Whatever Matt Feels Like Posting

(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...)

As if corrupted SMW levels and randomly-generated semi-coherent text weren't amusing enough on their own, now they're combined into one thing: the Super Mario World Randomizer!




The level names kind of remind me of a vague idea I had for a LJ meme several years ago, after I found out about the LJ Dungeon Adventure and LJ Space Adventure memes; I thought it might be cool if someone made some sort of "LJ Mario Adventure" where you put in a LJ username and it would generate a series of Mario levels at random that had something to do with that user's interest list.

(Though I never did anything with this idea because "something" was the key word here; the dungeon and space adventures can say "Bones are scattered in the shape of <arbitrary LJ interest>" or "You hear the sound of <arbitrary LJ interest> echoing through the ventilation shafts" and leave that up to the imagination, but making a randomized Mario game like that would require making a way for it to come up with what an <arbitrary LJ interest> Shell or <arbitrary LJ interest> Mushroom or whatever would look like and do based just on the name. Or, come to think of it, I guess it could work with only the level names having LJ interests in them. Enya Challenge anyone? [And yes, that entry I linked to is unfortunately a VERY accurate representation of my writing style 7 years ago. That's why I want to make my own dream journal someday...])



Okay, if the whole reason I posted this was to show you the video, maybe I should stop rambling so much about a vaguely similar idea I thought of five years ago and never did anything with or even mentioned until now.

Share the pepperoni secret!

I was going to update the interests in my profile (for real this time), albeit by removing a few outdated interests, adding as many new ones as will fit, and then put a list of ALL the interests I wanted to include in my bio. (As opposed to making a program to figure out which 150 interests are the most frequently/recently mentioned in my journal so I could put those in my "real" interests list - I still plan to do that, but not right away.)

Anyway, I was looking online for a way to count how long my updated interests list is without having to actually put it in (or rather, how many commas are in it - then I just add 1). I found such a page, but that site also had a bunch of other features I wanted to check out, so... I did.

Right now I'm looking at this one. I put in "matt" three times. I forgot what order I got these results, so I put them from least to most weird:

( Word associations that only sometimes make sense )

I'm probably going to play around with it some more. There goes my productivity.

There weren't any words related to repost

No, I haven't turned into my exact opposite! :) (I hope that link still works once this entry goes up. If not, just go to my previous entry.)

DISCLAIMER: Just because something was in my not-interests list doesn't necessarily mean that I hate it. Of course there are things that I actually hate in there (e.g. essays), but there's also things that I merely find overrated (e.g. zombies, Captain Falcon, Chuck Norris, Team Fortress), or are fandoms that I can see myself getting into eventually but am not currently into (e.g. Game of Thrones, Dragonball Z), or are things that actually are the opposite, or an opposite, of my actual interests (e.g. ESTJ instead of INFP, atheism instead of Christianity), and so on and so forth. And, of course, unless you're new here (or haven't been here in a while, or something), you know the score with the word "feminism" - the actual definition of the word is something I agree with, but the word itself has become so associated with the extremes of feminism that I don't really like to identify with it.


Unfortunately, due to the conference being today, by the time this entry goes up, I probably still won't know if anyone fell for it. Or even if anyone hates me for liking Comic Sans - to the point that visiting Ban Comic Sans or any page that links to it (except, hopefully, this one) is so traumatic for me, I'm not even going to make sure that link actually goes to it. Please don't kill me...

In fact, the timing of the conference prevented this prank from being exactly what I wanted to do - I wanted to actually replace the interests list for April Fool's Day (and even leave it that way for about a week in case anyone wanted to explore the Dungeon of Not Matt1993 or Starship Not Matt1993 or something). I've had this idea since *checks* January 23 at the latest and was really hoping I'd get to do it this way, but April Fool's Day ended up being the day before I present, and there's no way to schedule a temporary replacement for the interests list like there is for scheduled entries.

So I had to make up a plausible-sounding reason other than "I'm trying to do an April Fool's prank on LJ at a time when I may or may not have access to a computer, let alone one that I'd feel comfortable accessing LJ on" for why I would come up with a new interests list but not actually put it in my profile right away. "There's more than 150 and so I need to narrow it down" was the best I thought of, but as it turns out, my not-interests list had less than 150 when I thought of that idea, so I actually had to add more just because of that.

I considered just waiting until next year to try this prank, but with my luck, I'll probably have even less free time in 2017. :(

I can't believe it - I finished the creative vortex poll I mentioned I've been working on!!

( cut for LOTS of length )

I hope the poll shows up...

EDIT: It did, but I accidentally put "Finish rereading" as an option when it should've been "Finish rereading therapy notes" and I can't change it now. Oh well.

Have a surprisingly good reason to repost this