Whatever Matt Feels Like Posting

Hyperbole and a half

AI created by Harmonykorine

I'm Allie


Since this is an AI based on a real person (even if she's represented here by her cartoon version), reminder: everything these AIs say is made up. Don't take anything they say as fact.

Chats I've made starring Allie: (Estimated total reading time: 15 minutes)
237 - Allie Brosh and Strong Bad (Jul 23, 2024 - 15 min. read) - It's just an example meant to show how a simple comma can change a sentence completely, not a suggestion of what to do to your grandmother. But at this point, I'd like to know what you'd find appetizing.

Domain LiveJournal.com was registered on April 15, 1999. The same year, the cult movie "The Matrix" was released, the 6 billionth inhabitant of the Earth was born in the city of Sarajevo, and Britney Spears' debut single Baby One More Time topped the world charts.
On April 15, 2021 LiveJournal turns 22 years old! LiveJournal celebrates its birthday and gives you a card with a bright event that happened the year you started your blog!

What happened in your life the year you started your blog?

---

To answer that question, 2007 was when I started high school, and I probably got the Wii that year and was looking forward to Super Mario Galaxy and Super Smash Bros. Brawl. And I first joined the IRL autism social skills group that I was a part of for a while. 2006-2008 was of course when I was also way too obsessed with a certain "funny"-screenshot-gallery-turned-crossover-comic that I used to write, and 2007 was when I put it online for the first time. And while I had already been a fan of Enya's music, 2007 was the first time I saw photos of her, which makes that when I first started to develop a crush on her. :) Also, am I lame for having never seen Lost?

Interesting how LJ came up with a meme involving years like this just now - recently I figured out that creating a Spotify account was easier than I expected it to be, so I did, and I decided to listen to all of the "Top Hits of <year>" playlists from the year I was born to the present in order. In fact, by doing so I learned that Baby One More Time was released in 1999 just before LJ mentioned it in this meme. :) (I do remember Britney Spears being popular during my childhood; I just didn't know the exact year any of her songs were released)


Those of you who created your account in 2016, 2020, or 2021: What did you get? Hopefully something good. I really hope this meme sticks to its word and lists a bright event for EVERY year, instead of doing the already overdone jokes about those years. I hate that people STILL get judged for enjoying 2016/2020 or enjoying anything about them or having looked forward to them. :(

Well, not only is mezzacotta STILL broken (and it's been a while since the last time there was any confirmation it's being worked on), the ruins of the two newest comics are almost if not exactly identical.

This is making me even more worried. Not only is it still unclear if the comic generation code can EVER be fixed, it may be the case that even if mezzacotta is repaired such that it can display entire comics again, all comics starting with yesterday might be the exact same one over and over! :(

EDIT: Well, I've looked at the two newest comics enough to confirm that what's left of them is not EXACTLY identical. But they're still similar enough that it's making me nervous that the comic generation code is PERMANENTLY broken and may not be repairable.

Two things I meant to post about last month but never did for whatever reason:

- On October 12 my friend and I went to the State Fair of Texas! That was fun. I was stressed about it because I'd never had a guest over other than pathvain_aelien, but it turned out well for the most part. :)
- On October 19 pathvain_aelien, ellaina02, and I went to a VR show!... VR demonstration? What would the right term be?

And some things I thought of to post about more recently:

- The Irregular Webcomic! forums are GONE?! Possibly FOREVER?! Which means the mezzacotta, Square Root of Minus Garfield, Lightning Made of Owls, and Comments on a Postcard forums (all of which I read a lot more than the one for IWC itself) are ALSO gone?!
While I didn't like the fact that those forums often had a lot of drama in them, with so many people overanalyzing everything (more so than in Square Root of Minus Garfield itself), arguing about what is or is not art/humor/etc., and so on, and as such haven't been to those forums in a while, there were also just enough forum threads I DID find interesting or amusing that I wanted to eventually go back and read what I missed. Now I might not be able to do that! That was such a big forum, even archive.org probably won't have EVERYTHING!
And that means that since I've linked to that forum sometimes, I'm gonna have to go back and fix ALL of those broken links to point to the archive.org versions. I WAS up to early 2018 in my slow journey to fix everything I needed to fix in my entries... now this sets me back to late 2011! :(
EDIT: Also, does today's mezzacotta (not IWC) comic show up for anyone? It doesn't for me. Nor does this one. It looks like if you put in the date for any comic that has not already been generated, it fails to load it. :(
This is the THIRD TIME (at least) that this comic has been broken in the past few years! I'm scared!

- On a happier note, yesterday I was flipping through a random catalog and in the section for bedroom sets, one of their bed designs is named after Enya. ENYA. That is awesome. Maybe I should pick that the next time I need new bed sheets!
(Also, that same catalog had a section on video games, which makes this probably the first catalog I've ever read to mention Mario AND Enya. This of course made it even better for me. I have a long history of getting disproportionately excited whenever there's a Mario reference AND an Enya reference in relatively close proximity.) :)

So, I'm way too late in posting this (again), but my 26th birthday was last Sunday!!

Wow... I'm 26. I remember when it felt like it would be a LOOONG time until I was 13. Now I've waited that long twice!

What I got for my birthday:

- Piranha Plant amiibo!
- Three books I read years ago and wanted to reread: Caps For Sale, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, and How to Eat Fried Worms! (Well, I thought I read them all years ago, but I'm reading Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing right now and everything is so unfamiliar to the point that I think I may not have actually read it years ago, I just remembered thinking the title is funny-sounding. So maybe I'm reading it for the first time now! Would you look at that!)
- They didn't come in until the 18th, but Nintendo Labo VR Goggles!!!! I've been wanting those ever since I knew about the new VR mode in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate! :D

(note to self: put in the previous/next buttons later)

http://www.museumofconceptualart.com/accomplished/index.html

(This marks 10 years after when I did this when I turned 16, the first time I ever posted this for my birthday. Wow... I've known about this website for over ten years. And it's still around, even! Good for them!)

At age 26:

American anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote her famous dissertation, Coming of Age in Samoa, which claimed that in some societies adolescence is not a particularly difficult time.

Albert Einstein published five major research papers in a German physics journal, fundamentally changing man's view of the universe and leading to such inventions as television and the atomic bomb.

Benjamin Franklin published the first edition of Poor Richard's Almanac, which was to play a large role in molding the diverse American character.

Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Chereshkova became the first woman to travel in space.

College dropout Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple Computer.

Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, revolutionizing the economies of the United States and Britain.

Antoine Joseph Sax invented the brass saxophone.

"Johnny Appleseed" brought apple seeds to the Ohio Valley.

Napoleon Bonaparte conquered Italy.

Gon Yangling memorized more than 15,000 telephone numbers in Harbin, China.

Orion Krynen of Denver, CO reached this age without much incident.

British ethologist Jane Goodall set up camp in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve on Lake Tanganyika and began studying the lives of chimpanzees.

Ken Kesey published his first novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Thomas Pynchon published V., for which he won the William Faulkner First Novel Award.

Kirsteene Luhrmann of Melburne, Victoria quit smoking.

Stephen Breen from Dublin, Ireland found this site.

Darren Blackburn became the first and only athlete of the Principality of Sealand, despite being somewhat lacking in athletic ability.

Syd Jesus co-founded the dUdU Art Collective in Oakland, California and turned an entire warehouse space into a conceptual art piece entitled "The $5000 Gallery."

Matthew Royer took a dog for a walk every day of the year in Minnesota, with a coldest daytime high of 0 degrees F. The average walk time was 30 minutes.

Derrick Pallas was horrified to realize he was losing his hair, just like Dad.

Jan Birkeland from Norway managed to get to work without hitting a single red light.

Katherine Blauvelt in a skirt was deemed "all grown-up" by her boyfriend.

Kristen finally was able to get her fingernails to grow without chipping and peeling because she started taking a multi-vitamin on a daily basis.

Tom Pemberton rode a bicycle with lit fireworks strapped to it into a pool while wearing a banana costume.

SJ Yee resigned from a giant multinational corporation to found a personal development site for the book smart.

Angie Olson got so drunk on her 26th birthday, her friends were able to dress her up as a clown.

matt1993 discovered the two mysterious lost episodes of Super Mario Maker Crash Course.

...

Okay, okay, that last one's not on the list. But it SHOULD be! I have a story behind that. Stay tuned for when I write a full post about it!

Is ANYONE able to see the following mezzacotta strips?

http://mezzacotta.net/archive.php?date=-17-05-22
http://mezzacotta.net/archive.php?date=17-05-22
http://mezzacotta.net/archive.php?date=-18-05-23
http://mezzacotta.net/archive.php?date=18-05-23

(Pro tip: Don't try to load them all at once in four separate tabs - I find that the comics have always been less likely to show up if I try and open more than one at a time.)

And if not, is ANYONE able to see at least one strip that is not linked to from the hall of fame or cast page? (Strips that are read more often usually load faster, and I know at least two in the hall of fame still load for me, so I'm less concerned about the ones in the hall of fame.)

If you find one that works, link to it in the comments so I can test whether or not I can see it.

(Also I feel I should note that if you do see a comic but there's no dialogue in it, that does not mean the comic didn't finish loading. Since mezzacotta is a randomly generated comic, that's a fairly normal occurence. Incidentally, that particular strip is in the hall of fame and as such it does load for me.)

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.

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

Now I just have 449 to go... I hope there aren't many more that are as long as that one. Off the top of my head I can already think of 18 more entries that are going to take a while to fix. :(

I'm glad most of my entries aren't that long... I couldn't bear the thought of it taking another 4×449=1,796 days to fix all my entries. By July 5, 2023 (1,796 days from now) everyone probably will have left both LJ and DW and moved to a third website, and all my work would be for nothing. And every webcomic I ever read would be gone by then. :(

OF COURSE the week I noticed that a bunch of Photobucket images that used to be broken are suddenly back for whatever reason is ALSO the same week that I find out that Irish Breakfast, yet another one of the many webcomics I want to read someday that I discovered through a long chain of webcomics being linked to from other webcomics I'd stumbled upon, is gone now. Before I got to read it.

...Oh wow, turns out the situation is even worse than I thought it was when I started writing this entry. At least TWO webcomics I wanted to read are gone now that weren't before, because I had to find the URL for Bitmap World so I could link to it just now and it turns out it was taken down as well (but last year rather than last month). :( (And of course it HAD to be Bitmap World... in the chain of webcomics from Square Root of Minus Garfield to Request Comics that led to me discovering Irish Breakfast, Bitmap World was the only one where I still had yet to read anything except the "characters from other webcomics, including Irregular Webcomic! and Terror Island, in Bitmap World style" page and a couple other miscellaneous non-comic pages.)

At least they're both on archive.org... I'm so dependent on archive.org nowadays. If archive.org itself ever went down, I would probably DIE. If it had never existed, I probably would've died LAST YEAR. :(

Why do so many webcomic authors feel like they need to take down their stuff??? Every time that happens, I have to go visit whatever other websites I like that I can think of off the top of my head just to see if any of them are ALSO gone! O_O


So, as a tribute to Bitmap World, here's a list of all the webcomics I can think of that I wouldn't know about if they hadn't drawn both Irregular Webcomic! and Terror Island characters in their style: (NOTE TO SELF: make these links when I have the time to do so)

Bitmap World itself
Terror Island
Triangle and Robert (which is another one that's went down but I knew about that already, and it's one of the few to go down AFTER I got to read it all the way through)
FOMS
Request Comics
tiny ghosts
Irish Breakfast
Nutflix (I haven't read that either but wanted to, but I checked just now and I think that's also gone now. THAT MAKES THREE. :( )
Tall Comics (I haven't read that either but want to)
I know there's at least one more but I don't have the time to try and find the name of it.

I've been trying to cut down on the "express everything I want to say by editing Garfield or other comics and/or making stuff with my sprites" thing that I did on LJ a lot in 2012-2013 or so, but I just HAD to make THIS one:


(Original Garfield strip: June 19, 2003)

Hmm... Seeing those three versions of myself in one room like that really makes it stand out that the modern sprite version of myself has a skin tone noticeably darker than my real skin tone. Oh well.