Whatever Matt Feels Like Posting

Help! I've been placed under a dark curse that causes me to mindlessly refresh YouTube and Twitter over and over looking for things that will upset me, no matter how much I want to focus on my chores and my hobbies!

This curse, of course, is called "anxiety".

EDIT: You might be thinking "well, just block YouTube and Twitter!" I considered it, but that's not a practical solution to me. First of all, those two sites were just two examples; blocking one site will just cause me to check another site a lot more. I learned that when I made that resolution to stop checking TV Tropes so much. Second, there's many things I ENJOY seeing on YouTube and a few on Twitter as well. Third, I've also come across very good news from the same sites - including one just after I made this post.

So, you know how about a year ago Photobucket changed their Terms of Service so that users had to pay $400 a year for their images to be visible anywhere other than Photobucket itself, and sometimes it wasn't even visible there?

And you know that made me upset because even though I've never used Photobucket for image hosting, a lot of things online I wanted to catch up on someday have used Photobucket, and that would mean I'd never get to finish catching up on them?

And you know how I've made various jabs at Photobucket because of it such as claiming that Photobucket managed to even take down my userpics on LJ but not on DW (or vice versa depending on what site you read my April Fools entries on) and being like "These people think Quidd is the worst company ever - haven't they ever heard of Photobucket?!"


Um.


So today I was working on fixing my old entries, and I got to one* that does have an image hosted on Photobucket in it (because it was uploaded by glowing_dragon, not me), and... IT SHOWS UP.

Then I went to a couple of other places on the Internet that I'd been to before that I knew had Photobucket images in them because they became broken when Photobucket changed their TOS.

THOSE IMAGES SHOW UP NOW TOO. (I haven't seen any "3rd-party hosting disabled" placeholder images, anyway - images that users have deleted entirely are obviously still gone.)

...

I need to ask...

Did, uh...

DID PHOTOBUCKET FINALLY COME TO THEIR SENSES?! I'd Google it to find out for myself but I'm too afraid of finding more online drama that'll upset me. (Yes, even when I thought Photobucket was the one company that actually deserved the hate it was getting for changing their TOS, I still couldn't always bear to read it.)


Even the thought that Photobucket MIGHT have realized their mistake is so surreal... I feel like I'm dreaming. I might as well act like this is all a dream, but I can't do that right now because I'm supposed to take Enya to see another Enya perform live at 103:206 PM. :P




*Note: yes, that entry mentions that I was doing an MS Paint meme but I gave up on that years ago because I procrastinated it for so long and felt overwhelmed by it. :(

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

Just now, I decided to at least glance at my friends page for the first time in eight months or so, JUST so that if I still didn't feel comfortable reading it and ended up putting it off for (say) another eight months, it would feel like two 8-month hiatuses instead of one 16-month hiatus, which would hopefully help me feel slightly less like I never get anything done.

So far, how I feel about it is even better than that! WAY better!

When did my friends page suddenly become enjoyable to read again and not almost completely full of drama?! Filtering out certain tags and asperger entries used to not completely help, so how is it helping now?!

I'm definitely not complaining! Maybe now I can actually go back to checking it regularly for good!

Still feels like I won't be able to completely catch up with all of my friends, though...


There were other things I wanted to mention - many REALLY good, many REALLY bad - but it's already 2:18 AM so I really should go to bed. I just wanted to post now about this momentous occasion!

Wait, who is this matt1993 dude again?

There's only two votes so far in this poll, but I gave each thing to do 1 point for each first-choice vote it has, 1/2 a point for each second-choice vote, 1/4 a point for each third-choice vote, etc., and catching up on my friends page more is currently in the lead with 1.25 points.

However, as I've mentioned in a couple of places after posting that poll, realizing how many unfinished projects I had made me depressed for a while because it sunk in even deeper that I probably will never finish all of them, and I felt even worse about abandoning most of them for two or three years. While I feel a little better about it right now, this probably isn't the best time to risk seeing much more online drama.

I'll continue reading new entries in my friends page at least once every 3 days like I've been doing (and I might read it a little more often now that I've seen the poll results), but I really think I should post the lists of non-LJ-related things I'm worried you'll hate me for and of things that remind me of the Forbidden Comment Threads fairly soon (because, remember, I probably do have to do so eventually for my mental health).

At the same time, I also don't want to wait too long before I finish catching up on my friends page, so I came up with the idea to work on both things at the same time with this method:

( Blah blah blah blah blah... )

But even that compromise doesn't seem like something I should work on right this moment given the state I've been in (but, fortunately, not this moment), although I'll probably start switching back and forth between other things and this later on when I'm in an even better mood.

The next highest project in the results is finishing those autism self-help books, with exactly 1 point, but I think right now I should go with something that I won't have a lot of time to do next semester while I still have the chance.

The third highest score is new userpics with 0.5078125 points (one second choice and one eighth choice), so for now I'm going with that :) Although that will also have to wait for a bit... I was planning on making a separate table and poll about my userpic ideas, but all I've finished so far is a list of them. (And given how I only remember some of my ideas when I'm not writing any down, I'm probably not even done with that...) So I'm gonna have to get started pretty soon!



In the meantime, here's a few videos I've been meaning to post here!

http://mostexcitingworld.com/video-helmet-camera-captures-firefighter-bringing-a-tiny-kitten-back-to-life/ - I don't think I can embed the video, but this firefighter actually took the time to revive a kitten he found. Very heartwarming! (EDIT IN 2018: The link is broken now, but I found an archived version of the article with the video still missing and the video itself separately.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bB7obyuuY8 I can't embed this either since my Internet is being slow, but these people recreated the dance scene from A Charlie Brown Christmas. Cute!

Presumably, repost just the videos and
remove all the boring stuff about my creative vortexes

I finally won an X-Files Bingo round with pathvain_aelien! Yay!!!

( Meme yoinked from sarea_okelani )

( Quizzes )

( First Garfield Randomizer comics in over a year )

Post this entry into your journal! (well, it'd be weird to repost all of it, but you could repost some of it)

( Even more band names taken from conversations )

I had to spend time actually participating in drama this week since it was the last week to come up with a skit to be in and practice it, so I didn't get as many band names this week, but oh well.

Today, I was writing a rock-paper-scissors program for my online college computer class while at high school (let's hear it for dual-credit), and was almost done when other students came into the computer lab for their class (usually I'm alone in the lab), and one of them turned my computer off thinking he was turning his computer on. (The towers are on the left of the monitors they are connected to; he must have expected them to be on the right.) I had to start all over from the last time I had saved, which wasn't that far into it. Never before have accidents been so annoying.

In drama today, we were working on things for the talent show; namely, the band was trying to come up with their name, and everyone else was working on banners. Well, for a while; eventually, those who weren't in the band suggested names, inspiring me to write down band names based on conversations I was listening to.

( I'll share them with you )

Clean copper crepost