Whatever Matt Feels Like Posting

62,240,060 seconds until I get to be happy again.
62,240,055 seconds until I get to be happy again.
62,240,050 seconds until I get to be happy again.
62,240,045 seconds until I get to be happy again.
62,240,040 seconds until I get to be happy again.
62,240,035 seconds until I get to be happy again.
62,240,030 seconds until I get to be happy again.
62,240,025 seconds until I get to be happy again.
62,240,020 seconds until I get to be happy again.
62,240,015 seconds until I get to be happy again.
62,240,010 seconds until I get to be happy again.
62,240,005 seconds until I get to be happy again.
62,240,000 seconds until I get to be happy again.
62,239,995 seconds until I get to be happy again.
62,239,990 seconds until I get to be happy again.
62,239,985 seconds until I get to be happy again.
62,239,980 seconds until I get to be happy again.
62,239,975 seconds until I get to be happy again.

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. :(

Being obsessed with a) mezzacotta, the randomly generated webcomic that's (retroactively) been around since 9999999999999 BC, and b) nerdy math-related stuff, I thought of an idea for a LJ/DW meme that incorporates both! Back in July or so. Why didn't I post it until now? For that matter, I'm surprised I didn't think of this meme before July 2017.

Anyway...

1) Look at the mezzacotta strip from your birthdate:
http://mezzacotta.net/archive.php?date=1993-07-14

2) Look at the strip(s) from the day you joined LJ and/or DW and/or any other blogging site you use regularly - if you don't know when that is, you can go to your profile and find out (at least for LJ and DW):
http://mezzacotta.net/archive.php?date=2007-08-19 (LJ)
http://mezzacotta.net/archive.php?date=2017-05-13 (DW)

3) Optionally, also look at the strip(s) from any other dates that are significant to you!
I'll skip this step, though - while there are many other dates that are significant to me for whatever reason, I think I'll just use my birthdate and the dates I joined LJ/DW for this.

4) Put in the same dates from steps 1-3 again but with AD changed to BC. You can do this just by putting a minus sign before the year in the URL:
http://mezzacotta.net/archive.php?date=-1993-07-14
http://mezzacotta.net/archive.php?date=-2007-08-19
http://mezzacotta.net/archive.php?date=-2017-05-13

5) Put in the dates from steps 1-4 again, but replace the years with the last two digits of them:
http://mezzacotta.net/archive.php?date=93-07-14
http://mezzacotta.net/archive.php?date=7-08-19
http://mezzacotta.net/archive.php?date=17-05-13 (...so is he going to show me or not? :) )
http://mezzacotta.net/archive.php?date=-93-07-14
http://mezzacotta.net/archive.php?date=-7-08-19 (A hair restorer on leeches?)
http://mezzacotta.net/archive.php?date=-17-05-13 (I guess a penny isn't enough.)

6) Now take the dates from steps 1-3 and replace the year with your LJ and/or DW (and/or other blogging site) user ID! On LJ and DW at least, that's also on your profile.
(Any time I say to replace the year with a number that isn't a year like your user ID, do this for both BC and AD if the AD version exists [i.e. the number is between 1 and the current year]. If it doesn't - which it won't 99.9% of the time - then just use BC.)
http://mezzacotta.net/archive.php?date=-13627499-07-14
http://mezzacotta.net/archive.php?date=-13627499-08-19 (I'd say that's changing focus more than just "a bit". :P )
http://mezzacotta.net/archive.php?date=-13627499-05-13 (Yes, I even combined my LJ user ID with the date I joined DW and vice versa. Because that makes a lot more sense than the strip I got by doing so!)
http://mezzacotta.net/archive.php?date=-3192525-07-14
http://mezzacotta.net/archive.php?date=-3192525-08-19
http://mezzacotta.net/archive.php?date=-3192525-05-13 (The first panel of this one is the best part.)

( these next few are so mathy, they're under a cut )


If any of these methods gives you an invalid date:
Year with leading zeroes - remove the leading zeroes.
Year is 0 - use 9999999999999 BC (13 nines), 1 BC, and/or 1 AD instead. Or, if this happens in step 5, replacing it with 100 BC/AD makes sense too.
February 29 in a year that doesn't have one - use February 28 and/or March 1 of that year instead.

Well, August is over, so that means Matt1993 Nostalgia Month is over - so I changed my LJ and DW styles and userpics back to what they usually look like. (If you met me during Matt1993 Nostalgia Month and therefore don't know what I'm talking about, see this entry, or see it on DreamWidth, and then maybe see a few entries after it.)

If you do know what I'm talking about, you're probably thinking: "Waaait a minute, there's still something here that looks different from what I remember... Sure, the background went back to yellow or other yellow and Anya, Noma, Ricky, and blushy guy went back to not being as badly-drawn, but something is-- Wait, are these MY thoughts that are showing up in this entry?! Is this dork's journal reading my mind?!? I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 100. It's 47. Okay, that's just scary. I'd better not start thinking about my darkest secret..."

And to all that, I say:

1) Um, the "blushy guy" is me. And the other three are Enya, Roma, and Nicky - it says so right there on the userpic. Speaking of which...

2) Yes, remember how I asked whether or not some of my userpics are legible enough and then tried to make more legible versions of some of them? But never got around to uploading those as userpics?

No, of course you don't remember, because that was years before I met at least half of you, and it's been so long that those of you who were around for it probably forgot all about it. So to refresh your memory:

one
two
three
four


Anyway... I finally got around to that - or at least, I hope I updated all the ones I meant to! Four or three years later. I still haven't even updated my sticky "list of userpics in order added" post to include these updated versions OR the 2009-style versions (retroactive or not) - or any versions of my userpics besides "what they normally looked like from late 2009 to the first half of 2017". And due to a glitch on LJ, now not even those will show up in that entry again until I edit all of the image URLs to have "https://" instead of "http://" :( *

I guess that makes me the Enya of userpic updating... But hey, I finally finished one thing I started, at least! :)

3) Don't worry, your darkest secret is safe with me. I make no guarantees about your second-darkest secret though! :P


Now to go edit every entry and comment I ever made to fix all the userpics that are broken now. :(


*They need to call HTTPS something different - I keep wanting to use that as the plural of "http". "I need to change all the https to https!" ;)

(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 )

I am sick and tired of people blaming 2016 for all the bad things that have happened this year.

Yes, I get that there were a lot of celebrity deaths this year, people got upset with each other over the election even more so than usual, etc. Those were definitely bad things that happened this year. But the Internet has taken this WAY too far - I'm getting tired of people blaming the year for it. (Dear 42 and It's Over 9000: I apologize. You are not the most annoyingly overused number-related memes in existence.) the way some people talk, it's like they think nothing good happened in 2016 (not true!) or that nothing bad happened in 2015 or any other recent year (also not true!). They make me feel like I'm not allowed to enjoy anything that was released in 2016. :(

Sorry for the rant - I just needed to get this off my chest before the end of the year. (Not that it'll make any difference - there's still people who complain about Super Mario Maker being released on September 11 last year...)


To anyone who happens to discover my journal while this is still on the first page: Rest assured, rants like this (or rants of any kind) are not very common in my journal. :)

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! )

Earlier today, I randomly started thinking about a userpic idea I had thought of months ago (but haven't had the chance to make yet) which would basically be part of this screenshot of Super Mario 3D Land (found on the Mario Wiki, by the way):



...with "HELL ON WHEELS" written on it.

Neither this userpic idea nor the fact that I was distracted by it today briefly is that bad a sign in and of itself, of course... but then, while flipping through pages in my Calculus textbook to find the exercises for this homework assignment, I happened to turn to page 666 just before I found the assignment, which happened to start on page 668.

A bit creepy...

Once I turn in the final copy of my analytical paper and peer review any papers that still haven't been reviewed by 8 PM, I'll have made it through the English class without going insane!

I spent so much time working on this paper and analyzing articles that Rachel Hajar and Geoff Watts (the authors of the first two articles I used for it) have, unlike any other authors of articles I've cited in papers so far, gotten appearances and mentions in a few of my dreams:

( Cut for length but some of them are pretty funny )

And now for something completely different. Funny conversation pathvain_aelien and I had about a week ago:

PATHVAIN_AELIEN: That's because our table is lacking in fruit and vegetable matter and pretty much anything besides pizza matter.
ME: At least it's lacking in dark matter.
PATHVAIN_AELIEN: I want some dark matter!
ME: Might be kinda dangerous, though.
PATHVAIN_AELIEN: Well, so is not getting a proper diet with fruits and vegetables!

This repost button is also lacking in dark matter

My family had Chinese food for dinner, and Dad and I got the exact same fortune:

"The wise thing to do is to prepare for the unexpected."

Wonder if it means something?

Another interesting finding - my lucky numbers were 4, 9, 16, 25, 37, and 40... which is 2², 3², 4², 5², 6²+1, and 7²-9. Okay, so 37 isn't exactly 6² and 40 isn't even particularly close to 7², but still...

The wise thing to do is repost this entry
(or maybe it's the foolish thing; I can't tell)