Storie's of Mark

A normal S'soM timeline would contain a monthly post about my time spent at a Sunday noon car event in San Antonio, Texas, but there hasn't been one since June. I would have wrote a couple posts for the previous Social Sundays events of July and August, but there hasn't been a reason to write my experience containing every minute of thing I've seen at the venue of the month. The 'tl;dr' form, as this fast-paced world calls it, is that videos and photos uploaded to Odysee and Pixelfed better portray the scenery of a car show than an entire blog post written by yours truly. However, for the reader wanting a detailed explanation on why I don't write about car events anymore, I'll continue on now that those with short attention spans may have clicked off this page.

While venues for each month are different in site rather than locale, the experience is often the same atmosphere of a sweat-struck crowd strolling gently to browse the exotic cars lined-up inside a 'VIP' section. Photographers take the same shots they've made in the previous month to upload online for the tenth time, and regular car attendees of the show make their prescence known to a familiar circle of people, whom are managing something for that noon. This has been the case for The Rim, and Eilan Hotel, which was the last event I went to as of writing. In fact, these two sites aren't far apart from each other as the I-10 merely sits between them. Looking from the distance standing on the Eilan village upper-level deck, The Rim area can be seen easily to point out last month's show site! No wonder driving to the Eilan Hotel felt familiar to the route I drove in July. It's like every car show blends in with each other, just with slightly different exotics and sports models. Same can be said for vendors, but they are simply sponsors of Social Sundays, and are quite close to the people behind the organization.

WIth all that in mind, NO shame should be intended for showrunners Dennis and Nathan for hosting Social Sundays exclusively in the northern part of San Antonio. I understand that they attract an influx of middle-class people with no intent for devious activities in a family-friendly environment, which is what makes Social Sundays highly regarded in the local car community. The issue with doing a car meet in northern San Antonio repeatedly is that it becomes a tedious experience for myself to write about on the blog space as I'd be reusing the same terminology once every month, except it's a different site. Sure, I could explain what the buildings of the area look like, or what are my favorite cars I saw during my visit that month, but my external media pages can tell you, reader, the experience of a Social Sundays event you're interested in learning about in visual-form. I've found great use for uploading hundreds of images to Pixelfed, and got used to merging clips I've recorded to go on Odysee. I believe both forms of media are the saving grace for not having to write about car events in the span of two days, taking a weight off my shoulder when it comes to uploading content related to the car event of the month.

The same thing can be said about other car meets throughout San Antonio. Whether it's CarFest & Coffee, Slow Sunday, The Lot, or others, the experience will usually be similar to the big Social Sundays meet every month. A bunch of car people socializing while showing off their wheels. I do speak to car owners often at these events, but given the nature of speaking in the middle of a crowd with loud music playing in the background, hearing words can be difficult. People congregating in the background are conversation killers, so thanks to them for stealing the attention of someone from myself.

The link is already on the index page and navigation bar, but my Odysee page is at odysee.com/@spaceofmarkxyz. This is where I'll upload videos initially before YouTube sees them. Did I just say YouTube? Yes, your eyes don't deceive you, reader.

In case you want the link to it for some reason, my YouTube page is at youtube.com/@spaceofmarkxyz. If you care about privacy and Google hogging your RAM usage, do not click on this YouTube link. Otherwise, the page exists to inform normies on the platform about my Odysee and Pixelfed pages. Getting the platforms exposed will teach people that alternate social media exists on the internet, hence the purpose of YouTube being treated as the gateway.

I know this was all mentioned back in BPU2. For those who haven't heeded the call to migrate to alternate platforms, now is the time. Odysee is where you'll see the car shows as you hear them with no editing, or voiceover. Sorry, but the cars already do the speaking to not require my own input.

One note to point out about YouTube is its copyright system. If you haven't watched any Social Sundays content, there will sometimes be music played in the video either by someone's speaker or subwoofer nearby my camera when I record, which affects a video's availability in certain parts of the world. If the page wasn't enough of a gateway to Odysee already, then affected videos can be viewed there free of censorship, and copyright automation.

My Pixelfed page is at pixelfed.social/spaceofmarkxyz. This is where I'll upload pictures I shoot at car events, which are usually about a hundred per month. These pictures are usually portraits, close-ups, and experimental shots inspired by photographers on Instagram engaged with the San Antonio car scene. A set of 20 pictures are uploaded per-post by the server's standard, and are grouped in the Collections tab of my profile by event name. In other words, no picture is singled out in any of my posts in case a car owner is reading this, so you'll have to scroll through my content to see if your wheels appear. Each photo group in Collections contain an Odysee link to the pertaining event's footage if available, so as such, all my platforms remain interconnected with one other. Odysee links Pixelfed. Pixelfed links Odysee. YouTube links website, and so on.

Why Pixelfed? It's connected to the Fediverse, open-source, and privacy respecting. BPU2 has you told you this, but I should tell you why I chose this particular server to create my account on. The picture limit is set to 20 per-post, no 2FA is required, no phone number forced onto my account, and response times are quick. It is also the largest public Pixelfed server containing, at the time of writing this post, 583,000 users worldwide. You can find out more about this server here if you wanna learn about most of the features provided, but it's Instagram without the nosey privacy devils.

Video uploading is possible on the pixelfed.social server, but I'd rather keep this piece of content mostly to Odysee. Unless there's a clip I possess that isn't worthy of a 0.001 LBC upload fee, then my Pixelfed page may see a video or two depending on its duration.

The stories, rants, picture tie-ins, and 4 Fun Photos. I had great fun writing about these car events from memory, almost like retracing my footsteps made in a venue on a nice Sunday. I've realized that the actual car owners of these events are informed through the likes of Facebook and Instagram, making any connection to decentralized platforms virtually impossible without someone like myself poking my toes into the swamp of YouTube to get the message out there. This also means that writing old-fashioned blog posts like this serve no purpose against modern-day short-form photography posts on mainstream media that receive multitudes of attention compared to my niche space indexed on Wiby.

If photo and video content on Instagram do so well with the car community in San Antonio, then why should I write about a car event like it's an essay for college every month just for them to be forgotten about? I think I made my point in the previous S'soM posts regarding not just Social Sundays, but my alternative social media platforms being out there for the reader of this space to consume. They are for when I don't have anything to write about, and when I do have an idea for a S'soM post, you'll see it on the main page as always. This may be the last time I plug my own social media accounts away from Space of Mark so as to not drag anything from past S'soM posts time and time again.

The spotlight here has been San Antonio all-post-long, but I may not write about other car events outside of my own city for the same reason they aren't necessary. Sure, I have car content from another city a few years back, but once you see its pictures, you'll know the story of that event better than I could explain it in text-form.

I should've ended this post by telling you to follow my external pages for more content, but I didn't want to come off as a clickbait-type scum. I don't do this for money either. I want to show off these amazing car events from my world in the simplest way possible, for free! Thanks for reading, and kindly stop scalping the watermelons at H.E.B.