Whatever Matt Feels Like Posting

Good news: I no longer feel like people might see me as a horrible person or hate me just because of the fact that I've had this userpic since I was 15-16.

Bad news: I now feel like people will DEFINITELY see me as a horrible person and hate me just because of the fact that I've had this userpic since I was 15-16.

https://blog.emojipedia.org/ios-13-1-emoji-changelog/#fn4
https://twitter.com/jeremyburge/status/1050038527155691520
https://intheloopaboutneurodiversity.wordpress.com/2019/03/20/the-ableist-history-of-the-puzzle-piece-symbol-for-autism/
https://www.learnfromautistics.com/the-problem-with-the-autism-puzzle-piece/

(Like most entries when I post a lot of links that make me worry, I wanted to address everything I saw on these pages that worried me, but that would require looking at them for much longer and taking a lot longer to write this entry. Also, the less I write, the less likely I am to unintentionally be offensive? Maybe?)

What I feel like these articles are saying in a nutshell:
- I'm a bad person because I made this userpic, even though I was 15 at the time (16 when I made the current version; both versions have identical text)
- I'm an even WORSE person because I continued to have it even after the first time I saw anyone being offended by the idea of puzzle piece(s) representing autism in general
- I'm even worse still because I continued to have it after the first time anyone specifically told me that they were offended by my userpic specifically, which was about two years ago by now
- I'm even worse because I don't want to remove or replace this userpic. Especially not after so long. And because I still like the autism puzzle piece symbol. And because I like how colorful this userpic is and how I used color palettes from Super Mario World for the non-painted-over pieces. If you like other symbols of autism better, that's fine - I just wish I didn't have to feel like almost everyone with autism will hate me because I prefer the puzzle piece(s).
- I'm a horrible person for supporting Autism Speaks, even though I AM autistic. And for thinking that a lot of things Autism Speaks has done that people have issues with remind me a lot of how *I* used to not understand autism very well, so I feel like I'll be hated because of that and for having worded so many things badly over the years. And since a lot of those things were things Autism Speaks has said *in the past*, when autism wasn't well-understood in general, seeing people talking about that makes me feel like *I* can NEVER be forgiven for ANYTHING I do that is wrong or problematic, no matter how much time is passed. More on that: https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/323952.html
- I'm a horrible person for the fact that I thought I strictly *needed* there to be a cure for autism for so long, and while I now get that not everyone wants there to be one, I still feel like *I'd* be a lot happier in general if I weren't autistic. (Because I feel that if I weren't autistic, I wouldn't word things so poorly so often or make userpics that turn out to offend everyone, for starters...)
- I'm a horrible person if I prefer person-first language, and I'm a horrible person if I DON'T prefer person-first language, and I'm a horrible person if I don't care either way. (FWIW, I'm in the "don't care either way" category. More entries about my thoughts about that: https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/306411.html https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/325430.html)


When I wrote the text on this userpic ten years ago, I was expressing my frustration at how autism isn't very well understood, even by me, and how I wish it was understood better. (It DEFINITELY wasn't well understood for a lot of my lifetime!) In other words, I felt that autism IS a puzzle to those who don't understand it well (including well-meaning people, and I feel that well-meaning people don't need to be yelled at and called jerks just because they don't understand; they just need to be educated on the subject) - sometimes including autistic people themselves such as me. Similarly, I've always felt that I never know what to say or do to not offend people and not unintentionally make everyone hate me - social skills have always been a "puzzle" to me in that regard. And I felt that way even more back when I made the userpic.

Could I have worded the userpic better when I first made it? Well... no. Remember, a) I have autism, which in my case has always made finding the right words difficult for me; b) this was back when I was still fairly new to posting online in general, so I was still naïve enough to think that I could word it however I wanted and people would understand what I meant; c) this was also back before I knew that there was ANYONE who hates Autism Speaks, or ANYONE with autism who wouldn't want there to be a cure for it, etc. because my experience with autism back then was so limited.

Could I have worded the userpic better when I redrew it later that year? Probably not. I could have tried to if I'd known that 8-10 years later I would end up feeling like everyone will hate me for wording it the way I did, but since I didn't know that... I didn't. I just used the same wording again. And *even if* I'd known that I should reword it, there's no guarantee that the new version would actually have been better, for all of the same reasons that the first version turned out as poorly-worded as it did.

Could I make a new version of the userpic that is worded better NOW? Maybe. I've even considered it. But I don't want to.
First off, whenever I try to word things in a way that has no possibility of offending anyone, I always feel like I'm being forced to add dozens of disclaimers that make whatever I'm writing far too long to read, which all turns out to be for naught when I inevitably offend someone anyway.
Secondly, I now feel that this userpic is good at representing my personal struggle with autism because it contains symbols and wording that could be seen as problematic. What could be a better representation of my anxiety about being misunderstood and disliked for things I've made years ago when I was worse at wording than something I made years ago that I have anxiety about being misunderstood and disliked for? How can the rainbow/gold infinity symbol (or any other proposed autism symbol that I've never heard of until just today, and am therefore probably a bad person for not knowing about them) represent MY experience with autism in the same way?


I hope this makes sense - as usual, I had to write it quickly so I can get this posted so I can stop worrying about it sooner. So if I worded something wrong, it's because of that AND my being bad at wording in general.


Well, time to be unable to sleep at all for another week or two thanks to worrying about this. :(

So, you know how about a year ago Photobucket changed their Terms of Service so that users had to pay $400 a year for their images to be visible anywhere other than Photobucket itself, and sometimes it wasn't even visible there?

And you know that made me upset because even though I've never used Photobucket for image hosting, a lot of things online I wanted to catch up on someday have used Photobucket, and that would mean I'd never get to finish catching up on them?

And you know how I've made various jabs at Photobucket because of it such as claiming that Photobucket managed to even take down my userpics on LJ but not on DW (or vice versa depending on what site you read my April Fools entries on) and being like "These people think Quidd is the worst company ever - haven't they ever heard of Photobucket?!"


Um.


So today I was working on fixing my old entries, and I got to one* that does have an image hosted on Photobucket in it (because it was uploaded by glowing_dragon, not me), and... IT SHOWS UP.

Then I went to a couple of other places on the Internet that I'd been to before that I knew had Photobucket images in them because they became broken when Photobucket changed their TOS.

THOSE IMAGES SHOW UP NOW TOO. (I haven't seen any "3rd-party hosting disabled" placeholder images, anyway - images that users have deleted entirely are obviously still gone.)

...

I need to ask...

Did, uh...

DID PHOTOBUCKET FINALLY COME TO THEIR SENSES?! I'd Google it to find out for myself but I'm too afraid of finding more online drama that'll upset me. (Yes, even when I thought Photobucket was the one company that actually deserved the hate it was getting for changing their TOS, I still couldn't always bear to read it.)


Even the thought that Photobucket MIGHT have realized their mistake is so surreal... I feel like I'm dreaming. I might as well act like this is all a dream, but I can't do that right now because I'm supposed to take Enya to see another Enya perform live at 103:206 PM. :P




*Note: yes, that entry mentions that I was doing an MS Paint meme but I gave up on that years ago because I procrastinated it for so long and felt overwhelmed by it. :(

Check out this exclusive photo of Enya in her role as Mary O. in the upcoming--

Oh wait, April Fools' Day is already pretty much over. That, and this "exclusive photo" might also just be an existing photo of Enya edited onto a Super Mario Maker background and with Mary O.'s clothes drawn over hers. Made by me. Because, again, my entry about Mary O. and Yamamura: The Movie was an April Fools prank. :P


( Why I didn't actually use that picture in the entry itself - cut because I'm guessing that out of my April Fools entries, the MO&Y entry was the least interesting to anyone besides me )

---

Oh, and all those other things (Photobucket somehow taking down non-Photobucket userpics; my considering deleting this journal; my other journal being suspended; this site shutting down) were April Fools pranks too, even if you see this before I'm done changing the Photobucket placeholder userpics back to the normal ones (which I probably won't get done with all of tonight). So please, don't panic. Please. :)

I have to say, after over three years of trying to fix various broken images and other things in my journal, it was so surreal putting time and energy into breaking some of my images instead. :P


This is pretty much how it felt!


To those of you who've read any of these April Fools entries and still like me: Thank you for tolerating and putting up with the fact that I have such a weird sense of humor. Also thank you for putting up with my fanboying, if you read that one. :P


If you missed any of these April Fools entries, here they are:
Mary O. and Yamamura: The Movie: LJ DW
Photobucket'd userpics: LJ DW
Account suspended: LJ DW
Where should I move my entries to now?: LJ DW
Since I couldn't add a poll to the LJ version of the previous entry after it was posted, I was forced to put that in a separate entry instead. And then to crosspost that entry to DW just because I don't like the idea of a LJ entry not having ANY counterpart on DW. (though I made the DW version private until now)


Even if you normally read my entries only on LJ or DW, I recommend making an exception here and reading both copies of each of my April Fools entries, because as part of the joke this year, I might have thrown my usual attempts at making my LJ and DW look nearly identical out the window for the day and deliberately introduced a few subtle differences between the versions of these entries... ;)

...



Okay.



HOW, JUST HOW, DID PHOTOBUCKET MANAGE TO REPLACE ALL MY DREAMWIDTH USERPICS WITH THEIR PLACEHOLDER IMAGE?!

HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE??

My userpics aren't even hosted ON Photobucket!!!

I'm... quite scared right now. :O



Fortunately, my LJ userpics don't seem to be affected for whatever reason. (YET...)



You know what? I decided I'm giving up on this whole "keep a DW account as a backup" thing and going back to just using LJ. It was so much easier when I only had one journal to maintain... (Though while I highly doubt I'll change my mind about this, please, if you list me as a friend on here, keep me listed just in case).

Goodbye, DreamWidth.

Not only have I still only went through and fixed 265 entries, I just now fixed the first one (I think) that had userpics in the body of the entry. Turns out in that entry, they were showing up to begin with even though the URL hadn't been changed to https yet, but that still wasn't enough to--

...Wait. I had userpics in the body of an entry, and they still had http in the URL, and they were showing up anyway?!?!

*checks the "list of userpics in order added post" where all the images were broken for a while because they had http in the URL, and indeed, now they're showing up again too*

YAY!! At some point LiveJournal finally fixed the issue of userpics not showing up in the body of entries, and now I don't have to edit thousands of entries just to make entries that have userpics in the body look presentable!! THANK YOU!!

*continues looking through old entries anyway, because there are still other things in them I want to fix, especially on DW, and I figure I still might as well do that now since I already have the motivation... but at least it's slightly less hopeless now!*

LiveJournal, please fix our images. Or at least acknowledge the fact that they're broken. :(

Sincerely,
The least likely user to make a post like this

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...)

[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?

As I've mentioned a while back, I plan on replacing some of my userpics with more legible versions. (even though I've procrastinated that for probably at least a year now...)

Since I knew that doing that will cause me to lose track of what order I added my userpics, I kept a list of my userpics in my profile in order added - but I'm starting to run out of room on my profile now, so I moved it here and reformatted it into a table that hopefully looks better than the old layout.

Note that this excludes the following:
- Old versions of these userpics
- Alternate versions of some of these that I made to protest SOPA/PIPA/ACTA/etc. a few years ago

( Here they are! )