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It's a hot day in Noble, Oklahoma and I'm sitting with the crew from Pleasures, one of the premier car and truck clubs around. Kevin Blackshere and his girlfriend Becca (aka Pigtails) and I were discussing the car/truck scene and how it has changed over the past year. Like so many times before, Becca and Kevin recited to me almost the identical words that I hear at almost every event that I attend: Street Source Magazine has brought the entire show scene closer togther. The first or second time I heard this statement, I just kind of blew it off as some poor minitrucker who had been partying too much in the hot sun. But after hearing the same words time and time again, I started to think about the scene before SSM, how it is now and just how different things really are. The thoughts rushed through my head of how things were before we offered fans a place to converge and talk, and before you introduced yourself by your screen name as opposed to your real name. Boy, has it ever changed! Before SSM, I had already been active in the show scene for many years. For the past few, I've been hanging out with my Relaxed Atmosphere family and building and showing my Nissan Hardbody. Competition between clubs had been at an all-time high, with members from every club tossing out insults at each other and even going as far as printing t-shirts with statements aimed at opposing clubs. Clubs did not really mingle with each other. If you were in a club, you would normally only hang out with that one group of people. Occasionally, a fight would break out between members of different clubs. And if the top club competitions weren't enough, the smaller, less known clubs weren't offered the same respect from members of the larger clubs. The scene really was a mess. It should not have been this way, but sadly it was.
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Another obstacle facing the scene was distance. There were literally thousands upon thousands of people, both east coast and west coast, you never had the opportunity to meet or talk to simply because they happened to live on the other side of the county. How many times have you seen a ride in a magazine and thought "You know, I wish I could talk to him and ask him how he did that?" SSM weakened that obstacle. The Internet is a very powerful tool and we play host to clubs from coast to coast, and from many other countries as well, including Canada, Australia and Germany. Conversation is only one click away and everyone is invited.Obviously SSM is not the end-all of club competitions or individual people. Competition will always be there. SSM has merely helped to break down the walls that were once there between clubs. And as you all know, SSM can't take away the distances between east and west coast and everywhere in between. But, we can offer everyone a place to speak and meet and just enjoy each other's time and company. So as I sat and talked with Becca and Kevin, I thought about how many people and how many clubs that I've been fortunate enough to meet over the past year as well as the hundreds of individuals. These aren't just people that I talk to, these are people that I consider friends, whether I've had the opportunity to meet them in person or not. And I remember when I first met Becca and Kevin in the SSM chat room. Because of that, I have two new friends that happen to live seven hundred miles away. Friends that I probably never would have known otherwise. Bobby StewartBobby@StreetSourceMag.com
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