Whatever Matt Feels Like Posting

It's December now? GOOD!! Because at least there's one New Year's meme I can get out of the way now, six days before I get too distracted playing Super Smash Bros. Ultimate to remember to do it. :)



Go to your Calendar and find the first entry for each month of 2018. Post the first line of it in your journal, and that's your "Year In Review".

January 2018

I think there's a glitch in my copy of Windows 7. It says today's date is "1/1/2018". I thought the year 2018 didn't exist - didn't the world end in 2017?

February 2018

YES! I'm FINALLY done fixing all of my entries in 2007-2010! (Hopefully...)

March 2018

It's Friday already and not Tuesday or Wednesday... but at least this is still the most regular feature I've had in my journal since the weekly Garfield Randomizer comics in 2009!

(This, of course, is about my weekly Miiverse backup entries... which of course did not remain a regular feature for long...)

April 2018

https://www.mariowiki.com/Mary_O._and_Yamamura:_The_Movie

May 2018

So I found this two-part YouTube video called "500 Characters I Want In Smash Bros. Switch"...

June 2018

About time I posted some more of these. Once again, I meant to post them last week...

July 2018

- On June 14 or 15 or so I saw The Incredibles 2, then saw Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom a week or two later! I liked both :)

August 2018

It took four days (more than that if you count the time I spent putting it off), but I'm finally done fixing one of my longest and most cringeworthy entries ever! :D

September 2018

Well... it's September 4. So Sunday was the first anniversary of the day I was finally motivated - by a glitch LJ had for about three weeks where a lot of images were suddenly broken in entries - to finally get around to fixing the broken images AND everything else I wanted to fix in my entries on both LJ and DW.

October 2018

WARNING: I am extremely depressed and therefore this entry is going to make no sense whatsoever because I am physically incapable of wording an opinion very well when I am depressed.

November 2018

pathvain_aelien stayed at my apartment for a while; in that time we watched the How To Train Your Dragon TV show! (Specifically, the third of the three shows there were. P_A, what was the third show called again? Dragons: Race to the Edge.) We made it to season 4. :) Have any of you watched it?

December 2018

It's December now? GOOD!! Because at least there's one New Year's meme I can get out of the way now, six days before I get too distracted playing Super Smash Bros. Ultimate to remember to do it. :)

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! )

(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 )

Wordle Year in Review 2016


It took a lot longer than usual for me to get around to it this time, but I finally did it!

---

Go to Wordle and...

1) Paste in all entries you posted in January 2016 and make a Wordle configured any way you like
2) Paste in all entries you posted in February 2016 and make another Wordle configured any way you like
...
12) Paste in all entries you posted in December 2016 and make another Wordle configured any way you like
13) Make a Wordle out of your entries from ALL months of 2016, configured any way you like

Then post all of these Wordles to your LiveJournal!


You may do steps 1 - 12 only or step 13 only if you prefer.

It's up to you if you include subject lines, comments, community entries, friends-only entries, music tags, location tags, etc., and it's up to you whether you post your Wordles in a public or friends-only entry. Anything else I didn't think of is probably optional as well.

---

← 2015 2017 →

This time around, there was an additional complication involving an entry I actually wrote in May 2016, but listed as January 2015 to mess with everyone's heads, including mine. (which, like a lot of my entries, will probably make no sense whatsoever if you haven't read a lot of my entries from November 2014 [at the LATEST] to May 2016... but if you're feeling lucky, go ahead and read it without context! :P )

Anyway, the complication is: does that entry count as January 2015 or May 2016? So some Wordles have two different versions, one listed as being from 2015 or 2016 and one listed as being from "2015B" or "2016B". Without the B, it means the retroactive entry counts as the month it was actually written: May 2016. With the B, it means the retroactive entry counts as January 2015. (And yes, this means I'm retroactively adding two more Wordles to the PREVIOUS year in review!... but to reduce confusion, I'm not actually putting them in that entry; I'm just putting them here.)

( cut for length )

I feel like I should say something about 9/11 today.

But there's not much I can say about it that a) people haven't said already and b) I haven't said in this entry from four years ago.

The only vaguely-9/11-related entry I could potentially write that would be unique is if I finally replaced this userpic with the more legible version seen here (EDIT: That entry was friends-only for some reason, so here is the updated userpic itself [EDIT IN 2019: Welp, in 2017 I actually did replace it, so now it'd make more sense to show you the OLD version.]) and posted about that. But having September 11 be the day I update a userpic parodying my 8-year-old self's questionable grasp of reality doesn't seem like the best thing to do in memory of 9/11... yet, at the same time, I feel extremely obligated to post something that's somehow interesting and in good taste. And I can't.


I don't know why I'm really posting this... I just feel like if I don't at least post something today, people are going to wonder why I didn't (or why I already didn't post anything on September 11 in 2012, 2013, or 2014), and if I do post, people are going to wonder why I'm not writing enough. Yes, I do remember being woken up really early one morning in 2001 when I was 8 and being told about something that was happening that I didn't really understand at first, and then watching the news (which either reran a news clip from earlier that day or my family recorded it, I don't remember which), and hearing about it at school, and I remember being kind of scared at some point... but that's about all I remember of my experiences from the day itself, and I've said most of it already.

Just tell me what I'm supposed to say on September 11! And whether updating this userpic today would be a good or bad idea! I feel like I'm expected to know whether it's a good or bad idea automatically, but I don't...

I just now found out, a little over 18 days and 8 hours before the End Times* begin, that there could be as little as only 1 or 5 hours (dunno whether these are UTC or Dubai time) before the End Times begin. (Minus 37 more minutes due to how long it took to write this entry...) And yet Google knew about it as early as November 19...

This is how I feel right now:



Anyway, I brought back ten of my blackout userpics from earlier this year when SOPA and ACTA were impending our doom. Specifically, I brought back the only ten I made that either have no text at all or still could be construed to make sense when used to protest something that threatens the freedom of the Internet in general rather than specifically anything that is currently considered fair use.

I probably won't get to make any more considering how busy I've been lately, but hopefully either everyone else's voices will still be enough to get ITU to change their minds, or after they see everyone else's voices, my ten userpics will end up being the straw that breaks the camel's back.

*Caveat: While it's interesting that this should come up so soon before December 21, I still don't think it can be considered definite proof that there's anything to that date - it's still "maybe something will happen, maybe not" to me. The only difference is the "maybe" is now mostly tied to what happens during the ITU's meeting...

This probably doesn't make a lot of sense because I had to finish writing this really quickly before they start making decisions on stuff, but oh well.

Post to your journal! There is still time!

(I finally posted it. Here goes nothing...)

(By the way, pathvain_aelien and ellaina02, I added a few things after the proofreading)



What's sad is that recently-- Well, okay, not that recently, due to the long amount of time it took to write this entry, have it proofread, and continue to worry about whether or not it makes sense even after I had it proofread. But last October, I was hit with a realization similar to Character 15's, and I'm not even a randomly generated webcomic character.

( This post is so long, I'm even using lj-spoiler tags as lj-cuts )

Rant about the inevitable part of this entry that doesn't make sense

Anti-bullying month
Who is the biggest bully in your life? One response chosen at random will win an Amazon Kindle. [contest details] (sponsored by bullying_begone)

Answer View Answers

WHOA! Perfect timing, bullying_begone - today, I met my first real-life bully in 11 years. (So far, people online have only been mean to me when I actually say stupid stuff, so I don't count those.) In fact, this is a rare occurrence of me using my uChIN RA G userpic without having banned someone from commenting in my journal.

See, today in College Connections class (which was hard enough before I knew one of the other students would bully me), we did a couple of group activities, and the first was a common camp activity that's starting to get old, so you may have heard of it - it's that one where there's a "chocolate" "river" and two "islands" and we have to all cross to the other side using "marshmallows". (EDIT: Due to pathvain_aelien's confusion, I should say the only reason I put stuff in quotes in the previous sentence was to show they were pretend marshmallows or islands or whatever, and were actually rubber square tiles, hula hoops, etc.) The first time we did it, I lost two marshmallows in a row by forgetting to make sure someone else had their foot on them before I moved mine off of it, so once we were done, one guy who had collected about half of the marshmallows whacked me in the head with them. One girl said something like, "Hey, don't hit him with the marshmallows!", but no one else seemed to notice. It didn't physically hurt that much, and the pain went away quickly, but it still hurt me emotionally.

Then we had to try to do the same thing again, but faster, now that we knew the strategy. Although I had finally figured out to leave my foot on each marshmallow until I knew someone else's foot was there, I messed up in some other way that I still don't quite understand, so that guy hit me upside the head again (which, at the time, I thought was him still not forgiving me for my errors the first time), and either that same girl or a different girl told him not to, but again, no one else seemed to notice.

So after that activity and the other one they did (luckily, this time only 10 people had to volunteer to participate, because I was too depressed to want to participate in anything else), we discussed the differences in everyone's strategies and stuff. I called out the guy who had hit me with the pretend marshmallows, and since I was so depressed, I don't really remember what all was said, but at the time, it seemed like no one would talk to him about it because the professor didn't see.

After class, though, the guy did apologize to me, saying that it wasn't supposed to actually hurt and that normally he does it to everyone when they mess up. I asked him why he hit me the second time, because I didn't remember messing up that time, but he pointed out that I did, and now I vaguely remember. Nonetheless, I still couldn't fully accept his apology because it was still uncalled for, especially since he only hit me even though everyone - including himself - messed up at some point. And, as it turns out, the professor had noticed after all; she sympathized with me, saying that his behavior was uncalled for, and that she would talk to him about it.

Repost this entry or I'll hit you with marshmallows

wilted_camelia
Tales from the rift
If you could travel back in time and ask any deceased political figure (famous or infamous) a single question, who would you choose, and what would you ask?

Answer View Answers

That would be hard to decide - although people in America today almost constantly argue about the stances that the Founding Fathers would have taken on particular issues, and I would like to settle one of those issues by asking George Washington about it, it would be hard to pick which issue to ask him about.

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