G'night Oppo

"Blondude" (Blondude) 11/14/2020 at 23:00 • Filed to: Oppositelock, Goodnight Oppo

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My first post on Oppo, my first Kinja post, my last G’night Oppo post, and now this too

I’m not sure where this post is going to go or if it’s gonna make any sense, but I feel like I have to write something. Fair warning, this is totally stream of consciousness and it’s definitely going to be the longest and most personal post I’ve ever made here.

Where to start? I first discovered Jalopnik in early 2012. In fact it was !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! of all things that I clicked on. The old layout had that sidebar with other stories from the day and I ended up binging a ton of posts all night. I discovered Oppo just a few days later. Admittedly (and embarrassingly) it was through a COTD post where I saw $kay post her usual comment and though “who the hell is this?” and clicked through to her profile. I was greeted by a ton of posts with #oppositelock at the end of them and curiously clicked though. 8 years later I still haven’t left.

I lurked for a while before creating an account myself. I watched silently from the sidelines as the whole Gawker universe shifted from the 5.0 to 6.0 commenting system, and the ensuing mass exodus from this new community I loved. It was during that period of watching the seemingly few remaining members that I figured I had to join up soon. I actually remember seeing !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and that’s what made me decide I absolutely had to join, I just had to build up the courage first. I didn’t even have a driver’s license at this point and for some reason that fact kept making me second-guess myself. In early December for some reason or another I finally just said fuck it and created an account. !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! .

Since then This place has been like a second home to me. I was in high school when I joined and honestly I didn’t really have any close friends back then. I’d spend all day in class as a social outcast, but when I finally got home and hopped on Oppo I felt like I really belonged. I’d finally found my people. One’s who were just as weird and nerdy about cars as me and one’s who didn’t judge or make me feel bad about myself.

This takes me to a very specific, personal memory I have of this place. Try as I might I can’t find the link to it (the original user may have deleted it), but someone made a very personal late-night post sometime in late 2013 and I’ll never forget the conversation I had with some of you. It was around this time that I had started to suspect there was something different about me, not just that I was awkward or whatever, but that somewhere in my brain things were wired differently. I had a suspicion that I was on the autism spectrum, and that I’d even been tested for it when I was younger, but there was no way I was comfortable with talking to my parents about it. This night someone here was having a similar personal crisis and turned to you guys for support. I jumped in the comments to join and what resulted was a group therapy session that started the transition to where I am today. I learned that some other opponauts were on the spectrum too, and learned a lot about how coping mechanisms and ways to help feel “normal” from them. It was from that point that I really delved into doing research into it and trying out different techniques to maybe just feel a little less out of place in the world. It wasn’t until a few years later in college that a friend talked me into seeing a therapist for my then-terrible mental health, but once I was there I started talking to her about these suspicions and she helped me work through them. That summer I finally confronted my parents about it and it turns out my intuition was right. When I was in 6th grade my parents had me tested for autism and I was diagnosed with PDD-NOS. They never told me because I guess they didn’t think the diagnosis was correct and/or just didn’t want to face that reality. I’ve since forgiven my parents for it and I’ve gotten a lot better in the last few years. I’ve accepted who I am and through tons of practice I can actually hold a conversation in person and not stumble over my words or run out of things to say. I’m not embarrassed of who I am and all of this was kickstarted by one night sitting on my laptop at 4am talking with you guys.

I guess I should talk about that thing everyone knows me for here as well. It was just a thing I saw people do from time to time here when it came time to log off at the end of the day. I thought it was a really sweet thing to do, so I started doing it from time to time as well. I made some goodnight posts in the pre-Kinja days but it wasn’t until the night after our change to Kinja that I made what I consider !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . For the next while I was on Oppo (what felt like) constantly. I had a ton of free time back then and the whole Kinja changeover was a big deal, so I was spending all of my time familiarizing myself with this new environment and discussing it with the rest of Oppo. As a result I found myself making those goodnight posts more frequently. It only took about 2 weeks for it to become routine. I’m very much a creature of habit, so once I started making G’night Oppo posts every night it just became part of my daily schedule. At the time I was waking up for high school at 6am, so as I result I would log off Oppo at 10pm (central) so I could get some semblance of rest. Originally my posts were made when I actually signed off for the night, but sometimes it would be hard to make a post just before bed or I would stay up until like 4am (because teenager), so I started making my posts earlier in the day and just scheduling them for 10pm.

The images I included in the posts came from a variety of places. For a while before this I has a bit of a hoarding habit and so every time someone posted a car photo here I would save it. It was this stockpile that I originally pulled from for all my posts. I still have the folder on my hard drive and it’s about 6,000 images I saved over the course of something like 2 years. I didn’t just pick any image though, I had a couple rules for what was acceptable to use. It had to be at least somewhat wallpaper size, which really just meant it couldn’t be less than 1024px on any side, but preferably much larger than that. I also didn’t want to post stuff people had already seen, so that meant no press photos, no photos from the fp (2013 24 Hours of Le Mans mega gallery stuff), and no photos from major sites (no Speedhunters or StanceWorks watermarks). With this in mind I would literally just scroll down randomly in that folder and pick a random image. If it met my criteria I’d use it, if it didn’t I’d pick something else until I found one that did. This worked well for the first couple of years, but it got progressively harder and harder to find content that met my rules and wasn’t something I’d already used. At some point I discovered !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . I’m not sure how as I didn’t even use Reddit at the time, but that became my primary image source once my personal stash ran dry.

I kept this up daily for years. I’d usually schedule a post shortly after I got home from school and if I knew there would be a period of time where I wouldn’t be able to schedule a post for the day (travel, etc.) I would schedule multiple posts in advance for the number of days I’d be away. I started college in the fall of 2015 and with that I thought that I’d be too busy to be able to continue, so I made a little mention in one of my posts at the time that I might not be able to continue doing this in the near future. Well it turns out I had more free time in college than I thought. It was easy enough to keep up with it my freshman year as I didn’t really have much of a social life still. Just class, homework, Oppo every day. By my sophomore year I actually had a tight-knit group of friends and it was at this point it became harder to keep up with my nightly posts. I managed for a while (though sometimes they posted a little late), but by my junior year I knew I had to find a way to wrap things up. That February it would be the 5th anniversary of my first G’night Oppo post, so I decided that would be a good stopping point. I realized I hadn’t be doing it nightly for the first couple weeks, so I figured !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and then keep it up until I reached !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! .

The outpouring of support from you guys was far more than I ever expected. I didn’t realize how many people looked forward to those posts every night. Up until that point I thought that if anyone even paid attention they just thought I was some cringey weirdo with too much time on their hands (and they wouldn’t be completely wrong). That night I spent hours refreshing the page and reading every single comment anyone made. I was going through a lot in my life at the time and I had just recently started seeing a therapist for it and this sudden, unexpected wave of support was what finally pushed me over the edge. After bottling up my emotions and keeping everything to myself, reading the comments from you guys made me cry for the first time since I was a child. It probably seems weird that some randos on the internet are what made me reach that milestone in my healing process, but it really is true and I don’t know how else to show how much this place has meant to me over the years. I’m doing a lot better now though. I’m actually happy for the first time in a long time and, yeah, things get shitty sometimes, but I’m able to get through them and keep going and I wouldn’t have gotten this far if it wasn’t for Oppo having my back for all these years.

So thank you. This isn’t the end of Oppo, but it is the end of this Oppo and with it all of the craigslist finds, build updates, shitposts, and life stories that I read through so eagerly over the years. I’ll still be around on DriveTribe or The Hyphen or where ever we finally settle. We have a whole world of opportunities ahead of us and maybe this is just the start of something even bigger. Hell, maybe I’ll start doing G’night Oppo again for old times’ sake. And if any of you are in the Denver area and see a gray Land Cruiser with an Oppo sticker feel free to say hi!

Tohru > Blondude 11/14/2020 at 23:11

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I remember the 6.0 switchover.