The back half of '22 got a bit crazy for me with a busy new job and some health issues so I haven't prioritized hyphen updates or technical work to it like I wanted to. I'm drawing some new boundaries with work and reprioritizing things for '23 so I hope that all gets better this year.

At any rate here's a financial update for the back half of 2022!

Total numbers from June through December 2022

Recurring Donations
$1,253.71 from an average of 26 users/month

One time Donations
$1251.73 from 29 total users

Merch
$371.56 from t-shirts, hats and shit (Thanks @derp!)
$125.75 from stickers and keychains (Thanks @KITT222!)

Costs
AWS: $2,208.92
Email: $42
Domain Renewal: $24

Resulting in a net positive of $727.83 over the last 7 months of the year.

Hosting costs are trending upward with both our storage needs increasing and increased bandwidth/traffic. In June it was ~$300/month and in December is was ~$325/month.

I'm in process of moving the dev site from AWS to my garage which will lower our hosting costs a small amount.

Donations have stayed relatively consistent with donations up and down from month to month but averaging a bit over costs. We've got a bit more than 18 months running costs in the bank which leaves us in a great place financially and a bit of room to do things with it too.

As always if you want to buy some sweet oppo kit and support the site head over to oppomerch.com or if you'd rather give directly through PayPal do that here.

Thanks everybody for keeping OPPO awesome - it's still hard to believe that the site's a little over 2 years old and going strong! The generosity of the community continues to blow me away.

NEW JOB TIME!!!!

For the last 18 months I've been working for Company A that has been subcontracting me full-time to Company B. Company B is a giant tech company out here. The pay is good at my current job but the benefits are lousy: terrible health insurance, poor 401k match, terrible PTO and so on. The job itself is interesting but I only get to see a small part of the system as a sub and influence it even less.

Right about 6 weeks ago a director of a different department at Company B reached out and asked if I'd be interested in a full time role at Company B as the Technical Lead of their Physical Security Systems Administration team. I talked it over with the Boss (as we'd been contemplating a move to Germany in the next year) and decided to put my hat in the ring. It's an opportunity that was just too good to pass up.

This was followed with about 10 interviews over several weeks which is always a stressful as hell process then the recruiter pushing back a decision on it a couple weeks which stressed me the hell out.

Then officially today, I've gotten and signed the offer!!!!!!!

The details of the job are likely boring as hell for most of you so I won't go into them but I am excited as hell!!!

I am taking a week off between leaving my current role and starting a new one so I'll take a couple overnight adventures to decompress before starting. This does mean I'm now a maybe for @CarsOfFortLangley's PNW meet as I'll be in the new role barely a month by then.

To also make it a car related celebration here's a plumbed up analog oil gauge that says the ranger's engine isn't about to explode!

So folks, a very sad day has come. The end of DriveTribe. They announced today that the site will be shutting down at the end of the month.

DriveTribe was a pretty cool place for automotive enthusiasts of all stripes to get together and interact. They were also really supportive of this community in particular. I talked with their CEO when G/O was shutting us down and while he wanted us to have a presence on his site he also thought it was important for a unique community to have it's own place like the hyphen and he even kicked us some cashola to cover costs. I am truly saddened that another enthusiast platform has been killed by facebook and a lack of ad revenue, the world is a shittier place because of this!

So today I call out to all our members that have spent time on DriveTribe to pop back over there and invite the communities that you've been a part of to join us here. Everybody is welcome and with 14 months and going strong here, I can't promise we'll be around forever but we're not going away anytime soon.

If you're new to Oppo from DriveTribe, welcome! We're glad to have you, say hi, introduce yourself. Oppo is a pretty special place, enjoy it. You'll find content on overlanding, aircraft history, restoration, diecast modification and so many other things it'll keep you entertained. If you're new pop over to Best of Oppo and take a look at some of our users post we like to highlight.

A housekeeping note, we're entirely user-supported through merch and donations so we run no ads. We like it this way and plan to keep it for the foreseeable future. The site is also built and maintained by users so we're a truly independent site, exempt from the whims of large media corporations.

If you're the owner/spokesman of a large community that wants your own sub-forum here with it's own mods and rules, let me know and I'm happy to oblige.

There is really only one main rule here, Don't be a dick.

PS - our poll engine sucks but we don't usually use them as prevalently as they were pushed on DriveTribe.

A CAR HAS BEEN BOUGHT!

Last night I bought a 19 Tiguan SE.

The options are just about perfect on it for me. No sunroof, radar cruise, third row or lane keep. Has android auto, AWD, is a real color and blind spot monitoring. The inside is black leather which isn't awesome but the lack of a sunroof will help and there's already some tint on it.

Yesterday I (and especially my wife) was getting fed up with the vehicle search and while browsing alltrack listings (and being disappointed) a decent priced tiguan was spotted. A quick look at specs showed me that a tiguan is only a tiny bit bigger than an alltrack while having the same gas mileage and cargo space and has slightly more power. It is objectively uglier than an alltrack but a fine looking crossover and should fit my needs and desires on a vehicle right now quite well and cost me $5-10k less than a comparably equipped and mileage alltrack, tourx or volvo. My thinking is very similar to @HammerheadFistpunch and his earlier post talking about this exact thing and while I'd rather have a hatchback or wagon those options are shrinking fast and this fits my needs just about perfectly now.

So I went for a test drive yesterday evening and quite liked it. The car felt a lot like my MK6 TDI sportwagen (which I loved) and I brought it by the house and the missus liked it too so I went back. Relatively little runaround at the dealer but it took forever (as it always does).

Damn fingerprints

The price was decent (for this fucking market) and the warranty sweet. VW stacks the factory warranty and the CPO warranty so I've got 3 years and change (and nearly 60k miles) plus a year and 12k miles CPO warranty that starts when the factory warranty ends.

The Fleet! (well most of it)

For now there are no other changes planned for the fleet. This takes the ranger out of forced daily driver duties. I'll use it around town and slowly figure out what I need to do next on it. It may get tiring and be rotated out for another fun project but we'll see.

At the moment my wife drives more than me and the Tiguan gets more than 50% better gas mileage than the GX so she's already laid claim to the VW for now. This does give me access to the GX for wilderness explorations, it'll accompany me on some off road relaxation next week and to the PNW oppomeet in June if I can make it.

My wife is incredibly happy with me being done car shopping and I'm sure you all are too.

Just a little over a year ago the kinjapocalypse finally came to be. While we kept faithfully visiting the G/O sites, engaging and generating ad revenue the decision was made to ax all user communities.

There was a good deal of panic and grief in those days as there was no clear place for us to go to. It seemed the true end was actually here. Many life rafts popped up, some with more promise than others but none really seemed to speak to the whole community. DriveTribe was very close with an engaged and supportive ownership group but the mobile interface was very lacking, ads were heavy and it just didn't feel like home to a good chunk of the community.

While so many of us were dealing with the stress and upheaval of a global pandemic, a recent election and so much more the last thing we needed was the death of our community. I was in the middle of a cross-country move at the time having just started a job in California and living alone in a studio hotel room while looking for permanent housing so my wife could join me.

My social support groups were all gone as I was living in an entirely new place and the prospect of losing Oppo too was a bridge too far and after talking to a bunch of folks on both the Discord and Kinja I decided to start doing research and tinkering around with options for a new oppo. I'd also been drinking, which probably helped tell the 'this is too big a problem to solve' part of my brain to shut the hell up.

I go into a bit more detail around the actual creation in a post I made on our two month birthday. I still have a hard time believing that the community has managed to survive largely intact. We all have stories and memories of communities long gone that were special to us. There was a very real risk that Oppo would suffer the same fate of turning into solely a FB group.

There was definitely something truly special in oppo and it is definitely still here. That magic is what allowed us to survive, without it we'd be gone I'm sure. This is a place that so many of us have come to for advice, entertainment, friendship, support and camaraderie. One year in our new home is not only surviving but I'd say thriving. We're serving up roughly 800k page views a month with an engaged and growing user-base. Excellent content gets created faster than I can keep track of it and I'm constantly surprised the knowledge and experience we have in our little corner of the internet. While we'll never be huge, new and old members show up and introduce themselves regularly and our substantial lurker community keeps this place humming along nicely. I'd for sure like to see some more new folks so tell your friends, but we're still healthy.

So a year later we have a pretty well functioning community that's self funded with no ads and is proving itself to be quite sustainable in the long term. I don't see us going away anytime soon. Myself and the @Curators have plans to keep growing the site as well as better highlight the Best of Oppo with dreams of turning it into a destination of sorts. We're still all volunteer run so work and life having the demands they do slow these things down but we'll get there.

I couldn't have done any of this alone and just want to thank everyone that both helped in the early days and since. Feedback and engagement is essential and we couldn't do any of this without all of you.

This got more sentimental than I intended for it to, but so be it. It's late and I'm waxing poetically on this a bit as I think back to our humble beginnings.

As always if you have any suggestions, feedback, thoughts or questions feel free to reach out to me directly either on chat here or email at oppo@opposite-lock.com.

It's been far too long since I've posted a traffic update but here goes.

edit for @Just-Jeepin
Times on all graphs are Pacific.

First the snapshot of our internal forum metrics for the last 24 hours

This looks pretty typical for us day to day.

Here is the overview from the last 6 months

Note that big-assed spike from when drivetribe died. It has returned both a sustained bump in registered user activity and guest activity (these are folks with or without a login). It's tapered a bit but we're still steadily above where we were before it.

Thanks for hanging out here and making us batter. As of this point you're now full Opponauts, no longer DriveTribe refugees!

More metrics from the internal stats engine.

Here's a breakdown of new topic creation over the last 24 hours.

Same over the last month

Now I'll pop over the google analytics metrics. I'm using the last 6 months as the dataset again for most of these.

User OS breakdown

I know the blackberry is @svend but who's the PS4?

Geographic breakdown

Over the last 6 months our search engine referrals have gone up substantially from where they used to be.

Now onto more specifics of google search results that landed on OPPO

My favorite snippet there is that for some reason the algorithm loved @doodon2whls's post about a new dyson jet engine and just kept feeding it to people netting nearly 7k views to a joke post.

Couple searches both from our former parent and new friends lead some folks here (again hilariously around another search term to the dyson engine post)

Google sent me this email too recently

On google discover we got some attention for a bit 6 months ago and then it's totally ignored us ever since.

As an aside I had to increase the allocated storage on the server today to make sure there's room for all the shitposts #topshelfcontent.

If there's any other stats you want to take a look at let me know and I'll see if I can dig them up.

Well that's all the entertaining statistic snippets I've got for now. Thank you everybody for hanging out here, posting, lurking, donating, buying merch and just all around being awesome!

After a few weeks of back and forth with the seller waiting for a smog inspection I have a pickup!

It's an 89 Ranger with the 2.9 V6, a 5 speed and 4x4. The boss lady enthusiastically approved and is excited for a project we'll work on. Both for her to get her hands dirty and something to keep my ass occupied.

It does not actually have a smog inspection, the valve covers leak badly and smog shops wouldn't inspect it with the engine bay smoking. I got it cheap enough though I'm not terribly concerned about it, even if I have to put a couple grand into it (which I don't think I will) I got it far less than if I had bought a slightly nicer one with an inspection and it passed back in April anyway.

The pickup is hopefully a solid project for me that checks a lot of boxes. It runs and drives pretty well but still needs a decent amount of work. When done it should also be a solid little runaround and exploration pickup.

The interior is absolutely trashed and will need a couple trips to the junkyard for explorer seats and various ranger trim bits.

While there is some surface rust on various body panels from sun baked paint fading and flaking the undercarriage is mint!

I cannot believe a 33 year old beater pickup looks this clean underneath. California is still breaking my brain having lived all my life in the rust belt.

In the next few days I'll replace the valve cover gaskets and give it a light tune up while I work up a larger parts list of both junk yard items and fresh parts it'll need to put back in full fighting form.

Wish me luck!

A couple weeks back my wife had planned a day outing with some schoolmates. The plan was to spend a Sunday hiking near Mt Tampalpais with me and her plus 5 others.

It came time to start planning logistics on the Friday afternoon before and one of her friends suggests we all just take her GX instead of 2 cars.

Her reply was she's game to drive some folks but I the car only has 3 free seatbelts

They responded You drive a mom-mobile, I'm sure it'll fit all of us!

My bride was then insistent that her car only seated 5 but we'd figure out logistics later.

Fast forward a couple hours and she gives me a call. Apparently her friends had been pretty insistent over discord that her car should have enough room to seat all of them. She was digging around the back of the car looking for these mystery seats and wanted my help.

I'm paraphrasing but here's how the conversation went:

jminer: Yes, your car has 7 seats, but the back ones are tiny

elle: No, it can't have more seats - I don't even see where they'd be

Note I folded down the rear seats when we bought the car and haven't raised them once since

jminer: They're there, I promise. They're folded into the cargo area behind the seats try pulling up one one of the things that looks like a latch there

elle: HOLY CRAP I HAVE A THIRD ROW OF SEATS IN MY CAR!!!!

jminer: starting to laugh uncontrollably Yes you do

elle: sits down in one Damn these are tiny, I barely fit back here!

jminer: still laughing

elle: folds up the second seat How do you get in or out of these things?!

I can hear her now climbing over the back of the 2nd row to get out of the back seat

jminer: laughing even harder One of the 2nd row seats slides forward to let you in and out

elle: goes around to the back of the car There's no storage space left back here now!!!

jminer: laughing my ass off at work now This is why they're always folded flat!

At this point the conversation goes back and forth like this for probably nearly 10 minutes with us both being quite entertained. Then she sheepishly tells her friends that they were right and she can drive everybody.

Now as a note I probably folded down the rear seats during my initial test drive of the car and my wife may never have seen the rear seats up in her car in the 16 months we've owned it. The rear seats in the GX are also hilariously small while also leaving next to zero storage space behind them. Honestly it would be a better vehicle if they weren't there.

Here is an image from google comparing the storage areas available with two rows of seats up and down.

I have no moral to this story, but this conversation made me and my wife laugh a lot and I wanted to share it.

This afternoon I decided to try to change the transmission fluid in my old ranger. So I took a late lunch and pulled it into the garage (driveway is sloped).

It's an old truck and the transmission is old enough that it takes GL-4 gear oil and not a flavor ATF (not sure why I added this other than it was a pain finding fluid for it).

The first step of a fluid change job is to make sure you can open the fill plug, otherwise you're gonna have a big problem later. The 17 mil bolt on the drivers side of my transmission refused to budge though.

I tried whacking the 1/2 inch ratchet with a hammer which almost always works on this sort of issue but nothing. Small amount of heat from a propane torch (aluminum case so I can't go nuts here) and nothing.

Got the 6 point socket tapped on there well so it didn't strip, but no dice.

Time to try out my ryobi half inch impact. It's the OG model and getting a bit tired but should be able to bust this bolt loose.

Not enough room between the transmission and framerail for it so time to grab a wobble extension. I was able to get it wedged in there just so and I had high hopes it would work.

I took a pic here thinking it'd be part of a halfway decent story summarizing my ingenuity and experience...

That did not happen

Wedging it in there the tighten/loosen switch got reversed and I hammered it on tighten for a second. Surprised it didn't undo I checked and found that error. When I flipped the switch the impact didn't like it. The motor brushed sparked once on trigger pull then nothing several times. This impact has 3-4 years of regular abuse in it but usually works fine.

I took it out and played with the power switch on the top and it started working again. Hmmm - maybe a problem for later but working at the moment. I wedge it back in there hit the trigger then bam!

The socket pops off the bolt and then the wobble socket spins and chucks the 17 mil half inch socket at my fucking forehead. This all happens in an instant and FUCK!

I roll out from under the truck and feel my forehead my hands don't come away covered in blood - phew. I'm definitely a bit stunned so time to move the ranger out of the garage (parked halfway in) while I'm still pumped full of adrenaline. I go inside and while I'm bleeding it isn't much but am greeted with this.

All said and done I'm lucky, doesn't need stitches and a pretty clean break in the skin. I was a dumbass and wasn't wearing eye protection, if I'd been a little less lucky this fucker could have damn near blinded me! I'll keep an eye on it for infection but for now I'm calling myself an idiot and staying away from the transmission in the truck for a bit.

Don't be like me, wear your PPE folks!

While I hate to unload on Oppo, it feels like that's almost all I've done lately. It's been a shit few weeks though.

So on September 1st I got admitted to the hospital for heart failure, my wife's birthday is September 2nd (happy birthday to her!). Still working on getting meds adjusted but I'm alive. Although the stress of the below events has definitely bumped up my BP 20 points.

Today I found out that my mother is in hospice care at home. Apparently two weeks ago she got diagnosed with terminal stage 4 pancreatic cancer that's spread wildly. No phone call to us, then Thursday last week had an episode of some kind akin to a stroke and now has aphasia and diminished control of the right side of her body.

I have a complicated relationship with my family and my mother. I'm going to go into it a little since venting to Oppo is very therapeutic and allows me to work through my thoughts and emotions. The short version is that when I was 13 my parents went through a brutal divorce after 25 years of marriage and my mother got full custody. This seemed good since my father did not want anything other than visitation and is in general a huge asshole. What happened next though is this divorce kicked up my mothers bi-polar disorder from a manageable level to off the charts.

I have 5 siblings, two older (one mentally handicapped), my oldest brother was long gone at this time leaving me and 3 younger siblings ranging in age from 11 to 6 when this happened. Overnight this turned me into the sole responsible adult in the house dealing with my mother's episodes, bouts of severe depression, suicide attempts and just lack of much care altogether. Once I could drive this meant getting everyone up, fed, ready for school, dropping my older handicapped brother off at work, two younger siblings off at school then taking myself to highschool. All while also working full-time to pay for shit.

Being a 14 year old dealing with your mother after a 2 week commitment in a mental institution and electro-shock is something fucking else (I'm not ancient, this was a common treatment in Missouri well into the 00's). All the while caring for your 4 siblings. It was quite an event when you hadn't seen your mother for 2 days, then a family friend comes to give you a lie about where you mother is (which means she's in a psych hospital again) and drops off a couple casseroles.

To say this was stressful is an understatement but it's the environment that I became a man in. Upon much reflection as I've aged it definitely instilled me with a strong sense of duty, self-sufficiency and paternal instinct but also very much caused me to grow up well before I was ready to. It also thoroughly ingrained a 'walk it off' mentality deep into me regarding mental health as I took any sign of internal mental weakness as a 'failure' akin to what I'd witnessed in my mother. Through a great deal of introspection I've grown a lot there, but I still have considerable work to do.

I of course know now that her disease was not her fault but at the same time there was a lot that could have been done by her to make things easier on us. There are still a lot of old hurts that I realize now was mostly her disease but they are deep wounds. In the late 90's bible belt there definitely wasn't a lot of sympathy for a divorced mother with psychological issues.

To sum up my current feelings, I very much love my mother but have a complicated relationship with her. I haven't really talked to her more than a quick check in probably 3 years since every conversation for years revolved around only a few topics: why didn't we have children, my wife and I are going to hell since we're sinners, why don't I love her anymore (since I didn't come see her enough) and that she might as well kill herself because of the aforementioned items. For my own mental health I cut off contact with her as I was tired of the emotional blackmail.

This led to splits with my siblings as they uniformly took her side on my being a bad son as I needed some space to work shit out. They were all either gone (oldest brother) or too young to remember the worst of it and only fondly remember the manic episodes where mom would sign us out of school and drive us to Pensacola for a couple days. I got a passive aggressive voicemail this morning about needing to call one of my brothers then precious few details both during the call and since other than a clear message that they don't want me to come there (to Missouri) and see her.

I'm still torn on what to do, she likely has two months left unless another acute cardiac event happens so I've got to work through my shit and figure out what I am going to do. Likely in a few weeks I'll head out for a day or two to say my goodbyes, but I fear that will dredge up more shit than it solves.

Covid also complicates the matter, Missouri is a bad place to be in the US right now with a very high unvaccinated population (including a couple of my siblings). The reason she's home is that the hospitals and hospice care facilities are all full due to anti-vaxxers and since she's terminal the hospital refused to do any diagnostic tests after her stroke/episode.

So Oppo, thanks for listening to my nonsensical personal ramblings. It is really helpful to type this out and brain dump in a friendly place. It really helps me work through shit and I already feel a bit better.

If there's a moral to my story, it is don't ever neglect your mental health. If you need help get it, there is no shame in getting help and working on yourself.

On a completely unrelated (but happier and forum related) topic I may be buying a vehicle this week. Found something that matches enough of my preferences that I think I'll pull the trigger. The perfect vehicle doesn't really exist for me, so it's a good enough hunt right now.

@WhoIsTheLeader I like this better than the shadowbox it used to put around it

@CarsOfFortLangley I like it.

Also I love this

@way2blu There's a bunch of small improvements with the upgrade. I don't have them all cataloged, like now I'm pleasantly surprised with this 'mark all notifications read'

assasaas

@liam said in 20 MINUTES UNTIL DOWNTIME:

@jminer said in 20 MINUTES UNTIL DOWNTIME:

Taking down oppo in 20

You have been warned

Smooth sailing!

Thanks! There's almost always a few quirks that got missed in testing when we come back but I'm not expecting anything major.

@CB said in 20 MINUTES UNTIL DOWNTIME:

@jminer All upvotes being reset, everyone goes back to zero.

An interesting idea you have there...

Taking down oppo in 20

You have been warned

We're back!

@Wrong-Wheel-Drive said in OPPO Maintenance tonight at 2000 PST:

@jminer QUICK EVERYONE, TO DRIVE TRIBE WE GO!

Good luck with that

@AestheticsInMotion said in OPPO Maintenance tonight at 2000 PST:

@jminer ooooh what's the poll update? Can we embed them mid post instead of only at the top?

Don't get too ahead of yourself there - you'll be able to put a hyphen in a poll option now.