Whatever Matt Feels Like Posting

As I said in the second part of my first regular entry in a while (I think? What even is a "regular" entry in my journal anymore?), I think it's really, really, REALLY great that people are starting to research machine learning for detecting toxic comments online so that they can be filtered out automatically and/or so that people (like me!) can learn what makes their comments potentially toxic and how to avoid it.

You know what would be even better, though?

If I could actually use it.

Many of the websites and videos I've seen about these tools for detecting toxic comments make it seem like you can just type or paste in a comment and BAM, it will give scores representing the likelihood of it being a toxic comment for various potential reasons. So I thought "oh hey, I can paste in of my LJ/DW entries and comments one by one and it'll tell me which ones are the best and worst, and then I can rank them and sort them into 'cringe levels' like I wanted to a couple years ago!"

But finding a website that lets me do that is harder than I thought...
https://www.perspectiveapi.com/ - Has a note saying to not enter personally identifiable information, so naturally I'm wondering what exactly that entails and if certain things in some my entries count. Seems like this would be the easiest to use, though, if I knew for a fact that doing so would be okay. (EDIT: Well, I tried this one out with a random sentence that isn't from my journal and actually got a rating with it! I guess I'm gonna use this one after all - I'll just save entries with my name in them for last, I suppose. But it would be nice to figure out how to use one of these other tools too in case the scores differ.)
https://www.unitary.ai/product - This page has an interface where you can input your own text and hit "Compute" and it will estimate the toxicity of it... except not because the "interface" on that page is just a mockup apparently! They went out of their way to make it look like you could highlight the example text and replace it and click Compute but it doesn't actually let you do that? :(
https://detoxifai.com/ - This one has a live demo where you can type in a comment (yes, this one actually lets you type into it!) and click "Analyze Toxicity" and... it says "Processing" and then never does anything.

And pretty much everything else I've found requires me to install Python, learn how to code in Python, install Git (or remember whether or not my current laptop is the one I once had Git installed on before), relearn how to use Git when I never understood the first time, and/or learn how to make an API just to use it. :(

So I think I've mentioned before that I don't find jokes about the coronavirus, social distancing, face masks, etc. very funny - ESPECIALLY when people start taking it to the extreme and judging people in the PAST, or in FICTIONAL WORLDS where the coronavirus doesn't exist, etc. for whether or not they're social distancing or wearing masks. Because it's like, if they're going to be so judgemental about it in scenarios where it's NOT necessary, then I feel like they probably absolutely HATE people in real life just for coming within 5 feet and 11 inches of them or FORGETTING a mask or taking their mask off for like FIVE SECONDS or something.

I really need to vent about a couple of particularly upsetting examples of such jokes I just came across (because of YouTube recommendations, so no, I don't go LOOKING for these), so here they are:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhuxzqIhg94
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSwaW52JD8M

And a couple I've been seeing in my YouTube recommendations for a while back but still never seen and never intend to:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQKHdJ8TlYk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bDzZ48F8Vo


I've never even seen any of these videos, but I know I'm not going to like them, and I know I DEFINITELY do not like most of the comments on at least the first two. SOME OF THEM ACTUALLY THINK FICTIONAL CHARACTERS HAVE TO FOLLOW THE SAME GUIDELINES AS REAL PEOPLE. Which means those commenters must be REALLY mean to people who don't follow the rules, EVEN WHEN IT'S NOT POSSIBLE TO. As someone who understandings why the guidelines in real life are important, I can say that THAT is why so many people aren't taking it seriously, and why a lot of the time I can't even say I blame people for not taking it seriously.

This is way more annoying than anything else I've ever declared to be annoying.

I might regret saying this, but I think I'm going to feel better if I vent, so I'll just say it. "Jokingly" getting mad at people over new restrictions that NO ONE likes or is used to just makes all the new restrictions even worse than they have to be, and therefore makes more people think they are tyranny. If you actually think any of the above videos or their comments are funny, there is probably something wrong with you.


More examples of what I mean by coronavirus jokes not being funny and making me depressed, since you new readers may have missed this:

https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/376182.html

YES!!!!

I'm FINALLY up to 944 entries fixed!!!!!


Yeah, that doesn't sound like a major milestone, but when you consider that entries 929-935 and 937-944 are all really long entries with lots of links to previous entries and comments by me - some of which were very cringeworthy or in upsetting threads - and so I had to skim through ALL of those entries again to change the LJ links to their DW counterparts when possible/necessary and decide what tags needed to be added... getting through all that IS a pretty significant milestone!! :D


How long have I been working on fixing just that set of entries?

*reads through my entries from this year until I figure out when that was*

September 4. In over two months, I only fixed sixteen entries...


At least hopefully from now on I'll start getting to feel like I'm making progress and it's not completely hopeless! :D

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. :)

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128778526

This article was written over seven years ago. The past seven years of my life would've been SO much better if I'd known about it back then (and there was a way to use it on LJ entries and comments instead, or someone made a similar system for checking those)!

I've been meaning to post some more quiz results for a while now. They're really starting to build up in the text file I'm saving them in :)

Another one I first took over seven years ago and am revisiting now:

Old result:

Originally posted by matt1993 at For once, Quiz Galaxy gave me an answer I expected

I'm so ashamed of some of my wording back then... :(

Anyway, my new result is:



Now for two quizzes I haven't taken before:

Hi! I'm Matt Aaron. For more info about what I do most of the time, go to my profile page.
Right now, I'm wondering what the next Strong Bad E-mail will be like. You should check them out (on homestarrunner.com); they are really funny and were the inspiration for some of my funny screenshots (again, more info on profile page).

...

Wow, now that I've changed my journal style back to what it used to be (although my actual first entry predates this style by... I think a year and a half), it IS easier to convince myself that I haven't wasted the past 3½ years worrying about being judged for everything I do! (Or at least it's easier than it was the last time I quoted my first entry. And not just because I misquoted it a little that time.)

Hopefully it'll stay that way!

By the way, you might have noticed that even though I implied that I would only change the colors of my journal back to what they were, I went ahead and changed the font back to whatever it was too. This is because soon after I changed it to Andalus in the first place, I noticed that certain special characters appear slightly misplaced from the rest of the text when written in Andalus (e.g. "Schächter", "Schrödinger", "Wænya" - but apparently not "Pokémon"), so ever since then, I occasionally considered picking a different font but never got around to it. Well, now I did!

I also changed my journal title back to "Tidbits of Matt's Life" - what it used to be long before it was "Life and times of a cancelled author". I'm still referencing "author cancelled" in the subtitle, though - it's "A cancelled author attempting to let go of the past" instead of "My board of regrets".

:)

Repost like it was 2009

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

Well, I'm not over all of my worries yet, but I think this might be a good time to get back to some of the stuff I've been putting off for a while now first.

I've made a to-do list of those things that I'll put into a poll next time I get the chance so you can decide what you want me to work on first, but I decided I'd definitely start by finally posting the LJ Comment Stats that I normally post every August 19. I'm not manually adding information to make it easier to compare to last year's results this time, though - when I did that last year, it took a really long time. But I might eventually go back and add it.

← 2012 2014 →

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Top Commenters on matt1993's LiveJournal
(Anonymous comments excluded from rankings)

1	matt1993	2019
2	pathvain_aelien	1121
3	glowing_dragon	381
4	rovanda	168
5	irish_ileana	134
6	adawnrae	103
7	awehla	100
8	penelopexxx	96
9	eccentricrabbit	44
10	xlormplover	44

( 11-83 )
Total Commenters: 83
Total Comments: 4584
Report generated 9/15/2013 11:27:51 PM by scrapdog's LJ Comment Stats Wizard 1.7

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YAY! You're finally shutting up about the list of regrets and stuff for now!

(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