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?...

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?...

We hit-up the London Freeze Festival on Saturday and this is what we found...

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... 

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

What would the Internet be like without an endless stream of penguins Photoshopped onto snowboards? We're about to find out...

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...

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...

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...

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? ...

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...

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...

Behance.net is an internet place that arty folks congregate to show off their wares. Amongst the mass of creativity are some industrial designers having a crack at improving snowboarding. Some of the ideas they've come up with are really interesting, others...not so much...

It's said that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. For some people all they have is perspiration. Today we celebrate the efforts of these incredibly moist and flagrant folks...

A while ago we created a bunch of stickers for pioneering snowboard brands that had gone the way of the step-in. Seeing as those stickers have been selling like things that occasionally sell, we thought it would be time to produce some more. Keep an eye out for a strangely forgotten key moment in the history of snowboarding...

A few years back Google Instant was launched, the feature that tries to anticipate what you're trying to search for while you type. When it launched the Google marketeers promoted it with three key benefits; faster searches, smarter predictions and instant results. What they didn't mention is that it also has some downsides; 1. if you write a blog called Illicit Snowboarding you'll spend the next few years being exposed to some of the most heinous shit on the internet every time you start searching for the site, and 2. it consistently feeds you unwanted insights into the squalid mind of the internet. This week we used Google Instant to find the questions that the internet is asking about snowboarding and here's what we learned...

I was just reading the last magazine of the season from those part-timers at Whitelines and in it there was an article by Chris Moran about the current state of snowboarding fashion. At the end he asked; “If anyone has any ideas as to how to make snowboarding irresistibly sexy again, please write”. Well Chris, funnily enough, we have the answer…

A few weeks ago I went out to the Burton European Open and somehow managed to avoid mentioning the actual competition in any of the coverage. I didn't do that purely because I'm a contrary git; when I agreed to go on the trip I fully intended to find some way of writing something interesting about it, but I just couldn't find any angle. I didn't just struggle to find something to write, I struggled to even have the patience to watch the event, and judging by the coverage of the bloggers that went to the US Open last week I'm not the only one to hit this problem. The main thing my trip confirmed is that snowboarding is a horrible sport for spectators. In fact along with the day I once wasted at a cricket match and some hours spent watching my life tick past at a major league baseball game, attending the BEO is now in my top three worst spectator experiences of all time...

After all the excitement of recent weeks and the sudden proliferation of posts, we're finally back to our more sedate weeklyish article rate. This week to simulate your eyes I've arted a pretty poster depicting some of the very first snowboards; a time when snowboards still weren't called snowboards and when they were so savage they all had to be controlled by leash....

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...

A couple of weeks ago we mentioned an art competition Nokia and Burton are running. That competition is now at the public voting stage so we decided to see how things were progressing. There was good news, bad news and sphincter-looseningly-terrifying news. The good news is that 391 people entered into the competition, the bad news is that I had to wade through 391 entries to write this article, and the sphincter-looseningly-terrifying news is that now it has come to the public vote some of the most intense crap we've ever seen is somehow winning the vote. Democracy is taking one hell of a beating, and it needs your help...

I've been here since Sunday getting into the spirit of this event. It's the first time I've gone out of my way to go to one of these competitions. Here's what I've found so far...

This week, for a rare change of focus we've headed off to the Burton European Open in Laax, courtesy of Nokia, to attempt some live event reporting. So far things haven't got off to a great start, the first two days of qualification have had to be cancelled due to high winds and a dumping of fresh snow. The only thing happening on the course today was me cutting some fresh tracks right down the middle of it.

So in a change to our anticipated schedule of dry event reporting and tedious interviews, we've decided to pay homage to the other great feature of the BEO...the fact that it all takes place on a mountain called Crap.

There's a whole hour of winterwanderwegging Crap to the right.

And this great feature of Laax, along with a lethal combination of puerile minds with too much spare time, inevitably started us thinking of other dubiously named mountains, resorts and ski trails like the gloriously seedy...

So, in what must be the best piece of event reporting from the BEO you're going to get, we brought all the names into one convenient format, and are proud to bring you - The Übermap of Dirty Ski Resort Names...

I'm flying off to cover the Burton European Open (otherwise known as the BEO - pronounced BeeYeow!) at the start of February courtesy of some fine fellows at Nokia. There you go readers, proof that all you have to do is write a blog for 5 years, and put in approximately 1,600 hour's (the equivalent of 200 working days) of work and things will start happening for you. Before you all rush off to start your own blog though, there's a much shorter-term opportunity to get an even better deal for just a few days of effort you might be interested in...

If you've come up with a cunning plan to create the greatest snowboard company ever seen, the first thing you'll need is money. Traditionally your options were limited to breaking open your piggy bank, borrowing money from your friends or family, prostrating yourself in front of your bank manager, taking up some sort of  criminal endeavour, or being publicly humiliated on Dragon's Den/Shark Tank. Nowadays though there's a new option for any poor-orphaned-friendless-pround-honest-shy people out there: crowd funding. 

Take your brilliant idea, stick it on a site like Kickstarter or Indiegogo, and sit back while billions of potential investors throw cash at you. So far 43 snowboarding ideas have gone through this approach and here's our 10 favourite doomed attempts...

It's amazing humanity survived the early part of the last century  When they weren't busy filling their time with intermittent bouts of genocide, all-encompassing global conflicts and inventing weapons that could kill the planet, here's how people relaxed...