Quantcast
Channel: illicit snowboarding
Viewing all 102 articles
Browse latest View live
↧

Multimedia Snowboard Tragedies

May 23, 2013, 5:51 am
$
0
0
I like to put these snowboard book reviews into themes, because no one reading something on the interweb wants to read about individual reads they aren't going to read, so I look to see if there are any interesting trends to be found that you might be interested in. This time out I ended up picking up all of the two non-fiction books that have ever been written about snowboarding tragedies to see what's going down in that genre. Cheery. There were two trends; the first trend was that every single one of these books is written by blokes named John, and the second was that that both stories were much more than just books, they had developed into fully blown multimedia experiences. So for people who don't like reading, this is the read for you. Stick with this and there'll be all sorts of opportunities to look at pictures, click buttons, watch videos, Facebook Like stuff and abuse people in comments sections...

Cold a Long Time by John Leake
It seems the story of Duncan MacPherson's disappearance got a fair bit of coverage in Canada, but not much outside of that, so I'd never heard anything about it before I picked up the book. The book is self-published so the quality of the cover and the printing wasn't good, my expectations were low and I only picked it out because I'm a sucker for crappy snowboarding related books. Then I was blown-away by it.

Let's start our multimedia journey with the book trailer video, every good book has to have one these days. Somehow this lad managed to snag Bill Paxton and his drawl to do the narrator duties.
Having watched that you might be thinking that with the sinister music, the overuse of the word mystery and the interview sections with the over-animated author you wouldn't get tired of slapping, that this book has conspiracy bollocks written all over it. That's what I thought when I started reading the book and I hadn't seen this trailer.

For the first half of the book the genuinely disturbing information was swamped by John Leake's slightly hysterical writing style and his conspiracies about things that really just sounded like just your run-of-the-mill incompetence and shitty bureaucracy. I was close to putting the thing down, but then I hit the second half of the book and suddenly things got interesting. It turns out that despite first appearances John Leake did the graft, produced the evidence and was able to back up his claims. This is not a flaky conspiracy theory, it's actually the true story of how a number of people in a ski resort managed to cover up a terrible thing and got away scot free.

------------------------------Spoiler Alert------------------------------
Normally the last thing you want to know about a book that's promoted as a mystery is what actually happens in the end, but this story is different. This story need spoiling. It's a whole lot better if you actually know what happened before you start. In fact the promotion of a story like this as a mystery reduced the otherwise powerful impact of the events and undersells the book. Instead of being presented as a who-done-it it should be a how-did-they-do-it. The the real story is how it happened and the nasty shenanigans that occurred afterwards. So here's what happened:

On the 9th August 1989, Duncan MacPherson, a Canadian former ice hockey player disappeared on a solo trip in Europe.
By the 16th August his parents were alerted that he hadn't turned up for a job he was starting in sunny Scotland.

Then heaps of incompetence and bureaucracy took place as the various police forces and diplomatic services muddled their way through their working weeks.

On the 20 September the car he'd borrowed from a friend in Germany was found in the car park of the Stubai Glacier in Austria with all of his belongings in. It had sat there for 42 days, while the resort was open, without anyone apparently noticing.
It's hard to spot, but it's the red one.
On the 9th August he'd taken the gondola up to the glacier, rented a snowboard set-up and taken some beginner lessons. According to the rental shop he'd returned his snowboard gear that afternoon and after that no one ever saw him again. The local police assumed that he either decided to walk down the mountain and died somewhere on route, or he somehow went snowboarding again on an imaginary snowboard and fell into a crevasse in one of the marked-off areas away from the marked ski run.

The somewhat inept searches were called off on the 14th October and by the 14th January 1990 the case closed and his disappearance was put down to an unspecified case of 'mountain accident'.
.....

14 years later, on the 18th July 2003, on a very warm day, his body appeared, in a shallow crevasse right in the middle of the slope.
The red arrow is where he died and the black arrow is where his body was found 14 years later
He was found with all the rented snowboard equipment everyone had insisted he'd returned on the day he died.

The body was recovered by the piste grooming team (except for the bits they missed that his parents found when they went to have a look later), some more cursory and botched police work ensued, no one wondered how the rental gear had suddenly reappeared, no one bothered doing an autopsy and by the 6th October the case was closed again and this time his demise was put down to a bad bit of 'accidental death.'

After this the parents slowly started to come to the realisation that it wasn't quite that nice and simple. When they finally got hold of the x-rays and photos from the Austrian pathologist and Duncan's effects which included the rental equipment they started to notice that things were significantly amiss.
For starters, this was the snowboard. Have you ever had a snowboard accident which tore your snowboard to shreds? Me neither.
The snowboard wasn't just broken, it was ripped apart by something very powerful. His clothing had also been shredded including his left boot lining although the left boot itself was separate and undamaged, there were three unaccountable gloves left with his body, both his left and right hands had been cut off, his left leg had been severed entirely below the knee and in the middle of the thigh and it was apparent that all this damage happened before he went into the glacier.

Here's where the multimedia thing kicks in again. If you want to see the details (and it's just a tad minging) it's all there in glorious technicolour on the book's website along with chocks more evidence including the photos used here. There's no doubt at all that this lad was horribly mangled by some heavy machinery on the day he died. Here's what the evidence suggests happened:
  • In the afternoon of the 9th August Duncan MacPherson was the last one on the slope when he fell and suffered a serious injury, presumably a broken leg, which is why he was unstrapped from the board and his left boot was off. He was alone on the hill in fog so no one was able to see him in trouble.
  • At some point later that day he was hit by a piste groomer and dragged into the tiller which caused all the damaged to him and the equipment.
The tiller is the spiny spiky bit at the back of the pistie beastie.
  • His body was then jimmied out of the mechanism by at least two piste workers and chucked into a convenient crevasse, along with the gloves that they'd got bloody during the extraction. The crevasse was then covered in snow to hide the evidence.
  • The rental shop owner covered up that the snowboard wasn't returned at the end of the day. In 2003 the rental shop owner sent a letter to the parents denying that they ever stocked Duret snowboards, despite clarifying that they did in police reports at time of the disappearance and the Duret snowboard having their identity shop rental stickers on it. That's taking denial to an incredible level.
  • The snowboard instructor who had taught him in the morning, who was expecting to see him the next day for another lesson and who was looking after his clothing, didn't alert anyone to the disappearance.
  • The resort employees didn't notice the car parked for 42 days.
  • The police were incredibly work-shy at all opportunities.
  • The forensic pathologist didn't run an autopsy when the body was found in 2003.
  • The prosecutor dismissed the case out of hand.
And that, my friends, is how you cover up a dead body in a ski resort.

If you find all that just a little bit disturbing then have a watch of this 45 minute long documentary on the CBC website which is well worth the time. The Fifth Estate - A Cold Case

And to finish off your multimedia experience I'd recommend getting a hold of the book. It might be an odd writing style but there's loads more to this story and it's so bonkers you'll struggle to put it down.


Next, I got this on my Kindle.
Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek by John Branch & The New York Times
It was a sad story. It was short. It brought me nothing.

At least that was that case, until I subsequently found out that it was not just an ebook, the story itself was just the base of an incredible online article, with interactive graphics, interviews and video elements. The New York Times wanted to produce an article that made full use of all of the opportunities the internet has brought together. I'm not sure why they chose this particular story to really go to town on, but they did and it took something from being ordinary to being brilliant. It took a team of people several months to produce and it's since won a Pultizer prize (we haven't even got one of those). So, don't buy the crappy ebook (whoever organised that bit was really letting the side down), instead clear about two hours of the time you'd normally waste watching CSI reruns and have a go at this: Snow Fall



Enough of this. Happy summer snowboarding season!


You Might Also Like...
Pro Snowboarder Autobiographies - The Mega Book Review

Snowboard Propaganda For Kids


↧
Search

17 Epic Snowboard & Ski Slasher Movies

June 5, 2013, 7:01 am
$
0
0
I'm from the Jaws generation, and I'm now forever cursed with an irrational fear of getting eaten to death by huge aquatic teeth missiles. As a result one of the things I've always really appreciated about snowboarding as opposed to surfing is the significantly lower risk of becoming a fish snack. Now either I'm not alone in my shark-based fear predicament, or someone who I've never met in my life really has it in for me, so severely that they have been studying my every move to find my single weakness and target that through the medium of a low-budget straight-to-video horror flick, because this summer sees the release of the almost entirely unanticipated movie Avalanche Sharks.

And Avalanche Sharks isn't the first horror movie to tackle the oddly specific niche of snowboarding and skiing. If you for some reason don't share my specific fear of sharks, maybe one of these other scenarios will do it for you...

1. Avalanche Sharks
After a horrific avalanche, the staff at Twin Pines Ski Resort starts to receive reports of missing people and creatures that move beneath the snow. As the body count piles up, the management tries to cover up the situation, which leads to disaster on their busiest day of the year: Bikini Snow Day.
Maybe I shouldn't be so worried about this after all. There's no chance I'd run into one of these suckers on Bikini Snow Day, I look crap in a bikini.
It was filmed in Mammoth, it's released in July and stars Brooke Hogan, Hulk Hogan's daughter, who also featured in an earlier movie from the same production company; Sand Sharks.

To give you an idea what to expect here's a trailer for that movie...

It gets a lowly rating of 2.7/10 rating on IMDB, just a tad better than their follow-up movie 2-Headed Shark Attack.


Weirdly this isn't the first snow shark movie, another one was released in 2011...
2. Snow Shark: Ancient Snow Beast
And with an IMDB rating of 1.9 and the garnering the critical review; "what a piece of crap", it's easily the worst movie on the list. Check out this thing of beauty....


3. Ice Spiders
"Eight Legged Freaks meeting Hot Dog: The Movie"
Two shit movies together, make one big turd.


4. Summit
That's enough big scary beasties for the moment, there are also some snowboarding and skiing slasher movies. This Kickstarter funded movie is going to be released in 2015.



5. Iced
Proving you don't need crowd-funding to fund a crappy ski-themed slasher movie, Iced was released in 1988.
Years ago, their dear friend was killed when he fell from a cliff while skiing for a love of a woman. Now, years later, they have all been invited to a remote ski resort by an unknown stranger. As they arrive, they begin to suspect something is not right... but by the time they realize, its far too late! Someone is stalking them, seeking revenge for a loss none of them understand... and by the time the sun rises on their desolate cabin, they'll all be ICED!
The full movie is here if you fancy working your way through it...


6. Shredder
It's the same movie again.


7. Cold Prey
Mirroring snowboarding, after the Americans invented it the Norwegians got involved and proved to be better at it. Cold Prey was released in 2006 and gets a very fair 6.3 IMDB score.
You can watch the full movie on You Tube here. They went on to produce two more, one in a hospital following directly on from the first movie and a prequel set in the 80s.


8. Class Trip
Sticking with the Euro theme, in 1998 the French got involved and produced this...

It is very French



9. Avalanche
If that was a little too art house for your tastes then here's some Hoff.
Duncan is a murderous thief. When he jumps out of his plane, it crashes into the Rockies and produces an avalanche. A quiet family trapped inside their house will rescue him. They will have to survive the disaster and the madman.
I've watched this one. Hasselhoff is the baddie. Spoiler alert: he's not a very good actor.


10. Winter Kill
A sniper is killing residents at a winter resort. Who will die next? And why?
This TV movie from way back in 1974 was the first ski resort slasher film and with an IMDB score of 7.4 it's easily the highest rating of any of these movies. It featured a young Nick Nolte and according to the reviews, "It is worth watching this movie just to see a man wearing an entire suit made of corduroy".


11. Scarce
SCARCE depicts the gruesome fate of three lost snowboarders trapped at an isolated forest cabin owned by two menacing locals who harvest human flesh. As the day of the slaughter nears, they attempt to escape barefoot through the frozen wilderness.
This trailer for the lowly 3.9 scoring Scarce is all red neck cannibalism I can be bothered to handle.


12. Frozen
Pretty poster by the very talented Kevin Tong
This has probably been the most commercially successful snowboard horror movie to date. Here are some interesting pieces of trivia from IMDB.
  • When the wolf takes down actor Shawn Ashmore, it is actually a boarder collie in that one shot. The German shepherd that was trained to do the stunt mysteriously died two nights before the scene was shot.
  • An audience member fainted at the film's first showing at the Sundance Film Festival (though this could be attributed to the festival's high altitude). 



13. Ice Queen
It's Species in a ski resort


14. Dead Snow
Two words: Nazi Zombies
It's another decent Norwegian one and there's a follow-up in production.



15. Yeti: Curse of the Snow Demon
"It is one of the dumbest pieces of crap i've ever seen in my whole life" Darkside2003, IMDB reviewer.


16. Snowbeast
A Colorado ski resort is besieged by a sub-human beast that commits brutal murders on the slopes.
Another oldie. Back just after the release of Jaws this low-budget movie was churned out. The full movie of "the regrettable 1977 made-for-TV abomination, Snowbeast" as described by the fella that illustrated the poster above, is here.


And finally there's...
17. Snow Beast
A remake of the crappy 1977 movie starring him off of the Dukes of Hazard
While the research team is trying to find out why the lynx have disappeared, the local ranger ('Jason London' ) is searching for the answer to what is making tourist disappear; even if it the last thing he ever does... and it is.

So their you go, plenty of monsters and killers to select from, personally I think the most fearsome sight was watching the Hoff pretending to be a bloke called Duncan.


You Might Also Like...
Hot Chalet Girl on Chalet Girl Action – The Surprising Inspiration for the Chalet Girl Movie

Snowboarding’s 10 Worst Crowd Funding Ideas


↧
↧

Say What You See - Can you name the 25 ski areas?

June 27, 2013, 5:11 am
$
0
0
This week we've created a new way to waste some of your spare time before next season. Can you name the 25 ski areas in this huge dose of Photoshoppery? ...

Click on the pic to see the full-size version
I'll give you this tip: They're all good-sized ski areas, most of them are from the US, there's 2 from Canada, 2 from France and 1 from each of Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Italy and Switzerland. Feel free to guess away in the comments section.


↧

Putting the Anal in Analysis. Why SIA's newly released snowsports participation study is a bit crap.

August 1, 2013, 4:56 am
$
0
0

I'm a bit concerned that the people who analyse the snowsports industry are a bit crap at their jobs. I guess if they were good they'd be working in banking...

Earlier this week SIA (Snowsports Industry America) released their yearly participation study which you can buy now for a hefty $899. This was opening section and chart from their press release:

The snowfall got a late start this season, really getting underway after the Christmas holiday. The lack of early season snow affected all snow sports except freeski and telemark, which both finished the season with more participants than previous years. Ultimately, overall snow sports participation was down 3% to 19.3M participants across all disciplines; alpine ski had a 19% drop in participation but still brought the most to the mountain with 8.2M, followed by snowboard with 7.4M, freeski with 5.4M, snowshoe with 4M, cross country with 3.3 million and telemark with 2.8M participants.


Here's another way of looking at those results...

The growth in freeskiing, and telemarking is great news for those specialities but not much use for skiing as a whole, because they both grew at the expense of traditional downhill skiing. Taken as a whole snowboarding and skiing (the dotted line) are showing pretty much the same trend with a slight drop since the 2009/2010 season.

The data they used here was also released a few months ago by the Outdoor Foundation who used the same survey to look at the US participation across all types of sports and activities (it's why my chart above has an extra season of data). Here's how those snowsports increases and decreases fit into the bigger picture.

Hunting with handguns is up 17%. Apparently there are now almost as many people running about the US firing off handguns at anything that moves, as there are surfing. 

Small numbers provide less accurate results

The SIA press release doesn't mention that it's just a subsection of this much larger study and it makes a difference. Here's how the original study was conducted:

During January and February of 2013 a total of 42,363 online interviews were carried out with a nationwide sample of individuals and households from the US Online Panel of over 1 million people operated by Synovate/IPSOS. A total of 15,770 individual and 26,593 household surveys were completed. The total population used was 287,138,000 people ages six and older. 

42,363 sounds like a thorough survey and for the benefit of not turning into the most pedantic wanker ever I'm going to assume the survey itself was well conducted. When you get into the individual sports though, the results are less robust. Let's take one of the sports from the study, freeskiing, as an example.

Freestyle skiing last season apparently had 5,357,000 participants, that's 1.87% of the US population. With a survey of 42,363 that means that just 792 people surveyed participated in freeskiing. Each person in the survey accounts for 6,778 people in the real world and it doesn't take a lot of people to make a huge difference in these figures. The difference between the 2010/11 and 2011/12 season figures, for example, is just one person. All it takes is a small difference in the group being sampled each year for the results in these specific sports to vary a great deal.

Just under 4,000 people in the survey were involved in any of these snowsports. How accurate does that make the report when you focus the results just down to those sports? A lot less than the 42,363 you think you're getting for your 900 bucks.


Correlation is not causation

So there are the numbers and even if it's a smaller survey than you might think you're getting it is still enough to provide some useful guidance, as long as you ignore the analysis provided by SIA that is. Going back to the opening sentence of that press release:

The snowfall got a late start this season, really getting underway after the Christmas holiday. The lack of early season snow affected all snow sports except freeski and telemark, which both finished the season with more participants than previous years. 

Why would late snowfall reduce the number of alpine skiers but increase the number of freestyle skiers or telemarkers? That's a pretty big guess to make on a survey of 4,000 people. Late snowfall might account for something like this overall drop, but it doesn't explain the redistribution. Did the seasonal snowfall really have any impact at all?

Talking about bankers, here's a little story from the day that Saddam Hussein was captured.

Immediately after he was captured Bloomberg News released this headline: US Treasuries Rise; Hussein capture may not curb terrorism

Half an hour later the market moved and the analysis completely changed: US Treasuries Fall; Hussein capture boosts allure of risky assets

This was a classic case of applying a nice and simple story to a complicated situation, two analyses that both couldn't be true at the same time. People have a tendency to look at numbers and create stories even when the situation is far too complicated to do so and this is what SIA have done here.

To put it another way, a friend of mine illustrated this problem because he wanted to explain this concept to his clients who were making the same mistake. I'm going to use his graphic because I'm too lazy to create a snowboard specific version.

There is a correlation between the number of ice creams sold (snowfall) and the number of shark attacks (people participating in snowsports), but the increase in ice creams sold (a change to a late snowfall) didn't cause the increase in shark attacks (decrease in snowsports participation). There are a whole load of factors not shown in these two lines on a graph and it's the same in the SIA results.

Snowsports in general could have fallen for a whole number of factors that sound reasonable - They could have fallen because of the weather conditions (although the significant late season snow would have pushed this factor the other way too), but they could have also fallen because of the higher costs of transport, higher ticket prices, fewer children getting involved, the current economic climate, the high price of getting started, increased competition from alternative sports, fewer women getting involved, skiers and snowboarders getting older, the population becoming more obese and so on. I could come up with a plethora of other factors that correlate with the fall in snowsports participation, but they didn't necessarily cause the problem and they certainly weren't the only factor. In reality any significant change was most likely due to a raft of interacting factors that would be too difficult for one person to ever get their head around. It's nice to be able to find a simple explanation, but it's very misleading when you get it wrong.


In reality, all we can tell from this report there probably isn't much change overall, while skiing is diversifying so that freestyle skiing and telemarking are becoming more popular styles. That's it. If you plan to  run your business on anything more than that you need to know that you are just working from someone else's finger-in-the-air guesses.

Maybe the full report isn't so bad, but all the signs from the press release say otherwise. If they can't get that brief synopsis right, it makes me worry about the full-length version and I won't be spending $899 to find out.

Enough of that. Here's the history of freestyle skiing in 2 minutes.
How the fuck did that only come in 16th place?



You Might Also Like...

The new site design. It took bloody ages, so if you don't like the change feel free to keep it to yourself.

Reports of the death of snowboard are greatly exaggerated. Some even worse industry analysis by RRC Associates.

↧

Hipster Snowboard Branding - Electrifying Logos

August 8, 2013, 5:52 am
$
0
0
Earlier this year Electric decided to revamp their brand and go through the monstrous process of changing all their stationary. The resulting rebrand was all over the recent design trend of hipster branding like an ironic suit. This week we thought it would be a good idea to hipsterise a bunch of other snowboard brands...

Electric was acquired along with their parent company Volcom for $608 million in 2011 by the French luxury retail conglomerate PPR. Two years later here's what they had to say about the re-brand in their press release:

After over twelve years in the action sports market, Electric is refreshing its brand with a newly designed logo, strategy and products. The sophistication of Electric’s products, influences, goals and interests developed alongside the rapidly evolving market, highlighting the need to refresh the company’s image in order to accurately represent the brand. Eric Crane, who designed the original Electric identity in 2000, is leading the new identity project. The new “VOLT” logo, photography style and brand design celebrates Electric’s Southern California roots with an emphasis on premium quality and timeless style.

So they're going to charge more and to justify the additional costs they'll be providing nicer packaging. Here's the change...


Granted the old wordmark (the writing bit) was a bit shit, but the old logo was really strong and instantly recognisable. In comparison the new one, which follows the ultra-minimalist and extremely-literal hipster aesthetic, is just a bit forgettable.

Here's a small bit from a recent Transworld Business interview with Eric Crane explaining how you get the hipster look:

What went into designing the new logo? Inspiration, historical connections for the brand, ties to the industry/market?

The new logo process was really collaborative and thorough. I worked with several designers, as well as our creative director Jack Bailey and co-founder Kip Arnette. We wanted to retain the gesture of the Volt, but distill it down to is primal essence and meaning. The cleaner version is much more conducive to communicating the brand vision and looks amazing on product.


Hipster product

Describe Electric’s new vibe in three words:

Timeless, sophisticated, powerful

That's clear enough then, and now we know how to do it, lets give it a shot with some other snowboard brands...













What do you think? Should these guys or any other companies jump on the hipster branding bandwagon? Surprisingly for something that took all of ten minutes to come up with, I think the Quiksilver one might actually be an improvement on the real thing.


You Might Also Like...

See where Electric and PPR fit into our infographic on The Faceless Corporations That Run Snowboarding

Hipster Snowboarding Dad

↧
↧

Top 10 Brilliantly Useless Do-It-Yourself Snowboard Instructables

August 15, 2013, 5:56 am
$
0
0
The other day we came across Instructables.com, a site for sharing do-it-yourself tips and projects, and we thought it would be interesting to see if there was anything useful we could find to improve snowboarding. We found nothing. What we did find was a million ways to create a snowboard display rack, some crappy tips on learning to snowboard and an incredible horde of bewilderingly useless inventions that should never have seen the light of day. Here's our top 10...

10. Rockhead Helmet
Trust me, the Flintstones look is going to dominate 2013/14? Here's how you get it done:
Step 1. 'The bigbox stores sell "stone" spray paint. A can costs between $6 and $12 usually. I like to mask off the edge of my basic snowboard helmet and paint it with this stuff.' 

Step 2. 'While I'm at it, I remove the lens and strap from my ski goggles and paint them to match my helmet.' 

Step 3. After that, just sit back and let the chicks come to you.

And it could be even better:
'One of these years I'm going to buy or make some foam "gravel" and glue some of that stuff on the helmet.' 


Let me save you the time of reading the instructions. Snowboard, two blocks of wood, put snowboard on blocks, bench.


8. Mohawk Helmets

Stop, Metal Hammertime!

If for some reason you can't get your rocks off while wearing the Rockhead Helmet, you are sure to sweep the ladies off their feet by making like a brush. 

If you're a lady why not try this one...

Oh


7. LED Snowboard by god.favored
Firstly, it's worth noting that this lad has the gall to name himself God Favoured.

Secondly, 'I absolutely love snowboarding, but I'm really not very good.  I can do a few tricks, but i live next to a ski resort in Utah and most of the people who i see go are crazy good.  So i needed something to "show off" a little, and since i cant do many tricks, i figured why not build something really cool.' 

Well that didn't work out. You've got two options God Favoured; either put some serious time into learning some tricks, or it's time learn to become slightly less of a narcissistic twat. 





Step 1: This is the fun part where you get to shovel 2 tons of snow.

Materials:
-Snow (and lots of it, helps when you get a record snowfall)
-Shovels (a small one and a big scooping shovel)
-Cold weather (-1 helps)
-Two friends to help you
-Wood (to help in the making process)
-Muscles
-Time (took me and my friends 2 whole days)
-Lights (for working at night)
-Ladder (to get on your roof)
-Common sense (since you'll be working mainly on top of your roof a you'll be skiing off a jump)

Step 2: Style the hell out of it.

If it's worth doing, it's worth doing again.
Worth doing, so that a smug fifty year-old man can take the time to throw out some casual insults at his perception of your family living situation:
"As I read this instructable, I imagined that you are probably the teenaged son of a single mother, because I can't imagine any father allowing this (considering he's the guy that has to fix it) and no grown man would do something like this to his own roof. How far off am I?"
About 40 years?


4. Make a takedown bow from skis!

This scarcely intense man recently built a concealable murder weapon from an old set of cross country skis.

And he's now running around Grinnell Iowa with his medieval killing device. Good luck to anyone who lives out there. 

4b. As an alternative, for the people who have already read the Blag article on this bow and are feeling just a little miffed by the inclusion of something they've seen already in this top 10 list - Creating a fiberglass snowmobile trailer

"Here is a snowmobile cutter I built over the last winter. It is a cat chasing a mouse chasing a chunk of cheese. The cheese is the hitch and the cat is the actual trailer. It is sized to carry a banana box and a bit more."
Completely window-lickingly mental, but mental with a quality and workmanship that can only be admired.


And with just a small helping shove Marty McFly unicycled his way back to 1955

On those cold snowy days when you cant think of anything to do, why not make fire snowballs! Of course, nobody should do this it is dangerous. That doesn't mean you cant enjoy my friend an I full of stupidity.

Its actually quite easy to make fire snowballs. All you need is a snowy day, gloves, gas, and an empty scull.

First you make snowballs.
Second you pour gas on them
Third you light them
Fourth you throw them

This is best done when really high or really drunk.


"Wallets,hats, bags and backpacks, cases and skins. These are all things that you can make from duct tape. I love them all but I wanted to make something new, something barely anyone if anyone has done before. So i came up with an idea. A duct tape coat, a insulated winter coat to be precise. And after days of work and 2 e-large rolls of duct tape i made it."

After finishing his hobo-chic coat Ostomesto was inevitably admitted to his local psychiatric hospital where he now spends his time drooling and rocking in the corner while sporting a delightful duct tape straightjacket he made himself.


1. Duck Tape Snow Goggles by McGyver2
Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo, Raphael and the new addition - Remedial Pottery Class Dave. What an absolute leg end.


You Might Also Like...
↧

Worth1000 closure wreaks devastation on the snowboarding penguin Photoshopping industry

August 22, 2013, 6:38 am
$
0
0
What would the Internet be like without an endless stream of penguins Photoshopped onto snowboards? We're about to find out...

Sad news gang, Worth1000, the endless Photoshop competition site that seemingly fuelled most of Boing Boing and BuzzFeed's content, is shutting down.

"But what is Worth1000?" I hear you say.

'Worth1000 is a collection of online arenas where the worlds best artists compete daily in creative competitions.' Worlds best artists. Really? I guess that might explain why the infinitely talentless Tracey Emin managed to hack out a career in art if all the competition was busy Photoshopping clothes onto monkeys.

'Borrowing its name from the expression "A picture is worth a thousand words", it opened to the public on January 1, 2002.' Due to the artistic depreciation that ensued, a picture is now only worth 386 words on the open market.

"But Illicit, why are they shutting down?"

According to the founder's letter about the change it's because it's broken, the traffic is falling and he doesn't know how to fix it. A more likely explanation is that when you find that you've run the fifth edition of the competition 'Where Are My Pants', you've pretty much exhausted the format.

The internet will sadly now be devoid of all this...

The obligatory Shaun White appearance, White Wins, came in 27th place in the competition Where Are My Pants 5 (which was an actual competition).

I can't help thinking they could have done a whole load better if they'd named the work tighty Whities. 


43rd in One Letter Off.

It took me a while to realise it wasn't and entry some sort of masturbation themed contest.


These next three are actually the best ones I could find, which is surprising for the combined efforts of the worlds best artists.
76th in Miniature City 8

Also only achieved the heady height of 76th place, this time in Miniature City 2

34th in Subtle Changes 4

Now to the crappy ones. 

This next one spawned endless irritating text memes, adorned a thousand Facebook profiles and messed up every single snowboard Google image search since it was produced in 2006.
It came 2nd in the ill-conceived competition Wing Nutz. 
I hate both this picture and the word Nutz with a seething passion. 


11th in Super Stunts - the shotgun approach to Photoshoppery


This half-hearted blurring together of two images reached a rightfully disdainful 66th in Surreal Sports


45th in Snowy Mountain (no explanation for the ladies in the hats given, or needed).

When your snowboard Photoshop can't get beyond 45th in a competition where you start off with a bloody snowy mountain, it's time to realise you're mum was lying to you  - you're not creative and you should start preparing yourself for a career in shelf stacking.


26th in Coolio

Holy mother of God! What the hell came 27th?


Of course where things really got serious on Worth1000 was animal Photoshopping. They couldn't get enough of it...
21st in Bear Contest 3

This entry did not perform any better in the competition because of the perplexing way the bear was riding the snowboard side-saddle.


Slolum - 24th in Planet of The Apes 5

It's not even the right kind of snowboarding slalom gate! Mental.


4th Animal Olympics 4

Useless fact: There's been the same number of Animal Olympics as there has been Olympics which included snowboarding.


And when it come snowboarding animals, there's been no animal more visually abused than the unsuspecting penguin. Quite what the fixation the artists of Worth1000 had with penguins on snowboards was I guess we'll never now know, but they bloody loved them. 




There's ten times more snowboarding penguin entries than any other snowboarding animal or topic. And the pick of the bunch was this one.

It came in 2nd in Surreal Sports 3 - which by my reckoning also makes it the most successful snowboard-themed Photoshop that ever appeared on Worth1000.

11 years of Worthless1000 and a snowboarding entry never won a single competition, not even one of the seemingly endless penguin inspired ones. It a shameful historical legacy for snowboarding, but thankfully we'll be able to deny everything now that the site is officially dead. It's a brave new world from here on out guys, a life without reams of snowboarding penguins, only time will tell how that will affect the snowboarding world.


You Might Also Like...
If you like badly Photoshopped animals in snowboard environments, then there's always this. 

↧

Chad's Gap Vintage Snowboard/Ski Poster What We Made

September 5, 2013, 6:31 am
$
0
0
Two years ago I had a crack at producing some vintage snowboard posters. That time out I attempted to change history by taking some classic ski posters and replacing the skiers with snowboarders. It's taken two years to forget what a ball-ache designing a vintage travel poster was, so now I've gone and done it again. This time I've designed the poster from scratch and it just might be the start of a series looking at legendary snowboard spots. I started with Chad's Gap...

If you haven't heard of Chad's Gap, or need a recap, then I suggest you do four things right now:

1. Read section 10 of this here excelled article by Whitelines. Get Some

I'm glad for the sake of this project that the name 'The Nipple' didn't stick.

2. As mentioned in the Whitelines article here's the opening sequence of Pop featuring a fresh-faced Travis Rice almost having his career ended in the "whopercock slam", before going on to dominate the gap.


3. The following year, Chad's Gap chewed-up and spat-out Tanner Hall breaking both his ankles.


4. Go try it.*

Or if you're not a super talented professional snowboarder/skier you could always just buy the poster instead.

4 isn't a must, but feel free to get involved. As always the money we make goes to charity, probably some sort of charity that helps put snowboarders who have tried the jump back together again.

I wanted to get the scale of the thing as accurate as possible, that little blip in the middle is the snowboarder to scale. Here it is all vintagey


If you go for the full size print here's the little fella in actual size

Seeing as it's a legendary spot for both snowboarding and skiing I also produced a skiing version for anyone who's that way inclined 

The posters are now available from our Zazzle store. Click Here

* Attempting Chad's Gap is not recommended for pregnant ladies or children under that age of 3 months, everyone else should be fine. 


You Might Also Like The Previous Poster Projects...

Redesigning History, one poster at a time

Classic Snowboards - The Snurfer Era

↧
Search

Snowboarders Top Trumps & Proof that a snowboarder is the greatest athlete of all time

September 12, 2013, 6:32 am
$
0
0

We came across this pack of Top Trumps Snowboarders the other day and figured it would be worth a look. Little did we know that this unassuming pack of cards would provide the irrefutable truth that someone among us is the greatest sportsman ever...


Before I started writing this I assumed Top Trumps was the sort of addictive school yard game that had invaded every corner of the globe, but apparently they didn't so they might need a bit of explanation.

I've no idea what the fuck is going on here, but I know I want the buy them all.


Top Trumps were massive in the UK in the 70s and 80s, but similar games exist in other countries around Europe. In Germany they're called Top Ass.

Although it's probably not quite as exciting as you were anticipating.


This advert from the back of the Top Trumps Snowboarders pack is probably more what you were hoping for.
I'm pretty sure that 'keep trumping your mates' is a euphemism.


Here's what the cards look like and how the game is played. Each snowboarder is rated on six abilities. If it's your go, you select the first card in your pack. If you pick up the Craig Kelly card you call out one of the stats of your choice and if your snowboarder has a better rating than the other guy's you win his card. Whoever wins the card gets to pick the next stat and you keep going until one of you has won all the cards.

The snowboarders pack was a one-off edition that must have been released at some point in 2001. Assuming that the stats are scientifically calculated, it gives us the opportunity to go back in time and take a look at who were the best snowboarders twelve years ago...


Biggest Air - David Vincent (98)
Biggest Air: Here's Dave popping off a mogul run and clearing a chairlift.

Smallest Air - Leslie McKenna (65)


Greatest Speed - Shaun Palmer, John Olofsson & Brian Savard (48)
Greatest Speed: Easy, it's Speed. Speed 2 was shit.

Slowest Speed - David Vincent (18)


Most Style - Romain De Marchi (192)
Most Style: 

Least Style - Brian Savard (130)

Least Style: His name is Brian


Best Freestyle - Steve Bailey (144)
Best Freestyle: That must be a record for the amount of snow he managed to cram on a snowboard. That's style my friends.

Worst Freestyle - Victoria Jealouse (50)


Best Freeride - Terje Haakonsen, Johan Olofsson & Brain Savard (19)
Best Freeride: Terje really should also have been a shoe-in to lead freestyle rating; in this pack even the spelling of his name was freestyle.

Worst Freeride - Leslie McKenna (8)


Most Extreme - Axel Pauporte (10)
Most Extreme: Axel Pauporte is the most extreme thing to come out of Belgium since the Wehrmacht blew through the place in 1940.

Least Extreme - Danny Wheeler & Leslie McKenna (2)



So Who's The Best?

People have been arguing about who's the greatest sports person of all time since the second person tried sport. One of the reasons the argument has been ticking along all that time is that its really difficult to compare how good people were at different sports; how do you compare Formula 1 racing with ice dancing? The best method anyone has found to resolve this quandary is to measure how good a sports person is against their peers and compare that difference (the standard deviation) against people from other sports. The person they discovered was the greatest sports person of all time was a guy in a floppy green hat.
Any idea who that is?

It's Don Bradman, an Australian cricketer who played top level cricket between 1927 and 1949 and is pretty unanimously agreed to be the greatest cricketer of all time (although a lot of people would argue with that). Cricket is a sport (a bit like baseball) where there's a long history of recording statistics and the game has remained fairly stable for a very long time. Cricket batsmen (like Don here) are most usually measured on their batting average - how many runs they scored on average each time they went out to bat. Don Bradman had an international average of 99.94. To give that some context, the next three best batsmen in history have averages of 60.97, 60.83 and 60.73. Donald Bradman was measurably almost twice as good as the next best batsmen and he's 4.4 standard deviations away from his peers.

Using that as a measurement here's how he compares to a number of other sportsmen who dominated their sport.

It's not perfect, but it's as close as anyone has found to bring some sort of conclusion to this endless argument. Now we can turn this method to snowboarding and we can use the Top Trumps stats to see who the best snowboarder is and how they compare to other sports.

Worst snowboarder - Leslie McKenna 
Leslie McKenna was the worst snowboarder in an impressive three out of the six categories; Air, Freeride and Extreme. With those poor results it's no surprise that with a standard deviation of -1.82, she was by far the worst snowboarder in the pack. Whoever edited these Top Trumps really had it in for Leslie.
Leslie McKenna is the current Team Manager/Coach for the European Roxy Snow Team. She is not a fan of Top Trumps.


Best Snowboader - Terje Haakonsen?

"The greatest snowboarder of all time." It says it right there on the card, but he was only joint best in one category (Freeride) and when you run the numbers with a standard deviation of 1.81 he was only the second best snowboarder overall.

Best All-Round Snowboader - Johan Olofssen
With two category wins (Speed and Freeride) and strong performance across the board Johan Olofsson was the best overall snowboarder with a standard deviation of 1.92.



Greatest Sportsman of All Time - Steve Bailey 
What do you mean you haven't heard of him? He was the British Air Champion...

When it comes to freestyle snowboarding Steve Bailey has no equal. With a score of 144 he completely dominated this category. Steve Bailey is almost twice as good as the next best freestyle snowboarder (Terje Haakonsen) who only got a rating of 78. If you consider freestyle snowboarding to be it's own sport and do the math that leaves the little ginger wizard with an almighty standard deviation of 4.84, comfortably beating the Aussie bloke in the jaunty hat. Steve Bailey wasn't just a good snowboarder in 2001, he is also the greatest athlete the world has ever seen.

The world's greatest sportsman can currently be found selling snowboards to punters in the Chester branch of Ellis Brigham.



You Might Also Like...

We tried to figure out who was the most influential snowboarder once before

↧
↧

Sequences of Sequences - Resequenced Snowboard Photography

September 26, 2013, 6:13 am
$
0
0
We thought it would be interesting to have a crack at making some gifs, but we didn't just want to produce yet more of the same gifs of video clips that have suddenly started to swamp the internet. We thought we'd take another often maligned form of photography, the sequence shot, and see what would happen if we combined the two. It turns out that you can get some really interesting effects by reanimating sequence photography. See what you think...

First up, it's this photo of John Jackson landing a huge backside double cork. The photo was taken by Scott Serfas during the filming of The Art of Flight and it was good enough to make it into the top 50 of the recent Red Bull Illume contest. 


Resequenced:


Fair enough this next one is a ski photo, but it really is an excellent photograph by Dan Carr that also reached the top 50 in the Illume contest and we wanted to have a go at it too.


Reanimated:


Next up we tried a different type of sequence shot. This time it's a magazine spread by Rob Mathis.


Revolved:


Then there's this spread out of off of Snowboarder Mag.

Relaid:

And we'll end with a classic, not a classic bit of photography, but a classic moment from history: the moment Lindsey Jacobellis clutched defeat from the jaws of Olympic victory.


Regretted:

But we couldn't leave it there. If there's one thing I've learned about animation, it's that there should always be a happy ending.

Over the years we've seen this moment so many times we've started to feel a strange sense of empathy for Lindsey's plight. She must hate this video, perhaps even more than the music video she released a couple of years ago, because unlike that moment, she can't expunge this one from the web's memory. Every time she watches it she must relive the moment again and again, each time willing herself not to crash, only to be disappointed yet again.

We felt it was time for her to finally catch a break. So today's your lucky day Lindsey, we've fixed it...

Resolved:



You Might also Like...

Seeing as we've featured Snowboarder Magazine and one of their legendary pun titles, how about an article from last season: Craptions - The top 10 crappiest puns in the October edition of Snowboarder Magazine 


↧

A Fete Worse Than Death - Illicit Goes Undercover At The Fulham Ski Fete

October 1, 2013, 5:50 am
$
0
0
The Fulham Ski Fete took place on Sunday. You might be surprised to find out this event exists, and then you might just suppose it was a just an innocent event suffering from a lack of marketing, but you'd be wrong, something far more sinister was happening. We were suspicious about this apparently secret ski-only event held in t-shirt temperatures in the posh end of town. Were they surreptitiously keeping the event under the radar to exclude snowboarders? We decided to slip in undercover to see what was really going on. It turned out our fears were well founded and at the same time we hadn't even begun to grasp the full ramifications. You'll be horrified by what we found...

It looked innocent enough from their website and the marketing material they used



But things started to look more suspicious when we found the material they used to promote the event to potential advertisers/co-conspirators. All these incredibly vague statistics and the talk about aiming, targeting and concentrations was just a bit creepy. It might be code for something, but I haven't cracked it yet:

"We estimate that of the 1 million ski tourists in the UK, around 20,000 of them live in South West London. We will be targeting these people directly though our database and our extensive network within the ski industry. These will be our target participants, however this is not going to be the exclusive audience we will attract as you will see in our planned marketing strategy. We are aiming for an attendance of 3,000 to 4,000 people. With a combination of advertising in key local areas and by providing entertainment for all demographics we will achieve our target audience.

Figure 2 shows the breakdown of the ski market in London by postcode. The largest concentration is in the South West postcode."

If all we'd had at this point was some vague suspicious, we really started to get worried when we arrived at the nearest underground station, Putney Bridge, to find it had it's own fully functioning machine gun emplacement. What kind of public transport system needs security like this? What are they preparing for? What sort of people were we dealing with and what were we walking into?

And the big blue metal magnet/gun thing in front of it did nothing to alleviate our fears

In hindsight we should have turned back there and then, but in the interests of snowboard journalism we decided to push on. As we approached the event, past the fleets of Range Rovers and Porsche Cayennes, the next challenge we had was getting past their security systems, which consisted of this small pink fairy castle complete with cast iron fences and a moat.

It was like blundering into set-up of a medieval German fairy-tale, something told us this wasn't going to end well.

Once we'd managed to infiltrate the event we started to be followed by this uniformed gang of giant bugle-playing albino Smurfs.


They weren't the only musical entertainment at the fete. A bit later the après ski band Mullit turned up to spent some time wondering what the hell their manager was thinking when he made this booking, as they played Get Your Rocks Off... 

 To a crowd of tiny children

and disinterested adults...
Please note the man in the hat
(These two pictures are from Planet Ski's review of the event) 


Here's a few other strange things we saw:

Least likely animal to have in a ski logo award goes to...
Although technically the armadillo is monoskiing. The second ski is clearly unattached and careening out of control

Most expensive/heinous onepiece ever created award goes to...
Norrona and this £1,000 suit ($1,550), and for that price you don't even get any insulation. 

Amazingly it wasn't the flashiest item of clothing on display. We spotted this fancy get-up inside the bishop's palace.
That's just taking the episcopal

Strangest sticker pack to find in an ecclesiastical gift shop award goes to...


Supposedly the main focus of the day was the attempt to set a new record for the largest gathering of people wearing bobble hats. The existing record of 764 people had been held by a school in Northern Ireland since 2010. Here's the exact moment the Fulham Ski Fete crowd attempted to beat that record...


They would have had a better chance of breaking a record if they'd tried to set a record for people still wearing Ugg boots in 2013. The bobble hat record attempt was so seriously poor there had to be some underlying ruse. No one could fail this badly without doing it on purpose. What was happening here and what was their ulterior motive?

The answer? The Fulham Ski Fete is actually an underground elitist ski indoctrination event designed to turn their children in snowboarder-hating killers. Here's the evidence:

Training small children to become political assassins...
This seemed to be a particularly strange focus of hate, because at a rough estimate, every single member of the crowd were Tory supporters.

But turning on their own kind was only the start of it. Next up we found a game designed to promote animal abuse and normalise the infliction of pain on others...

And it wasn't just stuffed animals, it was live animals too. I managed to capture this shot of the two caged penguins who were kept out in the summer heat to be terrorised by small children
Moments after this photo was taken, one of the penguins succumbed to heat exhaustion and it's carcass was was torn apart and eaten by the baying mob.

But it was at this next stall that we truly started to fear for our lives. In the next 'game' the children were taught to throw heavy missiles at what are clearly crude representations of snowboaders...

To the left of that stall they were proudly displaying the remains of their latest unfortunate snowboard victim...

Our lives were clearly in danger so we immediately made our escape before our cover was blown. 

What, at the start of the day, just seemed to be a obscure event, turned out to be a horrifying anti-snowboard cult of rabid ski extremists indoctrinating the next generation to hunt snowboarders into extinction. How many more people are involved in this conspiracy, how much further does this go? I don't know what's going to happen to us now, but we had to get this warning out before it's too late. If you don't hear anything more from us, don't come looking for us.... you have to save yourselves...you have to warn the others.



This is the next event at Fulham Palace
I'm 90% sure this event is being organised by the wicked Queen from Snow White.



You Might Also Like...

Twitter Bombing the London Ski & Snowboard Show
↧

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow & Why You Love Snowboarding

October 16, 2013, 6:34 am
$
0
0
I've always wanted to understand why I love snowboarding. It's an odd sport for me to be into considering I live in a country that's short on snow or mountains, and that I've broken myself so badly snowboarding that I can't do half the things I used to be able to. What keeps me forking out a lot of money to do it and going back time and time again to accept even more punishment? I know I'm not alone in this strange behaviour, but what is driving me and all the other snowboarders out there? Is there one thing that all snowboarders share that makes them snowboarders? Turns out there is...

A few years ago a friend of mine told me he was afraid of heights, and I admitted I had the same problem. I told him how every time I was at the top of a cliff or skyscraper I felt a really strong urge to jump just to see what would happen. My fear is that I might actually go ahead and make the jump. He slowly explained to me that actually that wasn't a fear of heights, that was just being a mental.

I've always had a slightly unhealthy interest in getting my adrenaline fix. There were lots of opportunity in snowboarding to get this buzz and for a long time I thought this might be the main reason I liked the sport. Although it partially explained why I loved snowboarding, I couldn't ignore the fact that there were swathes of people that loved snowboarding but had no interest in adrenaline at all (especially my friend that didn't like heights, he was really in the wrong game). I was also aware that at the other end of the scale there is another group of people who take adrenaline seeking to levels that just blow my tiny little mind, like Darren Powell or Marco Siffredi. It was apparent that with such a wide scale that adrenaline seeking was not the one things all snowboarder's had in common.

...or a shared interest in wearing kinky spandex suits

A few years into snowboarding I got a proper job and became a punter, now having to catch the opportunity to snowboard wherever and whenever I could. The downside of this was that I could no longer be a fair-weather snowboarder, I had to start dealing with the worst the elements could throw at me. Suddenly the opportunities to feel the adrenaline rush were curtailed, I'd have a good day often followed by days of boredom and for a while I started to lose my interest in snowboarding. It all changed when one day a friend of mine handed me a short soft snowboard and introduced me to buttering. I was crap at first, but all of a sudden I was having a good time on bad weather days and after a while I was enjoying snowboarding again to the same extent without even a hint of adrenaline in the system.

I was now snowboarding in two completely different ways, two ways that were so different they may have well been different sports entirely. As we found in a previous article, over the years snowboarding has broken up into lots of specialisms. What once was a single sport is now a raft of very different experiences...


You can break this down further too. People can then experience each of those specialities completely differently: there are people doing this for their job, people that sacrifice everything else in the pursuit of snow, people that go one week a year, young people and old people, people who are mostly there for the parties and others who just seem to like getting dressed up in all the snazzy get-up.

Snowboarding is a complicated thing, enjoyed in a number of different ways by a wide variety of people. Could there really be just one thing all of these people have in common?


This bloke is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He's a Hungarian psychology professor who now lives in the U.S. He's never done a day of snowboarding in his life, but he does have the answer. Fortunately his concept is a lot easier to understand than his name, and it's what he calls flow which he describes as...

“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

To explain, the human brain can only process a certain number of things at any one time. If you are concentrating on a task that takes up a substitutional proportion of this available processing space then other things have to be sacrificed to make way. During this period things that would normally be on your mind like a sense of time passing, or your ongoing concerns/worries get dropped and you start to feel lost in the moment.

You can see in the chart below that this situation only happens when the task involves a high level of skill and a high level of challenge. A drop in either of those factors and the task is less absorbing and at the other end of the scale the task is really tedious. On the bad weather days before I tried buttering and all i was doing was getting form A to B, the skill level required and the challenge level was low and I was experiencing boredom and apathy. When I started to learn buttering, I took both these factors back up the scale, first feeling anxiety, then arousal (not that sort of arousal you dirty git) and later on as my skills improved moving into a state of flow.




I'd now experienced this same situation when freeriding on a fresh powder day, hooning down a corduroy piste and buttering down a gentle slope. Since then I've found the same experience in other types of snowboarding, I've even found it writing this blog sometimes. You can experience flow in all sorts of circumstances as long as the skill level and challenge of the particular task coincide. It explains why you frequently hear snowboarders saying things like this.

"There's just a feeling you get from certain things you do in life that just kind of feel pure and independent of what's actually, physically, going on. All of a sudden you have this feeling of clarity. Backcountry snowboarding has really done a lot to boost that feeling in me."
- Craig Kelly

For Craig Kelly it turned out to be backcountry snowboarding that gave him this feeling at the end of his career. A few years before he experienced the same feeling in freestyle, which drove him to dominate that scene before he found himself too comfortable and losing the flow. Flow explains why people love snowboarding, but it also explains why people fall out of love with it when they stop being able to feel it. (It explains what Rider's Block is, which Ed Leigh coincidentally wrote about on Whitelines earlier this week)

Here's an even better example:

“Out in the mountains, when I am on my snowboard something totally different guides me, which is quite difficult to explain. I just go with the flow. There is no other way to describe it. I follow what I am told to out there. Where this comes from I don’t know, but I do know how to listen to it. When it’s snowboarding time, it’s sacred time.”
– Nicolas Müller

Nicolas Müller even uses the word flow when trying to explain what he feels when he snowboards. Every snowboarder I have ever meet has had this experience at some point, even though most people have no idea what causes it and difficulty describing it. Flow is the one thing all snowboarders have in common and it's the reason that so many different people love snowboarding in so many ways. It's the pursuit of repeating that feeling that keeps us all coming back. 

Good luck finding your flow




If you want to find out more about flow, here's Csikszentmihalyi speaking about the concept. Try switching his examples from other sports and activities with snowboarding when you watch it.
http://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.html




You Might Also Like...

Darren Powell - The World’s Fastest (and most obscure) Snowboarder

The Specialisation of Snowboarding

↧

Seminal Snowboard Movies - Pornifying The Classics

October 23, 2013, 6:36 am
$
0
0
The standard way to tell if a movie is great or not is whether it's got it's own porn parody. Who can forget the cinematic greats like Shaving Ryan's Privates, The SoreSack Prevention, Forrest Hump, Casawanker, One Blew Over The Hookers Chest, or Shitty Shitty Gang Bang? Historically we've spent a lot of time turning porn into snowboarding content, this week we switch things round as we celebrate classic snowboard movies in the traditional way...






 



Can you think of any others?


You Might Also Like...

Hot Chalet Girl on Chalet Girl Action – The Surprising Inspiration for the Chalet Girl Movie


↧
↧

The Snowboarder's Total Guide to Life - Is this the worst snowboard book ever written?

November 8, 2013, 6:24 am
$
0
0
Over the past few days I've been slowly ploughing my way through this truly terrible book. It was one of the toughest and most miserable things I've ever done in the name of snowboard blogging. I didn't just have difficulties getting through the experience, there were times that I truly questioned my will to go on living. It's now my duty, as a warning to all of snowboarding, to share my experiences in the hope that others don't have to go through the same pain...


Here's the front cover. It looks fairly inconspicuous, a little dated, a bland font, a stock image and some dull captions.



The first warnings of what lay ahead of me came of the back cover. Have a read of this intro...

That was the first sign that this was an absolute bookius wankius

Other than the introduction being written by your embarrassing uncle, here are two other important important things to note:

1.   $12.95. This is a very pricey book.

2.   Bill Kerig can't carry snowboards

There might even be some reverse goggles-round-the-neck action going on here, which would mean he's also gone for the goggles/sunglasses combo. He shows all the hallmarks of being a bona fide douche. 


Despite all the warning signs I started to read the book. To give you a sense of what you get if you go that far her's a scan of a typical page. Things to note here include:

1.  Crappy cartoon of a girl wearing a skull cap. Do you remember the late 90s trend for snowboarders to wear Jewish regionalism head coverings? Halcyon days.


2.  This is page 12 and as you can see the single weak joke from the back cover continues.

3.  The massive text and huge margins they've cynically used to eke out a whole book from the most minimal content possible.


A bit further on here's an example of another thing they use to bulk out the book - irrelevant clip art. My favourite one is this dapper gent inviting someone to give him a blowy...
Page 48 and the same joke continues to stumble on


Holy shit. Look what tired snowboarding meme makes an early appearance on page 109




Another space filling device are the one-line "jokes" he casually exposes the reader to. Here's a couple of choice examples:




What does this even mean? Why are you torturing me like this Bill? Please make it stop



At this point I thought I'd compile the top 10 worst quotes, but it's all so consistently shitty, so instead I've just picked a few passages at random.

1. Rather, the North American Snowboarder has a 'tude. That's right, a 'tude. This is much more aggressive than any more schoolboyish "attitude." A 'tude is severed attitude.


2. There are eight subspecies in the mammalian category Singleplankus ripthehillicus. A species of Homo sapiens.*

* A fancy Latin name for you and me. No cause for homophobic alarm. 

I guess he's assuming that there is sometimes a good cause for homophobic alarm?


3. Since image is everything to the North American Snowboarder, choosing the appropriate pair of sunglasses is of utmost importance. These must not only protect the Snowboarder's eyes from the sun but also make the proper statement. "I am a Snowboarder, touch me and prepare to die."


4. Bollocks to this. I'll spare you the rest. 


I did end up reading the whole book and it's all just like this for 187 pages before the book just peters out. There is no punchline, no conclusion, no insight, nothing of any remote value at all. According to the back of the book Bill Kerig was a snowboarder at the time, but I've no idea who he thought the audience was, it's just unremitting dig at snowboarders. It's 187 seemingly endless pages all dedicated to one terrible joke, which has got to be some sort of record for the longest single joke in publishing history. For $12.95 it's easily the most expensive single joke in history and that was at 1997 prices. After barely making it through the experience alive I'm pretty sure it's no coincidence that 187 is the penal code for murder in California. It's a shitty twitter post that just didn't stop, no fuck that, it's a YouTube comment that didn't stop. 

In his career Bill Kerig has written several books, produced films, he was a pro skier, a stockbroker and he is now a CEO of an internet site. If his other output is anything like this miserable crap then he truly is the jack of all trades and master of none. Today Bill Kerig is no longer a snowboarder.


To be fair though, there was one good page in the copy I had...


I'm going to spend the rest of my life finding and destroying every copy of this book I can. If you want to help or if you are looking to acquire the finest snowboarder torture device ever created, you can find it here.


You Might Also Like...

Women Who Can't Carry Snowboards

Crap Snowboarding Memes: The Evolution Sequence



↧

Confessions of a Vintage Snowboard Trader

November 14, 2013, 7:11 am
$
0
0
Traditionally snowboarding has been seen as a young person's game, but snowboarding has been knocking around now for a generation, and as the snowboarders have aged the demographics of the sport has skewed dramatically. A decade ago only a quarter of snowboarders were over twenty four, but today almost half of snowboarders are. It's a trend that gets surprisingly little coverage considering these older snowboarders are by far the fastest growing group of snowboarders. One of the results of the interests and increasing influence of these older snowboarders has been the emergence of an ever more active snowboarding memorabilia market. I've not seen anyone cover this growing part of snowboarding before, so this week I got in touch with the guy who runs the Vintage Snowboard Trader group on the Facebook to find out more...



--- About Dave ---

Who are you and what got you into the collecting of vintage snowboards?
My name is Dave Martin, I live in a secluded little corner of the West Kootenays in BC Canada. I'm a snowboarder, snowmobiler, part time redneck, and to finance it all, I'm a journeyman industrial electrician.

I found snowboarding in 1992 and I was instantly hooked on it. It's been a part of my lifestyle and my personality ever since the day I first strapped in. During those early years I obsessed over anything to do with snowboarding. I read every page of every mag I could get my hands on, and watched the videos hundreds of times. In highschool, my bros and I would watch videos on every lunch break, and went out riding every spare moment we had. Those were fond memories, and every time I see an old board from that era, it takes me back to that time. So I've always wanted to have a few of those old school boards that I felt were really iconic, but never actively started collecting till a few years ago when Terje's original sword board came up for sale in my local classifieds. That triggered it for me.

Terje's rather impressive sword


Which is you most prized snowboard?
I really have a hard time choosing just one. I could maybe narrow it down to a top 5 or something. It's not as easy as just saying "this one is worth the most, so it's my crown jewel". It's more about what memories are attached to those boards.


Bollocks. You side stepped that question like a well-oiled politician. Let me put it another way: If some guy set your house was on fire and you could only grab one board what would it be? I need an answer or I'll be the guy setting the fire. 
Not gonna let me slide on this one, eh? ok, well this is tough because I have a handful of boards that I brought with me when I crashed the Red Bull Supernatural, and again for the Ultranatural. I tracked down Bryan Iguchi, Jamie Lynn, Terje, Devun Walsh, and Peter Line, and had them sign their boards for me. I mean, we are talking about most of my teenage heroes here, and it was a lot of hard work to get up there with all those boards.

Dave getting very familiar with Devun Walsh

& reenacting the infamous Scotty Lago Olympic medal incident with Travis Rice

& Dave meeting a very excited Peter Line

However, if I had to make the choice of saving just one board from total loss, it would have to be one that both means a lot to me AND is irreplaceable. The only one I can think of like that is my Aggression Tarquin Robbins with the shotgun base graphic. I think I could find all those other boards again, and probably get them signed again. But that shotgun board is one that I just never ever see for sale in all my searching. And not only that, but I wanted that board more than any other board in it's day. It looks awesome, and Tarquin just had the best style. My bro's and I would all be trying to do the latest fs 180's possible, just like Tarquin. And I actually modified my Kemper Fantom at the time to look like that board. I rounded out the nose and tail, painted the topsheet the same baby blue, and t-nutted a 26" stance on it. yup, that would be the one.

Tarquin Robbins - famous for being the only professional snowboarder to ever be called Tarquin.


How many snowboards do you have and how much money do you think you have spent over the years?
I'm not even sure I want to admit that to myself...Currently I have somewhere between 60 and 70 snowboards. I'd have to count to be sure. But lets say each board averaged at around $100 and you'd be looking at $6,000 to $7,000... That would be in the ballpark. But what the fuck, right? it's like fine art. The shit is priceless. (Actually in truth I think it's more like a midlife crisis.)

This man has a lot of snowboards...and garage doors.


What is the one snowboard you still really want to get hold of and is there a reason for your choice?
I've only got 3 more boards left on my wishlist that I'd really like to find. A Joyride Gabe Crane, because his part in Simple Pleasures was soooo good, and his method could rival Jamie Lynn's. A Caution 143cm Street from 1996, because it was a board I rode. And the Japanese release of Jamie Lynn's first pro model, AKA the octopus board.

If I had to choose just one from that list, it would be the Lynn. I'm a big fan of his, and the challenge of tracking down a board that wasn't even released in North America is pretty fun. I'd have all 4 of his 1st year pro models if I got one.
If anyone can get their tentacles on one of these you'll be able to ransom it to Dave for a shit load of money


What are your feelings about this Pottery Barn product? 



I'd be bummed if it were a real board, but since it's not I think it's pretty cool. There are a lot of benches out there made of old boards, and I just cringe when they're good boards. But with the vast majority of boards, they really couldn't be put to a better use than as a bench or a light fixture. I wish I could think of a good use for old bindings. I've got a shitload I'd like to get rid of.

What is the one vintage snowboard you wouldn't touch with someone else's?
Without a doubt, the Burton Safari's with the zebra print. I can't stand looking at those things. I wouldn't even want a bench made out of one. You couldn't give me one.

If you were a snowboard which one would you be and why?
Ummm, maybe an Aggression board, or which ever one that was really awesome in it's day, but never went anywhere in the industry, and is still givin'er whatever it has left to this day.



--- Dave on Vintage Snowboard Trading ---


In 2010 Terry Kidewell was hoping to sell one of his old snowboards. The auction got some good coverage but I don't think it reached the asking price (which I vaguely remember was $10,000). Why do you think he didn't manage to get the sale?
There's no doubt that there is more value in a board if it can be personally tied back to a pro rider like Kidwell, or a builder like Tom Sims. But in the case of when Kidwell was selling his boards, I think the snowboard community in general didn't want to see Terry separated from his personal collection. Those boards belong with him. So I think buyers backed off for that reason. At the time, I did hear about a group or a museum that was proposing to take donations from the community to buy the boards, and then planned to give them right back. I have no idea if that actually happened, but in my mind that would have been the ideal solution.



Do you think people collecting snowboards as investment or are people more interested in producing collections?
In this game you've got your guys that buy boards for nostalgia, some that buy out of compulsion, some that do it to flip a profit, and some that do some combination of all three. But I think the majority do it for the nostalgic/personal reasons, rather than to turn a profit. In most cases guys start out looking for a few cool boards they remember from back in the day, then 1 turns into 2, 2 into 4, 4 into 8, and so-on. It can definitely get addicting.



Some of the current prices people are selling snowboards for seem high. Do you ever get concerned that there is a market bubble?
I don't really get concerned about that possibility myself, but in some cases it could happen. Craig Kelly boards come to mind. there are like millions of those things out there, many still hiding away in closets and garages. Yet they seem to pull a premium all the time. Sure Craig deserves the respect, but in reality the supply outweighs the demand. If the masses all found out that their old CK board was worth a few hundred bucks all at the same time, we'd be swimming in CK boards overnight. Some guys have talked to me about drawing too much attention to old boards, and driving up prices as a consequence, but I think it's a necessary evil that will bring a lot of old boards out of hiding that would have never been available if they were never worth anything. If there's a bubble, it's gonna swell and subside based on supply and demand. Patience everyone.


I remember being surprised at the prices some old Burtons have recently sold for and I think they might be the most expensive snowboards ever sold. Was there something funky going on there with the bidding?

This Burton BB1 Londonderry sold on eBay in March 2012 for $11,211

This was Jake Burton's personal board, and he verified that before the sale. I heard this was a charity auction, so since it was charity, and a tax write-off for someone's business, and it had the proper provenance, the price went through the roof.

This 1984 Burton Performer "Black Widow" signed by Bob Novak sold on eBay in February 2013 for $11,732

To be honest, I don't pay much attention to anything prior to 92. I've got no personal attachment to those boards, because I wasn't riding at that time, and I'm not in this game as an investor. However, I do pick up on a few things just by scanning the group, and this board is definitely throwing up some red flags for me.

I heard a story of an old Burton like this that sold for something like $13k USD and it turned out to be a fake. YES there are fakes out there! I'm not 100% sure if the price was for real or not, but I'm sure the fact that it was fake was true. Be sure to get the facts if you are buying that really old stuff. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Anyhow, the common thread between all the fakes, were the amazing condition, the year 1984, and the supposed direct connection to this Bob Novak guy. Makes me sick to know there are scumbags out there that would rip people off like that.


Do you think Dual Snowboards are worth investing in?
Snowboarding's answer to snowblades! Oh definitely. If you were ever not having a good day snowboarding, you could switch to your Dual Snowboards and instantly be reminded that "hey, things could be worse". Future collector value? Don't even get me started!


Are there any legendary Vintage Snowboard Traders?
Dennis Nazari from Salty Peaks/Utah Snowboard Museum comes to mind. Apparently his boards number in the thousands. I'd love to see that some day. Pat Bridges from Snowboarder Magazine has a decent sized quiver, and what makes him stand out is that he actually rides all of them. A few guys from Vintage Snowboard Traders really stand out, whether it be because they buy up lots of boards, or just have amazing quality or rare boards. Jon Thompson, Tim MacKenzie, Kurt Heine, Scott Serfas, Hugues Beauchamp, Jeff Patterson and Steve Lestikow are notable collectors from the Vintage Snowboard Traders group. Todd pretty probably has the most complete Chris Roach collection ever, and Tim Peacock in the UK has the most amazing Jamie Lynn collection. I know I'm forgetting some. There are so many.

Kurt Heine, Dave, Pat Moore and Tim Peare



--- The Vintage Snowboard Traders Group ---

How did you end up setting-up the Vintage Snowboard Traders Facebook group?
When I started collecting, I was searching all over the web for boards. I tried a couple of snowboarding forums before I wondered if there were any other collectors on Facebook. I found the groups Dig My Quiver and History of Snowboarding. I was blown away when I got into those groups, cuz there are a lot of the old pros, photographers, filmers, and company owners there. I went from having almost no exposure to these people that I had only read about, to interacting with them directly, overnight. I was chatting with fucking Tom Sims for christ sake. Fuckin, Terje was "liking" my pictures. I talk with guys like Ranquet, Roach, Rehberg, Russell Winfield, Tarquin, Kurt Heine, Bud Fawcett, Scott Serfas...  the list goes on.
ANYWAY, I was searching craigslist like crazy for old boards, and there were a lot that were awesome boards, but they weren't on my wish list. I'd sometimes post them up in DMQ or History, in case other guys wanted them, but DMQ is a place to post pics of boards you already own, and History is a place where you post old pics and tell stories. I felt like I was detracting from these groups when I was posting all these craigslist ads, so I opened up Vintage Snowboard Trader, invited a few people, and just went nuts with posting craigslist ads. Pretty soon other guys were posting up what they found, and we were all helping each other build our collections. The more action that took place in the group, the more people it attracted, and it has been snowballing this way ever since.


I often see people asking if others in the group can pick up a snowboard for them. What are the rules to this? there seems to be a lot of trust between a number of people in the group.
We have a goon squad that beats the shit out of anyone that doesn't hold up their end of a deal. Haha.

The community that has developed around the group is so awesome, in that we can all really trust each other. It's such an awesome collection of like minded people. Guys are genuinely stoked to help each other out, and once you really get a sense of that, it's easy to trust everyone there. There aren't really any rules when arranging someone to help with a pick-up and shipping, but it's always good form to offer up some extra money for gas and beer.


Where else do Vintage Snowboard Traders hang out? Was there something before the Facebook Group? Are there other places on the Internet and do they meet in real life?
Mainly just the Facebook groups. "History of Snowboarding" to bullshit, "Dig my Quiver" to show off your boards, "Snowboarders in Exile, Old Skool films" to post about videos, "Lib Tech Snowboard Collectors", and "93/94 Boardshop" focuses on the 90's specifically. That's the general format, but there's a lot of crossover topics happening in all the groups.  It's the easiest way to connect online.

There are a few on-snow retro days that take place around the States, and there are usually a few of our members there. Retro Fools Day at Steven's Pass WA looks like a great event. I think legends of Tahoe is an annual event. But this summer one of the Vintage Snowboard Traders member suggested we do a group ride together, and they decided to come right out to my back yard, and ride Baldface! The owner of the lodge, Jeff Pensiaro, is a member of the group and he opened up a special session just for us, and is organizing a swap meet. He's also invited a bunch of historical pro riders and famous industry dudes to make guest appearances. We're stoked to say the least!

Terje stands awkwardly next to Dave in his Phantom costume


What do the guys from the Vintage Snowboard Trader group hate most about the guys from the History of Snowboarding group?
They are all a bunch of kook, wannabe, snowbladers. Just kidding. It's pretty much the same people in both groups, so I guess it's just self loathing.


Do you have a special handshake? 
The initiator of the handshake does a "jerk-off" motion on the other guy's thumb.

An unsuspecting Jamie Lynn about to get "initiated"


What does your average vintage snowboard trader look like?
Huge beards, massive cocks.


--- The End ---


You Might Also Like...

If you have a massive cock and an impressive beard you can stalk or join the Vintage Snowboard Traders Facebook group here

These photos of Dave stalking the snowboard legends are from the time that he gate crashed the Red Bull Supernatural and if you'd like to read more about it, here's his write-up.

And finally, here's some snowboarding demographics showing the continuing growth of older snowboarders.


↧
Search

Extreme Pie Charts

November 21, 2013, 2:02 am
$
0
0
For several years we've been creating infographics to help visualise different aspects of snowboarding. One thing we've almost entirely avoided using so far is the much maligned pie chart, described by this guy as, "easily the worst way to convey information ever developed in the history of data visualization". This week we challenge our fears and give this plucky little underdog a chance. And it's also a chance for you to win big by giving it a shot too, thanks to the team at Extreme Pie who have agreed to supply the prize. Sometimes this stuff just writes itself... 


Here's the prize that's up for grabs; a nice array of snowboard swag, either for yourself, or a way of getting Christmas done in one go:


And if that wasn't clear enough, here's how that looks in real life.


Here are the rules:
1. Create a snowboarding themed pie chart
2. Share it on the Facebook page
3. You've got two weeks to enter. The closing date is Thursday December 5th.
4. We'll select a winner
5. Stuff gets stuffed in the post
6. You win Christmas


To give you some inspiration here are a few we've created:

Earlier this season the guys at Whitelines posted up this video along with the claim "Is this the first circle rail success story?"






After 5 years of Illicit Snowboarding I thought it was about time we shared some information on what type of content people read the most on the site:


Not that I'm bitter or anything, but my recent post on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's theory of Flow I was so damn proud of, is setting records for the least read post on the site ever. What the hell is wrong with you?

Whatever



Just before that article on psychology we made a slightly more successful one on hipster snowboard logos. 

Hipster Pie Chart



And finally...
Ceci n'est pas une pipe chart


Acceptable pies include:
  • Interesting snowboard statistics.
  • Questionably accurate snowboard statistics.
  • Pie charts jokes (they exist).
  • Things that look like other things.
  • Because we're an equal opportunities blog we'll accept any sort of graph or charts, and we'll even accept Venn diagrams.
  • It doesn't have to look pretty; feel free to bang one out in something like Excel, PowerPoint or just scrawl it on a napkin.
  • Extra points if you can work something up with this photo from RadShot of Mike Knobel nose grabbing over a blank pie chart. 


Thanks to Extreme Pie and Blackleaf.com for the prizes. Here's our Facebook page for your entries. Good luck 

↧

Beanies, Bean Bags, Boobs & Booze – 12 things we learned from the London Freeze Festival

December 3, 2013, 7:11 am
$
0
0
We hit-up the London Freeze Festival on Saturday and this is what we found...

1. Free drugs

2. The après ski bars theme I wrote about a few weeks ago was excellent and it’s definitely the way to go for this event.

3. And that might be bad news for us snowboarders, because the future of the snowboard competition is really not clear. It had already dropped down from being a big air event largely funded by the FIS to a pretty dinky rail jam, and I don't see any obvious why back from that.  The snowboarding was really just peripheral to the bars and just gave the boozing and parting some wintry legitimacy.

4. The rail jam was not a massive success. They'll need to have some sort of snowboarding at the event to give people a reason to come to some bars in the middle of a field in winter next year, but the format might have to change. It was pretty clear that the bulk of the audience had no clue what the hell the rail jam was all about and they were really underwhelmed despite the best efforts of the two shouty Ant & Dec impersonators and a bunch of snowboarders gamely sacrificing themselves on the scenery.

The crowd goes mild while Denis Leontyev spins on to an oversized can of deodorant


5. As a rarity for a snowboarding event, the crowd was an even mix of the sexes. Statistically, more girls like snowboarding if there’s less actual snowboarding involved and it’s in a convenient location in the centre of London.

6. But, misogyny is still hanging about like the bad stench around the portaloos.

Look out for Halfpipe London's spanking wife advert later in the season

 Appearing in a snowboard mag near you right now

Ensure you never get laid again with this lovely t-shit

7. There really are are very few genuine home-grown snowboard companies. I counted just two of any value at the event; Butta with their snowboard wax and Douk pronounced ‘duke’who are attempting to run a snowboard manufacturing business in the UK. All the other brands at the show were really just people with a logo. There were more t-shirt and beanie companies than you can shake a shitty stick at. No country needs this many woolly hats, let's try something else.

8. Oh, and the answer is not giant bean bags. Also there was a bunch of guys selling massive bean bags, and anyone who wasn't selling a massive bean bags had at least one or two to decorate their stand. What’s the obsession with giant bean bags in the UK? Who they hell actually uses these things and why’s it in any way associated with snowboarding?

This lad is hung like a horse

9. Good news - onesies are officially dead. Last time I went to the Freeze Festival the place was riddled with people flogging them, this year there was just one stall left and only a few dickheads still wearing them.

10. While we're talking about the retail tent, the one sector that wasn't here but should have been were the resorts and travel companies. People were only buying things they could carry, because they were there for that parties, so the guys selling snowboards were bang out of luck. But the audience would have been ideal for people trying to flog travel and holidays. The après ski bars were great and it's amazing that people weren't right outside the Crazy Kangaroo flogging trips to St Anton or Ibiza Rocks the Snow selling holidays to Meribel. And the guys that organise Snowbombing should have been all over this like flies on shit.

11. Idris Elba, great in the Wire, bit of a school disco DJ.


12. You might already have started to suspect this what with Mr Elba's headwear/friend choices or the lads on the beanbags, but the main theme at the London Freeze Festival was irony. It was all about silly hats, 80's music, Christmas jumpers and retro ski suits. 




On Saturday night Freeze Festival goers set a Guinness World Record for the most irony ever assembled in one place


Most snowboarders in the UK are people that go for a one week holiday once a year and this year's Freeze was all about what they are interested in and it was successful in doing that. It's an insight for people within the snowboard scene to see what is actually happening in our sport. Remember when snowboarding was the bright new thing and it was all about the future? Well that phase is over. In the UK at least, snowboarding in 2013 is all about the irony of the past.

That's everyone in the UK except this guy, who was rocking round the place in snowboard boots, camo trousers and a jester hat without a hint of irony...

 ...which is ironic


↧
↧

Nokia Giveaway Caption Comp

February 12, 2013, 5:40 am
$
0
0
Nokia gave me a phone for the Burton European Open coverage and now it's time to give it away. I promised to do this before I got the phone and after a few days of playing with it I'm regretting that decision, but my mistake is someone else's gain...


Here's what you can win:

 - A Nokia820 in red (worth £320 or $400) 
 - A tiny Nokia x Burton sleeping bag
 - A BeeYeow t-shirt - Size Mediaum
 - And a Burton BeeYeow 2013 bobble hat

Crappy photo taken with my iPhone
To win this swag all you have to do is write a caption for this photo on our Facebook page. 
Click here to visit the Facebook page 

I'll pick a winner on Monday 18th February. Good luck.

*****UPDATE*****

This story had a happy ending. The winning caption was the very minimalistic "Connecting People" and with the winner harking from Finland this has turned into a heart warming homecoming for this particular little Nokia phone.



↧

Illicit does...Motivational Snowboard Quotes

December 10, 2013, 6:20 am
$
0
0
We though we'd have a go at creating some motivational posters for snowboarding. These things are guaranteed Facebook bait, so this post is bound to be a winner. It's just a common snowboard saying stuck on a stock photo, how hard could it be?...








There's a good interview with John Cardiel on Whitelines



Well I hope you're feeling inspired now. Feel free use these to motivate your friends on the Facebook.


You Might Also Like...

Seminal Snowboard Movies - Pornifying The Classics


↧

Punters vs Core Snowboarders & What Shaun White Actually Means To Snowboarding

December 13, 2013, 3:19 am
$
0
0
Over the past few months across the snowboard magazines and the blogosphere there's been a heated discussion about what Shaun White brings or doesn't bring to snowboarding. Some people hate him, some are disappointed by him and some have defended him, interestingly few have professed to actually like the fella. There's been lots of well argued opinions, but ultimately it has all been opinions and as they say, opinions are like arseholes, everyone's got one. We wondered what's the reality? Does Shaun White represent snowboarding or not?...


Let's hit the stats.

There were 6.1 million snowboarders in the US in 2010. I'm going to use the snowboard participation in 2010 from the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA), because it's the most useful source I can get hold of and there hasn't been a dramatic change either side of that year.

Of those 6.1 million snowboarders:
  • 34.4% of them were 'frequent' snowboarders, who snowboarded for 10 days or more that year. 
  • 43.8% were 'occasional' snowboarders, hitting the slopes between 3 and 9 days.
  • 21.7% were 'infrequent' only ridging for 1 or 2 days.

Here's those figures in a pie chart :

(OK I may have lied a little at the end of last week about not doing another pie chart)

66% of snowboarders, the whole area in blue, are only occasional or infrequent snowboarders.

Even the frequent group is not all that dedicated, take that 10 day figure up to two weeks and you'd expect to have another group making up about 20% of the overall figure. It's very likely that only 15% or less of snowboarders are on the hill more than two weeks a year.

There's a lot of people who snowboard, but on the whole they're not exactly dedicated. 


So, how big is the dedicated core of snowboarding?

Reading a snowboard magazine is an activity that's pretty much a staple of anyone who considers themselves to be a serious snowboarder, the type of people who engage in debates about the relative merits of Shaun White. It's not a bad way of counting what most people would consider to be the core snowboarders.

Here's the same chart of the total number of US snowboarders compared with the circulation figures of the biggest US snowboard magazine Transworld Snowboarding:


Hardly any snowboarders actually read a snowboarding magazine. TWS have a circulation of just 120,558 readers, just 2% of all US snowboarders. For comparison Snowboarder Mag have just 70,000 readers and Snowboard Magazine just 60,000 and I wouldn't be surprised if there was a significant overlap between those readerships too. Effectively core snowboarders only account for a minimum of 2% and a maximum of about 5% of all snowboarders.

If you're reading this article, you probably fit in this 5% group and it's likely the snowboarders you know do too. When your're a 5 percenter and your surrounded by others 5 percenters it might seem that snowboarding is all about the core values, but it's not. 95% of snowboarders don't know what the core values of snowboarding are, they don't know the history, they don't know the jargon, they don't know the names of the riders or of the tricks and they are largely ambivalent to all of these things.

95% of snowboarders are punters. Snowboarding is all about the punters.

In short; the core snowboarding values which we are concerned about do not represent snowboarding. They hardly matter at all.


So if the core snowboarders and the things we care about don't represent snowboarding to most snowboarders then what does?

Knowing that the snowboard magazines were only read by a very small proportion of snowboarders the next thing to take a look at is to see if there are aspects of snowboarding that the punters are more interested in.

  • Transworld Snowboarding has 120,558 readers, a similar number of Facebook likes (167,000) and they have 454,389 visitors to their website. They reach a few more people that way, but some of these people won't be based in the US which stops the neat comparison to the 6.1 million US snowboarders.
  • Travis Rice, core snowboarding's current poster child, has a similar influence to TWS with 175,000 Facebook likes.
  • Industry behemoth, the main supplier of snowboarding gear to punters and the guys responsible for making the US Olympic team look like homeless patchwork dolls, Burton, is more representative with 685,000 likes.

But the most representative person or brand in snowboarding to the punters is...

  • Shaun White, who has a massive 2.4 million Facebook likes.

At this point we have switched to a less useful comparison of global figures against the US snowboarders overall number, but I'm keeping it for a sense of scale. Here's a look at what the punters are interested in and influenced by in snowboarding:


Nothing and no one is more representative of what most snowboarders believe snowboarding to be than Shaun White.


Snowboarding is not our sport, it's the sport of punters.

It's not the sport of Signal, it's the sport of Burton and Nike.

It's not the sport about snowboard magazines, it's the sport of articles in in-flight magazines and in sunday newspaper supplements.

It's not the sport of Illicit Snowboarding, it's the sport of About.com.

&

It's not the sport of Travis Rice, it's the sport of Shaun White.


Shaun White isn't addicted to snowboarding. He doesn't snowboard all season, he's quite happy to do other things like skateboarding, play in a band, rub shoulders with celebrities, or flog stuff in Target. Sounds weird to us, but that's a closer description of the aspirations of your average snowboarder than Travis Rice who does nothing but snowboard, or me, or you, or any of the guys who wrote those opinion pieces.

Shaun White is snowboarding and it's probably time that we should all suck it up admit it to ourselves.



You Might Also Like...

50 Pictures of Shaun White being a dick representing snowboarding, nah fuck it, who am I kidding, it's 50 pictures of him being a dick.

Ed Leigh's article that sparked this all off 'Why I don't like Shaun White' has mysteriously been removed from the Whitelines site. Perhaps they kissed and made up. I guess you'll have to read about it in their magazine (as if anyone reads those).

And Whitelines' riposte to their own article 'In Defence of Shaun White' is worth a read. It's a bit strange that they apparently don't talk to each other so they end up communicating by open opinion pieces. Look out for next week's article 'Fuck you Steve, it's your turn to make the coffee'.

Then there was the Angry Snowboarder piece 'It's not hate, it's disappointment', which kinda was hate, but good hate to read.

And finally ACM's article, also called 'In Defence of Shaun White', illustrating the current snowboard article title drought we're experiencing in the UK, which was also excellent, but lacked a comment section to soak up the vitriol.


↧
Viewing all 102 articles
Browse latest View live
Search