Whatever Matt Feels Like Posting

As I said in the second part of my first regular entry in a while (I think? What even is a "regular" entry in my journal anymore?), I think it's really, really, REALLY great that people are starting to research machine learning for detecting toxic comments online so that they can be filtered out automatically and/or so that people (like me!) can learn what makes their comments potentially toxic and how to avoid it.

You know what would be even better, though?

If I could actually use it.

Many of the websites and videos I've seen about these tools for detecting toxic comments make it seem like you can just type or paste in a comment and BAM, it will give scores representing the likelihood of it being a toxic comment for various potential reasons. So I thought "oh hey, I can paste in of my LJ/DW entries and comments one by one and it'll tell me which ones are the best and worst, and then I can rank them and sort them into 'cringe levels' like I wanted to a couple years ago!"

But finding a website that lets me do that is harder than I thought...
https://www.perspectiveapi.com/ - Has a note saying to not enter personally identifiable information, so naturally I'm wondering what exactly that entails and if certain things in some my entries count. Seems like this would be the easiest to use, though, if I knew for a fact that doing so would be okay. (EDIT: Well, I tried this one out with a random sentence that isn't from my journal and actually got a rating with it! I guess I'm gonna use this one after all - I'll just save entries with my name in them for last, I suppose. But it would be nice to figure out how to use one of these other tools too in case the scores differ.)
https://www.unitary.ai/product - This page has an interface where you can input your own text and hit "Compute" and it will estimate the toxicity of it... except not because the "interface" on that page is just a mockup apparently! They went out of their way to make it look like you could highlight the example text and replace it and click Compute but it doesn't actually let you do that? :(
https://detoxifai.com/ - This one has a live demo where you can type in a comment (yes, this one actually lets you type into it!) and click "Analyze Toxicity" and... it says "Processing" and then never does anything.

And pretty much everything else I've found requires me to install Python, learn how to code in Python, install Git (or remember whether or not my current laptop is the one I once had Git installed on before), relearn how to use Git when I never understood the first time, and/or learn how to make an API just to use it. :(

https://www.livejournal.com/2018/

Apparently the image that's automatically generated by this feature doesn't stay around forever - it gets replaced every year with the next year's version, so my "2017 in LJ" entry is now showing the 2018 stats. Lame... So if you're reading this a year or more later, my actual 2018 stats were 126 entries posted and 948 comments and likes received.

I don't like it when things get deleted or replaced after only one year or less. If homestarrunner.com took that approach, only one Strong Bad Email would still be on the site by now and it's one that isn't technically counted as a sbemail. If Super Smash Bros. took that approach, NONE of the characters that are in it would be there because all of them - even the most-recently-created ones like Inkling, Corrin, and Incineroar - debuted at least two years before Super Smash Bros. Ultimate came out. </rant>

← 2017





In other news, I've fixed over 1,000 entries! Yay! :D

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 )

Speaking of Miiverse, here's a Miiverse backup post that I meant to post last week! :)

Featuring what apparently was my first few Nintendo Land posts in 13 days. At the time, that was my longest hiatus from any specific Miiverse community in addition to this being the first time I posted to Miiverse at all in over a week.

← 01/10/2013 01/21/2013 - 02/01/2013 →

Nintendo Land Community
Matt 01/18/2013 8:45 PM

Nintendo Land Plaza


8 7


Nintendo Land Community
Matt 01/18/2013 8:50 PM

The Legend of Zelda: Battle Quest
Having to keep refilling my quiver makes ME quiver...

3 0


Nintendo Land Community
Matt 01/18/2013 9:02 PM

Metroid Blast
Wow, Level 6 was easy compared to the one before it...

5 0


Nintendo Land Community
Matt 01/18/2013 9:54 PM

Donkey Kong's Crash Course
Finally made it to Area 8!

6 0


Nintendo Land Community
Matt 01/19/2013 7:19 PM

Pikmin Adventure


7 1

(It turned out I was remembering wrong when I drew that first panel - in that section, the ? Block [that I'd opened by that point on the first try but not the second try] has a clock IN it; the ? Block and the clock are not both there at the same time. I'm pretty sure the one comment was me pointing this out.)


*I always assumed this was specifically the theme for timed missions in Pikmin Adventure, but apparently it's not!

So when I was writing my previous entries, I noticed that there seemed to be a glitch where new embedded YouTube videos on LJ wouldn't show up for some reason (even though at least one still shows up in an old entry). I was forced to just put text links to them all instead.

I decided to post an entry with videos I haven't embedded on LJ/DW before in it to see if it works now/works any better when I'm crossposting from DW to LJ.

And what better way to do that than show you guys an underrated YouTube channel I discovered a few years ago and somehow haven't mentioned here until now (except for how I think "michelleheafy" is in my ridiculously long interest list in my profile)?







Her voice is so soothing... as one commenter put it, "This is what it would sound like if Enya composed Mario soundtracks." (Yes, someone BESIDES ME said "Enya" and "Mario" in the same sentence, and it's not even a reply to anything I said/wrote. I'm as surprised as you are!)

Those of you who recommended I stay away from YouTube because it seems like a bad place for me... this is one of the reasons why YouTube is mostly a good place for me. :)

So... I've known about Chip's Challenge since I first played it in late 2004 or early 2005. And I've had Mario Party 3 since... I don't even remember when, but probably sometime between 2004 and 2007.

And yet it somehow took me twelve years or so to realize that "Chip Shot Challenge" (the name of one of the minigames in Mario Party 3) is likely a reference to Chip's Challenge?! I literally just realized it yesterday! Wow.

Has that ever happened to you where some game/movie/book/show/song/etc. you like makes a reference to another game/movie/whatever you like and you don't realize it until years after you first liked both? :)

(EDIT IN JUNE 2019: ...Okay, now the consensus of Super Mario Wiki is (and has been since February 2018) that the name of that minigame is NOT a Chip's Challenge reference - it's most likely just a coincidence that they both happen to have the words "chip" and "challenge" in the name. But still, I'm surprised it took me twelve years to even mistakenly think it might be a reference! And reference or not, this entry still led to some interesting comments on LJ. :) )


In completely unrelated news, now I've fixed 218 out of 1,193 entries. At the rate I'm going, I won't have them all fixed until about November 28. And by then something else will have probably gone wrong and I'll have to spend three months fixing something else on LJ and/or DW. :(

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 (if you see scary/apocalyptic video game music in the music tag, that usually means I'm worried about something. But sometimes it doesn't.)")

Apparently I just posted one of the most popular entries on LJ. Which I guess is pretty easy to do if I'm one of the only people still posting to LJ at all...

So, hi new people! Sorry for all the inside jokes that would've made much more sense^{[citation needed]} if you'd been here 7 or 8 years ago. Before you go asking me what "HWHD" or "WTCN" or whatever means, visit my FAQ and glossary of Matt1993isms (taking into account that the former is fairly up-to-date but the latter was last updated in 2011).

Anyway, onto the important stuff:

I THINK I read all of your comments. I know why people are moving to DreamWidth (well, NOW I know, but until now I'd heard a lot of seemingly different reasons and wasn't sure which, if any, were accurate), and I agree that it would be a good idea for me to create a backup journal on DreamWidth (or maybe another site) because who knows how long LJ will be around and how long anyone else will be on LJ at the rate things are going.

But at the same time, LiveJournal has been one of my favorite hobbies, if not my #1 favorite hobby, for over a third of my life (I'm 23, turning 24 in July, and have been active since February 2009 when I was 15½). So I am NOT going to leave LJ entirely. There is no way I can - it's just too much of a part of who I am, and I really hope that one day it goes back to the way it was.

I've finally decided that my plan is to have a LiveJournal AND a DreamWidth (or a LiveJournal AND an account on some other journal site). In fact, I would start creating my backup account RIGHT NOW if it weren't for the fact that I need to decide what site to backup my LJ to.

I'm going to need a site that has most, if not all, of the features that I use on LiveJournal - I want to make my DreamWidth (or whatever) similar enough to my LJ that it will be REALLY easy for me to adjust to using both.

This means I want to find a site with:
- A way to make TWO accounts. I've been wanting to make a separate journal on LJ for dreams for a long time - now that THIS just happened, when I finally get around to making a LJ dream journal, I'd want to have a backup of that on DreamWidth or whatever as well.
- The ability to use at least 116 userpics, because that's how many "regular" userpics I have right now. (I'd VERY strongly prefer the limit be significantly more than 116, though.)
- A way to make a profile and interests list similar to what LJ has.
- A friends page.
- A way to automatically backup my old entries and the comments on them to the new journal - with the mood, music, location, repost buttons, images, videos, tags, timestamps, friends-only status, custom friends groups, and probably something else I forgot intact. (A lot of you said DreamWidth lets you import entries and comments with most of these intact.) Or, at the very least, I need it to be possible to manually add whichever of these things would not automatically be transferred. (cactus_rs, you said that I'd lose images and videos - you don't mean that images and videos can't be used at all in entries on DW, do you? :( Though I guess I could just have the videos be replaced with the URLs for them if I have to...)
- A way to upload images similar to ScrapBook - and with them having the same privacy settings as entries.
- A way to have comments be screened.
- A way to make the journal style similar to the one I'm using here. By this I just mean I don't want it to be TOO drastically different - I think any yellow layout would work. And this only applies to my journal - other pages on whatever site I backup my LJ to don't have to look anything like LJ in terms of design as long as the features I need are there.
- Probably something else I forgot. I'll edit this entry if I remember anything else.

How many of these features does DreamWidth have? Does another site have more of these features? Am I making any sense whatsoever? (I've been misunderstood a lot before. I REALLY hope that doesn't happen here...)

No, that subject line wasn't me having road rage. I was just describing what the quiz results I'm posting today are about. :)

( Look, I remembered to LJ-cut these BEFORE I posted it this time! )

Repost on red

Between my waiting over a year to contact Google about why Ours Will You 1-Up was taken down only to find out that it was too late to do so, and a new Enya CD coming out before I finished redesigning OWY1U, writing any more of Moya's Space Log, OR updating my profile, interests, or glossary, it's really starting to sink in that I've procrastinated SOOO many things on LiveJournal.

I figure the best way to feel better about it is to suddenly finish several updates I've been wanting to make all at once, so that's what I'm doing right now!

I started by... Remember when I was so depressed about the Forbidden Comment Threads that I decided to add "Dark Matt1993" LJ Trading and Tarot cards under the regular Matt1993 cards I already had on my profile (also seen here, but slightly more outdated)? I've been wanting to remove those from my profile (just the Dark Matt1993 ones, I mean) for a while now that I worry less often - and hence, they're more outdated than the cards for regular me despite the latter being made earlier. So I finally got rid of them.

But since there will probably come a time when I want to remember exactly what the Dark Matt cards said, I actually just moved them here along with the paragraph that was above them. (This also ended up finally making the text on the cards as legible as I wanted it - even though I included HTML tags for white text, the text was still black while these were on my profile.)



Considering what I feel like now, both of those are very outdated. I decided that a neat thing to do for an update would be not to replace them, but to make separate trading & tarot cards for Dark Matt1993.

Unfortunately, the site where I made the Matt1993 cards seems to be down right now, so I had to copy and edit the HTML from those cards. But nonetheless, here they are:

( Super outdated angst from about half a Dark Sky Island ago in the form of a LJ trading card! )


( Super outdated angst from about half a Dark Sky Island ago in the form of a LJ tarot card! )

(And yes, I just used "Dark Sky Island" as a unit of time equivalent to about seven years - the time between the releases of And Winter Came and Dark Sky Island. :) )

(EDIT: I just realized the the above paragraph only makes sense if you saw the LJ-cuts that these cards are under.)