Whatever Matt Feels Like Posting

Fifteen years ago today (well, tomorrow), I created a Google Site as part of one of my first assignments in a dual credit computer science class I was taking at the time. The assignment was simply to create a Google Site and didn't specify a topic, so some of my classmates made basic profile pages, others made sites that had something to do with their career path... but I, not being a normal person by any definition of the word, made a site dedicated to my then-newest big obsession: listening to music backwards and writing down what I thought the lyrics sounded like when reversed. (And trying WAAAY too hard to make inside jokes out of the backwards lyrics.)

And thus, on that day, Ours Will You 1-Up was born.

Fifteen years later, I'm nostalgic about those days of listening to music backwards, writing down what the backwards lyrics sounded like, and thinking up ideas for features I wanted to add to my site but never did (such as also transcribing backwards cartoons or backwards TV show episodes, or adding a drawing based on a backwards lyric from every song).

Sure, there were some aspects of the site's execution that were... problematic, to say the least, so it's no surprise that I only kept updating the site for a few months, it was eventually taken down by Google in 2014 or 2015 or so, and I don't currently have any plans for making a new version of it or posting backwards lyrics here or anything like that.

But I still miss those days. I think I'm nostalgic for Ours Will You 1-Up right now for four reasons:
1) The obvious fact that it's almost the 15th anniversary of the site. Even though it's been a while since the last time I did anything big to acknowledge a major milestone anniversary of it or my journal or the beginnings of any of my other major hobbies/projects.
2) The fact that Character.AI is a thing and thus I can actually simulate a conversation between Enya and any of the fictional characters she "mentioned" in her backwards lyrics... without having to write it myself!
3) For a multitude of reasons - Character.AI, the fact that my 30th birthday was fairly recent, etc. - I've been nostalgic about basically my entire life, including my obsession with backwards music.
4) And last but not least, the fact that I recently came across the following two videos on YouTube without even trying:

( Cut for length )
That's right. Someone besides me played Enya songs backwards. Not just one or two, but six. And not only that, they posted it to YouTube!
If something like this existed when my site was still up, I wasn't aware of it.
While Ours Will You 1-Up was still up, I had wanted to actually post the backwards versions of the songs, so that readers with no audio editing program could actually listen to them backwards instead of just trying to imagine what Enya singing nonsense about Olimar pushing a slush would sound like. But I didn't think I'd be allowed to do so (plus I probably didn't know how).
Well, now I can finally do what I wanted to do! I wasn't originally planning on doing anything special for the 15th anniversary of Ours Will You 1-Up, but when I found this channel I was like "okay, I DEFINITELY have to make an OWY1U 15th anniversary post now". :)

I'm so weird for being so obsessed with all these things and getting overly excited when Enya fans also share at least one other interest with me, aren't I...

Today is the first anniversary of the day I joined DreamWidth... wow.

How did DreamWidth manage to probably be the first social network I was still using a year after I joined it?

LiveJournal - Of course I've been obsessed with LJ since 2009, but back when I actually joined it on August 19, 2007... not so much. I didn't do a whole lot on it for a while and went on a long hiatus early on. August 19, 2008 happened to be during that hiatus.

Facebook - I don't remember when I joined it, but probably about the same time as LJ. But like with LJ, I kept losing and regaining interest in it for a while. I also remember my first Facebook account being suspended because no one would verify the high school I went to (since there wasn't even an option for the high school I actually went to), but I don't remember when that was. So I may or may not have been using Facebook a year after I joined it.

Blogger? - For a dual-credit computer science class (the same one that Ours Will You 1-Up spawned out of, I believe), one of the assignments was to create an account on Blogger... at least I think it was Blogger. So I did, but I only ever made one post on it. Even if I wanted to update it now, I can't because I don't remember my username (and who knows if it's still up, anyway).

Miiverse - I joined it when I got my Wii U on December 25, 2012, and was active on it for several months, but then went on a hiatus from it and December 25, 2013 happened to be just before I came back from that hiatus - and then posted regularly for several more months only to go on an even longer hiatus.


And despite my having been on DreamWidth for over a year, I still only have 736 entries fixed :(

The tenth anniversary of my LiveJournal is on August 19!!!


To celebrate, August 2017 is Matt1993 Nostalgia Month! (Okay, so that would also be an accurate description of basically any month from October 2015 to July 2017... but for August 2017, it's an even MORE accurate description!)

When I joined LJ nearly ten years ago, I never thought I'd be still on it for this long - especially given how I kept going on hiatuses from it until February 2009. I also never thought so many things would have changed since then, or that I'd be posting about so many new things since then.

I keep wondering what basically everything I've posted to LJ in 2009-2017 would look like to my 14-year-old or 15-year-old self (i.e. from the era when I wasn't that active on LJ and didn't think I ever would be).


Well, now that question will be sort of answered, because:

1. I'm changing my journal style back to Blue Gray (which is what I think I was using at first and had left as for... I'm not even sure how long; probably until early 2009 but MAYBE earlier) for a month, then will change it to Pale Yellows again at the end of the month. Though I'm leaving the journal title and subtitle as is because I don't remember what those were back in 2007 - and I decided that if I'm keeping those as is, I'll also leave in other anachronistic references such as the comment text being "# Doom 2 bad guys will come out of my ears"/"Rob Morrow to you!" :)

2. As those of you who've known me since 2009 know, five of my oldest userpics used to look different until I updated them late that year (and I don't think I had any userpics at all before 2009). Well, I'm temporarily changing those five userpics back to what they looked like in 2009!

( Back to the good old days! (I can't believe 2009 is “the good old days”...) )

3. And why stop there? If my newer userpics had also existed prior to November 2009 or so, some of them likely would've looked different back then, too - so I've taken what I call the "Super Mario Maker approach" because I'm a dork and retroactively created "older" versions of eleven more userpics, and am temporarily changing them "back" to these versions for the month!

What would my journal and some of my comments have looked like if...
- that brief era when I played D&D had been at least a few months earlier
- I'd started watching The X-Files before 2010
- I'd had my first /crazymegavideo/ dream before 2010
- the Forbidden Comment Threads had happened at least a couple of years earlier, resulting in 2009 being during the four years or so of depression and angst they caused me
- and so on
...and therefore some of my userpics about these had been made when I was 15 instead of 16-22?

Let's find out!!

( Draconian userpic poink! )

It was fun using my 2008-2009 drawing/spriting styles once again in 2016-2017! Even if the old-style versions of the 7:97 and /crazymegavideo/ userpics don't sync up as well with the regular versions as I thought they would. :)

4. And, as if making ancient in-jokes look even more ancient wasn't anachronistic enough already, I'm even applying the same temporary changes to my DreamWidth account! This includes the same userpic changes, and... okay, not the SAME layout changes, because LJ and DW have different default layouts. Still, I figure if DreamWidth had existed in 2007 and I'd had an account on it back then, I probably would've used its default layout for nearly two years like I did on LJ, so I'm temporarily using that layout (Neutral Good) for a month. :)


(Before I actually make any of these changes, though, I'm going to make sure both the LJ and DW versions of this entry look okay - so my journals may or may not still be yellow when you see this.)


I've got some more ideas for celebratory posts as well, so stay tuned! :D

So, in the aftermath of a lot of my ScrapBook images mysteriously going missing (and the images I had hosted on Google Sites also going missing nearly two years ago*, though I have since restored the ones used before August 2009 and am in the process of restoring the rest), I have an idea:

I suggest that everyone reading this (especially those of you who are new or relatively new to my friends list) please do the following a few times:

- Pick a random year between 2007 and the present (except 2008; I only had one post that year and it has no images, broken or not), a random month, and a random day of that month
- Go to http://matt1993.livejournal.com/yyyy/mm/dd/, replacing the yyyy/mm/dd with the date you picked
- If I posted that day, read those entries to find out a) a glimpse of what I was doing in that era and b) whether or not there are any broken images in those entries. And then if there are, let me know in the comments on this one.

If at least some of you do this a few times, you'll get to learn a little more about me and I'll have a slightly easier time pinpointing just how many images in my journal are broken! (And I'll also get a better idea of how many of my entries make sense to people who haven't been here since 2009 or so!) :)


*Wait, that was nearly two years ago?!?


EDIT: Hey, LiveJournal's staff fixed it - the images show up in my ScrapBook now! I still have yet to make sure they show up in my actual entries, though. Note to self: if I come across an image that doesn't show up, press Ctrl+F5 before assuming that it's still missing.

To all of you who looked through random entries to see if there were any broken images: Thank you for the help! :)

Yep - I created my LJ account on August 19, 2007. Sad how the anniversary of LJ should happen to be the day after I accidentally deleted a lot of LJ-related stuff, though... in fact, I was so busy after that happened, I didn't get to finish this post until the day after the anniversary of my LJ. :(

I also wanted to include LJ comment stats (which I said I'd do every three months starting on the fourth anniversary, but ended up deciding to just do once every year), but since this post is already late, I'll post them later.

( First line of my first entry on or after the 19th of every month )

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