You might have noticed that things have got more than just a little sporadic round here. I'm out. Here's why...

This season I've been doing some colouring-in to help fill the pages of Whitelines magazine, so for the first time this stuff is being looked over by the terrified eyes of some professional editors. It's been a interesting process and at times things have become very heated as it did with my latest spread. Today I'm going to reveal all and show you what really happens behind the Wizard's curtain...

The one thing that's had the largest effect on snowboarding in the last few years has been the rise of the internet. By that, what I mean is the rise of the internet and it's keyboard-mashing hordes has directly effected the word 'snowboard'. Never before has one word been spelled so many different ways by so many different people. Today we take a look at what happens to some of those sad misspelled snowboards after they are launched from Twitter into the unwelcoming abyss of the interweb...

Zoo York are the latest non-snowboard brand to try and break into this market, but unlike the recent successes by Nike and Adidas, Zoo York's efforts are a case study in how it shouldn't be done. This is how you don't learn from experience...

The first Whitelines magazine of the season, the buyers' guide, is out on the shelves now and the quick purchasers amongst you might have noticed that a couple  of the pages have been coloured in by us. Illicit has gone non-clickable. We were tasked with what turned out to be a very tricky job of creating a mildly-amusing infographic. On the face of it that seemed straightforward, until we realised that those two things are mutually exclusive. Still, we forged on and produced the definitive historical guide to snowboarding fashion trends and weirdly enough it turns out that this cheeky chap might just be the most fashionable man in snowboarding...

The Chinese eCommerce group Alibaba is about to go public in what is expected to be the largest tech IPO of all time. 80% of everything sold online in China goes through this company and they flog more merchandise than Amazon and eBay combined. It's not a company most people outside China are familiar with, so we figured we'd take a look and see what all the excitement is about...

Yet again, during and after an important snowboarding competition, one of the main things everyone was talking about was the judging. Questioning the judging of a sport isn't a topic unique to snowboarding, but the level and consistency of it is. When we should be talking about the snowboarding itself, we're forced to spend time trying to figure out what's going through the minds of a group of anonymous guys sitting in a little temporary hut. But the problem isn't the judges themselves, the problem is the judging system - The current system is fundamentally flawed and it needs to change...

Sometimes it's not who you know, it's who you don't want to know...

I thought I'd have a look around the snowboarder profiles on the Sochi Olympics site and two things struck me; firstly, the website was full of interesting glitches which made this process very tricky (but that seems to be a standard for this Olympics), and secondly, why do all the snowboarders look so damn grumpy?

This week we scoured the depths if Imgur to find their best snowboarding posts. Imgur is the photo sharing site beloved of Redditors and the great thing about it is that the photos come with their own comments, so our caption writer was able to take the week off...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...