Fifteen years ago today (well, tomorrow), I created a Google Site as part of one of my first assignments in a dual credit computer science class I was taking at the time. The assignment was simply to create a Google Site and didn't specify a topic, so some of my classmates made basic profile pages, others made sites that had something to do with their career path... but I, not being a normal person by any definition of the word, made a site dedicated to my then-newest big obsession: listening to music backwards and writing down what I thought the lyrics sounded like when reversed. (And trying WAAAY too hard to make inside jokes out of the backwards lyrics.)

And thus, on that day, Ours Will You 1-Up was born.

Fifteen years later, I'm nostalgic about those days of listening to music backwards, writing down what the backwards lyrics sounded like, and thinking up ideas for features I wanted to add to my site but never did (such as also transcribing backwards cartoons or backwards TV show episodes, or adding a drawing based on a backwards lyric from every song).

Sure, there were some aspects of the site's execution that were... problematic, to say the least, so it's no surprise that I only kept updating the site for a few months, it was eventually taken down by Google in 2014 or 2015 or so, and I don't currently have any plans for making a new version of it or posting backwards lyrics here or anything like that.

But I still miss those days. I think I'm nostalgic for Ours Will You 1-Up right now for four reasons:
1) The obvious fact that it's almost the 15th anniversary of the site. Even though it's been a while since the last time I did anything big to acknowledge a major milestone anniversary of it or my journal or the beginnings of any of my other major hobbies/projects.
2) The fact that Character.AI is a thing and thus I can actually simulate a conversation between Enya and any of the fictional characters she "mentioned" in her backwards lyrics... without having to write it myself!
3) For a multitude of reasons - Character.AI, the fact that my 30th birthday was fairly recent, etc. - I've been nostalgic about basically my entire life, including my obsession with backwards music.
4) And last but not least, the fact that I recently came across the following two videos on YouTube without even trying:

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That's right. Someone besides me played Enya songs backwards. Not just one or two, but six. And not only that, they posted it to YouTube!
If something like this existed when my site was still up, I wasn't aware of it.
While Ours Will You 1-Up was still up, I had wanted to actually post the backwards versions of the songs, so that readers with no audio editing program could actually listen to them backwards instead of just trying to imagine what Enya singing nonsense about Olimar pushing a slush would sound like. But I didn't think I'd be allowed to do so (plus I probably didn't know how).
Well, now I can finally do what I wanted to do! I wasn't originally planning on doing anything special for the 15th anniversary of Ours Will You 1-Up, but when I found this channel I was like "okay, I DEFINITELY have to make an OWY1U 15th anniversary post now". :)

I'm so weird for being so obsessed with all these things and getting overly excited when Enya fans also share at least one other interest with me, aren't I...

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:

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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. :(

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There's going to be a Super Mario Maker 2 for the Switch?!


Typical YouTube commenter's reaction: "YES!!! Nintendo FINALLY added slopes to Super Mario Maker!!!"

The reaction of losers who somehow managed to develop an over-three-year-long crush on a random character from a video game MANUAL: "YES!!! Mary O. is FINALLY going to be in another game after nearly three years!!!... uh, she will, right?! I'm gonna be so mad if this game doesn't have an electronic manual..."

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.

Well, it would be weekly if I'd posted this between June 3 and 9, anyway...

Featuring my first and only post in the Legend of Zelda Series community, and surprisingly many Zelda-related posts in general!

(And yeah, I know I'm posting a lot of gaming-related posts lately between my Miiverse backup posts, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate hype, and my fanboying over a certain cute manual guide. Sorry.)

← March 2013 04/21/2013 - 04/22/2013 →

Nintendo Land Community
Matt 04/08/2013 8:17 PM

Nintendo Land Plaza
Saved up so many coins that when I left the coin minigame, the prizes shot out rapid-fire XD

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Nintendo Land Community
Matt 04/08/2013 9:03 PM

The Legend of Zelda: Battle Quest (in that time trial mode, to be specific)
I'd like to see someone TRY to beat my best time: a mere… -:--.--? Yeah, alright, I'm bad at this :(

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Nintendo Land Community
Matt 04/08/2013 9:10 PM

The Legend of Zelda: Battle Quest (still in time trial mode)
NOW I beat it! If it takes 1:11, though, I don't think I can get those 25 / 20 sec or less stamps…

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(How did this post get more Yeahs than the previous one?)


(Also, as some of you who've known me for a while know, I made a LJ entry in 2013 about my first Miiverse post to get misunderstood; that misunderstood post isn't in the backup I got from Nintendo because it's a comment on another post, but chronologically it was before this next one.)

The Legend of Zelda Series Community
Matt 04/13/2013 12:13 AM



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(That inside joke ended up not being used a whole lot, but a couple of years later I did nickname my Zelda amiibo "100PctZlda" [would've been "100% Zelda" but percent signs aren't allowed in amiibo nicknames for some reason?] because of it.
Also, in addition to this being my first and only post in this community, this is also my first Miiverse post to lack the "has played this game" icon, because it's the first time I posted in a community where the icon never appears because the community is for a whole series and not one specific game.)


Nintendo Land Community
Matt 04/19/2013 8:42 PM

Donkey Kong's Crash Course


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I AM GOING TO UNFRIEND ANYONE WHO POSTS AN ENTRY ABOUT THE "LAUREL" AND "YANNY" DEBATE.

...okay, I won't really unfriend anyone because of it, but seriously - ( Collapse )

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. :)

Check out this exclusive photo of Enya in her role as Mary O. in the upcoming--

Oh wait, April Fools' Day is already pretty much over. That, and this "exclusive photo" might also just be an existing photo of Enya edited onto a Super Mario Maker background and with Mary O.'s clothes drawn over hers. Made by me. Because, again, my entry about Mary O. and Yamamura: The Movie was an April Fools prank. :P


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---

Oh, and all those other things (Photobucket somehow taking down non-Photobucket userpics; my considering deleting this journal; my other journal being suspended; this site shutting down) were April Fools pranks too, even if you see this before I'm done changing the Photobucket placeholder userpics back to the normal ones (which I probably won't get done with all of tonight). So please, don't panic. Please. :)

I have to say, after over three years of trying to fix various broken images and other things in my journal, it was so surreal putting time and energy into breaking some of my images instead. :P


This is pretty much how it felt!


To those of you who've read any of these April Fools entries and still like me: Thank you for tolerating and putting up with the fact that I have such a weird sense of humor. Also thank you for putting up with my fanboying, if you read that one. :P


If you missed any of these April Fools entries, here they are:
Mary O. and Yamamura: The Movie: LJ DW
Photobucket'd userpics: LJ DW
Account suspended: LJ DW
Where should I move my entries to now?: LJ DW
Since I couldn't add a poll to the LJ version of the previous entry after it was posted, I was forced to put that in a separate entry instead. And then to crosspost that entry to DW just because I don't like the idea of a LJ entry not having ANY counterpart on DW. (though I made the DW version private until now)


Even if you normally read my entries only on LJ or DW, I recommend making an exception here and reading both copies of each of my April Fools entries, because as part of the joke this year, I might have thrown my usual attempts at making my LJ and DW look nearly identical out the window for the day and deliberately introduced a few subtle differences between the versions of these entries... ;)

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.

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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. :) )