UPDATE ABOUT UPDATES: An update

July 5, 2009 10:41 pm Published by

Any info is better than none, so here’s a bit of news about what’s going on with Noriyaro at the moment.

I recently posted the 200th article on the site. Hooray!

I’m also currently back in Australia for the next two weeks, so posts might slow down a bit (what, even more?!?). I have an enormous backlog of random photos I haven’t used so far on the site though, so I’ll be going through my old stuff when I have some spare time, and posting up what I can find. Off the top of my head, I know I have some pics of a 1JZ-powered Toyota Crown wagon drift car that some of you might find interesting, as well as pics from the “2PD Meeting” for automatic-only drift cars at Fuji Speedway.

Now here’s an interesting one. I won’t be contributing any more content to the Speedhunters website.

I remember that a lot of you guys had a gut reaction of “Thanks for killing another blog I like to read, Speedhunters” when it was announced that I was going to write for them.

I should have listened, since the readers who said that are exactly the ones I’m writing this sort of stuff for.

Let’s not go into that too much though. It’s done, and I think the car blog world already has enough slow-motion “I just bought a camera that can do it” videos, or self-absorbed art-school verbal wankery where I talk about myself and my own “journey” instead of the subject, or sentences that end with “don’t you think?”.

Noriyaro is and will always be all about showing you what goes on in Japan: cool people doing cool stuff with cool cars.

I also have a couple of ideas for making Noriyaro a little bit more interactive. More on that another time!

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This post was written by Alexi

38 Comments

  • martin says:

    sounds great man. i am glad you decided to stick to what you are doing with this site.

  • Andre says:

    Man i come here everyday to see some updates, i think your blog is super cool and you show some cool coverages. So i just want to send a big thanks and keep up the good job even tho you have not much time. That SpeedHunter thing… Just forget it, you’re bigger than that.

    Cheers from Portugal

    BTW: some more videos would be cool so i can post at my blog with props to you course.

  • kurisu says:

    Glad to hear there’s some cool new stuff coming!

    Glad to also hear its not just me who’s getting bored of the overly pretentious (but also not very good!) writing and ego feeding in some other car blogs too!

  • Fury-S12 says:

    haha i dont mind “some” of the stuff on speedhunters but your paragraph sums up alot of the articles quite well your content is hugely better

    i like the interactivity idea 🙂

  • Walter says:

    Up for you Alexi, from Italy !
    You make me feel the real drift lifestyle of Japan every post !
    go ahead thus ! ! !

    …only one demand: more night drift scenes ! =)
    because they’re very cool

    bye

  • haikii says:

    dawww and i was just about to send u an email about meeting up in japan for some food y0! Im in tokyo right now and was gonna see if you wanted to meet up for some food on us! haha oh well.

    good to see you left speed hunters too! noriyaro will get the time it deserves! hahaha

  • John says:

    Thats what I like to hear.

  • mikeyee says:

    hooray!

  • BlueSlug says:

    works for me, apology accepted 8)

  • Matt says:

    I gotta agree with you Alexi, Speedhunters is starting to get on my nerves with its pretentious BS from time to time. That’s why I was stoked that you were writing for them. Your photos aren’t as amazing as some of the professionals over there, but your insight and down to earth style more than make up for it and your articles are always a good read. That just means you should post more over here–I check this site often…even just a random photo or two with a paragraph jotted underneath it would make my day 🙂

  • Isidro says:

    glad to hear from you! I thought you got into a drift accident and had to be hospitalized for a while… but I’m glad that didn’t happen!
    ugh… i dont read Speedhunters’ posts anymore (only look at the pictures) because:
    – slow-motion videos get me angry because I just want to see whats going to happen in real time instead of having to wait a long time and i want to hear the sound of the engine and sound of the tyres and cheer of the crowd and bang of the crash and the splash of the water puddles and any birds that fly by while the cars drift by.
    – I don’t like the continuous use of “big words” describing something as simple as an awesome car, or explanation of why you like a certain camera angle on a certain car and its artistic values.
    – I don’t like to read about what little “interesting” obstacles you encountered on your way to the drift event or at the event, or how awful you feel because you didn’t take the time to walk around the pits and photograph every awesome car and instead just stayed in one spot during the whole event.
    – I definitely don’t like to read huge essays about your sex fetish for Falken Tire and Need For Speed and FormulaD even though those are the ones who keep you alive. Its too boring.

    Alexi, sorry for that possibly unnecessary rant… but i just had to let that out… you can edit/delete this comment if you want to

    keep up the good work with Noriyaro, one of the few blogs I read
    cool people doing cool stuff with cool whips.. thats what makes this blog #1 IMO
    I’d like to know what you have in mind for making Noriyaro more interactive!!

  • kOOpA says:

    all sounds good ^^ well said on the verbal wankery, hahaha!

  • banpei says:

    Great news! Thumbs up! d:)b
    I’m not sure if you are referring to my comment in this announcement, but if so I feel flattered:
    http://noriyaro.com/?p=2452
    I must say that I am proud that you did let your blog die, unlike the other examples in that topic. Even tough your post frequency dropped a bit you managed to keep it alive! 🙂

    Then I have a question about contributing to Speedhunters: somehow you were not really in the picture on that blog. What happened?

    And of course I’ll be very interested in the 2PD Meeting footage! I saw some how-tos in an episode of (I thought) Drift Tengoku and started to practice with my puny 3 speed auto. Must say it is really interesting what you can achieve with an automatic and open-diff! 😀 😀

  • Warren says:

    Noriyaro > speedhunters
    simple as that

    I can’t get how people cannot be bored after the 35th slo-mo video!
    Seems like everyone is doing that nowadays and its kind of boring!
    Drift is about that kind of badassery http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzr0AIsPilY

  • Sam says:

    WOOT!!

    Does this mean we’ll be getting daily updates again? 😛

    Also welcome home.

  • macka says:

    speedhunters, powered by terrible need for speed games

  • Eiji says:

    Yay for Alexi!

    I look forward to reading your daily blog every few days :P.

  • Zeb says:

    Haha, good call @ ‘don’t you think?’

  • Jays14 says:

    Dude, i hate blogs but i read yours, nori yaro is the only blog that i have been on again after the 1st look.

    Keep it up….

  • Lee says:

    You’ve summed up exactly how i feel about speedhunters. They cover all sorts of cool shit all over the world. I want to enjoy it, but i don’t.

  • Luke says:

    Good to see im not the only one who is thinking like you, they seem to pick and choose when they want to use your work, offer zero support for your upcoming projects.

    Jump into the money crunching world of SP.com, they have scared every single movie editor out there when it comes to using slow motion because they have abused its so much turning 3 seconds of video into a 4 minute video. They are giving the new generate of fans a false view on the world of cars and drifting.

  • Kevin says:

    Thanks Alexi. you did us a favor by sticking to what you truly believe in!

    Cheers from the Philippines!

    -Kevin

  • Jerry says:

    Right on Alexi!! Funny thing is, the articles you wrote for Speedhunters were some of the best one they ever put on the ‘net. I remember when your first one popped up and I didn’t look at the author and thought, “Man, this feels like Alexi’s work” and sure enough, it was yours! Keep up the good work, it’s always a pleasure to see new material on noriyaro after clicking the bookmark tab!

  • fejjan says:

    I love Nori Yaro! I check it every day hoping for a new post. And I’m glad your going to be focusing on it again.
    So cheers and a big thx from Sweden! 🙂

  • Josh says:

    omg thank youuuuuuuuuuuu best news ive herd all day

    nori yaro is my daily stop to cure bordom plus its cool cos ur from aus (im from adelaide)!

    HUGE props from me

    your living my dream LOL

    cheers for the many hours spent reading your blog

  • Benson says:

    Alexi you rock!! I’m glad you came to your senses. This isn’t a cool guy competition!

  • Lith says:

    I’m glad you will be updating this site 🙂
    I check the RSS feeds basically every day for new stuff 😀

  • christoff says:

    I have to agree with a couple people above – I really WANT to like SpeedHunters… the concept seems like exactly what I’d love but in the end I look at the pics as fast as my mouse can scroll and then move on just glad to be caught up with it.

    Also, I don’t think I noticed any of your contributions beyond the excellent Vaughn stuff and maybe 1 other post many weeks back. Seemed like this all happened quite a while ago but it’s just official now? Does this mean you’ll put your links to other sites back up on the right side of the page?

    Thanks for your efforts here up until now and we all look forward to much much more.

  • leongsoon says:

    I couldn’t agree more about slow-mo videos; I just watch maybe about 1 in every 15 videos they release. Slow-mo and weird music doesn’t do it for me. I like your style; raw, unadulterated, what the real scene is all about!

  • Rob says:

    speedhunters. a bunch of game nerds trying to act as if cars actually had an impact on their life. if so, the need for speed series would actually be good. long live noriyaro!

  • Isidro says:

    @ christoff
    I didn’t see anything else on speedhunters published by Alexi either. BUT I saw some of Alexi’s Noriyaro posts and topics somewhat copied and published on speedhunters by other people.

    that really pissed me off, especially because the gave NO CREDIT to Alexi for being the first to post that content.

    Noriyaro FTW

  • Laurence says:

    Well I look forward to the new paradigm that we are spiraling into! I have been pondering this predicament and I can only hope that a symbiotic relationship between blogger and bloggee can transcend the grandiloquent contributions prevalent in the current zeitgeist. A cromulent idea, don’t you think?

  • MeZ says:

    Laurence quit talking with your jibba jabba :P!

    Awesome news Alexi!!!!!
    Cant wait to see what youve got planned, Nori Yaro is already awesome times 10 and now you say your working on it to make it more interactive? Are we aiming for possibly awesome to the power of over 9000???!!!!!!!

    😛

  • James says:

    Word Alexi

    I really dig your articles in Autosalon magazine which no one seems to have mentioned.

    Contrary to everyone else, I like reading speedhunters… they offer quite a large variety of cars which is cool but I think what everyone seems to dislike is the fact that all the writers on there seem to be in a bit of a competition with each other seeing who can write the greatest post or who can make the coolest video. But hey I’m a pretty artistic person myself so I like watching there slo-mo vids and artistic perspective on things.

  • Alexi says:

    Some of these comments are hilarious.

    I didn’t actually mean to go off on a rant! I just wrote it and hit “post” without reading it.

  • Ben Comana says:

    Its a shame it didnt seem to end in good terms, but im glad this blog will be up and running in full steam.

  • Corey says:

    Thanks for that update.

  • TMR Tony says:

    You’re a bloody legend, Alexi. I’m glad to hear you’re out of Speedhunters’ blog-destroying clutches and devoting your time to things like Noriyaro and ASM.

    Keep on keepin’ it real, pal.