Let me start by saying, I have no intention of leaving oppo as I did when Kinja was unveiled in early 2013. I intended to make it to one of the lifeboats, which one hasn’t been decided yet. I was quite perturbed by the fact that oppo was dying, but, fortunately, those fears have been mollified by the several replacement options; I will see you there.
I wanted to walk through my experience with oppo over the years as a fitting way to say goodbye.
I was introduced to Jalopnik in early 2009 by a good high school friend. It took me a few months but on April 9, 2009 I made my first comment on Jalopnik:
At the time, I was called E30M3. I mean, I didn’t have a car, let alone a BMW. It was aspirational.
Now, I don’t remember when I came across oppo, but I do remember it was mentioned on the front page at some point, think it was after an update or something along those line. I had a look and I couldn’t stop coming back. When I first came across oppoistelock, I was a chemical engineering student at Georgia Tech. Fairly certain I was a second year, which would make this 2009 or 2010, probably late 2009.
I was active thorough the remainder of my college years. I remember in summer of 2011 I was living at home and would wake up very early, drive to MARTA, and take the train to Tech. I usually got there plenty of time before my first class, so I would go to the ChemE computer lab and hop on oppo. So if you’re a ChBE student at Georgia Tech, know that I spent many hours on oppo in basement of the Ford Building.
I feel like one of my crowning achievements was earing a star on oppo; stars were part of the commenting hierarchy before Kinja.
If you don’t understand the reference:
Now, they changed up a bunch of things in 2012. They took away stars and we lost all our oppositelock history. This is my oldest post in existence:
Remember, when all of our profile pictures were Willy Wonka, for some reason.
That’s March 12, 2012, by the way.
2012 was the also the year I graduated college, and I made a post to commemorate.
After this, I was around until early February 2013 when Kinja was introduced. I could not stand that early iteration. Retrospectively, I should have stuck around as I had nothing going on until September when my real job started. I was on hiatus from February 2013 to April 2016.
Here are those two posts:
My world had been upended then and I figured I needed something new to my life, so I came back. I want to thank everyone who didn’t abandon Kinja and kept this place awesome for me to return to.
Since then it’s been real. You all were there for me when I was unemployed and utterly miserable. You gave me the chance up fulfill the life goal of buying a car long distance and road tripping it home, and other than the flight I didn’t have to pay for anything.
Got to go to two oppo meet ups in Nashville.
2017:
2018:
You’ve been patient with me as I unnecessarily shopped for cars.
I’ve very much enjoyed this weird corner of the internet.
Thanks for everything Oppo. Until next time, goodbye.