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...

So, I know I haven't posted a lot of positive or funny or even non-depressing posts lately. And I know many of you are tired of my journal being depression posts over and over, more so than usual.


The thing is, there HAVE been other things I've been meaning to post in here. Quite a few, actually. But I haven't gotten around to posting most of them for multiple reasons:

( reasons )




I think the best course of action is for me to link to a bunch of old entries in my journal that are vaguely similar to some of the ones I've been wanting to post, so you at least have an idea of what to expect from my journal if you're fairly new to it. If you like these entries, you'll probably like the entries I've been meaning to post; if you think these entries are weird, you'll probably think I'm weird or at least that the entries I've been meaning to post are weird. ;)



In no particular order:


( It's hard to figure what constitutes an 'average' entry in my journal, but hopefully these are close! )

So, I'm way too late in posting this (again), but my 26th birthday was last Sunday!!

Wow... I'm 26. I remember when it felt like it would be a LOOONG time until I was 13. Now I've waited that long twice!

What I got for my birthday:

- Piranha Plant amiibo!
- Three books I read years ago and wanted to reread: Caps For Sale, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, and How to Eat Fried Worms! (Well, I thought I read them all years ago, but I'm reading Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing right now and everything is so unfamiliar to the point that I think I may not have actually read it years ago, I just remembered thinking the title is funny-sounding. So maybe I'm reading it for the first time now! Would you look at that!)
- They didn't come in until the 18th, but Nintendo Labo VR Goggles!!!! I've been wanting those ever since I knew about the new VR mode in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate! :D

(note to self: put in the previous/next buttons later)

http://www.museumofconceptualart.com/accomplished/index.html

(This marks 10 years after when I did this when I turned 16, the first time I ever posted this for my birthday. Wow... I've known about this website for over ten years. And it's still around, even! Good for them!)

At age 26:

American anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote her famous dissertation, Coming of Age in Samoa, which claimed that in some societies adolescence is not a particularly difficult time.

Albert Einstein published five major research papers in a German physics journal, fundamentally changing man's view of the universe and leading to such inventions as television and the atomic bomb.

Benjamin Franklin published the first edition of Poor Richard's Almanac, which was to play a large role in molding the diverse American character.

Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Chereshkova became the first woman to travel in space.

College dropout Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple Computer.

Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, revolutionizing the economies of the United States and Britain.

Antoine Joseph Sax invented the brass saxophone.

"Johnny Appleseed" brought apple seeds to the Ohio Valley.

Napoleon Bonaparte conquered Italy.

Gon Yangling memorized more than 15,000 telephone numbers in Harbin, China.

Orion Krynen of Denver, CO reached this age without much incident.

British ethologist Jane Goodall set up camp in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve on Lake Tanganyika and began studying the lives of chimpanzees.

Ken Kesey published his first novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Thomas Pynchon published V., for which he won the William Faulkner First Novel Award.

Kirsteene Luhrmann of Melburne, Victoria quit smoking.

Stephen Breen from Dublin, Ireland found this site.

Darren Blackburn became the first and only athlete of the Principality of Sealand, despite being somewhat lacking in athletic ability.

Syd Jesus co-founded the dUdU Art Collective in Oakland, California and turned an entire warehouse space into a conceptual art piece entitled "The $5000 Gallery."

Matthew Royer took a dog for a walk every day of the year in Minnesota, with a coldest daytime high of 0 degrees F. The average walk time was 30 minutes.

Derrick Pallas was horrified to realize he was losing his hair, just like Dad.

Jan Birkeland from Norway managed to get to work without hitting a single red light.

Katherine Blauvelt in a skirt was deemed "all grown-up" by her boyfriend.

Kristen finally was able to get her fingernails to grow without chipping and peeling because she started taking a multi-vitamin on a daily basis.

Tom Pemberton rode a bicycle with lit fireworks strapped to it into a pool while wearing a banana costume.

SJ Yee resigned from a giant multinational corporation to found a personal development site for the book smart.

Angie Olson got so drunk on her 26th birthday, her friends were able to dress her up as a clown.

matt1993 discovered the two mysterious lost episodes of Super Mario Maker Crash Course.

...

Okay, okay, that last one's not on the list. But it SHOULD be! I have a story behind that. Stay tuned for when I write a full post about it!

So as you've probably noticed (unless you read my entries on DW only), I changed my LJ style... turns out the glitch where videos wouldn't show up in IE only happens on outdated journal styles, which my Pale Yellows style was, so the glitch won't be fixed.

So I had to pick a different style, and wow... not only do videos show up again, I finally get to see when someone "likes" my entry since I no longer get the email notifications about it, and I finally found out that to fix the glitch where status bars that used to show up correctly now made pages unreadable, I didn't have to edit them manually on LJ - all I had to do was set "Resize images in entry" to "No resize"! Though I checked just now and DW doesn't have a similar option. Another reason for me to still prefer LJ...

When I changed my style, I also had to go through and look at all the customization settings again to make it look more or less like it did before, including entering my blurb again. I figured since I had to do that, I might as well not re-enter the same blurb as before and instead put in, on both my LJ and DW sidebars, the new blurb I wrote recently that I was planning on replacing it with eventually anyway.

For posterity, the old blurb said:

What has ten fingers, autism, synesthesia, a crush on Enya, lots of Mario games, thousands of regrets, a feeling of worry about being judged for almost everything, and a tendency to write blurbs that become outdated quickly?

Me!

...You're not laughing. Have you heard this one already?

Anyway, in my journal, at first almost all of my entries were public, but lately I've been making more and more of my entries friends-only, usually if they're about things I worry (MAYBE too much) about. I never really intended for it to turn out that way, hence why I didn't put up any sort of "this journal is semi-friends-only" notice until just now (July 2015).


And wow... I've been using the Pale Yellows style since 2009. There were a couple of times I changed the colors to custom color schemes, and then in July 2015 I reverted it back to its original colors so it'd feel like a return to the good old days, and in August 2017 I temporarily made it look as much like my pre-Pale Yellows layout as possible (without actually switching to the old layout) to celebrate the tenth anniversary of my journal... but in nine years, I've never replaced the Pale Yellows style entirely until now.


Now I have to look at my first 700 or so LJ entries again just to make sure the new layout didn't also cause any of them to not show up correctly anymore. At least this should be faster than the first time around since I've already fixed them once. :)

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

Now that I know a lot of people are leaving LJ and moving to DreamWidth now, I feel the need to make a probably incoherent ramble about how I really don't want to have to move to DreamWidth, or even create a backup journal on DreamWidth just because everyone else is. (Unless there's a way to transfer ALL of my old entries and ALL of the comments on them there, because I'm a nostalgic guy who likes having a LJ because I get to look back at old entries and comments from several years ago and DO NOT want to lose that, especially not while I'm still not done with my trip through memory lane / catching up on things I'd went on a hiatus from checking) So if you're moving to DreamWidth or another site, PLEASE don't leave LJ entirely, okay?

This is making me so sad... In 2015 or so, LJ was already a lot less active than it used to be - now it feels like everyone who hasn't already left is leaving! :(

I'm too depressed to think of a good repost button caption
but this entry definitely needs a repost button

With Valentine's Day coming up, I decided to post these quiz results now:


( Valentine's Day and/or love quizzes )


Also, since some of you probably don't know this about me yet: Even though I'm single, I love Valentine's Day! And I love Valentine's Day candy and I think romance can be so sweet. (I happen to have a userpic with half of a candy heart in it, so I know that kind of makes it look like I was in a bad breakup or something, but no, I've never been in a relationship at all - I just made the userpic so I could reference a backwards lyric.) Anyway, my point is, the only thing that makes me depressed on Valentine's Day is people complaining about how much they hate Valentine's Day. It always makes me feel like they'll hate me for liking Valentine's Day... :(

So if you're planning on posting some sort of rant about how you hate Valentine's Day and how anyone who likes it is clearly delusional, etc... go ahead, but would you mind putting it under a LJ-cut or having a special tag for it so I can easily skip it? Please? :)

Complain about this entry

Wow, this guy managed to combine my childhood with my childhood. :)



Next time someone I know is a Mario fan complains that they hate Christmas music, I'm gonna be like "No you don't!" and show them this. :)

Spread the holiday cheer and/or Mario nostalgia

I said in a friends-only entry earlier today that one of my classes today made me feel so uncomfortable, I felt that nothing that could possibly make my day any better.

I WAS WRONG.

While being reassured about what I mentioned in the entry itself also helped me feel a little better, what REALLY improved my day was:

TODAY, I FOUND OUT THAT THERE'S A NEW ENYA CD COMING OUT ON NOVEMBER 20.

http://enya.sk/2015/10/enya-talks-about-dark-sky-island/

http://entertainment.ie/music/news/Enya-is-releasing-a-new-album-next-month-hear-the-lead-track-Echoes-in-Rain-here/371397.htm

http://enya.sk/2015/10/dark-sky-island-deluxe-edition-cover/

SHE'S BACK. SHE'S BACK. SHE'S FINA-LULLY BACK.*

Those moments lost, forever gone, can never be again... UNTIL NOW! It's easier to remember only good days... BECAUSE THOSE DAYS ARE BACK! :D

I missed that beautiful lady so much... ♥


The only problem is now entries like this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one seem even weirder in retrospect than they already did (is that even possible?) because many times have prooty passed* since the last time I knew for a fact that Enya is still alive and that her hiatus wasn't because of anything weird I said on LJ four years ago. I've forgotten what it was like to not be so worried about those things! :)


*Yes, I threw Homestar Runner references into a post about Enya. Enya and H*R both went on long hiatuses that began within a year of each other and ended within a year of each other, so why not? :)


Echo this post in rain

I'm too lazy to repost or link to the original entry, but I got pause last time.

This time:



Repost this entry just like in
the good old days