SOPA/PIPA/ACTA gets passed), I thought that the owners of all the works referenced might sue me for it, b) there were quite a few strips that just didn't make sense whatsoever, and c) to understand certain strips, one must read certain other strips or long, rambly explanations first, so I'd have to find a way to make it so that you can't read certain strips unless you've read the prerequisites.
I ended up deleting as many strips as I could that were either not very funny or didn't make sense on first sight and redrawing all the rest. This left only about 50 out of 456 the first time I put PSL online. When people said it still was poorly-drawn or didn't make any sense, I revamped it again and ended up leaving only 13 of the original strips. I also added a "new plot introduction that's actually halfway decent" (i.e., a plot introduction that actually makes less sense and the only good thing about it is that, the three characters I wasn't too lazy to hand-draw actually turned out fairly well-drawn, aside from being talking heads and copied and pasted every time they appeared in another hand-drawn panel), attempting to re-introduce Dido and Enya (whose portrayal as rivals for no reason was made into the actual plot), as well as several other characters who appeared only in strips that had ended up rejected. Unfortunately, this meant that instead of rambling in an attempt to explain strips, I ended up rambling to explain why there aren't so many (like I'm doing right now), so it still wasn't well-received.
After that, I considered starting over once more and making the comic entirely about Dido and Enya hating each other for no reason with the other characters taking sides, getting rid of the other strips entirely just to guarantee that people will know that the comic is no longer like those. That never happened, though, because I didn't feel creative enough and because I started being interested in backwards music instead. I did put a few miscellaneous screenshots on my LiveJournal every now and then, and I eventually went back and tagged most of these as New PrtSc Land due to their similarity to the original concept of PSL, but nonetheless, NPSL isn't really a new version of PSL.
As I've mentioned a few times, I'm thinking of rerunning the 1st and 3rd versions (I don't have the 2nd anymore) on LiveJournal - with all the QOTW references, all the unfunny jokes, all the not making any sense, etc. - alongside new versions that are much better-drawn (considering how the last few strips of the third version turned out, there's hope if I keep myself from getting lazy and using sprites) and make fun of the old ones. I sure hope I'm actually able to come up with a unique way to make fun of every stupidity and not make new stupid mistakes along the way. That, and I think it'll be more interesting if it actually has a plot (that's better than "On the red corner, Dido and some random characters that I'm guessing would like her more than Enya! And on the blue corner, vice versa!"), either throughout or after the remade comics, and in fact have an idea for a new plot and a few ideas of how to implement it, but I don't think I'd be able to flesh any of them out enough without asking pathvain_aelien, ellaina02 and/or forgetmenotcj for help (and thus spoiling the ending for at least one of the only three people who has more than a 10% chance of reading it).
Plus, whatever I do, if I want to draw it better than any of the first three versions, I'd probably have to do it almost two years in advance, which means if I get any constructive criticism, I wouldn't be able to take advice from it for years.
And also, the fact that PSL was poorly-drawn hasn't kept me from making userpics in the first style for the anniversary of PSL and considering replacing my regular userpics with those for PSL Day...
Ours Will You 1-Up
Not much to say about it. It was pretty much just a website where I posted backwards lyrics to music I have (and didn't take requests, much to the annoyance of anyone who liked a song I didn't have, as I'd seen when I first tried to kick off this idea as a SmackJeeves forum thread).
I self-promoted it in some of the same sort of places that I would promote PSL, but not as many, although I did overuse lots of backwards lyrics-related inside jokes in places where they're guaranteed not to be understood. You think my occasional "holy whole hand dealer" or "what the sail" nowadays is annoying and that these two userpics are weird? Imagine what it was like when I said those phrases much more often, didn't realize "WTCN" might look like "what the Chuck Norris" (look, I even have a Wikipedia link this time!) to people who don't know it means "what the cattle note", and also said "what the beat coping gnat" and "what the noose mug Yoshi" a couple of times! (The phrasing of this paragraph is too similar to that of my "You think PSL is poorly-drawn now? Look at what it USED to look like!" comments. Go figure.)
However, the biggest thing that didn't make much sense about the site itself before I took it down was certain words I decided to censor in the backwards lyrics that would be better off uncensored (or vice versa).
In fact, I still am not quite sure whether to have censored and uncensored versions, or what to censor, etc., which is why I took it down - I needed some time to sort it out and apply the new censoring rules. That would have been a great idea if the page I replaced the home page with clearly explained that it was a backwards lyric site and did not start out with inside jokes based on backwards lyrics that obviously wouldn't be understood by new readers. (What was I thinking?) I'm still unsure as to whether to make the site private until I'm ready or replace the error page with one that isn't exactly as stupid as PrtSc Land. Whichever I do, I need to do it VERY quickly before someone does completely misunderstand OWY1U and make an Internet meme based on their misunderstanding. Especially since P_A told me one time about a shirt that, if I remember correctly, has a 1-Up Mushroom with the words "Will me 1-Up?" or something underneath...
And I'm also unsure about whether or not to take song requests; while it'll have more of an audience that way, I'll probably get lots of requests for songs that have been controversial because of supposed backmasked satanic messages or whatever. That would be missing the point, because the point is to put the backwards lyrics for any songs and not just controversial ones. Unless I only take requests from my LJ friends or make this a collaborative project between all of us or something...
Dream art galleries and cast lists
One day back when I was a more frequent poster to
_dreams_, I decided to add artwork and cast lists to ALL the dreams I posted! This was a pretty pointless idea, because the only things I ended up drawing (or spriting, because I got lazy and mainly stuck to Super Mario World dreams) are things that can pretty much be imagined exactly just from the text. I mean, everyone who's seen a CD at some point in their life can guess what two CDs appearing out of thin air would look like! I could have at least drawn what was actually on the front of those CDs to make it interesting, but NOOO, I was too lazy to even draw what I vaguely remember of the CD designs.Illustrating dreams isn't that bad of an idea in and of itself, though, so I haven't refrained from making a 7:97 userpic and, much more recently, a /crazymegavideo/ userpic (which isn't even uploaded as an actual LJ userpic yet). Problem is, some of the frames of /crazymegavideo/ being waterlogged in that one look kind of like PSL style no matter how I try and edit it (her body does, anyway), so now I'm worried that my drawing ability has regressed. The animation isn't that smooth either. I blame my PSL-styled userpics.
Also, a dream that I had after I got rid of the original art galleries (warning: one of the things in the list I mention later in that entry is kinda awkward, so try to only read the full dreams in that entry) has a drawing of something that I initially thought couldn't be explained well in words, thus making the artwork concept seem actually useful until I realized I could've just said "the Tetris block was hovering in midair just below the nail rather than actually being nailed". Oh well...at least people know the Tetris block in my dream was orange? And a J Block? :P
Finally, as I've mentioned, I plan to add artwork to certain entries in my glossary of Matt1993isms, including drawings of characters from my dreams. For example, it gets tedious to say that /tensen/ looks like "a way more human version of the Jolly Dumple" (and I never even explained that the only features he actually shares with the Jolly Dumple are the hat, skin tone, and sometimes the tongue!), so this time, drawing artwork might actually be useful.
As for the cast lists, those are pointless because you can pretty much figure out who appears in a dream just by reading my description of it (excluding scenes I leave out because they're too weird, of course). I was quite surprised to recently discover that some of my old posts in _dreams_, after all these years, STILL had cast lists that I accidentally left there, presumably weirding everyone out until I finally removed them. :O
Caaaaast (in order of appearaaaaance): Meeeee, Mariooooo/Enyaaaaa, some girls dressed as Neopian faer--
Aah! A-jibblie jibblie jibblie jibblie jibblie jibblie...
April Fool's pranks
I can't even do an April Fool's prank here without overanalyzing my ability to make sense. For 2010, I attempted to emulate this, but I didn't really have enough time to finish it properly, and even if I had, it would've been too long to post.
For 2011, I attempted to write an April Fool's prank claiming that not only was there finally an Enya concert, but I just happened to find a front-row ticket to it, get Enya's autograph there, and save her from a burning building. At the time, it seemed to make more sense than my 2010 prank, but now it seems to make less and less sense every time I think about it. The fact that I kept referring to an airport without ever clarifying that I intended for the concert in my story to be in the same place as a Celine Dion concert I went to in 2009 is probably the least of my worries.
Moya's Space Log
For my birthday in 2010, I received Super Mario Galaxy 2 and a Moya Brennan CD, and, while typing an entry about everything I received, realized that it felt weird to mention Mario and Moya in the same entry whereas PSL, OWY1U, and my weird dreams have, over time, made this not true of Mario and Enya.
This gave me an idea for a drabble where Mario, Luigi, Enya, and Moya all work together in SMG2 and only Moya questions the logic, and I wanted
pathvain_aelien to write me one since she'd been wanting to write me a birthday drabble, but then I decided to attempt to write it myself as a full story for NaNoWriMo. Although I only managed to write 7,813 words out of 25,000 (I was doing the Youth Writer's Program) and "Team Brennario" only got the first Power Star, continuing this definitely has more potential than some of the other things on this list.However, there are still some reasons it might not:
- Considering that it's just Super Mario Galaxy 2 written in text with Enya and Moya thrown in, it's one of the least creative fanfics out there.
- The writing gets tedious and not very interesting whenever there's nothing new for Moya to question and just fairly long stretches of the same game elements.
- Even though I don't self-promote it the way I have with PSL or OWY1U, I still tried to explain it a few times in
_dreams_.- Enya and Moya being part Yoshi in the story is yet another OWY1U reference made while OWY1U is still down.
- It might be mistaken for me actually making fun of the Mario series for not making sense, even though I'm trying for a parody of people who often make fun of the Mario series for not making sense. If that makes sense. (After all, I can't even tell whether http://cartoonoveranalyzations.com/ is serious about their statements about cartoons or whether they're parodying people who make fun of cartoons that way!)
- Sometimes, the division between MSL and unrelated parts of my entries aren't that clear. That, or Moya's doing homework and traversing the Mario world at the same time.
- Any references to it don't make a lot of sense right now, since halfway through NaNoWriMo, I decided that I might be cluttering everyone's friends pages with all my MSL posts, made a custom friends group for its readers, and only just now made it public again. (Well, "just now" is relative due to the amount of time I procrastinated posting this, but still.)
- Due to my not being Enya, Moya, or any of their friends or family, I don't think I'm portraying them very well. I mean, the whole "Enya accepts Mario logic while Moya questions it, regardless of what they'd think about the games in real life, and they're both part Yoshi thanks to that backwards lyric..." sort of thing is fine, since it's not Mario or, um, real-world canon anyhow and it's the driving force behind the story, but I want all other aspects of their personalities to sound like they would in real life. And, well, they probably don't.
- Sometimes I forget to make Moya question some aspect of the Mario universe whenever she comes across it for the first time.
Despite all of this, if I want to remake PSL, I'd have to finish this first so that I can make it and the PSL remake part of the same canon like I hope to do.
Posts about Schrödinger's Enya
If Schrödinger's Enya really is Enya (and, to a lesser extent, if she isn't), the best way to show what every post I've ever made that includes the phrase "Schrödinger's Enya" and/or her username (including this one) must look like from her point of view is with an edited version of xkcd comic #231 with some help from #919 and colors pulled from two other xkcds:
My submissions to Square Root of Minus Garfield and Lightning Made of Owls
Okay, I haven't actually submitted (or even drawn) anything for either of these collaborative comics yet, but I've been thinking about doing so. Problem is, I worry that my ideas might turn out the same way all of these other things (except possibly Moya's Space Log and less possibly Ours Will You 1-Up) have. Square Root of Minus Garfield shouldn't be much of a problem since all they do is mess around with Garfield comics
Luckily, I have mysteriously become creative enough to think of a new LMOO idea at least once every week (and then get distracted by it all day)...but will I always be mysteriously more creative than usual? And what if all my ideas for both SROMG and LMOO are already done by the time I start working on them? (Strips similar to some of my SROMG ideas have already been made! And how long until someone else takes the LMOO script that I really want to make into a comic and makes it before I do?) And since quite a few of my LMOO ideas come solely from me thinking of objects that come in different colors and imagining what might happen if the LMOO cast became the corresponding-colored objects (since you're allowed to draw the characters as whatever you want as long as they retain identifying features), can I consider those ideas truly creative? And, if not, will I have plenty of other ideas? (Actually, I have come up with more ideas that way lately, but for how long?) And is it even creative to use someone else's characters in the first place? And, even though it doesn't really matter in LMOO, as pointed out earlier, am I actually capable of drawing as well as I'd like yet? And will I ever stop beginning sentences with "and" and ending them with question marks?
Sideways Compatible
As I've (partially) mentioned here before, I'm still thinking about writing a new webcomic. What I didn't mention is its title or premise, since I previously didn't want to give too much away (but might as well now, especially since there were no real spoilers at all):
I got the idea when
pathvain_aelien wanted to play Mario Kart Wii with me one day back when we still played it often and, not having a Wii Wheel, she jokingly said she'd use her iPod instead. That gave me the idea to write a comic about what could happen if various items are used as various other items. I even thought about taking suggestions for pairs of items and try to come up with unpredictable outcomes for each idea. Like PSL, pretty much any characters from fandoms I like would have been able to make an appearance in SC, although it would mainly star OWY1U characters. (This is why there's a miniature Wænya labeled "new idea for a webcomic" depicted in my brain in my post explaining creative Considering that I don't have as many ideas for Sideways Compatible as I have for other stuff (even if I take suggestions, I might not be able to come up with anything for them), I'm less likely to go through with this, but I have another idea: What if I make all of my SC ideas into LMOO strips? I wouldn't get to flesh out the personalities of OWY1U characters, but combining my SC and LMOO ideas, I might fare better in LMOO! Or I might not, considering how everything from my invention ideas to OWY1U has turned out.
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To put it into perspective, here's a timeline of all of these:
So basically, I can't make anything that's the slightest bit creative without having to have people proofread it just to be more than 50% sure it makes sense. I can't even write an entry complaining about this depressing fact without having to have people proofread it just to be more than 50% sure it won't offend everyone, from all over the universe, from every period in history, everyone.
I mean, I wanted to post it very soon after my realization, especially since it wouldn't have seemed as out-of-place while (the LJ-spoiler tag that used to be here said "blah blah blah blah blah blah blah....") I was still so depressed about this situation that I constantly felt empty inside about it. (And by "feeling empty inside", I mean that I felt the way Mario does in this Super Mario Bros. hack. Which is actually pretty bad for a feeling for which the best description mentions Mario.) But it still took a really long time just to make a few edited images, one animated userpic, and a graph! I did actually finish back in February rather than just now, but still!
Granted, the latter two do have a semi-decent amount of work put in, but I still didn't even hand-draw anything. I guess new sprites sorta count, but most of them still use edits of older sprites as a base and/or aren't that detailed.
I also didn't:
- explain anything here concisely (The part about the Quote of the Week alone is at least five or six times longer than my longest author comment from PrtSc Land!)
- use motion blurs in that graph
- manage to keep the graph from looking cluttered
- add anything past January 2012 to the graph after I uploaded it but before I finally posted this entry
- draw seven different-colored 3D PrtSc keys in less than three hours (even with some help from Irfanview and 3D Anaglyph Maker rather than just MS Paint)
- manage to draw three coordinate-transformed Garfield sprites without messing up two of the faces
- give /crazymegavideo/ decent-looking speech bubbles, or
- manage to keep /crazymegavideo/ from looking PSL-styled in my new userpic.
With this in mind, how will the new PSL, the MSL artwork, the glossary artwork, my LMOO comics, or even my redesign of Wænya and design of new OWY1U characters turn out? Remember, I didn't even get to check my LJ friends page in a while because of this, my college homework, and working on my program to prioritize everything! :(
Rant about the inevitable part of this entry that doesn't make sense
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At least you tried to explain various things in this entry, so no worries there!
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"Tried" is the key word here. One of the things about PSL that was criticized is the long author comments explaining everything, and this post is much longer than any one of those comments, so...
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(unless you think that's a valid critique...)
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Not that I like the fact that it's valid. Sometimes it's just impossible to condense anything to make it easy-to-read. (This entry is after my sisters helped condense it!) That's why I have this userpic.
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I can see the point, though. That userpic is the truth!
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