...Nice weather right?

Introducing Jr. Watermelon? - The man behind the melon

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Before I move on to my official introduction, You might be wondering...

Why is my profile picture a watermelon? and why does it have this yellow and green sticker on it? Besides it looking a bit silly, there is a good reason for why I chose this as my image. I figure that since it will be the first thing you see when looking me up, I'll give an explanation behind it.

It all started when I was setting up my Steemit page, I had just finished my banner when I wanted to look for a profile image to go with it. Since the name of my blog is Junsei Katarogu, the Japanese words for genuine and catalog (the content my blog will mainly be covering), I wanted to see if there were Kanji characters representing these words.

Since I don't actually speak or write Japanese (though I'd like to learn at one point) I booted up google translate and put the words into the textbox. I left it on Japanese-to-English translation at first, because I know there can be multiple meanings for the same words.

This was the result:

Yeah, I should've expected this outcome...

Instead of translating the words 純正 (Junsei, Genuine) and カタログ (Katarogu, Catalog) it read them as jun sei kataro gu, which translated to junior watermelon. And so came the idea to use a watermelon as my profile picture.

That explains the watermelon, so what's up with the sticker? The sticker (🔰), called a Shoshinsha mark (初心者マーク) or Wakaba mark (若葉マーク) is a yellow and green sticker, which new drivers (read: junior drivers * wink *) must display on their car for a year.

To summarize, combine the faulty-translated watermelon and the "Junior" driver mark. And you get the image I came up with for my profile.

About myself

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With the explanation of the profile picture behind us, I can now tell you a little bit about myself...

My name is Bryan, I'm 24 years old and live in The Netherlands. I am interested in just about everything that's related to vintage automobiles, especially Japanese cars from the 1980s and 1990s. I own an ever-growing collection of automobile-related literature, diecast models and Lego sets.

Aside from cars from the 1980s and 1990s, I also enjoy the art-styles, music and general pop-culture from these decades. I really enjoy that for the last few years, these same styles and sounds are making a comeback in the form of retro-inspired art and music. I want to contribute to preserving the nostalgia from the not-so-distant past, which is what my blog will mainly be about.

I don't really know what else I could say about myself...

Nostalgia - The Gran Turismo factor

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So, why do I like the 1980s and 1990s that much? Or cars? I'll try to explain to the best of my ability. It was around the late 90s, we had just gotten our first gaming console. Back at the time, you had the choice for either a Nintendo 64 or a Sony PlayStation 1, Xbox had yet to arrive at the table. My parents had bought a PlayStation 1 and we had a few games with it. One of these games was about to change my life, or at least shape it: Polyphony Digital's Gran Turismo 2.

This was one of my first encounters with cars in video games and also car culture in general. For those not familiar with the game, you play as an aspiring nameless racing driver that wants to make a career in racing cars. You decide which path to pick, everything from the cars you own, to the license tests you need to race, to which races you do.

Starting the game, you get 10,000 credits, the in-game currency unit, and with this money, you can buy a car. Since most cars in the game cost well over this amount, you're quickly forced to travel to East City, which is the menu for all the Japanese car manufacturers.

A bird's eye view of East City, in a glorious 4-to-3 aspect ratio.

Since you only had 10,000 credits, even here you had a limited choice...
I decided to go to the Toyota Dealership first, It was here where I met, what might as well be the automotive enthusiast equivalent of a first crush:

Sleek lined wedge design, turbocharged and HOT-DAMN ONLY 4 GRAND!

From the moment that I purchased this 1993 Toyota Supra Turbo, I was officially sold by the styling and of the 1980s (It was introduced in 1986).

One of my favorite parts of this game was how you could just endlessly browse through the used car listings that were littered with hundreds of cars I had never even heard of before. American and European cars are popular here, but Japanese cars are a small niche. Unfortunately, the later Gran Turismo games kept moving further away from the obscure Japanese cars and more into the mainstream cars known worldwide. Which is why I prefer this one over all the other GT games out there.

Since this game and the cars and culture surrounding it stuck with me on a very nostalgic level, I've decided to dedicate my blog to preserving automotive literature that has the, what i'll call "The Gran Turismo Factor"

What this blog will feature

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Fast forward from my childhood to December 2016, I had just sold my Hot Wheels collection in favor of the superior looking Tomica Limited Vintage scale models. One of many reasons for this switch being that they had done a fantastic model of the Supra I mentioned above. I had found out about these models while chatting in a Discord channel dedicated to Automotive-related topics and noticed how amazingly detailed they are for their small scale.

Looking at them on the Japanese Yahoo! auctions website, my eyes were met by a lot of vintage car brochures for a 1st generation Daihatsu Mira. I was intrigued by the Imagery these contained, and since it was a cheap lot, I decided to buy them so that I could include them in my Shipment of model cars.

Upon arrival, I fell in love with how well the presentation and documentation were done for a car that by itself isn't very memorable. When I tried to look up brochures online for other cars, I was baffled by how difficult it to find them for a lot of models. And that's when I decided that I wanted to collect and preserve automobile brochures from around the world.

To summarize: This blog will be dedicated to documenting and archiving my personal collection of Automobile Brochures, Catalogs, etc.

Final Words - Ask me anything

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This concludes my first and probably most difficult blog entry, I am still very new to Cryptocurrencies and the works of Steemit, but when I stumbled upon the platform I saw it's potential. I had finally found a place where I could publish all the digitally-restored brochures, and the facts that I can get feedback and even the possibility of a small earning for the work, had me sold on the platform.

If you have any questions and/or feedback for me, feel free to post a comment below. I'll try to reply to them the best I can, just keep it SFW everyone.

As a final, special mention, I'd like to give a shoutout to @crimsonclad and @meno for helping me set up my account and the PALnet / Minnow Support Project (MSP) Discord chat, you guys rock :D

All the content in the images above belongs to their respective owners, but I may or may not have eaten the watermelon

P.S. This post, excluding image links, but including this part, is 1,337 words long according to this handy dandy word counter... Just letting you know.