Whatever Matt Feels Like Posting

Fifteen years ago today (well, tomorrow), I created a Google Site as part of one of my first assignments in a dual credit computer science class I was taking at the time. The assignment was simply to create a Google Site and didn't specify a topic, so some of my classmates made basic profile pages, others made sites that had something to do with their career path... but I, not being a normal person by any definition of the word, made a site dedicated to my then-newest big obsession: listening to music backwards and writing down what I thought the lyrics sounded like when reversed. (And trying WAAAY too hard to make inside jokes out of the backwards lyrics.)

And thus, on that day, Ours Will You 1-Up was born.

Fifteen years later, I'm nostalgic about those days of listening to music backwards, writing down what the backwards lyrics sounded like, and thinking up ideas for features I wanted to add to my site but never did (such as also transcribing backwards cartoons or backwards TV show episodes, or adding a drawing based on a backwards lyric from every song).

Sure, there were some aspects of the site's execution that were... problematic, to say the least, so it's no surprise that I only kept updating the site for a few months, it was eventually taken down by Google in 2014 or 2015 or so, and I don't currently have any plans for making a new version of it or posting backwards lyrics here or anything like that.

But I still miss those days. I think I'm nostalgic for Ours Will You 1-Up right now for four reasons:
1) The obvious fact that it's almost the 15th anniversary of the site. Even though it's been a while since the last time I did anything big to acknowledge a major milestone anniversary of it or my journal or the beginnings of any of my other major hobbies/projects.
2) The fact that Character.AI is a thing and thus I can actually simulate a conversation between Enya and any of the fictional characters she "mentioned" in her backwards lyrics... without having to write it myself!
3) For a multitude of reasons - Character.AI, the fact that my 30th birthday was fairly recent, etc. - I've been nostalgic about basically my entire life, including my obsession with backwards music.
4) And last but not least, the fact that I recently came across the following two videos on YouTube without even trying:

( Cut for length )
That's right. Someone besides me played Enya songs backwards. Not just one or two, but six. And not only that, they posted it to YouTube!
If something like this existed when my site was still up, I wasn't aware of it.
While Ours Will You 1-Up was still up, I had wanted to actually post the backwards versions of the songs, so that readers with no audio editing program could actually listen to them backwards instead of just trying to imagine what Enya singing nonsense about Olimar pushing a slush would sound like. But I didn't think I'd be allowed to do so (plus I probably didn't know how).
Well, now I can finally do what I wanted to do! I wasn't originally planning on doing anything special for the 15th anniversary of Ours Will You 1-Up, but when I found this channel I was like "okay, I DEFINITELY have to make an OWY1U 15th anniversary post now". :)

I'm so weird for being so obsessed with all these things and getting overly excited when Enya fans also share at least one other interest with me, aren't I...

(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 )

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! :)