Whatever Matt Feels Like Posting

Those of you who have known me for only three years or less may think a lot of my recent entries and comments were dumb and irrational and badly-worded and didn't make a lot of sense.

Well, you're not wrong. Several of my recent entries were dumb and irrational and badly-worded and didn't make a lot of sense. Not just coronavirus-related ones, either.

But (with a few exceptions) they're nothing compared to some of the entries newer readers may have missed.


So I suggest we try to put this in perspective. If you've only been reading my journal since 2017 or later, I recommend that you do the following:

1) Pick a random date between February 2009 (or August 2007, if you're REALLY daring!) and the day I became friends with you on LJ or DW.
2) Go to http://matt1993.livejournal.com/YYYY/MM/DD or http://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/YYYY/MM/DD for that day.
3) Marvel at just how STUPID those entries and my comments on them were! (Unless it turns out there weren't any for that day. Or you're lucky enough to find a good entry.) But do try to keep in mind what my age was at the time (I was born in 1993).
4) Optional: Let me know if you come across any that have broken links or broken images or something that I haven't fixed.
5) Repeat steps 1-4 until you're like "Maybe Matt's recent entries aren't that bad after all, for the most part..."

It's December now? GOOD!! Because at least there's one New Year's meme I can get out of the way now, six days before I get too distracted playing Super Smash Bros. Ultimate to remember to do it. :)



Go to your Calendar and find the first entry for each month of 2018. Post the first line of it in your journal, and that's your "Year In Review".

January 2018

I think there's a glitch in my copy of Windows 7. It says today's date is "1/1/2018". I thought the year 2018 didn't exist - didn't the world end in 2017?

February 2018

YES! I'm FINALLY done fixing all of my entries in 2007-2010! (Hopefully...)

March 2018

It's Friday already and not Tuesday or Wednesday... but at least this is still the most regular feature I've had in my journal since the weekly Garfield Randomizer comics in 2009!

(This, of course, is about my weekly Miiverse backup entries... which of course did not remain a regular feature for long...)

April 2018

https://www.mariowiki.com/Mary_O._and_Yamamura:_The_Movie

May 2018

So I found this two-part YouTube video called "500 Characters I Want In Smash Bros. Switch"...

June 2018

About time I posted some more of these. Once again, I meant to post them last week...

July 2018

- On June 14 or 15 or so I saw The Incredibles 2, then saw Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom a week or two later! I liked both :)

August 2018

It took four days (more than that if you count the time I spent putting it off), but I'm finally done fixing one of my longest and most cringeworthy entries ever! :D

September 2018

Well... it's September 4. So Sunday was the first anniversary of the day I was finally motivated - by a glitch LJ had for about three weeks where a lot of images were suddenly broken in entries - to finally get around to fixing the broken images AND everything else I wanted to fix in my entries on both LJ and DW.

October 2018

WARNING: I am extremely depressed and therefore this entry is going to make no sense whatsoever because I am physically incapable of wording an opinion very well when I am depressed.

November 2018

pathvain_aelien stayed at my apartment for a while; in that time we watched the How To Train Your Dragon TV show! (Specifically, the third of the three shows there were. P_A, what was the third show called again? Dragons: Race to the Edge.) We made it to season 4. :) Have any of you watched it?

December 2018

It's December now? GOOD!! Because at least there's one New Year's meme I can get out of the way now, six days before I get too distracted playing Super Smash Bros. Ultimate to remember to do it. :)

So as you've probably noticed (unless you read my entries on DW only), I changed my LJ style... turns out the glitch where videos wouldn't show up in IE only happens on outdated journal styles, which my Pale Yellows style was, so the glitch won't be fixed.

So I had to pick a different style, and wow... not only do videos show up again, I finally get to see when someone "likes" my entry since I no longer get the email notifications about it, and I finally found out that to fix the glitch where status bars that used to show up correctly now made pages unreadable, I didn't have to edit them manually on LJ - all I had to do was set "Resize images in entry" to "No resize"! Though I checked just now and DW doesn't have a similar option. Another reason for me to still prefer LJ...

When I changed my style, I also had to go through and look at all the customization settings again to make it look more or less like it did before, including entering my blurb again. I figured since I had to do that, I might as well not re-enter the same blurb as before and instead put in, on both my LJ and DW sidebars, the new blurb I wrote recently that I was planning on replacing it with eventually anyway.

For posterity, the old blurb said:

What has ten fingers, autism, synesthesia, a crush on Enya, lots of Mario games, thousands of regrets, a feeling of worry about being judged for almost everything, and a tendency to write blurbs that become outdated quickly?

Me!

...You're not laughing. Have you heard this one already?

Anyway, in my journal, at first almost all of my entries were public, but lately I've been making more and more of my entries friends-only, usually if they're about things I worry (MAYBE too much) about. I never really intended for it to turn out that way, hence why I didn't put up any sort of "this journal is semi-friends-only" notice until just now (July 2015).


And wow... I've been using the Pale Yellows style since 2009. There were a couple of times I changed the colors to custom color schemes, and then in July 2015 I reverted it back to its original colors so it'd feel like a return to the good old days, and in August 2017 I temporarily made it look as much like my pre-Pale Yellows layout as possible (without actually switching to the old layout) to celebrate the tenth anniversary of my journal... but in nine years, I've never replaced the Pale Yellows style entirely until now.


Now I have to look at my first 700 or so LJ entries again just to make sure the new layout didn't also cause any of them to not show up correctly anymore. At least this should be faster than the first time around since I've already fixed them once. :)

Woefully late in posting this, but:

----

Go to Wordle and...

1) Paste in all entries you posted in January 2017 and make a Wordle configured any way you like
2) Paste in all entries you posted in February 2017 and make another Wordle configured any way you like
...
12) Paste in all entries you posted in December 2017 and make another Wordle configured any way you like
13) Make a Wordle out of your entries from ALL months of 2017, configured any way you like

Then post all of these Wordles to your LiveJournal and/or DreamWidth and/or whatever other blogging site(s) you're on!


You may do steps 1 - 12 only or step 13 only if you prefer.

It's up to you if you include subject lines, comments, community entries, friends-only entries, music tags, location tags, etc., and it's up to you whether you post your Wordles in a public or friends-only entry. Anything else I didn't think of is probably optional as well.

And if you're on more than one journal site (in this example, LJ and DW), you may do this for your LJ entries only, your DW entries only, your entries on both sites combined, all of the above - whichever. And you may post it to only one site or the other, or to both - whichever you prefer.

----

Personally I opted to do this for my LJ and DW entries separately AND combined, and post all three versions of each to both LJ and DW. Which means this took about six times as long to make as it usually does...

Left: LJ only
Center: LJ+DW combined
Right: DW only

You can also tell because I tried to skew the colors of the LJ-only ones towards LJ-blue and away from DW-red/pink, and vice versa for the DW-only ones. Looking at how some of the color schemes turned out, though, I might need to adjust my algorithm before my 2018 Wordle Year in Review...

( Wordles under the cut! )

Oh, and this year, I thought of a little word search game I could add onto this meme! (you don't have to make a little game like this if you make your own Wordle Year in Review though)

( Wordle Search! )

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail207.html
http://www.hrwiki.org/wiki/too_cool

Apparently, four days ago there was FINALLY a 207th Strong Bad Email! Yay!

So maybe the 208th one (and Humidibot Jr.?) will be made before 2023! :P

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: 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 )

Wordle Year in Review 2016


It took a lot longer than usual for me to get around to it this time, but I finally did it!

---

Go to Wordle and...

1) Paste in all entries you posted in January 2016 and make a Wordle configured any way you like
2) Paste in all entries you posted in February 2016 and make another Wordle configured any way you like
...
12) Paste in all entries you posted in December 2016 and make another Wordle configured any way you like
13) Make a Wordle out of your entries from ALL months of 2016, configured any way you like

Then post all of these Wordles to your LiveJournal!


You may do steps 1 - 12 only or step 13 only if you prefer.

It's up to you if you include subject lines, comments, community entries, friends-only entries, music tags, location tags, etc., and it's up to you whether you post your Wordles in a public or friends-only entry. Anything else I didn't think of is probably optional as well.

---

← 2015 2017 →

This time around, there was an additional complication involving an entry I actually wrote in May 2016, but listed as January 2015 to mess with everyone's heads, including mine. (which, like a lot of my entries, will probably make no sense whatsoever if you haven't read a lot of my entries from November 2014 [at the LATEST] to May 2016... but if you're feeling lucky, go ahead and read it without context! :P )

Anyway, the complication is: does that entry count as January 2015 or May 2016? So some Wordles have two different versions, one listed as being from 2015 or 2016 and one listed as being from "2015B" or "2016B". Without the B, it means the retroactive entry counts as the month it was actually written: May 2016. With the B, it means the retroactive entry counts as January 2015. (And yes, this means I'm retroactively adding two more Wordles to the PREVIOUS year in review!... but to reduce confusion, I'm not actually putting them in that entry; I'm just putting them here.)

( cut for length )

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! :)

So, as I vaguely said in my previous entry, I still haven't even started making a remake of PrtSc Land even though I'd always said I wanted to starting on the 10th or 12th or 15th or (some other nice number)th anniversary of it - and I'd always been hoping that it would be the tenth anniversary, specifically.

But there is one way I thought of to celebrate it, or at least celebrate the date August 12, 2006 itself: by posting the strips that several comics BESIDES mine happened to run on that date or the nearest date possible! In roughly the order that I first became interested in each of these comics!


( Set the time machine for August 12, 2006! )

Take a screenshot of this post