My current level of anxiety about the future... as a choose-your-own-adventure?
Page 1
You are Matt1993!
As you sit at your computer writing a LiveJournal/DreamWidth entry about some dumb choose-your-own-adventure thingy that is probably going to only make sense in your head, you think to yourself:
"Wow, this year has gone by fast. How is it almost May already? How is it 2019 already?! This means the discontinuation of Flash is only eight months away! (Or possibly twenty months away. But Murphy's law implies "in 2020" means the beginning of 2020 rather than the end of it...)"
Several times now, you have considered putting your long, slow, epic journey to fix all of your LJ/DW entries so that they show up the way you want them to on hold for a while, because there's so many Flash cartoons you've never watched but wanted to watch someday that you may never get to see if you wait too long. Right now, more than ever, you start to think that might be a good idea - excluding outages that lasted less than a day, it's been over a year since the last time you actually thought LJ might shut down or become so glitched as to be unusable.
But on the other hand, you feel like since you actually have the motivation to fix your entries, maybe you should go ahead and keep working on that first.
On the other other hand, you don't have that much motivation to do either right now, so you think you'd feel better if you just gave up on all of that for a while and spent all your free time on video games for now.
What do you do?
If you choose to watch all the Flash cartoons you've wanted to watch, turn to page 2.
If you choose to finish fixing your entries, turn to page 3.
If you're feeling lazy and just want to play some video games, turn to page 4.
Page 2
First, you rewatch the Flash versions of every Homestar Runner toon one last time, making sure to activate every easter egg there is because in a year or two you won't get to see them that way anymore! Then since you used to see people talking about Bonus Stage a lot on the Homestar Runner Wiki and Homestar Runner Wiki Forum, you finally watch it for the first time - awesome! You've been missing out on a lot! (I don't know WHAT you're missing out on, but you've definitely been missing out on it!) Then you watch more and more Flash cartoons you haven't seen before but always wanted to watch someday - Weebl & Bob! Taco-Man! With each additional web cartoon you watch, you feel somewhat more relieved knowing that you're getting this done BEFORE the death of Flash!
Then on December 31, 2020 when Flash is finally discontinued, you feel sad that (H*R notwithstanding) you have only gotten to see each of them ONLY once... but that feeling doesn't last long, because oh hey, someone made a Flash player emulator after all! You'd heard people talking about the idea of one but were still worried because you thought it might not be possible... well, I guess it is! Would you look at that! To celebrate, you decide to spend some time playing a lot of Flash games you haven't played in a while!
Once you're done revisiting all your favorite Flash games from the past, you realize you haven't posted to LiveJournal or DreamWidth in two years. You decide to log on to post an entry about how happy you are that there is a Flash player emulator...
LIVEJOURNAL IS GONE NOW. AND SO IS DREAMWIDTH.
Your friends on LJ/DW, having known since late 2020 that these sites would shut down while you were wasting your life watching Flash cartoons that haven't updated in years, have all imported their journals to a new website. Since you didn't import your journal, that means over a decade of your life... IS GONE. You wasted it. Distraught, you decide to pull up that Flash player emulator and rewatch some of your favorite web cartoons to distract yourself from this fact, but it doesn't help you feel any better.
GAME OVER
Page 3
Good idea! Those web cartoons can wait. Flash Player is clearly going to be around forever , but LiveJournal and DreamWidth might not! You may have not seen any evidence whatsoever that LJ or DW might shut down or become unusable in a while, but that doesn't mean it won't happen, right?
You fix all the entries you wrote in January 2017! February 2017! March 2017! Each time you fix one more month of entries, you make a whole post about that (knowing full well you will eventually have to make sure you don't need to fix that as well) as if that was the most important thing ever. April 2017! Hey, now you're up to the entries you wrote AFTER you joined DW, so there's not going to be as much you need to fix in these!
At this point not even the announcement that Flash is going to be discontinued earlier than expected (August 2019) can faze you - before you know it, you've fixed ALL of your entries! Now you know your DW friends can have exactly the same experience reading your journal that your LJ friends do!
Wait a minute. What was that about Flash being discontinued EARLIER than expected? In August 2019?! But now it's SEPTEMBER 2019!
At this point you no longer care what your entries look like - you feel more regret than ever before because you never got to see the web cartoons you'd wanted to watch. You feel like MAYBE, just MAYBE, if you had done SOMETHING different, it somehow would have led to Flash staying around long enough for you to finish watching all of those.
As a last resort, since you know some of those Flash cartoons have YouTube channels, you look for said channels... they're all gone now! Even Homestar Runner! Apparently in July 2019 YouTube, following in the footsteps of Photobucket and Tumblr, implemented a new terms of service that happened to, by pure coincidence, lead to the termination of the YouTube channels for ALL Flash cartoons you wanted to watch.
As a LAST last resort, you go to the Internet Wayback Machine to see if you can still see them that way... no such luck, because the Internet Wayback Machine has also shut down.
You wait a long time for there to be a Flash player emulator, but there never is one.
Why did you waste your life fixing entries that were so long ago that most of your LJ and DW friends aren't even going read them nowadays?
At least LJ and DW are still around, I guess. And they end up staying around for many years to come in this timeline (uh, I mean, the ONLY timeline there is), so all that time you spent fixing your entries was for nothing.
GAME OVER
Page 4
You decide - once again - that all this panicking about the future isn't really getting you anywhere; taking a break from it to play Super Smash Bros. Ultimate for a while sounds like a good plan!
You spend all of your free time playing it, and eventually have everything unlocked! Then since you never finished unlocking everything in the previous SSB game, you finish that next. Then you finish so many other games you've played and in many cases beaten but haven't 100% completed everything in... Super Mario Maker. Super Mario Odyssey. Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. Nintendo Land. Chip's Challenge. New Super Luigi U. Super Mario 3D World. Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker. You also finally get around to playing so many games that you've owned for a while but haven't played yet: 1-2-Switch, ARMS, Mario Party: The Top 100, Chip's Challenge 2, and so on.
But then eventually, you realize: "Wasn't I supposed to be updating broken links and stuff in my LJ and DW entries?"
You decide that that is what you should finally get around to doing, so you get on your computer to try it...
turns out both LJ and DW are GONE now. Apparently they both shut down in 2021.
Wait, 2021?! That means it's also too late to watch all those Flash cartoons!
And no, there is not an alternate universe where these things turned out okay, and if there was you wouldn't be able to go there anyway.
Why did you waste your life finishing games you haven't finished or played? You could've at least gotten your journal backed up onto a third website or watched all those web cartoons while you still could! Although either of those probably would have been a waste of your life also. Oh well.
GAME OVER
You are Matt1993!
As you sit at your computer writing a LiveJournal/DreamWidth entry about some dumb choose-your-own-adventure thingy that is probably going to only make sense in your head, you think to yourself:
"Wow, this year has gone by fast. How is it almost May already? How is it 2019 already?! This means the discontinuation of Flash is only eight months away! (Or possibly twenty months away. But Murphy's law implies "in 2020" means the beginning of 2020 rather than the end of it...)"
Several times now, you have considered putting your long, slow, epic journey to fix all of your LJ/DW entries so that they show up the way you want them to on hold for a while, because there's so many Flash cartoons you've never watched but wanted to watch someday that you may never get to see if you wait too long. Right now, more than ever, you start to think that might be a good idea - excluding outages that lasted less than a day, it's been over a year since the last time you actually thought LJ might shut down or become so glitched as to be unusable.
But on the other hand, you feel like since you actually have the motivation to fix your entries, maybe you should go ahead and keep working on that first.
On the other other hand, you don't have that much motivation to do either right now, so you think you'd feel better if you just gave up on all of that for a while and spent all your free time on video games for now.
What do you do?
If you choose to watch all the Flash cartoons you've wanted to watch, turn to page 2.
If you choose to finish fixing your entries, turn to page 3.
If you're feeling lazy and just want to play some video games, turn to page 4.
Page 2
First, you rewatch the Flash versions of every Homestar Runner toon one last time, making sure to activate every easter egg there is because in a year or two you won't get to see them that way anymore! Then since you used to see people talking about Bonus Stage a lot on the Homestar Runner Wiki and Homestar Runner Wiki Forum, you finally watch it for the first time - awesome! You've been missing out on a lot! (I don't know WHAT you're missing out on, but you've definitely been missing out on it!) Then you watch more and more Flash cartoons you haven't seen before but always wanted to watch someday - Weebl & Bob! Taco-Man! With each additional web cartoon you watch, you feel somewhat more relieved knowing that you're getting this done BEFORE the death of Flash!
Then on December 31, 2020 when Flash is finally discontinued, you feel sad that (H*R notwithstanding) you have only gotten to see each of them ONLY once... but that feeling doesn't last long, because oh hey, someone made a Flash player emulator after all! You'd heard people talking about the idea of one but were still worried because you thought it might not be possible... well, I guess it is! Would you look at that! To celebrate, you decide to spend some time playing a lot of Flash games you haven't played in a while!
Once you're done revisiting all your favorite Flash games from the past, you realize you haven't posted to LiveJournal or DreamWidth in two years. You decide to log on to post an entry about how happy you are that there is a Flash player emulator...
LIVEJOURNAL IS GONE NOW. AND SO IS DREAMWIDTH.
Your friends on LJ/DW, having known since late 2020 that these sites would shut down while you were wasting your life watching Flash cartoons that haven't updated in years, have all imported their journals to a new website. Since you didn't import your journal, that means over a decade of your life... IS GONE. You wasted it. Distraught, you decide to pull up that Flash player emulator and rewatch some of your favorite web cartoons to distract yourself from this fact, but it doesn't help you feel any better.
GAME OVER
Page 3
Good idea! Those web cartoons can wait. Flash Player is clearly going to be around forever , but LiveJournal and DreamWidth might not! You may have not seen any evidence whatsoever that LJ or DW might shut down or become unusable in a while, but that doesn't mean it won't happen, right?
You fix all the entries you wrote in January 2017! February 2017! March 2017! Each time you fix one more month of entries, you make a whole post about that (knowing full well you will eventually have to make sure you don't need to fix that as well) as if that was the most important thing ever. April 2017! Hey, now you're up to the entries you wrote AFTER you joined DW, so there's not going to be as much you need to fix in these!
At this point not even the announcement that Flash is going to be discontinued earlier than expected (August 2019) can faze you - before you know it, you've fixed ALL of your entries! Now you know your DW friends can have exactly the same experience reading your journal that your LJ friends do!
Wait a minute. What was that about Flash being discontinued EARLIER than expected? In August 2019?! But now it's SEPTEMBER 2019!
At this point you no longer care what your entries look like - you feel more regret than ever before because you never got to see the web cartoons you'd wanted to watch. You feel like MAYBE, just MAYBE, if you had done SOMETHING different, it somehow would have led to Flash staying around long enough for you to finish watching all of those.
As a last resort, since you know some of those Flash cartoons have YouTube channels, you look for said channels... they're all gone now! Even Homestar Runner! Apparently in July 2019 YouTube, following in the footsteps of Photobucket and Tumblr, implemented a new terms of service that happened to, by pure coincidence, lead to the termination of the YouTube channels for ALL Flash cartoons you wanted to watch.
As a LAST last resort, you go to the Internet Wayback Machine to see if you can still see them that way... no such luck, because the Internet Wayback Machine has also shut down.
You wait a long time for there to be a Flash player emulator, but there never is one.
Why did you waste your life fixing entries that were so long ago that most of your LJ and DW friends aren't even going read them nowadays?
At least LJ and DW are still around, I guess. And they end up staying around for many years to come in this timeline (uh, I mean, the ONLY timeline there is), so all that time you spent fixing your entries was for nothing.
GAME OVER
Page 4
You decide - once again - that all this panicking about the future isn't really getting you anywhere; taking a break from it to play Super Smash Bros. Ultimate for a while sounds like a good plan!
You spend all of your free time playing it, and eventually have everything unlocked! Then since you never finished unlocking everything in the previous SSB game, you finish that next. Then you finish so many other games you've played and in many cases beaten but haven't 100% completed everything in... Super Mario Maker. Super Mario Odyssey. Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. Nintendo Land. Chip's Challenge. New Super Luigi U. Super Mario 3D World. Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker. You also finally get around to playing so many games that you've owned for a while but haven't played yet: 1-2-Switch, ARMS, Mario Party: The Top 100, Chip's Challenge 2, and so on.
But then eventually, you realize: "Wasn't I supposed to be updating broken links and stuff in my LJ and DW entries?"
You decide that that is what you should finally get around to doing, so you get on your computer to try it...
turns out both LJ and DW are GONE now. Apparently they both shut down in 2021.
Wait, 2021?! That means it's also too late to watch all those Flash cartoons!
And no, there is not an alternate universe where these things turned out okay, and if there was you wouldn't be able to go there anyway.
Why did you waste your life finishing games you haven't finished or played? You could've at least gotten your journal backed up onto a third website or watched all those web cartoons while you still could! Although either of those probably would have been a waste of your life also. Oh well.
GAME OVER