The story of OTAKU PETROLHEADS LIFE (OPL) is a chequered one to talk about. What started as a casual writing hobby on Blogger would later become a showcase for the founder’s life passion and personal interest.
To begin with, it didn’t originally exist as OPL. The founder may have been a long-time Blogger user, but he only casually accessed it to read and comment on other Bloggers’ sites. Eventually, he decided to create his own Blogger site in 2014.
At the same time, he was having great fun playing SimBin’s GTR2 game and also developed an interest towards a Japanese pop culture involving automobiles called Itasha. To put it simply, it’s a culture involving the use of Japanese anime characters, mainly females, as car stickers. He decided to combine these two elements and came up with a blog site called GTR2 Itasha. It may sound very “imaginative”, but that was the new beginning. With the blog site online, he decided to create and showcase his personally made Itasha skin mods, which were also uploaded on the now-defunct NoGripRacing website.
Once he got familiar with the whole Blogger system, he decided to start writing about his interests. With cars being a big emphasis of his life, he began to write about auto shows such as the Geneva Motor Show and Detroit Motor Show. Just as he started doing so, he diversified the blog site by writing about topics that were unrelated to cars. The first was Japanese anime, where he would write about a quick glimpse of an upcoming show that sparked his interest. It was followed by cosplay events, with Kuantan Coswalk 2014 being the first to get covered (despite him already embraced the cosplay world two years earlier during his previous university’s Japanese Club trip to Comic Fiesta 2012), and then about technology and gadgets.
With such diverse topics to write about, GTR2 Itasha was no longer the relevant name to reflect the whole entity. In January 2015, the blog site was renamed to its current name and migrated to a brand new home in WordPress. Unfortunately, it was a short-lived migration as the college’s packed schedule prevented him from growing the blog site and continuing the web hosting subscription. In January 2019, it was back to the original home of Blogger before the remigration to WordPress in July 2022, where it remained home to this day.
We might have ended the story here, but the journey is far from over. There’s still a long way ahead.
Walk through the history of OTAKU PETROLHEADS LIFE on Wayback Machine.
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