Whatever Matt Feels Like Posting

Well, it's March 13. Anyone have any updates on how likely it is that LJ will actually go down? Or whether or not it's true what my sister told me that even if LJ does have a blackout for a while, it'll be temporary?

I figured I should give those of you who didn't meet me until after the first apocalypse some context on how I reacted to that and what I ended up doing as a result. (Including freaking out and stressing about it.) So I'm linking to some of the entries about that. I'm including links to both the LJ and DW versions of the relevant entries to save time / future-proof in case I end up having to backup my journal again or something. Not all of these are about LJ specifically because it wasn't the only major change causing me anxiety in 2017 - other things happened that certainly didn't help matters for me either.

https://matt1993.livejournal.com/296994.html / https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/292561.html
https://matt1993.livejournal.com/297441.html / https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/292836.html (Incidentally, I've heard that if LJ goes down, I could backup my journal to WordPress in addition to having DreamWidth as a backup. Does WordPress have the features listed here? [minus the creating two accounts thing because I think I've more or less decided against making a separate dream journal on LJ, DW, or any other site; my entries are dumb enough WITHOUT all the stuff that happens in my dreams that makes no sense when written out!])
https://matt1993.livejournal.com/297642.html / https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/292874.html
https://matt1993.livejournal.com/297800.html / https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/293263.html
https://matt1993.livejournal.com/298671.html / https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/294033.html
https://matt1993.livejournal.com/299247.html / https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/294591.html
https://matt1993.livejournal.com/299991.html / https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/295305.html
https://matt1993.livejournal.com/300277.html / https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/295574.html
https://matt1993.livejournal.com/300384.html / https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/295844.html
https://matt1993.livejournal.com/301042.html / https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/296398.html
https://matt1993.livejournal.com/301114.html / https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/296503.html
https://matt1993.livejournal.com/301662.html / https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/297176.html
https://matt1993.livejournal.com/302500.html / https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/297788.html
https://matt1993.livejournal.com/302604.html / https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/298065.html
https://matt1993.livejournal.com/302877.html / https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/298491.html
https://matt1993.livejournal.com/303545.html / https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/298958.html
https://matt1993.livejournal.com/304920.html / https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/300392.html

There's other relevant entries - several times I've posted about my anxiety about LJ or specific journals/communities or other websites/images/videos going down, and several times I've posted updates on how far I've gotten with fixing my own entries or how bad I felt about still being behind on my friends page, but most of them are similar to these.

Apparently on YouTube if there's a video that you don't like showing up as a recommendation, you can click the ellipsis next to it and click "Not Interested".

Why did no one tell me about this sooner?! Watching YouTube is going to be SO MUCH more enjoyable thanks to this! :D

(Although in this era, "enjoyable" is a relative term still...)

This has certainly been a disappointing week for weirdos like me who are in love with the guide to a video game MANUAL...

So, the Super Mario Maker 2 direct came out recently and throughout the entire video, my major concern was "Is Mary O. still going to be in this game??? Is that female narrator supposed to be her or is it someone else?"

They showed that Undodog and Mr. Eraser in the story mode - in 3D, with what seems to be actual roles in the story. So that made me hopeful because, if two characters who usually only appear in the SMM interface have roles in the story mode now... does that mean Mary O. could be in the game with a role in the story?!

Then I realized... since I still haven't seen Mary O. at all in the trailer, that STILL doesn't prove that she'll be in the game at all let alone in the story.

Then I realized something even more disappointing: technically Undodog and Mr. Eraser still haven't appeared in 3D, because for the story mode, Nintendo basically just stuck their 2D artwork (adding a LITTLE depth) in a 3D environment. So... if Mary O. appears in the story mode, they probably gave her the same treatment and now she's going to be canonically confirmed to be a 2D being in a 3D world.

Knowing that made me feel weird about myself... all this time I've had it in my headcanon that she's 3D and would be shown as such if she were in SSB or Mario Kart or something. If she ends up being 2D in a 3D world, that would not make her as attractive as I always thought she'd be...

I felt weird about that for a day or so.

Then today I discovered something even more disheartening:

She's probably not going to be in the game at all, or in any game ever again, because she seems to have been replaced with a new character named Nina.



WHY???

This is the most disheartening thing I've seen in a while. WHY DID THEY HAVE TO REPLACE HER? Why HER? It's just my luck that only one Super Mario Maker character has been replaced and it happens to be Mary O. - Undodog is still Undodog, Mr. Eraser is still Mr. Eraser, Coursebot is still Coursebot, even Yamamura is still Yamamura as it turns out, but they had to replace MY FAVORITE CHARACTER.

I changed my mind. I'm perfectly fine with the idea of Mary O. being two-dimensional, as long as she's still around! :(

I feel somewhat better knowing that I'm not the only one who was distraught about this - look at this outpouring of support for Mary O. in the comments:

( under the cut )


But there's also a lot of people making fun of the people who are obsessed with Mary O. OR Nina enough to care which one is in the game, so that makes me feel bad about myself.

And admittedly, most of you probably similarly think it's crazy that I'm THIS disappointed that a manual guide was replaced. But that doesn't change the fact that I AM this disappointed about it! :(


You know how one of my April Fools' jokes this year was that I finally have a unique mood theme and it's Mary O.? I know this is a weird time to finally say so, but yes, that's actually a mood theme I've legitimately been considering for quite some time now, and I got the idea exactly the way I described in the prank - I thought it'd be amusing to bring up the idea in an April Fools entry first and then later on be like "Oh actually, that part wasn't a prank; I'm actually planning on making that mood theme!" But now that Mary O. is most likely GONE, never to appear in a game again, that pretty much takes the joy out of it. :(

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. :)

Today (well, yesterday because it's 1:09 AM) was my first anniversary as a direct employee at work! :)

I was going to post some other things I'd been meaning to mention, but now this is the one that's on my mind the most so I'm gonna briefly post about just this one so I can kinda get it off my chest:

Just now I discovered that TWO YouTube channels I'd at some point seen a couple of videos of, liked those videos, and wanted to watch more of eventually have ended recently... one (Etika) is actually GONE now, and the other (cobanermani456) is still there but no new videos will be made, apparently because of a controversy that spiraled out of something that sounds a lot like mistakes I have made in the past...

THIS IS FREAKING ME OUT NOW. Just like earlier this year when I found out that THREE webcomics I wanted to read were gone now.

ANYTHING I LIKE CAN BE TAKEN DOWN AT ANY MOMENT. THERE IS NO LONGER ANY REASON NOT TO PANIC.

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




The first thing I thought was "Even with that many characters and the likelihood that most of them are going to be joke characters, I bet this list is STILL not going to even consider Mary O. even as a joke character..."


No one remembers me :(

Every time he put in a joke character (a non-game character, an Internet meme, some random fanart of a character who's already in SSB, an inanimate object, his dog, etc...), I was like "He included this but probably didn't include Mary O..."

Towards the end, I was like "29 characters to go and still no Mary O..."

At 491-500, the end of the "whatever video game characters he could think of" section:
INTROSPECKTIVE: The Sims. Diablo. A ******* Tetris block. Mary O., the--
ME: *pauses video to have a chance to process whether or not I heard that last part right, then fanboys because this guy ACTUALLY THOUGHT OF MARY O. EVENTUALLY... even if she's number 494 on the list, she's one of the few he felt the need to explain where she's from ("the guide from Mario Maker"), apparently a half-eaten grilled cheese sandwich and other joke characters are higher priority, and this is an entertainment video anyway and not a list of confirmed characters, AT LEAST HE REMEMBERED MARY O. EVENTUALLY*

I wanna know who did that fanart of her he used, too! I didn't think Mary O. could possibly get any cuter but I was wrong ♥

So, yeah. That's what it's like to be as obsessed as I am with such an obscure character. :)


I'm guessing probably none of you would know who Mary O. is if it weren't for my journal but have any of you ever been so obsessed with any obscure-ish fictional character (doesn't even have to be a crush) that you get THIS excited if anyone so much as knows who that character is? I don't want to feel like I'm the only one who's like this...

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. :)

So when I was writing my previous entries, I noticed that there seemed to be a glitch where new embedded YouTube videos on LJ wouldn't show up for some reason (even though at least one still shows up in an old entry). I was forced to just put text links to them all instead.

I decided to post an entry with videos I haven't embedded on LJ/DW before in it to see if it works now/works any better when I'm crossposting from DW to LJ.

And what better way to do that than show you guys an underrated YouTube channel I discovered a few years ago and somehow haven't mentioned here until now (except for how I think "michelleheafy" is in my ridiculously long interest list in my profile)?







Her voice is so soothing... as one commenter put it, "This is what it would sound like if Enya composed Mario soundtracks." (Yes, someone BESIDES ME said "Enya" and "Mario" in the same sentence, and it's not even a reply to anything I said/wrote. I'm as surprised as you are!)

Those of you who recommended I stay away from YouTube because it seems like a bad place for me... this is one of the reasons why YouTube is mostly a good place for me. :)