Whatever Matt Feels Like Posting

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

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! )

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

Ever since I found out about image sonification (converting an image to a sound or vice versa - in this case, with the horizontal axis corresponding to time and the vertical axis corresponding to pitch), I'd wondered if anyone had ever been able to listen to music "upside-down" by reversing the image vertically so that low pitches become high pitches and vice versa, but I could never find one. However, while trying to find a free program I'd downloaded a while back that used a different approach to image sonification (but I'd either deleted or forgotten about), I finally stumbled upon a program that can edit music as if it were an image, including turning it upside-down!



And there's even a free demo! Isn't it amazing when something you wish existed turns out to exist after all? :)

I never did find the other program that I forgot the name of, though, but I'm wondering if anyone out there happens to know of it.

Its method of converting an image to music, using my uChIN RA G userpic as an example:



Assuming that the red channel is mapped to piano, the green is drums, and the blue is flute (there's over 200 instruments to choose from, I think), most of the piece would be silent (for the plain black background), but towards the middle, the piano would play at only one pitch that is slightly lower than the highest pitch it allows (since all red values on the text are 248), the drums would play at two pitches (that one plus a slightly lower and quieter one for green values of 192, corresponding to the darker yellow/orange pixels), and, occasionally, the flute would play at that same high pitch (as there's only a few pixels - namely, the white pixels - where the blue is 248 instead of 0). And there's options to treat it as a grayscale image and only play one instrument, invert the colors (useful if there's more light colors than dark colors), lower the resolution to make a shorter piece, change the tempo, or have the tempo be faster whenever the instruments are quieter (to reduce the silence in this example).

If you didn't understand that, don't worry - you'd probably understand it better if you'd used the program I'm trying to describe, so that means you probably haven't. But if you do understand that, do you know what the program I'm talking about is called? Thanks!

bº²f fº λºⁿ└ ┒ºⁿ└∪ɘl¡

Kiss me, I’m Irish!
How are you celebrating St. Patrick’s Day?

Answer View Answers

( This is pretty much a repeat of the previous post with some new additions )

Green means go repost this entry

A couple more surprising findings:

- Apparently, during a few of the times that I wasn't paying attention back then, I would still answer questions consistently correctly - I definitely can't do that now! Then again, I'm assuming that "not attending" means not paying attention - it might just mean not making eye contact or something.
- Knowing my current talent with mathematics, you'd think that that identifying numbers and counting would be one of the few things that I was perfect at back then, but apparently not - I actually got certain numbers mixed up sometimes. And, just like with letters, this includes combinations of numbers that have completely different colors in my current grapheme→color synesthesia (12 vs. 11, 8 vs. 6, 8 vs. 7...). Knowing this, I'd say my mom was probably lying when she says that I hacked into her computer at age 2...

A couple of funny things I found:

- While being taught occupations, at one point I mixed up the descriptions of a vet and a fireman and said that a vet "puts out animals".
- While being taught opposites, I was asked what the opposite of "bad sitting" was (those therapists never seemed to like the way I was sitting :P) and so I said "bad standing".

Post to your can't detect!

I decided to change the colors of my journal style to match the colors of "Matt1993" in my grapheme→color synesthesia (with the exception of backgrounds that are currently white - I'll change them to black, because I think that looks cooler), so if you see the colors change every time you load the page, it's my customization in progress and not a weird glitch with LiveJournal. ;)

EDIT: Mostly done now - I still have to make the colors absorb a little of each other like my perceived colors actually do, but at least the remaining changes shouldn't be too drastic. By the way, if any of the colors are too bright or something and it hurts your eyes, let me know.

EDOT: Wow, mixing those colors perfectly is gonna take even longer than I thought - it's been the whole day and I'm only ⅛ of the way done. :(

EDUT: Decided to just go back to the unblended colors that M, A, T, 1, 9, and 3 have on their own - it actually looked cooler that way, and it's one less creative vortex for me. (Though I still applied the rule where the colors of the graphemes are mixed with the colors of how many of the same grapheme there are in a row [in this case, meaning the M, A, 1, and 3 are mixed with white like 1 and the T's and 9's are mixed with cerulean like 2]. That way, it should still be easier on the eyes.)

Magenta yellow-orange purple yellow-orange-that's-more-yellow-than-the-first yellowish-silver green!

I've had a LOT of homework lately. That's why I haven't been on LJ in a while - I didn't have the time until just now. To make matters worse, our air card for high-speed Internet broke, so now we're having to resort to dial-up, which means that while using my computer, I have to switch back and forth between two uncomfortable positions: sitting on the floor, and laying on my bed looking down at my computer that's still on the floor but now has the screen upside-down so I can read it more easily. I have to type upside-down in the latter position, too, which means I type WAY slower. But at least it looks cool to scroll up and down like that :)

Several links I've been meaning to post for awhile:

Farmville for Dummies? Really?

A candy heart with an adult message? Really²?

A toilet video game system? Really³?

Shooting teenagers for being too mouthy? Really⁴?

And finally, as usual, my progress with my procrastination New Year's Resolution:

←Week 5 Week 7→

( Auld Lang LJ-Cut )

Randomly post into your random journal

Three different 206's have shown up today:

- I was thinking about getting a snack, and I happened to look at the clock and it was 2:05 PM, so I waited until it changed to 2:06 to leave the room to get it. (Granted, it was kinda intentional, but it didn't take that long for it to change to 2:06, so I probably would've gotten my snack at 2:06 anyway.)
- I've recently made a program on my calculator that helps me decide what homework to work on first by dividing what I put as the relative difficulty of each homework assignment (with 1 being the difficulty of a math problem) by how many hours I have to work on it.* At one point, for studying for my economics test next Monday, this turned out to be 2.069800282. Even more interesting is the fact that just before I ran the program that time, I had randomly thought about what it would be like if, once I made a PrtSc Land-styled version of this userpic next PrtSc Land Day, Schrödinger's Enya commented on it.
- I'm reading Frankenstein for English class, and I read page 206 today.

Speaking of homework, I've had a LOT of it lately. :(

And now, back to your regularly scheduled pessimism: my New Year's resolutions!

←Week 3 Week 5→

( Stupid things one )

( Procrastination one )

*The formula is different if I'm at school, because then it'd be best to work on short assignments first so I don't have to take them home. In that case, I have it multiply instead of divide, then take the reciprocal of the result.

Po206st t206o yo206ur jour206nal!

←Week 2 Week 4→

( Stupid things one )

( Procrastination one )

Procrastinate reposting to your journal