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Vandalize Your Car
- mberning 7y agoShe’s killing the scene now
- NickBusey 7y ago"Driving a wildly painted car is like using my real name on the internet. Is it uncomfortable? Yeah. Sometimes it is. Honesty and transparency can be searing. But it’s also real."
- whatshisface 7y agoI would disagree that using your real name is more real than using a pseudonym, because it heavily pressures you to use the same filter you have in real life. On the other hand, when you're using a pseudonym there are fewer consequences for revealing what you really think.
- inflatableDodo 7y ago'We’re born naked and the rest is drag' - RuPaul
- ivolimmen 7y agoSo you think I dare not to disagree with you because I use my real name? Plus that I filter what I say? Bold statement. I always speak my mind but that might also be because of my Dutch upbringing. I am direct and brutally honest offline and online.
- scanny 7y agoPut yourself in the situation where your views go against what society may deem as acceptable, and given that it is tied to your real name there can be very real consequences (harassment/government action). Would you speak out the same if you knew that your community would feel very strongly against you for it?
- mikelyons 7y agousing my real name on hacker news has helped me be less ideological and more loving / selfless in my communications, more authentic and less egotistic
- hybrids 7y agoI don't know if that's necessarily true. Look at Facebook - people say mean and vulgar things under their real name all the time, often complete with a picture of their own face. Anonymity can be a factor in the way we treat each other, but it doesn't tell us the whole story.
- bigred100 7y agoIt seems like another one or those things where nobody actually cares
- dogma1138 7y agoAKA How to get pulled over at every traffic stop you ever pass by.
- anigbrowl 7y agoBe clean, put a camera on the dash, sue the police, profit.
- dogma1138 7y agoThe world does not start and ends with the US, one of my colleagues had one of the first 10 model S’s in the UK he haven’t been pulled over for like 5 years before that he still jokes about being pulled over 13 times during the first week because the cops just wanted to take a peek at the car. Driving a flashy car has implications like it or not, driving an obnoxiously flashy car is even worse. And in the US it’s likely even worse since a traffic stop is one of the most dangerous interactions you can have with the police. It also has other implications, parked at a block you don’t live on around the time a crime occurred? Well take a guess which car would be definitely reported as suspicious during the testimony sweep... P.S. I’ve seen conflicted studies about the benefits of a dash cam or stating to the police you are filing the engagement; while some studies show it reduces the “aggression” officers might display others show that it increases the chances of them basically wanting to fuck with you; if you think you can never be baited into acting out or they can’t confuse you during questioning to give a contradictory statement e.g. asking where you’ve been and where you are going multiple times then by all means drive what ever you want. I would rather minimize my interaction with the police because I can’t think of a single interaction with them that would be objectively pleasant under all conditions and I can’t guarantee that they won’t catch me on a bad day when I’m in a pissy mood and I might act or say something that could be taken as aggressive or suspicious.
- llukas 7y ago"land of the free and scared" - unfortunately
- 7y ago
- Causality1 7y agoThe ugliest thing about that car is the godawful off-center front license plate.
- NKosmatos 7y agoBeing a symmetry fan I sympathize, but Mitsubishi Evo has a big front radiator and so they’ve placed the license plate off center. Many sport cars follow the same logic.
- jjjensen90 7y agoIt is unfortunate, but the Evo has a front-mount intercooler to cool the turbocharger, a necessary and large piece of performance equipment.
- noipv4 7y agoEVO X is a turbo 4 cylinder and there's a FMIC to cool the compressed air (~25 psi stock). This offset license plate is also common with some high performance AUDI RS cars and Alfa Romeos.
- tudorw 7y ago'Anti-Theft' paintwork...
- ggggtez 7y agoIt probably has the opposite effect: Make thieves think they can smash and grab whatever is inside with impunity, since you obviously don't care about damaging it either.
- nickthemagicman 7y agoI wanted to make fun of this but it's really good look at the constricting forces of conformity in our lives that we all just pretty much follow unawares.
- mac01021 7y agoWhence comes the desire to ridicule?
- justinator 7y agoI mean, owning a car is still a form of conforming to social norms - cars are expensive and people have good jobs to afford them (which begins an awkward feedback loop of requirements). Try living without one. As a 38-year-old car free man, I feel almost deviant. In great shape from all that fresh and and exercise, but that also is somewhat peculiar (I don't look much like my age).
- Noos 7y agoI have lived without one, and for that time in my life, i was limited to ten miles in every direction, unless i wanted to spend an hour on a bus. I don't think people here get how limiting that life can be anywhere outside of a huge city. Or how wearying. I walked to work, and it took 45 minutes. I had to do that walk during 90 degree heat, 6 inches of snow the ground, heavy rainstorms etc, unless, like other people I knew without a car, we begged our coworkers for a ride. If we couldn't, we had to call out of work. We have plenty of people in my small town who walk or moped to work because they are poor. They usually buy cars the first thing they can get, because walking sucks.
- benrbray 7y agoBicycle infrastructure would be a comparatively cheap solution to this problem for most people.
- justinator 7y agoI never felt not owning a car was limiting in that way at all. I've actually crossed the US three times by bike! It feels more... liberating!, than anything else!
- HoveringOrb 7y agoWell, it's no uglier than my stock gray Focus.
- knolax 7y agoIt probably doesn't look as good IRL without all the filters used in the photos the article uses.
- NKosmatos 7y agoI’d love to do something similar, but the Greek law doesn’t allow it. The car registration must clearly state the manufacturer color(s). Try describing/putting the graffiti into this field :-) We’re not even allowed custom license plates.
- incompatible 7y agoMaybe you could just list the colours from the spray cans?
- avar 7y agoAre you sure? In The Netherlands you must notify the government if you change the color of the car so they can update the registry, if there's any doubt they'll help you pick. The list of colors is finite and based on EU law[1][2], so it would be odd if Greece didn't share the same system. It would mean you couldn't import re-painted vehicles into Greece, maybe that's true, but that seems like it wouldn't fly with the single market. The car in the article clearly has a base color of "yellow". On my street there's a car completely covered in stickers, to my eye it's mostly white, but looking it up I see it's registered as blue (barely any blue visible). So perhaps covering it in stickers is a way to get around this in some areas of the EU. 1. https://www.rdw.nl/particulier/voertuigen/auto/het-kentekenbewijs/bij-wijzigingen/kleur-van-uw-voertuig-wijzigen https://www.rdw.nl/particulier/voertuigen/auto/het-kentekenb... 2. It's: blue, brown, yellow, gray, green, orange, violet, red, white, black. Anything not listed must be whatever color is closest, e.g. pink is either "white" or "red" depending on if it's light pink or not.
- NKosmatos 7y agoChanging the color is allowed, but you can’t have graffiti or fancy designs(flames, clouds, waves...). You’re right about the stickers, they’re allowed but haven’t seen any fancy designs, mostly lines, stripes and a few numbers. I’m sure that if the whole body was covered you’d get into trouble here.
- avar 7y ago
- michaelt 7y agoWould you drive differently if your real name was spray painted across your trunk lid? Here in the UK, many tradespeople drive white vans emblazoned with the contact details for their business (there are also many unmarked white vans on the roads). White Van Man's reputation for considerate driving is, to be charitable, not above average.
- youeseh 7y agoSounds like an opportunity for someone to just be nice to fellow drivers and gain business.
- tom 7y agoI just engaged a local class company who’s Yelp reviews were atrocious. The reason was, 3 of the 4 were reviews of the guy’s driving, not his skills at changing a windshield. I went to FB, and saw reviews with pics of work and overwhelmingly positive scores. Gave him my business. Though, I did think about it a bit before hand. Also thought about Yelp’s relevance and the value of the very recent reviews that were all not for his work, but his driving.
- mosselman 7y agoSo when he kills a kid on the way to the gig he does for you, you won't judge?
- effingwewt 7y agoWell that escalated quickly. There's a world of wriggle room between driving like an asshole and murdering children.
- liambates 7y agoTo be fair much of that reputation comes from back in the day before most tradesman had logos on their vans. Back in the 90's almost every tradesman I knew drove a plain white Ford Transit van. Source: Grew up in Essex and most of my neighbors were white van men.
- Dylan16807 7y agoThe ideas about noticing other people are nice but if customized cars were common nobody would notice them either. And yes people would still zone out while driving, sorry.
- perl4ever 7y agoIf everybody had tattoos, they would still be identifying marks.
- icebraining 7y agoBut we already have identifying marks: license plates. What the paint job here does is make the car stand out, which is a different thing.
- Thorrez 7y agoJust make sure not to vandalize it as much as much as Linus Sebastian's car at LTX 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCSyNKbapdE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCSyNKbapdE
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- URSpider94 7y agoLong ago I read a story, which I can’t source now so it may be apocryphal, about author CS Lewis. As the story goes, after the Narnia series got popular, he made enough money to buy himself a very nice Jaguar. The first thing he did was to take a hammer to the car and dent it all over. His thinking was, if he did that himself, he would avoid the inevitable pain from every time someone slammed their door into his, or tapped the bumper in a parking lot.
- whatshisface 7y agoSome great advice for all of those fresh tech millionaires out there is that you should always buy a car at least an order of magnitude below what you can afford, for exactly that reason.
- dominicr 7y agoThat's probably good advice for anyone: don't stretch yourself financially, especially on depreciating assets.
- steverb 7y agoI still use the one pay check rule for cars. If it costs more than I make in one pay check, then I can't afford it. It has been a good incentive to get better pay checks. :-)
- dominicr 7y agoI buy second hand cars with some visible damage for a similar reason. They tend to be cheaper and we're not that bothered about any scrape & dents our family adds. Obviously you've got to check that the minor damage doesn't reflect more severe damage you can't see, but that's the same for any second hand car and a good inspection should reveal that.
- tbabb 7y agoBeing recognizable is maybe one thing I could get past for the cool factor of having a unique paint job. But that's also a commitment to nuke your resale value. If you plan on replacing the car before it's scrap, vandalizing it like in the article could be a ~$10k decision.
- astura 7y agoUm you could always repaint it, right? (~$1500-ish??? Maybe???) But she made it clear it already lost a significant resale value before the paint job - "heavily modified and long suffering" People also don't generally custom modify their expensive possessions unless they are committed to ownership for the long haul.
- paggle 7y agoYou can get it vinyl wrapped before “vandalizing” for a few hundred bucks. That actually improves the resale value since when you peel it before selling the original paint job will be in much better condition having been protected.
- dannyw 7y agoOn the other hand, if your unique paint job makes the news, you might have increased your resale value by $5k to $15k.
- whenchamenia 7y agoIdk, the average EVO owner is... different.
- pvaldes 7y agoI bet that the novelty will wear off in a few weeks. Now her car is just plain ugly. If you want to customize your car at least do it well.
- dannyw 7y agoBeauty is in the eye of the beholder.
- pvaldes 7y ago... but knowledge can lead to much more satisfactory results. This is not how you paint a car, with cheap products and any lack of direction in the art part. Professional grade car paint is really expensive stuff, for several good reasons: It does not change color or fade overnight and often has metallic dust or some kind of pearly "glitter" embebbed. A professional car painter will add also a hard layer of lacquer to protect the painting, uniformize the design, and add reflections and gloss (sorely lacking there). The car will not reflect light in the same way as a propperly painted work and will gets scratched and worn in no time. The design here is multicolor but totally flat and random (there is science in arranging adjacent colors also). Artistically is a mess. There are not sharp borders defining areas and gradients are badly executed. Not a common theme or a good idea to express, just plain chaos (in a not good way). Of course she can made anything with her car but lets not pretend that is a great job, not even mediocre. There are two good examples of how you made a unique car: https://dyler.com/cars/3724/bmw-i8-rene-turrek-joker-theme-coupe-2016-multicolor-for-sale https://dyler.com/cars/3724/bmw-i8-rene-turrek-joker-theme-c... https://www.rollingstone.it/musica/news-musica/la-porsche-di-janis-joplin-sara-messa-allasta/281908/ https://www.rollingstone.it/musica/news-musica/la-porsche-di...
- steverb 7y agoI don't think you and the author share the same definition of what satisfactory results mean. She seems pretty satisfied with it. You're right, she may hate it in a month or six, but she's happy with it now and I'm pretty sure she knows how to go get a professional paint job if she wants to.
- zhoujianfu 7y agoI have a recognizable crazy wrap and the license plate “fart gas” and pretty quickly realized I’m not really “anonymous” anymore and it does make me at least try to drive “nicer.”
- ct520 7y agoWell glad to see this went ok. A local art museum had a "Art on tap night" with a free style area. A bunch of guys with paint and ipa's quickly devolved into 1st grade styled wieners scribbled everywhere. Sort of what I expected when clicking on this article and strangers.
- ggggtez 7y ago>Would you still hang in the left lane, distracted by a podcast, if you couldn’t forget that the Honda behind you contained a real woman with her own schedule? Man, was the author this full of herself before the paintjob, or did huffing that much spray paint kill the empathy she supposedly wants other people to have? Maybe let the person in the left lane be distracted by their podcast in peace. Who cares.
- toss1 7y agoWho cares? Everyone else on the road. If you want to be distracted, go do it in the right lane (or better yet, in an out of the way parking spot). Don't piss in the commons - it's what you are doing when you hog the resources of the road. I sort of boil down road courtesy to nearly one rule of thumb -- don't make the other guy brake.
- cik2e 7y agoDon’t make the other guy brake is right. Sadly, this is the first time I’ve heard this said by anyone besides myself.
- AstralStorm 7y agoThe flip side is "don't make other drivers escape you". If you're heavily speeding or sitting on someone's bumper, you're doing just that, forcing immediate manoeuvre and preventing emergency braking. People who are not speeding may want to overtake too. They may misjudge your car's distance of you're going very fast.
- toss1 7y agoYou're joking, right? Even if we were talking about close tailgating, that in no way requires the kind of instantaneous reaction required by the sorts of discourteous/dangerous moves that make the other guymgal brake. This is in fact the exact problem - oblivious idiots will happily sit in the passing lanes for many miles creating congestion and hazards. In many parts of of the EU, this will at least earn them a ticket, but in the US, it's just ordinary to spread out & 'drive' in an oblivious state...
- paggle 7y agoThe downside of customization is that you lose your anonymity. I had a memorable vanity plate for two years that I gave up to regain the anonymity I prefer in my car.
- Corrado 7y agoI drove a yellow Audi A4 for almost 20 years and felt a bit like the person in this article. Now quite that extreme, but yeah, I could tell people were looking and they always knew who I was. It did make me think twice about parking out front of the adult bookstore once or twice.
- whenchamenia 7y agoI drive a Very disticnt custom car. The random people that 'know' me from traffic is staggering. It has changed me as a person, but like a mokawk, is not for everyone.