Whatever Matt Feels Like Posting

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.

I meant to take this quiz on my birthday, but I ended up forgetting to for 30 days :(



For some reason the text of the result isn't part of the "post to LJ" code anymore so:

(EDIT: I had the result down here, but then decided to try to put it where it's supposed to be.)

Happy a-few-minutes-early-in-my-time-zone birthday to me! :)

And also happy birthday to 13catswaltz, who has the same birthday as me! :)


And also also to Luigi - because Mario Bros. was released in Japan on July 14, 1983; my negative tenth birthday. ;)



Hey, there's an idea for a totally nerdy survey...

This page has a table (several paragraphs down from the beginning of that section...) that lists the dates every* Super Smash Bros. character debuted (because in SSB4, the order you fight them in All-Star Mode is based on that).

Use that to figure out your answers to these questions:

1) Which SSB character(s), if any, debuted on your birthday in any year?
Luigi

2) Which SSB character(s) debuted closest to the date you were born?
Meta Knight (debuted March 23, 1993 - the date closest to July 14, 1993 in that list).

3) Which SSB character(s) debuted closest to the date you created your LiveJournal/DreamWidth/some-other-journal-site account? (If you have/had multiple journals, you may answer this separately for all of them, some of them, or just one. Whichever you prefer.)
My LJ was created on August 19, 2007 - the character whose debut was closest to that is Rosalina (November 1, 2007).
My DW was created on May 13, 2017, long after the debut of the newest character (Corrin, on June 25, 2015).

:)



*Except Miis, alternate characters (the Koopalings and Alph), and characters from Melee and Brawl who aren't in SSB4. ( I went ahead and looked up the relevant dates in case you want to include them )

(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 )

Before my previous two entries, I also took several online quizzes I hadn't taken before, but saved all the results to a file on my computer hoping to post them later.

Since posting them all right now would be a bit much, I'll just post three of them today:

( Oops, forgot to LJ-cut these at first )


Can't think of a clever repost button caption right now

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!

(music tag should be: "Super Mario World soundtrack - Underground theme (I wonder how many people can guess why I picked THIS music...)")

A couple of days ago, I discovered that this entry I posted in _dreams_ on August 6, 2010 refers to "last Saturday", which would have been July 31, 2010.

July 31, 2015 was the Friday before yesterday... This means that as of that day, it's been FIVE YEARS since the first time a certain bizarrely-named water balloon lady and her brother appeared in my dreams! I can't believe it's even been that long.


Some of you may remember that I've posted this userpic of /crazymegavideo/ before but not been sure if it was a good idea to actually upload it as a userpic.

Well, as a belated celebration, I just now FINALLY uploaded it as an actual userpic over three years after I first made it!! (has THAT really been that long, too?)


...

Am I really dorky enough to celebrate the anniversary of the debuts of recurring characters from my dreams? It's not like it's interesting to anyone else...

Happy birthday, Weird Name and Weird Name!

By now you no doubt have heard the news about Satoru Iwata, Nintendo's president. :(

I intended to write a tribute to him as soon as I had heard the news (a very short tribute, of course, because I'm still not a very good writer), but I ended up putting it off until the 14th, which was my birthday, and every time I want to post about something sad and something fun at the same time, I'm faced with the decision of: Do I try and write one entry about both topics, with some sort of "On a happier note..." transition? Do I post two entries in one day? Do I just pick one and post about it?

ALL of those options have either always worked out badly for me in the past or have never been tried because I KNEW they'd work out badly, hence why I ended up not even posting at all on the 14th. I was considering waiting until the 18th to post about my birthday anyway since that's when my birthday party was, but I still ended up procrastinating so long that by the 18th I was in the same scenario: ready to post about my birthday party, but I still hadn't posted about Iwata, and still didn't know how I should go about writing about either topic.

And then, as you can tell, I ended up procrastinating even further because I feel like there's a huge hole in my journal now there's three consecutive entries that I'm posting way too late. At this point, I think the only way I might be able to make myself not feel this way is if I ask you to pretend that this entry doesn't exist but the three below do and were posted on the dates listed. (note: this probably doesn't matter at all, but I don't know whether or not the repost buttons will work correctly...)


( 3 entries that I should've posted instead of this one, and 10-17 days earlier )