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...

Well, I turned 29 last month. I thought that THIS year, I wouldn't be too depressed or unmotivated to write an entry about what I got for my birthday this year and would manage to do so AND finally post about what I got for my 27th and 28th birthdays as well. (I mean, I did post about some of my 27th birthday gifts, but in an unconventional entry and also didn't mention all of them.) But, sadly, I was still too depressed/unmotivated to get around to posting it - just not for the same reasons this time.

And today is the 15th anniversary of my LiveJournal. For years I've had an idea for something cool to make and post for the 15th anniversary of my LJ (or even the tenth anniversary since that's how long ago I thought of it!), but with so many other things on my to-do list, I never got around to working on it even when I was feeling okay - guess I'll have to aim for having that be an 18th or 20th anniversary post or something. And again, I was hoping to at least post an LJ comment stats entry for this year like I used to do every year for the anniversary of my journal, but I guess I'm once again not motivated enough to get around to that.


You know what's an even more odd milestone than the fact that I'm 29 years old, or that it's the 15th anniversary of my journal, or even that I'm coming up on my fifth anniversary at work (and am already well past that if counting before I was hired on full-time)?

The fact that I haven't posted an entry to LJ or DW in EIGHTY-SEVEN DAYS.

I didn't even realize it had been that long until about a week ago! To be fair, in July there were comments on the LJ version of my May entry so I have an excuse for not noticing it had been that long, but still... EIGHTY-SEVEN DAYS.

That's the third-longest hiatus between entries in my ENTIRE history on LiveJournal - and the only two hiatuses that were longer were December 2007-June 2008 and June 2008-February 2009.
Do you know how long ago that was? THIRTEEN YEARS ago.
So long ago that LJ wasn't even my favorite hobby yet and for over a year all I did on LJ was post a few entries and join one already-inactive community. I really do mean a few entries - the entry in 2009 that ended the hiatus and marked the beginning of LJ becoming my favorite hobby? That was my TENTH entry out of 1,535. (For that matter, it feels like it's been a while since my 1,500th entry, yet apparently I've only posted 36 more entries since then including this one?)

Does... Does that mean LJ is no longer my favorite hobby? Even when I was worried about rumors about LJ shutting down, or about drama on LJ, or the possibility of offending people - and even those when I INTENDED to go on a hiatus from posting for a while because I was worried about what people think! - I still liked LJ enough to post to it at least once a month, or at the very least more often than once every 87 days. That makes me sad. :(


I'm definitely still not going to LEAVE LiveJournal, but... wow. :(

I miss my LJ friends from the old days. I miss having friends on here that I feel understood by. Not to say that I DON'T have active friends on LJ or DW who understand me, but I don't feel as understood as I used to. If more of my LJ friends from the good old days were still here, I'd probably be more motivated to post. I worry a lot about what my newer LJ/DW friends think (or might think) about entries and comments I wrote in the early days, when I did a lot, lot, LOT of oversharing on LJ (something that I'm probably not even any better at avoiding now).


I don't know what else to say right now. There's many things I want to post about, but some of them good and some of them are bad (and the bad ones are very different from one another) so I'm never sure how to post about both good and bad things that happened without coming across as insensitive or tone-deaf like I end up doing pretty much EVERY time I EVER try to post about anything.

Haven't you always wondered what a certain bizarre unfinished Super Mario Galaxy 2 / Enya / Moya Brennan crossover I wrote when I was 17 would've been like if I hadn't been 17 when I wrote it, but it was still just as unfinished?

Probably not, because most of you hadn't even met me yet when I wrote Moya's Space Log.


If you weren't friends with me in November 2010 and have not read the FAQ in my profile, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about, so I'll link to an entry that'll hopefully explain it... basically, a series of inside jokes and my thoughts while writing an entry about what I got for my birthday somehow led to me attempting to write a silly fanfiction for NaNoWriMo that year where Mario, Luigi, and Enya and Moya Brennan all adventure together in Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Moya's always questioning the logic of Mario games while Enya simply accepts it.

But then I didn't finish writing it past the first mission of SMG2. And I never get around to finishing it for at least seven years despite occasionally promising to. I don't think that'll change anytime soon since there's still so many other things on my to-do list (that is probably even longer by now than Moya's Space Log would be if I had completed it).


BUT! As I said in a friends-only entry recently, I finally got around to something else I've been meaning to do for years - I combined all I've written so far of Moya's Space Log into one entry and revised it all again to change the things I really wish I'd written differently!


Now after seven years, you can FINALLY read what I've written so far of Moya's Space Log while only sometimes cringing at my 17-year-old self's poor choices of wording, sense of humor, or sense of... anything else!

( This explanation of some of the stuff I changed turned out longer than I expected... )


Here we go!

( Slightly de-cringed edition of Moya's Space Log under the cut! )

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail207.html
http://www.hrwiki.org/wiki/too_cool

Apparently, four days ago there was FINALLY a 207th Strong Bad Email! Yay!

So maybe the 208th one (and Humidibot Jr.?) will be made before 2023! :P

(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...)

[This entry is the dumb April Fools prank from 2017. For my actual 2023 Year in Review... wait until it's actually December 2023 and I make one. Most of the links aren't actually supposed to go anywhere.]

Wow, it's 2024 already? It feels like just yesterday it was 2017!

----

Go to your Calendar and find the first entry for each month of 2023. Post the first line of it in your journal, and that's your "Year In Review".

← 2022 2024 →

January 2023

Happy New Year! :)

February 2023

WHOA. SOMEHOW A COMMUNITY FOR MARIO/ENYA CROSSOVERS HAS EXISTED SINCE AUGUST 2019, YET I DIDN'T CREATE IT AND ONLY JUST NOW FOUND OUT ABOUT IT. If that's not a sign that I need to remake PrtSc Land, start posting backwards lyrics again, and/or finish Moya's Space Log, Mario's Loxian Odyssey, and F.L.U.D.D. Mk. II Shows the Hidden Heart, I DON'T KNOW WHAT IS.

March 2023

THERE'S FINALLY A 208TH STRONG BAD E-MAIL!!!

(Wait. That was nearly a year ago, and I still haven't made that Humidibot Jr. userpic?)

April 2023

Hello. We are Matt's amiibo collection. We have become self-aware, and we decided that this is our journal from now on.

May 2023

(no posts this month)

June 2023

(no posts this month)

July 2023

(no posts this month)

August 2023

(no posts this month)

September 2023

(no posts this month)

October 2023

No, my amiibo collection didn't really become self-aware and take over my journal. That was an April Fools prank, even though I was too depressed about LJ drama to feel like saying so for six months. Who would've guessed that marioenyacrsvrs, of all communities, would be even worse than asperger was back in the 2010s?! :(

(Great. I have to link to the three most drama-filled entries I've ever seen AGAIN?!)

November 2023

I hate to get political, but... if MatPat gets elected, I'm definitely leaving Mars and moving to the Moon. O_O

December 2023

Will people PLEASE quit blaming the year 2023 for the bad things that happened in it?! So far, THREE people have overreacted when I told them my wife and I got married on October 19. I never thought I'd say this, but can't they go back to complaining about 2016?!

--

The Martian new year is coming up soon, too, so stay tuned for the Martian Calendar Year in Review!

What was YOUR 2023 like?

http://matt1993.livejournal.com/12541.html
The first time I took that quiz, it said I had an 80% chance of surviving a T-Rex attack. Now it's:

You'd have a 66% chance of surviving
QuizGalaxy.com
You have an above average chance of surviving a T-Rex attack. You are able to recognize what the real dangers are as opposed to the imaginary ones. Go team!

Less than before, but it's still a lot more than what I feel my actual chance of surviving would be.


http://matt1993.livejournal.com/13234.html
My first date faux pas is still "Talking about your ex!" which still doesn't quite make sense because I've still always been single in the years since I took this quiz. I do talk about the past in general a lot, though...

(And yes, instead of just saying "Lies!" in that old entry, I put in a random backwards lyric that happened to have the word "lies" in it. I was weird back then. ;) )

http://matt1993.livejournal.com/13507.html
My epitaph this time is:

Matt
Don't mess with the Mafia

That was one of those all-you-have-to-do-is-enter-your-name quizzes, so of course it's a different result now.

I start work in (probably) 36 days... I'm so nervous! :O


Also, yes, I'm still retaking quizzes I took years ago to see how things have changed, and I'm still taking new quizzes. I just haven't posted the results of either in a couple of weeks.

When I retook "How Evil Are You?" I got "not evil", which is what I got over seven years ago, so I'll just link to the entry where I posted the original result instead of reposting it.

But the next one I retook, I did get a different result.

Old result from over seven years ago:

Originally posted by matt1993 at What is WRONG with me?!

(Since the people I just added as friends are probably wondering: Yes, my writing style seven years ago was full of inside jokes, mostly inspired by backwards lyrics. That's why I have a glossary. :) )

Since I'm not into every single thing that's stereotypically geeky, I think my old result makes more sense than either of my new results. Yes, I actually retook it twice - the first time, I got "not a geek", but I took it again since there were a few answers that I wanted to change as soon as I clicked on them, so then I got:

You are a Super Geek!
You are into everything that is geeky – which is hard because there are so many types of geeks. You are very smart and have a great imagination. People who call you a geek are just jealous, right?

I went from "not a geek" to "super geek" just like that? I think that quiz is broken. :)

I'm trying not to overuse this phrase too much nowadays, but HOLY WHOLE HAND DEALER.


While watching this, I paused pretty much every second just so I'd have more time to try to identify some of the characters in there. (Which I had to do again anyway so I could put all the characters I recognize in the tags. [EDIT: And, as I usually do, a few that aren't in there and are just tangentially relevant to jokes I used in this entry.]) :D

3, 2, 1, repost