Whatever Matt Feels Like Posting

http://www.museumofconceptualart.com/accomplished/

At age 27:

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. dropped out from his job at General Electric to become a full-time writer.

Henry David Thoreau went off for two years to live alone in a cabin at Walden Pond.

Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space.

Memphis millionaire Frederic W. Smith, whose father built the Greyhound bus system, founded Federal Express.

Scottish botanist David Douglas discovered the Douglas fir.

Ernest Hemingway published his first novel, The Sun Also Rises.

Boston dentist William Morton pioneered modern anaesthesiology after learning that inhalation of ether will cause a loss of consciousness.

Jimi Hendrix choked to death on his own vomit after ingesting wine and sleeping pills.

Janis Joplin died of an overdose of whiskey and heroin.

Conceptual artist Piero Manzoni crapped in 90 small cans which were then factory sealed and offered for sale at the price of gold.

Bob K., first degree murder, in prison for life with no chance of parole.

Jessica Schram trolled MySpace for seven straight hours during work.

So, I'm way too late in posting this (again), but my 26th birthday was last Sunday!!

Wow... I'm 26. I remember when it felt like it would be a LOOONG time until I was 13. Now I've waited that long twice!

What I got for my birthday:

- Piranha Plant amiibo!
- Three books I read years ago and wanted to reread: Caps For Sale, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, and How to Eat Fried Worms! (Well, I thought I read them all years ago, but I'm reading Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing right now and everything is so unfamiliar to the point that I think I may not have actually read it years ago, I just remembered thinking the title is funny-sounding. So maybe I'm reading it for the first time now! Would you look at that!)
- They didn't come in until the 18th, but Nintendo Labo VR Goggles!!!! I've been wanting those ever since I knew about the new VR mode in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate! :D

(note to self: put in the previous/next buttons later)

http://www.museumofconceptualart.com/accomplished/index.html

(This marks 10 years after when I did this when I turned 16, the first time I ever posted this for my birthday. Wow... I've known about this website for over ten years. And it's still around, even! Good for them!)

At age 26:

American anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote her famous dissertation, Coming of Age in Samoa, which claimed that in some societies adolescence is not a particularly difficult time.

Albert Einstein published five major research papers in a German physics journal, fundamentally changing man's view of the universe and leading to such inventions as television and the atomic bomb.

Benjamin Franklin published the first edition of Poor Richard's Almanac, which was to play a large role in molding the diverse American character.

Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Chereshkova became the first woman to travel in space.

College dropout Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple Computer.

Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, revolutionizing the economies of the United States and Britain.

Antoine Joseph Sax invented the brass saxophone.

"Johnny Appleseed" brought apple seeds to the Ohio Valley.

Napoleon Bonaparte conquered Italy.

Gon Yangling memorized more than 15,000 telephone numbers in Harbin, China.

Orion Krynen of Denver, CO reached this age without much incident.

British ethologist Jane Goodall set up camp in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve on Lake Tanganyika and began studying the lives of chimpanzees.

Ken Kesey published his first novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Thomas Pynchon published V., for which he won the William Faulkner First Novel Award.

Kirsteene Luhrmann of Melburne, Victoria quit smoking.

Stephen Breen from Dublin, Ireland found this site.

Darren Blackburn became the first and only athlete of the Principality of Sealand, despite being somewhat lacking in athletic ability.

Syd Jesus co-founded the dUdU Art Collective in Oakland, California and turned an entire warehouse space into a conceptual art piece entitled "The $5000 Gallery."

Matthew Royer took a dog for a walk every day of the year in Minnesota, with a coldest daytime high of 0 degrees F. The average walk time was 30 minutes.

Derrick Pallas was horrified to realize he was losing his hair, just like Dad.

Jan Birkeland from Norway managed to get to work without hitting a single red light.

Katherine Blauvelt in a skirt was deemed "all grown-up" by her boyfriend.

Kristen finally was able to get her fingernails to grow without chipping and peeling because she started taking a multi-vitamin on a daily basis.

Tom Pemberton rode a bicycle with lit fireworks strapped to it into a pool while wearing a banana costume.

SJ Yee resigned from a giant multinational corporation to found a personal development site for the book smart.

Angie Olson got so drunk on her 26th birthday, her friends were able to dress her up as a clown.

matt1993 discovered the two mysterious lost episodes of Super Mario Maker Crash Course.

...

Okay, okay, that last one's not on the list. But it SHOULD be! I have a story behind that. Stay tuned for when I write a full post about it!

There's a bunch of things I've been meaning to post about, but I'm not in the mood to write those posts just yet. So I'll make this list so I don't forget:

- Post about the rest of my birthday presents and the things that happened in my trip to Arizona that I forgot to mention before
- Post the annual Museum of Accomplishments entry
- Catch up on those "weekly" Miiverse backup entries
- Some videos that I somehow haven't gotten around to posting to LJ in the, like, nine years it's been since I first discovered them

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.

(For those of you new here: every year since I discovered http://www.museumofconceptualart.com/accomplished/index.html when I was 15, I've posted what other people accomplished when they were my age. Usually, this is a birthday post, but sometimes I forget until a little later. One time I even forgot about it until my next birthday!)

← Age 23 Age 25 →

At age 24:

Nelly Bly made a solo trip around the world in less than 80 days for the New York World, beating Phileas Fogg's fictional record.

Radioastronomy grad student Jocelyn Bell Burnell observed an unknown signal from outer space; this resulted in the discovery of pulsars.

John Couch Adams became the first person to predict the position of a planetary mass beyond Uranus.

Johannes Kepler defended the Copernican theory and described the structure of the solar system.

Entrepreneur Ted Turner took over his father's billboard advertising business. He later launched CNN.

Tracy Chapman released her first album, winning three Grammies.

Scottish physician Mungo Park became the first European to reach the West African interior.

Edgar Allen Poe won a $50 prize for the story "MS. Found in a Bottle."

Noah Webster published a spelling book.

Isaac Pitman devised the first scientific shorthand system.

Security guard Frank Wills alerted D.C. police to the Watergate break-ins.

Rainey Fellows donated a kidney to her (now ex-) boyfriend. They aren't together now, but he's doing very well. They're still friends.

Helene got a high score of 170440 in the popular online game Robot Unicorn Attack.

Tasha looked into her five-year-old son's eyes and decided to leave her abusive husband. Then she beat the odds and didn't go back even once.

David Hosei started his ninth business, eFamily.

(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 )

I turned 23 about 23 minutes ago (as of my writing this sentence)! Yay!! :D

I'm not going to get to open most of my presents until the party two days from now, though. So I don't have much to say yet.

I will, however, make a Museum of Accomplishments post now! It'll be nice to not be 14 days behind on it and 379 days behind on it at the same time. :)


← Age 21-22 Age 24 →

At age 23:

( At age 23, people did stuff. )

Happy birthday!

I feel like I should say something about 9/11 today.

But there's not much I can say about it that a) people haven't said already and b) I haven't said in this entry from four years ago.

The only vaguely-9/11-related entry I could potentially write that would be unique is if I finally replaced this userpic with the more legible version seen here (EDIT: That entry was friends-only for some reason, so here is the updated userpic itself [EDIT IN 2019: Welp, in 2017 I actually did replace it, so now it'd make more sense to show you the OLD version.]) and posted about that. But having September 11 be the day I update a userpic parodying my 8-year-old self's questionable grasp of reality doesn't seem like the best thing to do in memory of 9/11... yet, at the same time, I feel extremely obligated to post something that's somehow interesting and in good taste. And I can't.


I don't know why I'm really posting this... I just feel like if I don't at least post something today, people are going to wonder why I didn't (or why I already didn't post anything on September 11 in 2012, 2013, or 2014), and if I do post, people are going to wonder why I'm not writing enough. Yes, I do remember being woken up really early one morning in 2001 when I was 8 and being told about something that was happening that I didn't really understand at first, and then watching the news (which either reran a news clip from earlier that day or my family recorded it, I don't remember which), and hearing about it at school, and I remember being kind of scared at some point... but that's about all I remember of my experiences from the day itself, and I've said most of it already.

Just tell me what I'm supposed to say on September 11! And whether updating this userpic today would be a good or bad idea! I feel like I'm expected to know whether it's a good or bad idea automatically, but I don't...

You know Super Smash Bros., right? That fighting game starring such iconic video game all-stars as Larry, Mario, Princess Twinkie, Yogi, Kong 1, Zelda, The Beautiful Woman Interviewing Me, Shamu, Pudgy Airplane, Donald Duck's Offspring, Wombat?, Crash Bandicoot, Yellow Man, Charlie Brown, King Arthur, Knights of the Crooked Sword, Pegasus Dude, The Princess of Something, Triangle-Nosed Boy, The Unknown Yoga Person, Kid With a Crazy Sword Thing, Garfield and Friends, Something the Hedgehog, a LEGO, Happy, and more? ;)

Yeah, apparently, at some point around the time the 3DS and Wii U versions were released, there was a trend of people on YouTube showing their relatives (or, in at least one case, random people) all the playable characters' artwork and asking them to try to guess their names.

These are all of the videos of this sort that I've found so far*, and most of them are just so funny that even if you have no interest in video games whatsoever, I recommend that you watch at least one! :D (I highly recommend not reading the comments on certain ones, though...)




( Cut because I included 12 more, but they're great! )

*Except for one that's in Spanish and doesn't have enough subtitles for me to understand anything besides the characters' actual names. Also, eventually I found that there were so many that I decided to narrow it down by just watching ones that had at least a thousand views for now (though that was after I watched a couple that had less).

Offer up this entry to Some Goddess Person

Late again, but here's what I got for my birthday:

- Mario Party 9 from Mom, I think
- Kid Icarus Uprising and Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, also from Mom, but I can't play them yet because the L button on my 3DS stopped working just before my birthday :( But ellaina02 fixed it, and she also fixed the R button, so I'll get my 3DS back this weekend!
- DVD of Wreck-It Ralph from ellaina02 and Nace
- Mario T-shirt from pathvain_aelien
- mezzacotta T-shirt (the July 29, 3226 BC strip, specifically) from Jake
- And money from Mom and pathvain_aelien to get these 3DS/Wii U eShop games:
> the new games in StreetPass Mii Plaza
> New Super Luigi U
> the Coin Rush packs (DLC) for New Super Mario Bros. 2
> 3D Classics: Kid Icarus
> Pushmo

http://www.museumofconceptualart.com/accomplished/index.html

← Age 19 Age 21-22 →

At age 20:

Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard and cofounded Microsoft.

Canadian hockey player Scott Olsen founded Rollerblade, Inc.

English novelist Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, which was immediately successful.

Ragtime composer Scott Joplin became an itinerant pianist and travelled throughout the Midwest.

Despite a lack of experience, James Cagney fast-talked his way into a vaudeville dancing job.

Egyptian hermit Saint Anthony gave away his inheritance and joined a group of ascetics, eventually becoming the father of Christian Monasticism.

D. H. Lawrence began writing his first novel, The White Peacock.

Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice, her second and most famous novel.

English author Elizabeth Barrett Browning published her first volume of poetry.

Polish-born Joseph Conrad, one of the great English language novelists, began learning English, his third language.

Charles Lindbergh learned to fly.

John Stuart Mill pulled himself out of depression and found that the ordinary events of life could again give him some moderate amounts of pleasure. He decided that happiness is attained not by making it the direct goal of life, but by fixing one's mind on some other pursuit.

Leon Battista Alberti wrote a Latin comedy that was hailed as the "discovered" work of a Roman playwright.

The Greek philosopher Plato became a disciple of Socrates.

Sir Isaac Newton began developing a new branch of mathematics that would help him precisely predict the position of the planets at any given time. Today we call this branch differential and integral calculus.

Alexander Graham Bell taught a stray Skye Terrier to talk. By training the dog to growl on cue and then manipulating his mouth and throat, Bell could make him produce the phonemes "ow, ah, ooh, ga, ma, ma," to say "How are you, Grandmama?"

At age 20 Mona could use her second language, English, quite proficiently, so she began learning French, learned how to juggle and play classical pieces on the piano, began to draw with her non-dominant hand, studied animal and human anatomy extensively, applied for art universities, began writing a book on drawing, became a swimmer, and decided to learn to play the violin.

The usual repost button (okay, it's not that usual anymore, but eh)