Whatever Matt Feels Like Posting

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

It's the 11th anniversary of my LJ! And since I'm lucky enough that a) I still have my old Vista laptop with me, b) it still works so I could copy the LJ Comment Stats Wizard onto my current laptop, and c) the wizard still works on this laptop, that means...

It's once again time for LJ/DW comment stats! :)

Like last year, I manually edited the comment stats to include DW comments that are not also on LJ, even moving those of you who've commented a lot on my DW further up in the rankings or adding you to it if you weren't in the rankings otherwise. :)

My comment count is a fraction (and, by extension, so is the grand total) because I couldn't decide if this LJ comment and this DW comment should count as one or two comments (since all the other times when I manually posted the same comment on both the LJ and DW versions of an entry around the same time, I counted each LJ/DW comment pair as only one comment, but these two aren't exactly the same...), so I made this pair count as 1½ comments.

---

Top Commenters on matt1993's LiveJournal (and matt1993's DreamWidth
(Anonymous comments excluded from rankings)

1	matt1993/matt1993	3350½
2	pathvain_aelien	1726
3	glowing_dragon/glowing_dragon	785
4	rovanda	185
5	irish_ileana	134
6	adawnrae	113
7	awehla	100
8	penelopexxx	96
9	cactus_rs/cactus_rs	86
10	padabutterfly	71

( 11-159 )
Total Commenters: 159
Total Comments: 7659½
Report generated 8/19/2018 12:58:20 AM by scrapdog's LJ Comment Stats Wizard 1.7 and then manually edited to include comments that are on DW only and the users who would otherwise not be shown

---

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...)

(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 )

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.)

(I hope I don't end up overusing this and my previous entry's style of subject line as much as I overused "When the End Times come, we will all <verb> the <Noun Phrase> of the Apocalypse" back in the day...)


One (I hope) last entry before I actually go through with changing my journal style, because I really don't want this to be the first thing I post about after I change it:


So, a couple of days ago, I Googled "overcoming stress" and found some of these articles, which led me to the rest even though they're not all necessarily about stress:

http://lifehacker.com/5976310/nine-strategies-successful-people-use-to-overcome-stress
http://www.helpguide.org/articles/stress/stress-management.htm
http://lifehacker.com/5945018/to-succeed-forget-self-esteem
http://www.helpguide.org/articles/anxiety/how-to-stop-worrying.htm
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2011/07/11/10-practical-ways-to-handle-stress/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-path-passionate-happiness/201406/overcome-stress-saying-thanks
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/culture-shrink/201507/6-helpful-things-say-depressed-person
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolution-the-self/201507/the-secret-reason-so-many-us-procrastinate
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-path-passionate-happiness/201502/love-yourself-you-love-others
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/07/22/learning-to-let-go-of-past-hurts-5-ways-to-move-on/#at_pco=tst-1.0&at_si=55b8220dbf8b4d99&at_ab=per-2&at_pos=1&at_tot=2
http://blogs.psychcentral.com/nlp/2013/12/10-signs-you-are-emotionally-attached-to-a-negative-past/

These helped me feel a LOT better!... at first.

Then I got to these:

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/04/09/invisible-victims-when-men-are-abused/
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/02/11/beware-of-she-wolves/

When I read these, they resonated REALLY well with how I felt about the Forbidden Comment Threads! I thought my depression would be over for good!

...at first.

But then I read the comments on the last two articles. Now, despite having at one point almost completely gotten over my worry about suddenly being hated by everyone, even you guys, if I don't word something very well or it gets misread, I'm now back where I started. Because the comments on those articles suggest - no, prove - that I am a horrible, pathetic excuse for a human being just for feeling the way I feel about the Forbidden Comment Threads. And that I can never be forgiven for ANYTHING. :(

Show your friends what
a horrible person I am

Last week, as part of an assignment in Speech class, I rewatched The Mummy and watched The Ring for the first time.

Turns out that my prediction here was actually wrong - The Ring is, in fact, a lot scarier than the parody of it on Annoying Orange.


But you know what's even more terrifying than both combined?

A horror movie I watched yesterday called Worse than the Forbidden Comment Threads.

Have any of you heard of it? It's the sequel to that one movie about the guy who reads a cursed flame war that makes him start seeing nightmarish visions of his friends misinterpreting everything he's ever said and hating him for it, and seemingly, the only way for him to get rid of the visions is to make a list of everything he's said and done that might be misinterpreted and post that to his LiveJournal in friends-only entries.

I found both that one and the sequel REALLY disturbing... It's almost impossible to remember that either of them is just a movie. Maybe it's just because the main character looks kind of like me. Actually, come to think of it, he looks almost exactly like me... and he even has a lot of interests in common with me: same celebrity crush, same favorite video games...

Even the phrase "Forbidden Comment Threads" sounds familiar for some reason... Didn't I hear it somewhere before about three years ago? I remember thinking up a phrase kind of like it that had something to do with a--


O___O

...

Uhhh...

Guys...

...

I...

I just remembered...

The first one in that series was no horror movie...

I... I think I remember... the Forbidden Comment Threads...

...actually happening...

...as part of my own life...

...

I don't think the sequel was just a movie either...

...

There really is...

...something that's probably worse than the Forbidden Comment Threads...

...and I read it yesterday...

...

...

Okay, now I'm way too scared to even care whether or not going from actual horror movies to a controversy that I pretended was a horror movie is too sudden of a topic jump...

*hides and curls into the fetal position in a clearly horrified manner*


(short version of this entry: What?! The Forbidden Comment Threads are evolving!)


Somehow summon enough courage
and/or foolishness to repost
this terrifying entry

Result version 1.0 from 2009:

Your results:
You are An Expendable Character (Redshirt)

An Expendable Character (Redshirt) 70% Deanna Troi 60% Geordi LaForge 50% Data 49% James T. Kirk (Captain) 35% Mr. Scott 35% Chekov 35% Spock 27% Jean-Luc Picard 25% Will Riker 25% Worf 25% Leonard McCoy (Bones) 20% Uhura 20% Mr. Sulu 20% Beverly Crusher 20%

Since your accomplishments are seldom noticed, and you are rarely thought of, you are expendable. That doesn't mean your job isn't important but if you were in Star Trek you would be killed off in the first episode you appeared in.

Click here to take the "Which Star Trek character am I?" quiz...


Result version 2.0:

Your results:
You are An Expendable Character (Redshirt)

An Expendable Character (Redshirt) 70% Leonard McCoy (Bones) 50% Chekov 45% Will Riker 45% Deanna Troi 45% Data 42% James T. Kirk (Captain) 35% Uhura 35% Jean-Luc Picard 35% Geordi LaForge 30% Spock 25% Mr. Sulu 25% Worf 25% Mr. Scott 20% Beverly Crusher 20%

Since your accomplishments are seldom noticed, and you are rarely thought of, you are expendable. That doesn't mean your job isn't important but if you were in Star Trek you would be killed off in the first episode you appeared in.

Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Test


Characters whose percentages were higher this time: Leonard McCoy (Bones), Chekov, Will Riker, Uhura, Picard, Mr. Sulu

Characters whose percentages stayed the same: redshirt, Kirk, Worf, Beverly Crusher

Characters whose percentages were lower this time: Deanna Troi, Data, Geordi LaForge, Spock, Mr. Scott

I still don't know a whole lot about Star Trek (having only seen two movies and only being almost sure that those are the only two movies so far, and not having seen the show so the movies were hard to follow along occasionally), so while I did skim a few articles on memory-alpha.org, it's going to be mostly up to you to figure out what this says about me.

I do have a couple of guesses, though:
- First and second place were a redshirt and Deanna Troi last time; I had a feeling that a) first place would be a redshirt again but b) second place would probably be a male character this time, given what the Forbidden Comment Threads have done to the way I think. Not only was I right about both of these predictions, it also makes sense that Troi is still in the top 5 because she's a counselor and so she probably does think a lot like me. In fact, now I'm kind of surprised that she isn't still second or at least third.
- It seems to me that a lot of Star Trek fans argue about whether Kirk or Picard is better; given how much I try to avoid arguing of any kind (especially after the Forbidden Comment Threads), it makes sense that they got exactly the same percentage this time. Although last time, Kirk got 35% and Picard got 25%. That's going to start a flame war even though that was last time and I don't know what (if anything) that says about me, isn't it? Wait, of course it won't - the inevitable flame war about gender will probably start first...

Unnoticeably repost again