TougeFriends and the new Blog

I started the TougeFriends instagram a couple years back for the sole purpose of providing a change of pace from the typical automotive social media page. I was on 24hr staff duty on a Sunday (fml) and late in the evening, I was scrolling through instagram and noticed something interesting.

Every car page was basically exactly the same. I went through well over 50 pages and it was just a bunch of pictures of the same 10-20 cars. Slammed, obscene amounts of camber, parked somewhere, with a "tag the owner/tag the photographer/buy my merchandise/link in bio" captions.

I wondered: Why is everybody doing the same thing? Why aren't there really any pages that post more of the old school stuff? The stuff that got us into cars in the first place. There were pages out there where people frequently posted some of the old, nostalgic stuff, but I didn't really see anything that was dedicated. I knew I had access to stuff from various accounts over a 15 year period, so I thought why not just start one myself.

So I did. 

The idea was just to provide a breath of fresh air from every other page out there and just stick with a lot of the old stuff, specifically the JDM option and Drift Tengoku videos featuring mostly drifting, as that was what peaked my interest in the early days.

2 years later, the Instagram and Facebook page has grown quite a bit and I'm glad that people have enjoyed the content that has been posted. However, my collection of items has pretty much diminished and I've gone and found quite a lot of other stuff over the past couple years to continue having stuff to post.

When I started the page, I told myself that I would do my best to keep from posting the same regurgitated stuff over and over. I always found it to be a bit dull to have a page with like 700 posts, and 15% of them are the same. 

Recently, quite a few people have created pages of their own following suit and posting stuff from the "golden-era" of nostalgic JDM tuner cars. Pages like @vhs_option and others have a large collection of videos and files that they post from, and I follow them myself and enjoy what they have. I think vhs_option has the best assortment and collection out there right now on social media, quite honestly. Pretty much everything I had was from Tengoku and JDM Option, featuring pretty much nothing but drifting and all from the early 2000s. Meanwhile, that page has stuff from the 80s and 90s and has a wide variety of different stuff ranging from car tuning, time attack, road racing, drifting, and more.

Now that my collection is pretty much diminished, and my personal life has gotten much more busy between work, school, family, etc. I have decided to lighten up on the social media aspect of TougeFriends. Downloading old stuff, finding new stuff, and posting it on a nearly daily basis has just become a bit too time consuming for me to continue on doing. It'll still continue, but the posts won't be as frequent.

From this point on, I'll primarily only be posting on here. My goal is to do 2-3 posts every week, but it won't just be focused on old JDM videos and such. Instead, I thought it would be more fun to include other things. Things like how I got into cars, my own personal experiences, along with thoughts and opinions on certain aspects of cars and drifting and different communities today. Perhaps something to make it a bit more personal, and not just some random photo with a couple words for a caption. I will still post old pics and videos and the usual things that people like to see, but I thought it would be more fun to post things that can not only be used for viewing pleasure, but things that can connect people and start a conversation.

Perhaps I'll get back into the social media side of things down the road, but we'll see. In the meantime, thank you to everybody who has enjoyed the pages thus far, and I hope you enjoy the blog!