RIP Dylan

Unfortunately, Dylan Rieder passed away yesterday (October 12, 2016). Whenever a beloved figure dies, I never know how to react. I didn't know them personally, and it feels insincere to be truly distraught over the loss. What I do know is that I loved to watch Dylan skate, and I know a lot of others did too. If you're a skater, he was one of us, and if he was one of us, we've experienced a loss.

So let's remember him for some of his best work. Dylan, your style will never be matched. And you'll be missed.

Everybody, here's Dylan.

Happy Go Skateboarding Day!

It's June 21st, 2016, aka Go Skateboarding Day. If you haven't already, go skate!

If you need motivation or are stuck inside for some reason, here's a new video from Vagrant Skateboards:




Stop reading- go skate!

KOTR Score Update 2

It's a beautiful Saturday, June 18th, which can only mean two things: Go Skateboarding Day is coming up (So get out there and skate!) and I've tallied up the scores for yet another update on King of the Road 2015. My recreation of The Book was updated yesterday, and you can click that link to look at what I think the scores are. If you want to read up on what compelled me to do something like this, here's my original post where I explain that.

Chocolate
Earned Score: 2530
Speculative Score: 2730

Toy Machine
Earned Score: 2750
Speculative Score: 2750

Birdhouse
Earned Score: 4390
Speculative Score: 4890

Birdhouse is not only still winning, but actually seems to be pulling ahead of Toy Machine, which makes it all the more amazing, because we're well past the point where points come easily. Of course, Chocolate is actually catching up with Toy Machine a little bit, so it's pretty likely that Toy Machine just didn't score a ton of points for this particular episode/webisode.

I'm still endlessly entertained at the fact that Mike Davis is working so hard to get the most make-outs while competing with absolutely nobody. He could have made out with 3 women to get those 50 points and he's already topped 40, despite probably pissing off his girlfriend in the process.

Axel Cruysberghs is still the hardest working and Elijah Berle is still on top for MVP. As for Least Valuable Player, by my count, Stevie Perez has the fewest points, and seems to be mostly just chilling and skating. That might actually make me like him even more, but that's neither here nor there.

Point is, KOTR is still super entertaining and I love it. If you haven't checked it out already, I don't know what you're doing here in the first place, but go ahead and check it out so you can join us in watching this skate-fueled, stupid debauchery.

KOTR Score Update

As I discuss in this post, I was curious to see who was winning in King of the Road so far, so I made this monstrosity in an attempt to tally up the scores.

This is the update as of 6/14/16. The scores are:

Toy Machine

Earned Score: 2370
Speculative Score: 2370

Chocolate

Earned Score: 2000
Speculative Score: 2150

Birdhouse

Earned Score: 3740
Speculative Score: 4190

Birdhouse, somewhat unsurprisingly, appears to still be winning by a wide margin. Chocolate, on the other hand, is in last place despite having MVP Elijah Berle on the team.  Elijah's earned at least 1050 points by himself.
So why such a big difference in scores?

Simply put, Birdhouse just has the right combination of team members that pretty much any challenge is within reach. Clint and Jaws will do any weird challenge that is required of them, Clive has enough pop to ollie over anything, and Mike Davis can seemingly do just about any tech trick. Ben Raybourn has been absolutely destroying any trick having to do with transition.

And that's the real story here. Despite being on a team full of members that have been grabbing up as many points as possible, Ben Raybourn is only trailing Elijah by about 100 ponts. Elijah's been doing well because he's basically been grabbing up all of the high-point challenges, and his teammates have been shuffling around doing 20 and 30 point challenges.

So I'm ready to call it at this point: Birdhouse is going to get the three-peat. With a commanding lead and a can-do attitude, they really do seem unstoppable.

So Who's Winning KOTR?

King of the Road is one of my favorite pieces of media anywhere. Endlessly entertaining in a way that makes me laugh, makes me cringe, and even scratches my itch to watch skateboarding. I look forward to it every year, and this year in particular I had 3 extra months to look forward to it because they postponed its release to coincide with the launch of Viceland. This change has been a bit weird for some people, because the impression is that Vice has been hoarding all the good footage and only the minimal scraps for the webisodes.

In watching both the Vice version and the Thrasher webisodes, I've noticed that they make it difficult to get a feel for what the score is. I think that's for a couple of reasons. For one thing, I guess they think it adds suspense to not know who's going to win until the very end. I guess the other thing to consider is not knowing the score takes you along for the ride and immerses you a little bit more. After all, the teams didn't know how many points the other teams had, so they also had to live with not knowing who's going to win.

I have pretty mixed feelings about that, because on one hand, I don't want to know who wins the whole thing yet because that feels like a plot-spoiler. Plus, the points are really more of a motivator for the teams (winner gets a cash prize) and isn't the most important part of the viewer's experience for something like this. Anti-Hero proved in 2012 that the the points don't really matter. On the other hand, this IS a competition, and the information is dispensed slowly over a period of 10 weeks, and so I don't think it's crazy of me to want to know who's winning. It adds to the story if I can go into an episode thinking, "Man, Toy Machine really needs to pick up the pace if they want to win" and then I can see what they do during that episode. It adds a narrative.

Since I'm a huge nerd, as the name of this blog implies, I decided to go through and watch all of the episodes and do my best to tally up the points. This was way more difficult than I thought it would be, because Thrasher didn't release The Book on their website like they have for the 3 previous years, and the webisodes don't even show point values, so I had to watch the Viceland version to figure out the points (the name of the challenge and points flash on the screen for a maximum of 1second, by the way). As if that didn't make it difficult enough, Viceland left out a lot of tricks, so I had to watch the webisodes to make sure I didn't miss too many. So, you're welcome, is what I'm trying to say.

Click here for the full list of points so far.

The point summary is below. The 'Earned Score' is the score that I'm pretty sure of, while the 'Speculative Score' is what I expect the score to be if I guess right about the 'Highest, Longest, Most' category.

These are only rough estimates.

Here are the results so far:
Toy Machine
Earned Score: 1940
Speculative Score:1990

Birdhouse
Earned Score: 3240
Speculative Score: 3590


Chocolate
Earned Score: 2150
Speculative Score: 2250


Leading MVP: Elijah Berle, 800 pts.(Note: I'm not sure about this- These are only based on attempted points so far that I've been able to determine.)

Trailing LVP: Blake Carpenter, for whining the most while also producing 200 pts. Justin Eldridge has probably produced the fewest points overall so far though with 70 points, but in his defense he was sick for a day and has otherwise been pretty supportive of his team.

 

KOTR Book Reconstruction

For starters, I want to stress that all of these scores are only based on what I could tally from watching the show. There are inconsistencies throughout the show that make it difficult to be certain about the point values. It's also really easy to miss stuff, so I'm sure there are plenty of mistakes. Points rewarded in the 'Highest, Longest, Most' category are just guesses. There are also some other quarks of scoring- if a trick is really sketchy, does it still count? If a whole team contributes to a challenge, do those points count at all towards determining the MVP? Everything here is really just my best guess. Feel free to make corrections in the comments, but I won't change it unless I can find evidence of what you're talking about, so it's best to be specific if you actually want to help out.

If you're reading this from the home page, click 'Read More' below to see the list.
  

Marc Johnson and the Increasing Lameness of the Skateboard Industry

Yes, I'm going to talk about Marc Johnson's move from Lakai to Adidas. I know every other skateboarding blogger has already talked about it, and I know people are either already bummed about it or just don't see what the problem is. But I'm going to use what Marc Johnson did as  jumping off point to talk about a much bigger topic, and that topic is really more of an exploration of this question: Does anyone really like the direction skateboarding (its industry, media, and culture) is going?

For starters, let's recap what we know about Marc Johnson's move to Adidas. Adidas recently put out Away Days, a full length skate video. At the premiere, they announced that Daewon Song and Marc Johnson were joining the team.

For Daewon, the move was somewhat expected. Marc, on the other hand, stirred some people up, because back in 2013, he said in an an interview with Jenkem that he would not do that sort of thing. Literally. Here's the quote:

"If a big sports shoe brand paid you 2 or 3 times your current salary, would you consider leaving Lakai to ride for them?

Okay. No, I wouldn’t ride for a mainstream sports footwear brand. I would not skate for Big Company Footwear."

Tyler Bledsoe's Back!

I don't know how I missed this- apparently I'm 3 months late, but Tyler Bledsoe now rides for HUF. I'll admit, I've been busy with other things for the last 6 months, so I didn't catch it, but Tyler Bledsoe's amazing and I'm happy to see him hooked up with a shoe sponsor since he was dropped from Etnies last year. Here's the intro clip:



Bledsoe is of course also on one of the Alien Workshop offshoots, Quasi Skateboards. This gives me the opportunity to quickly talk about Quasi- I'm pretty excited about Quasi. It took a while for them to fully develop their image, but they basically took 3 of my favorite skaters from Alien (Bledsoe, Gilbert Crockett, and Jake Johnson) and paired that up with amazing board graphics. Check 'em out.

If you're not sold yet on how rad Tyler Bledsoe is, check out this clip that contains all of his footage from  Fourstar's Fully Tour'd. Style for days, this guy:

I Finally Figured Why Chris Chann Bothers Me

Quite a while ago, I watched this video, and it bothered me. I couldn't put my finger on why it bothered me, but the whole thing was very uncomfortable.


I thought maybe I was just off-put by how short the match was. After all, Chris won with just 7 tricks in a contest where it's not unusual to see pros volley 10 tricks back and forth before someone gets a letter. Maybe it's all in my head.

After I rewatched it though, I realized that I was actually just uncomfortable because of how little I related to Chris Chann. Let me explain:

Why Haven't I Seen This?- 27

There's tons of good skate footage out there. I just want to share something that's good that you maybe haven't seen before to get you stoked on skating.

This week's feature is longer than usual, as it's a full video. It's not really broken up into parts, so it made sense to post the full video. It's a work of art and it speaks for itself. If you have a half an hour to kill, I recommend relaxing and enjoying this video.

Why Haven't I Seen This? -26

There's tons of good skate footage out there. I just want to share something that's good that you maybe haven't seen before to get you stoked on skating.


This will be the last part I'm presenting from the Brainsworld series, and it appropriately ends with the last part. Kea Smith is just a really talented skateboarder, plain and simple. I'll let the skating speak for itself.

Why Haven't I Seen This?- 25

There's tons of good skate footage out there. I just want to share something that's good that you maybe haven't seen before to get you stoked on skating.

So for the next few weeks, I'm going to be featuring clips from a great video that I stumbled upon titled Brainsworld. A lot of the spots in the video are also featured in the A Happy Medium series, which makes me think that these guys are from Arizona, although they're a bit younger than the Happy Medium crew.

John O'Neal opened up this video with a solid part. He's got a mean front blunt and the ender looks scary as hell. Take a look.

An Overview of "Sour Solution"

So apparently all the key guys from the European Sweet Skateboards jumped ship late last year to start their own brand, Sour. I'm not sure why they all decided to leave, but you don't usually see that if the team is generally okay with where they are. Whatever the story behind that might be, they started their own brand and came out with The Sour Solution back in January. In the last week, the full video showed up on the web. I don't really care to 'review' the video other than to say I really liked it, but I think it might be fun to go through most of the parts to bring out some highlights.

Starting things off, we have a pretty entertaining bail section starring Simon Isaksson. At 1:45, there's a really cool trick where Simon does a Bennett grind where he grinds on the OTHÉR side of the ledge and then scares the hell out of a pedestrian, which makes it a line as far as I'm concerned. At 3:10 he starts a line by doing a slappy bluntslide (second one in this video part, mind you) and then ducks under a rail mid-slide. It's awesome.

Why Haven't I Seen This?- 24

There's tons of good skate footage out there. I just want to share something that's good that you maybe haven't seen before to get you stoked on skating.

So for the next few weeks, I'm going to be featuring clips from a great video that I stumbled upon titled Brainsworld. A lot of the spots in the video are also featured in the A Happy Medium series, which makes me think that these guys are from Arizona, although they're a bit younger than the Happy Medium crew.

This week we have Tyler Gould up to bat. Tyler's sick, you guys. This video part alone features some really awesome fastplant variations (a la Jeff Stevens), one of the most solid backside flips I've ever seen, and a kickflip 5-0 that's just perfect in every way. I hope you like it.

A Tribute to Pop Shuvits

It's pretty rare to see just a plain pop shuvit in a video part. It's pretty obvious why: it's just about the easiest trick you can do. A lot of kids learn shuvits before they can properly ollie, and I know that I could pop shuvit for weeks before I ever learned my first kickflip.

I think that a good pop shuvit really is a think of beauty though. For one thing, it's a true test of pop- there's no foot drag or flick, so all of the height comes from raw pop. Since all of the movement happens with your back foot, there's this cool symmetry where you start the trick with your back foot and stop it with your front foot. A good pop shuvit should look like your backfoot is delivering the tail of the board directly to your front foot. I can't help but feel alone in my appreciation of this trick though, because nobody else really raves about pop shuvits. So maybe through this tribute, I can convince you that a good pop shuvit is a beautiful thing. I'm not focusing on frontside shuvits, 360 shuvits, nollie shuvits, or fakie shuvits. Just regular, backside pop shuvits to really showcase how great this trick is.

For starters, let's look at Brad Staba's trick tip of a pop shuvit. It features a whole montage of good pop shuvit, but Staba has my favorite. It's a smooth, floating one that really just seems to work out perfectly.

Why Haven't I Seen This?- 23

There's tons of good skate footage out there. I just want to share something that's good that you maybe haven't seen before to get you stoked on skating.

So for the next few weeks, I'm going to be featuring clips from a great video that I stumbled upon titled Brainsworld. A lot of the spots in the video are also featured in the A Happy Medium series, which makes me think that these guys are from Arizona, although they're a bit younger than the Happy Medium crew.

This week we've got Tino Rincon. All I have to say about Tino is that he looks unnaturally natural on a board. At one point he does a nollie frontside 270 to back tail 270 out, and he does it with more ease than I thought possible. Enjoy.

Santa Monica Triple Set- ABD List

Hello ladies and gentlemen.

Did you know that Ryan Gallant did a kickflip backside noseblunt down the clipper ledge? Because I didn't until quite recently, and when I came across it, I stumbled onto the ABDarchives page for the famous clipper ledge.

Before I continue, just reflect on how awesome Ryan Gallant is, both for doing that trick and every other trick he's ever blessed our eyeballs with. Are we done reflecting? Good.

Anyway, I began to wonder what other famous spots had such pages, only to realize that very few seem to exist. Of course, a couple of famous spots are pretty well cataloged in other ways, so the most famous spot I could think of next was the Santa Monica triple set. When I began, I really didn't realize how much stuff had gone down at Santa Monica, but the spot always interested me. It's very distinct in videos, as it sits right on the beach and has a long history of crazy tricks going down there. It's a gap that is big enough that nobody really steps to it unless they're serious, but yet it's still manageable enough to be open to all kinds of possibilities- as we will see.

What I have here is (I think) a good start of a list of all the notable tricks that have happened at the Santa Monica triple set. I do acknowledge, however, that I almost certainly missed a few and for that reason, I'm asking for your help! If you know of another trick that has gone down at the set, let me know in the comments. I'll be updating the list as I discover new tricks.


NOTE: I apologize for the speed of the GIF's being kind of messed up. I couldn't find a better way to make them that didn't speed up the clip by almost double, so I tried to use slow motion video clips where possible so that they wouldn't quite have that weird hummingbird effect. Since this page is kind of heavy, the speed might also change depending on your internet connection, but I tried to be good about saying where each clip comes from so you could go see it for yourself if you choose.

For now, let's dive deep into skateboarding history and really appreciate some of the incredible feats that have gone down at this historic skate spot.

It was way back in 1993 that New World Order came out and Kareem Campbell opened up his part with an ollie down the triple set. Kareem's style is still great to watch today.

From the Borders

I know that a lot of people have seen this, because it was posted on Thrasher, but however many people see it there isn't enough. This video seems to be a brothers project, starring Steve and Dave Mull, and being filmed and edited by Tom Mull. Both parts are among the most enjoyable that I have seen in a very long time. Laced with creativity, powered by fast skating, and bolted together with a healthy dose of gnarliness, there's very little to not like about this video. It sounds kind of fruity, but this video is beautiful. The nature shots, the skating, the melodic music that goes perfectly with the footage. It's proof that skateboarding can be an art, and that's awesome.

Skate Jams Vol. 2

Once again, I've stumbled upon some music that I suspect that a lot of other skaters besides myself might like to skate to. The group is called RDGLDGRN, and before you hurt yourself trying to pronounce it, it's just "Red Gold Green" without any vowels or spaces, so I assume you pronounce it like you would pronounce the colors. They're coming up from the DC area, and I don't think I'm out of line by saying that they could very well have a hit song by the time their next album drops.  If I were to describe them, I would say that they fall pretty comfortably in the 'indie rock' category, but that's mostly because pretty much all up-tempo music that includes electric guitars and drums can fit comfortably into that category, due in no small part to bands and labels realizing that they could sell more albums that way.

But I digress. Wikipedia says they fall in the "Indie Go-Go" genre, so let's go with that (Did I just make a pun by accident? Dangit.)

I like these guys because they do a good job of giving each song it's own unique flavor. A lot of bands are able to do pretty much only one thing well- or at least, only one thing at a time well. I have no problem with that, but it makes it that much more refreshing when they have some songs that are pretty hip-hoppish:




And others that are more rock-driven with just the slightest hint of ska-like instrumentation:

Weekly "Why Haven't I Seen This?" - 22

With the plethora of skate footage that's out there, it can be easy to overlook things. And yet, so often we stumble upon a video that we've never heard of and find ourselves asking why we hadn't seen it before. Each week, I plan to post another lesser-known video that deserves more recognition, for your viewing pleasure.

Do you like fast, powerful, creative skating? Then you'll like this video. Black and white videos? Then you'll LOVE this video. Do you like giant, paper mache arms? Then you'll care for this video like it's your firstborn, because all those elements are there. Our friend Phil Zwijsen from Belgium delivers a web part that I didn't want to end. Check it out!