As it turns out, life doesn’t stop, and it certainly doesn’t wait for your ultraniche microblog to catch up.
I had a solid run of weekly posts since announcing my commitment back in March, and I hope you all loved the more disciplined posting structure as much as I enjoyed getting to share a lot more of what I got up to behind the scenes. While it has been quiet on my end for the past few weeks, I’m happy to say that the hiatus is over— a perfect storm of finals season, travel, onboarding at a new job, and getting started on my Masters degree has pulled me away from Racing Couture, but, for as long as I can manage, we’re back to weekly posts this Summer! There’s a lot I’m looking to share with you all over the next few months, and even as I write this it’s under the time constraint of needing to head out to a popup in Pomona with GetJapan before getting on track with Garagespeed in Apple Valley tomorrow.
Building on that, I haven’t been completely away from cars over the last few weeks— while I was back home in Boston, I had the chance to go to a morning meet hosted by Revival Motoring where I shivered from cold for the first time since moving to California, a 2 day drift event run by Lock City where I really thought I was going to watch good-friend Jason lose his factory-manual Lexus IS to the age-old turning left on a straight into the barrier move (hi Jason! nice save), got some track time in Paul’s factory-automatic GS300 drift car he built while waiting for his S14 to get finished, and learned what true fame was, sitting on a stoop after a Boba run with some Quincy car homies who were getting hassled by the paps.
The other big thing I was really happy with from my stint back East was Vertical Vlog 01 going live. I’ve been nudging more and more into longer videos recently, both for Racing Couture and with personal projects— I wanted to give long form vertical a try before I finally let myself admit that I’ve always wanted to make YouTube videos (filmed in the proper orientation). I may have to get over the connotation of YouTuber soon though— Instagram is about the worst platform, maybe save for TikTok, to share real, full length video. There’s so much Communications theory I could use to explain why, but in short, nobody wants to spend 10 minutes looking at one thing on an app where they spend an average of 3 seconds on everything else, especially not when its been compressed to death. Even with the most ideal export settings, Instagram simply is not the place for big video files, and so to be honorable to the enormous, 4K60 RAW that now lives on my computer despite the 480p you saw on your feeds, I wanted to share it again here, so that way the dedicated few who read Test Fit can understand exactly how much love and effort I put into the project.
It’s by far my favorite video I’ve ever made, and its, by leaps and bounds, the worst engagement graph I’ve ever seen on Instagram. WordPress is not working well with the video size either, evidently, and so while it may not be the most elegant way to view it, please copy and paste this link into a new tab to watch it in 4k!
https://videos.files.wordpress.com/7IKMVkSn/compressed-lcd-may.mp4
Lastly, enjoy a few photos I grabbed while I was back home— as always, I wish I took more, but I’m happy to have the memories in-between these snaps as much as I am thankful for what turned out.
And just like that, we’re back! I can’t wait to share this Summer with you all, and hopefully I’ll be doing that a little more consistently than I have been over the last month. Thank you all for reading, and I’ll be back next week with a recap of what’s setting up to be a hectic weekend of good times with better people. Keep doing cool shit in cars— I’ll see you all back out there soon. ///RC
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