matt1993, posts by tag: ages - LiveJournal

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

WHY IS MY MODEM NOT WORKING?!?!??!?!??!

OF ALL THE DAYS MY MODEM COULD QUIT WORKING, IT HAD TO STOP WORKING ON MY BIRTHDAY?!?!?!?

AND WHY IS IT STILL NOT WORKING TWO DAYS LATER?!?!??!!

I've kinda been able to use the Internet with my phone as a hotspot, but WHY DOES MY LAPTOP RANDOMLY REFUSE TO DETECT MY PHONE'S SIGNAL FOR NO APPARENT REASON?!?!?!?!


Yeah, I'm declaring myself to still be 27. My birthday this year DOES NOT count as a birthday.

http://www.museumofconceptualart.c…accomplished/

At age 27:

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. dropped out from his job at General Electric to become a full-time writer.

Henry David Thoreau went off for two years to live alone in a cabin at Walden Pond.

Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space.

Memphis millionaire Frederic W. Smith, whose father built the Greyhound bus system, founded Federal Express.

Scottish botanist David Douglas discovered the Douglas fir.

Ernest Hemingway published his first novel, The Sun Also Rises.

Boston dentist William Morton pioneered modern anaesthesiology after learning that inhalation of ether will cause a loss of consciousness.

Jimi Hendrix choked to death on his own vomit after ingesting wine and sleeping pills.

Janis Joplin died of an overdose of whiskey and heroin.

Conceptual artist Piero Manzoni crapped in 90 small cans which were then factory sealed and offered for sale at the price of gold.

Bob K., first degree murder, in prison for life with no chance of parole.

Jessica Schram trolled MySpace for seven straight hours during work.

Those of you who have known me for only three years or less may think a lot of my recent entries and comments were dumb and irrational and badly-worded and didn't make a lot of sense.

Well, you're not wrong. Several of my recent entries were dumb and irrational and badly-worded and didn't make a lot of sense. Not just coronavirus-related ones, either.

But (with a few exceptions) they're nothing compared to some of the entries newer readers may have missed.


So I suggest we try to put this in perspective. If you've only been reading my journal since 2017 or later, I recommend that you do the following:

1) Pick a random date between February 2009 (or August 2007, if you're REALLY daring!) and the day I became friends with you on LJ or DW.
2) Go to http://matt1993.livejournal.com/YY…MM/DD or http://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/YYY…DD for that day.
3) Marvel at just how STUPID those entries and my comments on them were! (Unless it turns out there weren't any for that day. Or you're lucky enough to find a good entry.) But do try to keep in mind what my age was at the time (I was born in 1993).
4) Optional: Let me know if you come across any that have broken links or broken images or something that I haven't fixed.
5) Repeat steps 1-4 until you're like "Maybe Matt's recent entries aren't that bad after all, for the most part..."

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.c…

(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!

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?

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It's no secret that I've fallen really far behind on my plan to backup some of my Miiverse posts on LJ/DW once a week. So I have an idea of how to get on a regular schedule that I'll have more motivation to stick to: start posting them once every two weeks instead of one, and act as if this had been my schedule all along starting from my first Miiverse backup entry - meaning the second Miiverse backup entry is now retroactively considered to be posted a week early (being one week after the first rather than two), the third one is retroactively considered to be two weeks early (being two weeks after the first instead of four), and so on.

As I've posted 23 Miiverse backup entries so far, that means the next one would get posted 23×2=46 weeks after the first, which would be the week of... December 12? So this means I'm now "still" caught up! :)

Do me a favor. The next time I consider doing some sort of regular feature on LJ or DW that requires me to upload new images or post entries with images in them once a week, please remind me about this and try to convince me to bring it down to once every two weeks...

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Finally, now that the last Super Smash Bros. Direct is out, I'll give you another taste of just how weird it is in the mind of Matt1993:

- When I first saw a screenshot of Kirby's Peach copy ability in Super Smash Bros. Melee (when I was 9), I somehow didn't realize that was Peach's crown - my mind jumped to the conclusion that King Bob-omb from Super Mario 64 was playable and either that was his pink alternate costume or Kirby's King Bob-omb copy ability.
- I made up an entire moveset for Mary O. & Yamamura from Super Mario Maker and posted it earlier this year. (And I've brought up the idea even earlier than that - see the music tag on that April Fools entry.)
- And somehow, despite all of that, I still at no point expected a Piranha Plant to be a playable character.

Also, why is it that so many Super Smash Bros. fans hate each other over who's playable or different opinions about who they want to playable?

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*Why couldn't this song have existed when MY world came to an end? It would have been so appropriate for that!

There's a bunch of things I've been meaning to post about, but I'm not in the mood to write those posts just yet. So I'll make this list so I don't forget:

- Post about the rest of my birthday presents and the things that happened in my trip to Arizona that I forgot to mention before
- Post the annual Museum of Accomplishments entry
- Catch up on those "weekly" Miiverse backup entries
- Some videos that I somehow haven't gotten around to posting to LJ in the, like, nine years it's been since I first discovered them

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.

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.

The tenth anniversary of my LiveJournal is on August 19!!!


To celebrate, August 2017 is Matt1993 Nostalgia Month! (Okay, so that would also be an accurate description of basically any month from October 2015 to July 2017... but for August 2017, it's an even MORE accurate description!)

When I joined LJ nearly ten years ago, I never thought I'd be still on it for this long - especially given how I kept going on hiatuses from it until February 2009. I also never thought so many things would have changed since then, or that I'd be posting about so many new things since then.

I keep wondering what basically everything I've posted to LJ in 2009-2017 would look like to my 14-year-old or 15-year-old self (i.e. from the era when I wasn't that active on LJ and didn't think I ever would be).


Well, now that question will be sort of answered, because:

1. I'm changing my journal style back to Blue Gray (which is what I think I was using at first and had left as for... I'm not even sure how long; probably until early 2009 but MAYBE earlier) for a month, then will change it to Pale Yellows again at the end of the month. Though I'm leaving the journal title and subtitle as is because I don't remember what those were back in 2007 - and I decided that if I'm keeping those as is, I'll also leave in other anachronistic references such as the comment text being "# Doom 2 bad guys will come out of my ears"/"Rob Morrow to you!" :)

2. As those of you who've known me since 2009 know, five of my oldest userpics used to look different until I updated them late that year (and I don't think I had any userpics at all before 2009). Well, I'm temporarily changing those five userpics back to what they looked like in 2009!

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3. And why stop there? If my newer userpics had also existed prior to November 2009 or so, some of them likely would've looked different back then, too - so I've taken what I call the "Super Mario Maker approach" because I'm a dork and retroactively created "older" versions of eleven more userpics, and am temporarily changing them "back" to these versions for the month!

What would my journal and some of my comments have looked like if...
- that brief era when I played D&D had been at least a few months earlier
- I'd started watching The X-Files before 2010
- I'd had my first /crazymegavideo/ dream before 2010
- the Forbidden Comment Threads had happened at least a couple of years earlier, resulting in 2009 being during the four years or so of depression and angst they caused me
- and so on
...and therefore some of my userpics about these had been made when I was 15 instead of 16-22?

Let's find out!!

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It was fun using my 2008-2009 drawing/spriting styles once again in 2016-2017! Even if the old-style versions of the 7:97 and /crazymegavideo/ userpics don't sync up as well with the regular versions as I thought they would. :)

4. And, as if making ancient in-jokes look even more ancient wasn't anachronistic enough already, I'm even applying the same temporary changes to my DreamWidth account! This includes the same userpic changes, and... okay, not the SAME layout changes, because LJ and DW have different default layouts. Still, I figure if DreamWidth had existed in 2007 and I'd had an account on it back then, I probably would've used its default layout for nearly two years like I did on LJ, so I'm temporarily using that layout (Neutral Good) for a month. :)


(Before I actually make any of these changes, though, I'm going to make sure both the LJ and DW versions of this entry look okay - so my journals may or may not still be yellow when you see this.)


I've got some more ideas for celebratory posts as well, so stay tuned! :D

(For those of you new here: every year since I discovered http://www.museumofconceptualart.c… when I was 15, I've posted what other people accomplished when they were my age. Usually, this is a birthday post, but sometimes I forget until a little later. One time I even forgot about it until my next birthday!)

← Age 23 Age 25 →

At age 24:

Nelly Bly made a solo trip around the world in less than 80 days for the New York World, beating Phileas Fogg's fictional record.

Radioastronomy grad student Jocelyn Bell Burnell observed an unknown signal from outer space; this resulted in the discovery of pulsars.

John Couch Adams became the first person to predict the position of a planetary mass beyond Uranus.

Johannes Kepler defended the Copernican theory and described the structure of the solar system.

Entrepreneur Ted Turner took over his father's billboard advertising business. He later launched CNN.

Tracy Chapman released her first album, winning three Grammies.

Scottish physician Mungo Park became the first European to reach the West African interior.

Edgar Allen Poe won a $50 prize for the story "MS. Found in a Bottle."

Noah Webster published a spelling book.

Isaac Pitman devised the first scientific shorthand system.

Security guard Frank Wills alerted D.C. police to the Watergate break-ins.

Rainey Fellows donated a kidney to her (now ex-) boyfriend. They aren't together now, but he's doing very well. They're still friends.

Helene got a high score of 170440 in the popular online game Robot Unicorn Attack.

Tasha looked into her five-year-old son's eyes and decided to leave her abusive husband. Then she beat the odds and didn't go back even once.

David Hosei started his ninth business, eFamily.