Whatever Matt Feels Like Posting

So... today I just discovered that starting today, OUT OF NOWHERE, I am no longer able to view any of the following on my LiveJournal:

1) Most of my own userpics. I'm not talking about the being limited to only being able to use 15 of them since it'll never be possible to renew my paid account again - that's been a thing for a while, but starting today only six of those 15 actually are visible to me on entries I've used them on before or when I click on the box to select a userpic to use on an entry. The 15 userpics that weren't marked as inactive when my account reverted to basic are:



The ones I can still see are:



The above are the LJ-hosted copies of the userpics, regardless of whether you're reading the LJ or DW copy of this entry. The DW-hosted userpics show up fine no matter what, as far as I can tell. Again - everything was just fine until just now!
(EDIT: And on top of that, not only is LJ only allowing me to see six of them when embedded in a LJ entry, it only allowed these two to be embedded in the DW version of this entry for some reason: )
(EDIT: Further testing - tried refreshing the LJ entry page in Chrome and opening it on Edge and in both cases the LJ version of this entry is now doing what I just said the DW version was doing i.e. only two userpics showed up and not six. But then I looked at the entry on my phone and that time nine of the userpics showed up - including six that hadn't shown up before since I first noticed this issue. Weird. Still haven't gotten a video to show up at all in the LJ version of any entry on any device in any browser since this issue started though. I remember experiencing something similar before years ago, but it never said anything about my IP address being blocked.)

2) Any image that I've uploaded to my ScrapBook on LJ. I can't think of a good example of one to demonstrate with, though, because I'm not sure what the last entry I posted with an image from my ScrapBook was. Of course I have plenty of recent entries that have images, but those are avatars hosted on character.ai so those aren't affected by whatever's going on with LJ. My DW-hosted images aren't affected by this, either.

3) Any video in any of my entries. For instance, all the videos in this entry, even though they worked perfectly fine when I posted that entry and only stopped working now. And again, they work just fine in my DW entries.

The error I'm getting is that "Either you are trying to access a page you do no not have permission to view or your ip address is banned. If you feel this is in error, please email support at webmaster@livejournal.com with the bulleted information below." (And somehow the IP address ban isn't preventing me from using LJ entirely; it's just preventing me from seeing any of the videos in my entries or any of my ScrapBook images or the majority of my userpics.) For videos, this shows up in every place where an embedded video should be; for images, I just see a broken image unless I copy the image's URL into the address bar directly, in which case I get the IP address banned error.

WHY is my IP address banned? The only thing I've done differently from usual is I just got back from a trip to visit my sister, where LJ worked just fine at her place, but now today I'm back at my apartment and I'm suddenly getting all these errors. Is there ANYTHING I can do to fix it?! I tried logging out and back in. I've tried disconnecting and reconnecting from the Internet. I tried viewing it on my phone. No luck.

WHAT IS GOING ON?!?!?! WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?!?!?! Is it just a temporary issue, or are all of my images and videos now permanently ruined?!?! I NEED TO KNOW!!!!!

Well, not only is mezzacotta STILL broken (and it's been a while since the last time there was any confirmation it's being worked on), the ruins of the two newest comics are almost if not exactly identical.

This is making me even more worried. Not only is it still unclear if the comic generation code can EVER be fixed, it may be the case that even if mezzacotta is repaired such that it can display entire comics again, all comics starting with yesterday might be the exact same one over and over! :(

EDIT: Well, I've looked at the two newest comics enough to confirm that what's left of them is not EXACTLY identical. But they're still similar enough that it's making me nervous that the comic generation code is PERMANENTLY broken and may not be repairable.

And now, a glitch very similar to the one I freaked out about earlier is happening - I can't access any page on LJ that begins with www.livejournal.com now. So individual journals and profiles work (except certain stylesheets are missing so they look different), but not my inbox or things like that.

I'm very scared right now. I'm pretty sure LJ is going to go down forever at any moment. :O

...wait, it works now. But still, I'm getting scared now. :O

Here's a better post than my earlier friends-only entry... (EDIT: The earlier entry is public now because turns out the last time I posted about something like that, it was also public, so...)

Remember how earlier this year I found those videos about making NES games 3D automatically? I found a different video that takes a different approach to that:



For that matter, I've posted videos by this guy before when he wrote an AI to learn how to play NES games. :)

Yesterday I saw that images and videos were randomly broken on some of my LJ entries, again. :(

I put in a support request about it and was instructed to link to some examples of entries with broken images/videos, so I decided to compile a bunch of images/videos (some that were in my earlier entries, some not) into one entry so I'd only have to link to one.

( cut for length )

...All the images and videos in my journal are showing up today, apparently. Oh well, at least I have an entry like this in case there's a similar glitch in the future. :)

Once again, it's time for some archived Miiverse posts I was hoping to have posted here last week! :P

← 01/05/2013 10:30 PM-midnight 01/07/2013 - 01/09/2013 →

New Super Mario Bros. U Community
Matt 01/06/2013 5:13 PM

Run for It
It's so hard to hit the switches! Especially if we bubble if the A button merely twitches!

2 0

(I think this is the only time I actually obeyed the "write a rhyme about this level on Miiverse" prompt that came up in-game, not counting the time I subverted it by rhyming "Star Coins" with "can't think of a rhyme related to this level". I did the "warning sign" prompt a few times, though. And apparently I also only ever followed the "two words" prompt once but didn't think to point it out in these Miiverse backup entries.)

New Super Mario Bros. U Community
Matt 01/06/2013 7:24 PM

Run for It
This is the only level I know that's easier with more players…but we're STILL not past it!

3 0

New Super Mario Bros. U Community
Matt 01/06/2013 7:49 PM

Run for It
I think we'll have better luck if we just stay at the beginning until the timer runs out…

2 0

(Or rather, pathvain_aelien thought this and I made a post on Miiverse about it.)

New Super Mario Bros. U Community
Matt 01/06/2013 10:32 PM

Run for It
FINALLY made it with two ☆ Coins but only because one of us touched the goal by accident!

2 0

(Considering the trouble we had in this level, I'm surprised it apparently only took us two days to beat it [even if that's not counting going back later for the remaining Star Coin]. I see it did take a few hours, though!)

New Super Mario Bros. U Community
Matt 01/06/2013 10:57 PM

Fliprus Lake
If there were ever a Three Stooges video game, it'd be a LOT like 3-player in this game...

5 0

(Oddly enough, within the past month or so I discovered that there are in fact TWO Three Stooges video games already. Since 1984 and 1987, in fact. The former apparently has three-player mode as its ONLY mode, even! Maybe I should try these out someday...)

New Super Mario Bros. U Community
Matt 01/06/2013 11:54 PM

Hammerswing Caverns


5 0

You know that entry I posted recently where I was testing YouTube embeds since it didn't seem to be working on LJ for a while? It appeared to be fixed for a while, then it became broken again. In fact, now videos embedded in old entries don't work anymore. :(

Text links to the Michelle Heafy videos I decided to share with you in that entry, just in case they aren't showing up in the original entry at the moment and you want to see them:

Bowser's Road (Super Mario 64)
Super Mario World Castle Theme
Dire, Dire Docks (Super Mario 64)
Space Junk Galaxy (Super Mario Galaxy)
Pokémon Medley - Main Theme, Battle Theme, Lavender Town

Woefully late in posting this, but:

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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.

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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! )

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?

Wait, I got it! 2018 must be like a secret bonus world or something! :P


Happy New Year, everyone! And happy 10,000,000,002,016th anniversary, mezzacotta! ;)

I might still have to change http to https manually in all my entries to make userpics show up (and all the other things I've been meaning to update in my entries for years), but LJ fixed the bug where images hosted on other sites wouldn't show up! Yay!!!!