The story of OTAKU PETROLHEADS LIFE (OPL, for the sake of easy reading) is quite a checkered one. What started out in life as a casual hobby for writing skill enhancement now becomes a serious hobby for my life passion and personal interest.
To begin with, my first Blogger site wasn't even called OPL. I may have been a long-time Blogger user, but I only access Blogger just to read and comment at other Bloggers' blog site. Eventually, I decided to have a go at creating my own blog site in 2013. At the same time, I was having some seriously good fun playing SimBin's GTR2 and also have developed an interest towards a Japanese pop culture involving automobiles called Itasha. Put it simply, it is a culture that involves the use of Japanese anime characters, mainly female, as a car sticker. You can definitely this video, courtesy of Danny Choo from Japan Culture, to get an understanding of it. Nevertheless, I decided to combine these two elements together and came up with a blog site called 'GTR2 Itasha'. It may sound very "imaginative", but that was genesis. With that website online, I decided to showcase my personally-made Itasha skin mods which I also upload on the now-defunct NoGripRacing website.
Once I got familiar with the whole system, I decided to take one step further by writing other topics of personal interest. Since cars are the whole emphasis of the blog site, I began to write about auto shows such as the Geneva Motor Show and Detroit Motor Show. But then, I further diversify the topic by writing topics that are completely not related to cars. The first was being Japanese anime, where I would write about a quick glimpse of an upcoming Japanese anime title that sparked my interest. As if that wasn't enough, enter another Japanese pop culture called Cosplay. It wasn't until March 2014 during Kuantan Coswalk 2014 where I finally wrote about it, even though I first started cosplaying back in December 2013 during Comic Fiesta 2013 while being a part of the event committee as a volunteer. Another favoured topic is technology, where I would write about anything related to the world of personal computing.
With such a variety of topic written, I decided that the name 'GTR2 Itasha' was no longer relevant. And so in 2015, I decided to rename the blog site to what is now known as OPL. I can just end the story here, but being a well-known website about cars, Japanese pop culture, and technology in the next five years time? That is definitely my long-term vision for this blog site. Time to take things seriously, wish me luck for it.
