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...

I'm two days behind in posting about this (I don't post about ANYTHING the day it happens anymore, apparently...) but happy 40th anniversary, Garfield! :)

I still remember back when Garfield's 25th anniversary was pretty recent. I was REALLY obsessed with Garfield in that era (2003-2004)... I can't believe that era was fifteen years ago. (Or that, interestingly enough, I'm going to be 25 in less than a month!)


Mini-rant time: I kinda don't like how there are soooo many people nowadays (especially authors of other comics I like) who think that Garfield is objectively never funny, or objectively less funny than it used to be, or what have you... because of them (and especially because of how, at least in 2013-2015 or so, Square Root of Minus Garfield steadily became less about what I liked about it - surreal, often mathematical mashups of Garfield strips - and more of a place for people to edit Garfield comics to insult fans of whatever they don't like, which is more often than not Garfield itself), I feel like I'm not allowed to like what I like. Not even the fact that I know there's plenty of Garfield fans in my LJ friends list keeps me from worrying about it. :( And yes, a big part of why I'm posting this entry is so hopefully I can finally get this off my chest after worrying about it sporadically for the past several years.

EDIT: And now that the YouTube video that made me worry about this the most recently and motivated me to post a mini-rant like this showed up in related videos a second time, might as well link to it in this entry.

I AM GOING TO UNFRIEND ANYONE WHO POSTS AN ENTRY ABOUT THE "LAUREL" AND "YANNY" DEBATE.

...okay, I won't really unfriend anyone because of it, but seriously - ( I'm sick enough of hearing about it that I had to post a rant about how I'm annoyed by it )

Check out this exclusive photo of Enya in her role as Mary O. in the upcoming--

Oh wait, April Fools' Day is already pretty much over. That, and this "exclusive photo" might also just be an existing photo of Enya edited onto a Super Mario Maker background and with Mary O.'s clothes drawn over hers. Made by me. Because, again, my entry about Mary O. and Yamamura: The Movie was an April Fools prank. :P


( Why I didn't actually use that picture in the entry itself - cut because I'm guessing that out of my April Fools entries, the MO&Y entry was the least interesting to anyone besides me )

---

Oh, and all those other things (Photobucket somehow taking down non-Photobucket userpics; my considering deleting this journal; my other journal being suspended; this site shutting down) were April Fools pranks too, even if you see this before I'm done changing the Photobucket placeholder userpics back to the normal ones (which I probably won't get done with all of tonight). So please, don't panic. Please. :)

I have to say, after over three years of trying to fix various broken images and other things in my journal, it was so surreal putting time and energy into breaking some of my images instead. :P


This is pretty much how it felt!


To those of you who've read any of these April Fools entries and still like me: Thank you for tolerating and putting up with the fact that I have such a weird sense of humor. Also thank you for putting up with my fanboying, if you read that one. :P


If you missed any of these April Fools entries, here they are:
Mary O. and Yamamura: The Movie: LJ DW
Photobucket'd userpics: LJ DW
Account suspended: LJ DW
Where should I move my entries to now?: LJ DW
Since I couldn't add a poll to the LJ version of the previous entry after it was posted, I was forced to put that in a separate entry instead. And then to crosspost that entry to DW just because I don't like the idea of a LJ entry not having ANY counterpart on DW. (though I made the DW version private until now)


Even if you normally read my entries only on LJ or DW, I recommend making an exception here and reading both copies of each of my April Fools entries, because as part of the joke this year, I might have thrown my usual attempts at making my LJ and DW look nearly identical out the window for the day and deliberately introduced a few subtle differences between the versions of these entries... ;)

Well, today is the day that Miiverse is shut down at 10 PM PST. (which would be midnight in Central where I live, so... I guess for me, it's not actually today? Whatever.)

Out of all the drastic changes this year (so far), I think this is the only one that I'm not all that upset about. Miiverse started out as probably the most positive online community ever, but it didn't stay that way for long - eventually it went so downhill, it's been years since the last time I visited Miiverse itself. I'd still read posts whenever they appeared in game (Super Mario 3D World, Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, Nintendo Badge Arcade, etc.), but I think the last time I went to Miiverse itself was 2014. Maybe 2015. I didn't even hurriedly try to find a way to save my own posts somewhere. (Though while looking up information about the discontinuation, I did notice that there's a way to request a downloadable archive of my posts, but I doubt I'll have time to figure out where to go to do that in the next few hours.)

...okay, forget what I said about not being all that disappointed. NOW it's making me kind of sad. :( Maybe I'll try and get an archive of my posts after all.

EDIT: Submitted the request! That was easier than expected. So easy, I must've done it twice by accident because it told me I submitted it already. :)

While I'm on Miiverse for the last time, have some random stats about my Miiverse account:

Following 53 users

13 followers

256 posts (hey, a nice nerdy number! And I wasn't even trying to have any of these be interesting numbers!)

1,788 Yeahs

Last post was on November 23, 2016 in Nintendo Badge Arcade. (Though it ALMOST was not the last post; for Valentine's Day 2017, I had every intention of celebrating by putting badges of the lovely Mary O. and a bunch of hearts from Zelda on my HOME menu because I'm the sort of dork who would at least consider doing that and posting that to the Nintendo Badge Arcade community. I did in fact make such a HOME menu, but didn't post it because it wasn't Valentine's Day yet - and for whatever reason, making it again on Valentine's Day and posting it slipped my mind. Probably because that was so soon after work started.)

I only made two Miiverse posts overall in 2016, and none in 2015 - the last one before that was on July 29, 2014 in the NES Remix 2 community. (I'm not surprised that this was so soon after Lucina and Robin were confirmed for Super Smash Bros. 4 - I do remember how the last time I checked Miiverse regularly, it seemed like EVERY SINGLE POST in the SSB community was like "With my Levin Sword, I'll _____".)

Speaking of which, my bio is:

"I'm a sensei; i.e., SNES am I!
(translation: I've been playing video games since the NES and SNES. My all-time favorite classic game: Super Mario World!)

I can't wait to play Super Smash Bros. 4, but I'd be even MORE excited if people would stop whining about the roster being just SLIGHTLY different from what they want. I really hope that there'll be less of that once the game's released..."

...SSB3DS has been out for over three years, and in a couple of weeks, that'll also be true of SSBU. I went THREE YEARS without updating that bio. Why do I have the sudden urge to turn up the hearing aid that I don't have?


Well, whatever. At least now my Miiverse posts will be turned into an ice cube so future generations can thaw them out and marvel at my same-length legs! :)

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

(music tag should be: "Kid Icarus: Uprising soundtrack - The War's End (because who am I kidding, no one else will ever post LJ entries that aren't about the migration anymore...)")

Today is a completely uneventful day... or at least I'm going to have to try to convince myself of that if I want to stop completely freaking out.

Since this is a completely uneventful day, I'm going to finally get around to posting some things I've been meaning to post.

Here's some more of the results of when I revisited quizzes I first took years ago:

http://matt1993.livejournal.com/15256.html
I don't know why I'm bothering to revisit all-you-have-to-do-is-enter-your-name quizzes, but this time around I got:
What will your Wanted poster say?
Matt
WANTED FOR: Baking a pie with a file inside to help get your lover out of prison
REWARD: All the corn you can eat!

http://matt1993.livejournal.com/21831.html
Just how EVIL are you?
Last time I was 12% evil. Now it's 3% evil.

http://matt1993.livejournal.com/22360.html
Still Judeo-Christian

http://matt1993.livejournal.com/23410.html
Still General Hospital, but the marker was placed correctly this time


In other news, I finally got around to updating the list of amiibo I own in my LJ profile a while back - I just never posted about it until now.

And does anyone here remember the game Chip's Challenge? Well, this may be old news to some of you, but recently I found out that Chip's Challenge 2 was FINALLY released after so many years! :D

(music tag should be: Snippets of Mario, Kid Icarus, SSB, BtVS, Enya, Dido, Céline Dion, Sarah McLachlan, Moya Brennan, Matchbox 20, Rascal Flatts, & Savage Garden music thrown together randomly in Audacity)

This has been kind of a disappointing April Fools' Day because:

1) Homestar Runner didn't update at all today, even though they did for April Fools' Day 2014, 2015, and 2016, and April Fools and Halloween are almost the only times they ever update nowadays.
2) I don't think many people noticed my April Fools prank at all.

For reference, my April Fools prank was this entry; however, when I first posted it (on March 31 in my time zone, but late enough that it was April 1 already for some of you), it was an exact copy of my first entry. Then I waited a few minutes or so and changed it to a copy of a different past entry in the same way... then changed it to another after a few more minutes, and so on - basically, if I was at my computer, I'd change the entry anywhere from once an hour to once every few minutes. (At first. I gradually updated it less and less often because it seemed like no one was noticing...)

By "exact copy", that means including the subject line, repost button, userpic, tags, mood, music, location... basically, everything except the timestamp, the comments, and friends-only status [though, of course, the only friends-only entries I used were ones that probably would've been fine being public]. And anything that I intended to change each time but accidentally forgot sometimes. Though if I used an entry I'd posted in _dreams_, autism, or asperger, I added a notice saying that it was cross-posted (even though I don't think copying a community entry to my own journal years later for April Fools' Day actually counts as cross-posting).

I chose the entries semi-randomly, sometimes by going to my Calendar for random years and months and picking a random entry I'd feel comfortable posting again, and sometimes by just putting in notable entries that I remember and wanted to include in this prank at some point. Some entries were used more than once.

And just to mess with your heads even more, I thought it might be fun to come up with a hypothetical FUTURE entry and add it into the mix! That's what the 2023 year in review is for. It ended up being my favorite thing about this prank, so I left that one up significantly longer than any other single entry.


Now that April Fools' Day is over, all the entries I ended up using are listed below for posterity. (Don't expect the repost buttons to work correctly, though...)


( The entries that you could've sworn that you'd seen already and/or that they said something completely different a few minutes ago, in order of their first use in this prank )

Since certain past years and dates (especially starting with 2015) sometimes still sound futuristic to me when I think about them, I thought I'd make a poll about it.

Poll #2062591 Forwards to the Future

What is the earliest year that you have, at some point in your life, thought of as the distant future?

1983 or earlier
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021 or later

What is the earliest year that you still sometimes think of as being in the distant future?

1983 or earlier
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021 or later

What is the earliest year that you still almost always think of as being in the distant future?

1983 or earlier
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021 or later

I think my 1, 9, 2, and 0 keys want a break now. :)

(I say that right before I have to type all those years one more time for the tags on this entry...)

Time-travel to your journal