I finally found it: the image that sums up all the frustrations of Internet car enthusiasm in just a couple kilobytes.
It’s part of a discussion you can find here, but to spare you the tragedy of trawling through the Duramax Diesels Forum I’ll give you the high points from my perspective:
- Navel-gazing sub-category of a hobby? Check; the forum is devoted to people who drag race diesel trucks on run-what-you-brung nights.
- Bragging about dyno charts? Yup.
- Asperger’s syndrome contrarianism? Yup — the guy who sees a dyno chart for a 550 horsepower two and a half ton diesel truck and, based on the reporting of an ET at an unknown dragstrip in unknown conditions, confidently announces that the dyno is ten horsepower off. That’s two percent.
The whole car-fan internet is like this: people rendering opinions on things they’ve never seen, experienced, or touched based on some narrow misunderstanding of raw data. It makes me want to quit the business sometimes. There’s just no satisfying the people in Mom’s basement.
Ugh… yeah….
This is pretty much the exact reason why I stopped visiting car forums so frequently. In fact, I went on for a few moons again after I bought our 2013 Altima. It was mainly to defend the car having read poor reviews on the forum BEFORE I bought the car. It was after people I realized people had simply bought it on price and had loyalty to another brand, that I was never going to win despite my reality being quite different than theirs. They believed the car was garbage when they bought it. They thought it was the wrong purchase in their gut. They hated their salesman or the service department employee. These are real complaints I read.
In older car forums, it’s quite different because people learn to love the good and the bad. Every Z32 owner I had read about when I bought my Z car, had to change the injectors. It sucks, but ethanol destroys the original ones. People just accepted it and the time it would take. They didn’t hate the hunk of metal for it.
There’s always that fringe though… the group that criticizes everything and nothing is ever right except what they have or do. Those people are just unbearable. Want to laugh at an unbearable ban-session/fight? Do a search of AMS crank pulleys or AMS parts on Z32 300zxs. I’ve seen people banned minutes after asking what people though of them without even an explanation as to what’s wrong with AMS Canada vs US.
The internet is a happy-sad place.
By the use of the tilda, context free estimate of an unknown measuing device, and inclusion of your email address on a public forum, I estimate that he consumed 132 grams of paint chips as a child.
I forgot to account for the back-handed “only trying to help” diss. Let’s see, carry the two, and I believe it was actually 153 grams of paint chips, give or take a gram.
Not paint chips, but paint fumes inhaled as a child (along with modeling glue). His Asperger’s OCD was discovered early, you see. He started with snap models, but then quickly moved to more highly detailed offerings by Revell and others. He’d painstakingly paint itsy, bitsy chrome rings around the dash dials of the General Lee, sniffing the Testors deeply into his lungs. Hour after hour, day after day, he’d attend to the tiniest details, and in the evenings spend extra time over the fumes of paint thinner as he cleaned his sable hair brushes. In fact, his collection is now under glass in a display in his mother’s basement, where he still spends a good deal of time on trolling the interwebs using her wifi for free. All that knowledge gleaned building 65 Chevy Stepsides and 55 Ford F-100 models should not be wasted, so he polices the truck forums for statements he knows not to be true.
As I’m in the process of restoring a lot of the modelcars I built as a teen, this one hits scarily close to home… ( I get a headache if I get close to paint fumes today)
Getting to those chrome rings on the dash of the Genral is a pain in the rear I assure you…
And on my wiring harness the blue wire with the green stripe is the second one from the left. Yours is the THIRD from the left. Why did you change the harness? And 1 of the bolts holding the brake master cylinder looks to be turned more than mine. Is yours loose? Etc, etc.
Oh don’t get me started Jack on the sad state of Internet enthusiasm. It became clear to me years ago real productive discussion was mostly impossible when I watched forum members argue about stuff they know nothing about with the SRT-4 engineers on SRTForums. I believe this is one of the great time wastes of our generation, some people are just looking for something to do I guess. For me it was a sign I should spend time doing more productive things. If you can keep it at arms length there is some good information sharing there. Just like Facebook everyone has a need they are trying to fulfill some have large emotional holes, I steer clear of those needy ones.
I used to hang around SRTForums until I sold my skittle. I avoided those chats because 9/10 they’re filled with questions where the only response is “We don’t comment on unannounced products.”
I do give props to the Mopar peeps for putting themselves out there. So hard in the auto industry to engage directly with customers and part of that community is what made things happen like giving the ACR auto-X’ers the Service Manual supplement to let them go -2 camber in stock class.
Not just the Q/A sessions, some of the SRT engineers like Dr. Who were right in the forums participating. Fantastic insights if you could get past the kids arguing with the guys who built the damn thing.
it’s bad no matter the topic. whether it’s a couple of 7th graders arguing about whether Ferrari is better than Lamborghini, or scoffing at your choice of phone, pointless bickering is everywhere.
I’m even guilty of it myself, having just come off of a back-and-forth with some Free Software loon who claims LibreOffice can easily replace MS Office. So of course I had to do my duty since Someone Is Wrong On The Internet.
I don’t frequent internet fora unless I’m trying to find an answer to a specific question, but I subscribe to some mailing lists for 3D photography and video as well as the Harp-L mailing list for harmonica players and enthusiasts. It doesn’t matter the venue, some people will use it as an excuse to argue with others, buff up their own bone fides, and act like jerks. I’m sure that I’m guilty of that myself sometimes, but it’s nice to see that when people act badly others will often point out that their behavior is inappropriate.
Harmonicas, guitars or cars, it really doesn’t matter the topic, people will bench race, strut and brag. Imagine that, people acting like people.
You would have had a very good shot at the final bonus question posed at a Japanese animation fandom convention contest years ago.
“Was Megumi’s harmonica chromatic, diatonic, or octave tuned?”
That we used a promotional poster and not a sound sample should make the answer obvious.
The only places worse than internet forums are the Facebook Groups. The “Woodward” group on FB is hands-down the worst place I’ve ever had the (dis)pleasure of visiting.
What kills me about some of the more established forums (neons.org comes to mind specifically) is when newer guys come onto the forum and spread misinformation based upon rumors. I once posted a thread regarding stroking a 2.4 go to into my ACR, and took into account piston compression heights, mean piston speed, etc. I was either told that I was wrong (I wasn’t), or the “I rev my 2.4 to 8k RPM all the time.” Yes, that’s why you’re on your 3rd longblock…. I’m not even going to touch on selling “expensive” (for a neon, anyway) parts to a group of people who seem to want everything for scrap prices. Sorry, Electromotive ITBs are worth a bit more than $400.
One of the few forums I visit nowadays is GRM. At least the place still contains some intelligence. I think corner-carvers does a good job keeping the idiots filtered out as well.
I always love the forum posters (and occasionally some internet blogs like Jalopnik) that that try to backwards calculate engine horsepower based off of some happy dyno as “evidence” their favorite performance car was somehow secretly underrated from the factory.
I’m starting to think that we’ve seen the end of the golden age of the Internet.
When in 1994 I first discovered other civilian 9C1 owners I couldn’t believe that there were others who shared my esoteric tastes.
That was a generation ago.
Now there’s a whole internet sub-culture that nurtures these increasingly idiosyncratic interests. From the cradle. There’s no need to be mainstream anymore. Whatever floats your boat you’re bound to find a kindred spirit on the Internet with whom to plot the overtake of the world.
Stuart Clurman calls them basement bombardiers on his lostworldsinc webpage. Worth a look, if not for the jackets, then for the copy.
The basement needs moar cowbell.
” There’s just no satisfying the people in Mom’s basement. ”
Well Jack ;
The simple solution is to move out and get your _own_ place .
=8-)
-Nate
I’ve owned a lot of different cars over the years, and whenever I get a car or brand I’m not very familiar with I register to one of the enthusist forums to try to find info a bout thecar, and general DIY and tuning tips etc. Often I end up wondering why these people bought their cars in the first place, or why they bothered to register on a forum for that car (some could be trolls) , but even more often I realize that some people would never consider another car, and have no knowledge of other cars at all.
I guess the most common questions I ever see are people asking how to change stuff that would not need changing if they hd bought ‘the right car’ in the first place.
(not including tuning tips, everyone always wants to go faster, no one ever wants to pay money to do so )