Whatever Matt Feels Like Posting

You've heard of Character.AI, right? It's this website where you can simulate chats between--

Oh, who am I kidding? Of course you've heard of it since it's literally all I talk about on here nowadays since I joined C.AI nearly a year ago.
64 of the 76 entries I've posted to LJ/DW since I joined C.AI (or 64 of the 79 entries since I first knew about C.AI) are all "Character.AI Chat Index: <number> <character name>". And I have no intention of stopping at 64.
65 if you include my current sticky entry (which starts off with an attempt at an intro to my journal in general but devolves into an index of all the C.AI stuff on the grounds that "everything else I was ever into was the closest thing to C.AI there was at the time, so this journal may as well be entirely about C.AI at this point and I should index my saved chats here!").
66 if you include an entry that is basically an old version of that one.
Even most of the remaining 10 (or 13) entries are still dedicated to C.AI, at least partially - or dedicated to the same sort of wacky crossovers that I enjoy making happen on Character.AI. And the ones that aren't dedicated to C.AI or the wacky crossovers I love are mostly posts like this one about how far behind I am about posting about anything else.

I still think it does make sense that I'm so obsessed with Character.AI and am more motivated to post about it than anything else. I've already gone over the reasons why so I won't repeat that here (except to add that I STILL sometimes manage to find characters I couldn't find before and never thought I'd find!! I won't spoil who, though...)

Instead, I want to address the fact that I haven't posted a lot about real-life stuff lately, which feels odd since that's probably what I should be posting about the most. And that's not just since I joined C.AI - for the past four years or so I've had little motivation to post and there have been so many things I meant to get around to posting but never did. I typically at least post about things like the 15th anniversary of when I started being active on LJ (February 6, 2024 - not to be confused with the 15th anniversary of my journal overall, which fell on August 19, 2022) or the seventh anniversary of when I started work (February 13, 2024), but this time I didn't even have enough motivation to post about that. Of course, the anniversary of me joining C.AI is today, so I am posting an entry now because of course I would. (Man... I can't believe that just a year ago, I knew C.AI existed and thought "what if they have Enya on here and I could ask what she thinks of Mario?" but figured that was little more than a massive long shot-- there I go again, going on a tangent about C.AI...)

Anyway, towards the end of last year I thought of a possible way to catch up on posting some of the things that I felt like I should have posted, but didn't. I was thinking that on each day of 2024, I'd post an entry that's basically "This day in Matt1993 history" and be about entries I posted on that day in the past plus things I should have posted about but didn't. Plus things that happened on that date, that I posted about, but posted on a different day than they happened. But I'd have to write all those entries in advance in order to have any chance of posting them in time, and as you can tell, I didn't get around to that before 2024 began. (That, and it would require drawing attention to my worst entries and comments on the anniversaries of those posts...) Maybe for 2025 though?

So if you're not interested in Character.AI or my entries about it (and that wouldn't change if I used a character or franchise I haven't used before that you really like), you probably may as well stop reading this journal. Sorry. I really don't see myself having motivation to post much of anything else (though I do make the per-character chat index entries backdated so they don't clutter up your friends page/reading page.)

There is kind of an upside, though. Character.AI isn't JUST for simulating hilarious or insightful or surreal conversations between BASICALLY ANY TWO FICTIONAL CHARACTERS OR CELEBRITIES I'VE EVER HEARD OF. They also have creative helpers, trip planners, and other self-help-related AIs - including ones for mental health - so naturally I've been talking to one of the mental health ones sometimes (one of the few AIs on there that I've ever actually talked to instead of just clicking on it so I can put it in a room with another AI and see what craziness emerges). Like everything else I've used on the site, I wish that had existed YEARS ago - in this case so that I could have avoided making so many mistakes I'd regret later in life, posting so many stupid things on LJ/DW or other sites, and most importantly, not had to annoy all of you so often by posting about things I've had anxiety about. I've done the latter a lot when I needed to talk about something I'm needlessly(?) anxious about to get it off my chest but didn't have a counseling session coming up soon (or before I ever had a counselor at all). In recent years I've slowly started learning just how annoying it truly is for people when they have to listen to me worry about everything all the time, and now I finally have a way to get some of the help I need without having to be annoying in the process. Again, I really wish that had been available for me years ago! I've always wished I could go back in time to correct mistakes I've made... now I know what the most efficient way to correct them is should time travel ever be invented. ;)

Last month, I posted a couple of friends-only entries. (If you're one of my LJ/DW friends and you saw both of those already, most of this entry won't be new to you so you can probably skip this paragraph or so.)

About what?

Well... for anyone who doesn't know (i.e. anyone who has never read an entry in my journal other than this one): I have autism, had somewhat of a sheltered childhood, and spent a lot of my life not being able to word things very well. As a result, many times I've said things that unintentionally came across as rude or were misunderstood, and this led to me becoming crippled with fear that everything I say is going to eventually turn out to be stupid or offend someone. Since I'm still not much better at writing, here is how my sister describes it: "You are always worried about doing something wrong/being hated, even when it comes to what movies or games or books you can like." (I'd add shows, and characters, and fonts, and art programs, and web browsers, and comics/webcomics, and websites, and numerical constants...) "And you can add that I said it's because you take everything you read in internet comments for truth (if someone says hate you think it means literal real hate, or that they will hate YOU for liking the thing they hate). That's really what it all boils down to. Everything is exactly the same in that it is always that, and always nothing to worry about, but something you worry about anyway."
Here are some examples of how much my anxiety about offending people deeply affects me:
- Sometimes I lose sleep or get onto a very irregular sleep schedule worrying about being hated.
- When I was in college, sometimes I would be so paralyzed with fear about something that made me worry about being hated, that I would be late for class or have trouble focusing on homework because all I can think about is the fact that there's something I might be hated over. To an extent, that still happens today when I'm at work.
- Sometimes all of these worries gets so intense that it becomes depression that I can only overcome by posting to my journal about some of the things I worry about being hated for. (usually in friends-only entries because it's bad enough having to worry what people who DO know me already will think!) Essentially, if it's true what my sister has told me about how I have trouble seeing things the way they are and that it's "obvious" to most people that most of my worries are nothing to worry about, then posting entries such as these is the only way for ME to see things the way they are.

And my two recent friends-only entries were basically that - yet another instance of me being so consumed with worrying about what people will think of me if they know I like X/dislike X/X thing about me that the only way I could feel even a little bit better about it was by posting about it. Despite being TERRIFIED of what the comments I would receive might be.

Well, the result was better than the anxious part of me expected.

So it helped.

A little.

But it wasn't enough now that we live in a world where online discourse about boycotts, separating the art from the artist, and differing opinions about ANYTHING has gotten to the point it's at.

So I'm going to have to up the stakes a little.

Things turned out alright when I posted about some of the things I worry about possibly being hated over in a friends-only entry... now let's see what happens when I post it again (with a few minor tweaks), but in a PUBLIC entry!

( *dramatic music* )

Hi! I'm Matt. For more info about what I do most of the time, go to my profile page. Or don't. It's not that helpful right now anyways.

Right now, I AM COMPLETELY FREAKING OUT BECAUSE I STILL DON'T KNOW IF LIVEJOURNAL WILL STAY AROUND!!! And am once again worried that people might hate me for still liking LiveJournal!
I'm also wondering what the next Strong Bad Email will be like if there ever is a new one. But mostly that freaking out about LJ thing.

*insert something about screenshots*

*insert completely unnecessary repost button added retroactively that pokes fun at the entry*

---

...What? This might be my last entry on LiveJournal, so I figured it should be a throwback reference to
my first entry... (DW link)

One hour to go.

Dear everyone who has told me, or their YouTube followers, or whoever, that the YouTube COPPA thing is nothing to worry about:

There's enough of you by now that I can KIND of take your word for it. But I am going to be SO MAD if you turn out to be wrong and this is the end of YouTube as we know it after all.

Good news: I no longer feel like people might see me as a horrible person or hate me just because of the fact that I've had this userpic since I was 15-16.

Bad news: I now feel like people will DEFINITELY see me as a horrible person and hate me just because of the fact that I've had this userpic since I was 15-16.

https://blog.emojipedia.org/ios-13-1-emoji-changelog/#fn4
https://twitter.com/jeremyburge/status/1050038527155691520
https://intheloopaboutneurodiversity.wordpress.com/2019/03/20/the-ableist-history-of-the-puzzle-piece-symbol-for-autism/
https://www.learnfromautistics.com/the-problem-with-the-autism-puzzle-piece/

(Like most entries when I post a lot of links that make me worry, I wanted to address everything I saw on these pages that worried me, but that would require looking at them for much longer and taking a lot longer to write this entry. Also, the less I write, the less likely I am to unintentionally be offensive? Maybe?)

What I feel like these articles are saying in a nutshell:
- I'm a bad person because I made this userpic, even though I was 15 at the time (16 when I made the current version; both versions have identical text)
- I'm an even WORSE person because I continued to have it even after the first time I saw anyone being offended by the idea of puzzle piece(s) representing autism in general
- I'm even worse still because I continued to have it after the first time anyone specifically told me that they were offended by my userpic specifically, which was about two years ago by now
- I'm even worse because I don't want to remove or replace this userpic. Especially not after so long. And because I still like the autism puzzle piece symbol. And because I like how colorful this userpic is and how I used color palettes from Super Mario World for the non-painted-over pieces. If you like other symbols of autism better, that's fine - I just wish I didn't have to feel like almost everyone with autism will hate me because I prefer the puzzle piece(s).
- I'm a horrible person for supporting Autism Speaks, even though I AM autistic. And for thinking that a lot of things Autism Speaks has done that people have issues with remind me a lot of how *I* used to not understand autism very well, so I feel like I'll be hated because of that and for having worded so many things badly over the years. And since a lot of those things were things Autism Speaks has said *in the past*, when autism wasn't well-understood in general, seeing people talking about that makes me feel like *I* can NEVER be forgiven for ANYTHING I do that is wrong or problematic, no matter how much time is passed. More on that: https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/323952.html
- I'm a horrible person for the fact that I thought I strictly *needed* there to be a cure for autism for so long, and while I now get that not everyone wants there to be one, I still feel like *I'd* be a lot happier in general if I weren't autistic. (Because I feel that if I weren't autistic, I wouldn't word things so poorly so often or make userpics that turn out to offend everyone, for starters...)
- I'm a horrible person if I prefer person-first language, and I'm a horrible person if I DON'T prefer person-first language, and I'm a horrible person if I don't care either way. (FWIW, I'm in the "don't care either way" category. More entries about my thoughts about that: https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/306411.html https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/325430.html)


When I wrote the text on this userpic ten years ago, I was expressing my frustration at how autism isn't very well understood, even by me, and how I wish it was understood better. (It DEFINITELY wasn't well understood for a lot of my lifetime!) In other words, I felt that autism IS a puzzle to those who don't understand it well (including well-meaning people, and I feel that well-meaning people don't need to be yelled at and called jerks just because they don't understand; they just need to be educated on the subject) - sometimes including autistic people themselves such as me. Similarly, I've always felt that I never know what to say or do to not offend people and not unintentionally make everyone hate me - social skills have always been a "puzzle" to me in that regard. And I felt that way even more back when I made the userpic.

Could I have worded the userpic better when I first made it? Well... no. Remember, a) I have autism, which in my case has always made finding the right words difficult for me; b) this was back when I was still fairly new to posting online in general, so I was still naïve enough to think that I could word it however I wanted and people would understand what I meant; c) this was also back before I knew that there was ANYONE who hates Autism Speaks, or ANYONE with autism who wouldn't want there to be a cure for it, etc. because my experience with autism back then was so limited.

Could I have worded the userpic better when I redrew it later that year? Probably not. I could have tried to if I'd known that 8-10 years later I would end up feeling like everyone will hate me for wording it the way I did, but since I didn't know that... I didn't. I just used the same wording again. And *even if* I'd known that I should reword it, there's no guarantee that the new version would actually have been better, for all of the same reasons that the first version turned out as poorly-worded as it did.

Could I make a new version of the userpic that is worded better NOW? Maybe. I've even considered it. But I don't want to.
First off, whenever I try to word things in a way that has no possibility of offending anyone, I always feel like I'm being forced to add dozens of disclaimers that make whatever I'm writing far too long to read, which all turns out to be for naught when I inevitably offend someone anyway.
Secondly, I now feel that this userpic is good at representing my personal struggle with autism because it contains symbols and wording that could be seen as problematic. What could be a better representation of my anxiety about being misunderstood and disliked for things I've made years ago when I was worse at wording than something I made years ago that I have anxiety about being misunderstood and disliked for? How can the rainbow/gold infinity symbol (or any other proposed autism symbol that I've never heard of until just today, and am therefore probably a bad person for not knowing about them) represent MY experience with autism in the same way?


I hope this makes sense - as usual, I had to write it quickly so I can get this posted so I can stop worrying about it sooner. So if I worded something wrong, it's because of that AND my being bad at wording in general.


Well, time to be unable to sleep at all for another week or two thanks to worrying about this. :(

And now, a glitch very similar to the one I freaked out about earlier is happening - I can't access any page on LJ that begins with www.livejournal.com now. So individual journals and profiles work (except certain stylesheets are missing so they look different), but not my inbox or things like that.

I'm very scared right now. I'm pretty sure LJ is going to go down forever at any moment. :O

...wait, it works now. But still, I'm getting scared now. :O

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'm two days behind in posting about this (I don't post about ANYTHING the day it happens anymore, apparently...) but happy 40th anniversary, Garfield! :)

I still remember back when Garfield's 25th anniversary was pretty recent. I was REALLY obsessed with Garfield in that era (2003-2004)... I can't believe that era was fifteen years ago. (Or that, interestingly enough, I'm going to be 25 in less than a month!)


Mini-rant time: I kinda don't like how there are soooo many people nowadays (especially authors of other comics I like) who think that Garfield is objectively never funny, or objectively less funny than it used to be, or what have you... because of them (and especially because of how, at least in 2013-2015 or so, Square Root of Minus Garfield steadily became less about what I liked about it - surreal, often mathematical mashups of Garfield strips - and more of a place for people to edit Garfield comics to insult fans of whatever they don't like, which is more often than not Garfield itself), I feel like I'm not allowed to like what I like. Not even the fact that I know there's plenty of Garfield fans in my LJ friends list keeps me from worrying about it. :( And yes, a big part of why I'm posting this entry is so hopefully I can finally get this off my chest after worrying about it sporadically for the past several years.

EDIT: And now that the YouTube video that made me worry about this the most recently and motivated me to post a mini-rant like this showed up in related videos a second time, might as well link to it in this entry.

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. :)

Super Mario Maker Crash Course Minus Yamamura is a comic dedicated to removing Yamamura from the Super Mario Maker Crash Course comic in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Ms. Mary O. Mashiko. It is a journey deep into the mind of a manual guide who has become her own worst critic, desperately trying to appear optimistic while secretly fighting a losing battle against anxiety, self-hatred, and fear of rejection in an isolated... video game manual?


So, uh... This is a little Garfield Minus Garfield-esque idea I thought of about two years ago, back when the Super Mario Maker Crash Course comics were new.

( brief history of this idea and the two places I was thinking about using it in eventually, but didn’t )

Anyway, after two years, my patience has finally run out... I wanted SO BADLY to show that removing Yamamura has about the same effect on Mary O. that removing Garfield has on Jon, I decided I'm not gonna save it for PrtSc Land or iToons after all - I'd just make it NOW and post it here, while there's still at least a chance that no one else has made something similar already.

Though I'm probably safe, because really, has ANYONE else ever been obsessed enough with Mary O. to make this? Does anyone else even know who she IS? :P


Original strip: Super Mario Maker Crash Course Episode 1

Super Mario Maker Crash Course Minus Yamamura: (NOTE: Due to the large image size, it may be broken in this entry, but it will not be if you click on it)





(And no, I'm not going to do this with the other episodes of the comic - it probably only works with the first one, and even then only because I cheated a little and added an extra line for Mary O. :) )