A couple of weeks ago a UK based advertising company with the sinister name of Captive Media, produced the world’s first piss-controlled computer games system. Finally we’re getting what we thought we were promised five years ago when Nintendo launched the Wii. The main aim of the system (or pisstem) is to find yet another way to squeeze just a few more advertising opportunities into the already advertising-saturated lives of the jaded public. One of the first games is a snowboard game where you control a screen by adjusting your aim. It's spawned a thousand pun headlines across the British press and now it’s spawned this article. We decided to see how this joystick-controlled ad fitted in with the other ambient or outdoor (out-of-home) advertising that's been produced, so here's the top 10 examples we could find...

Earlier this year the Rom-Com Chalet Girl was released. At the time we didn't go to the trouble of reviewing it, however it recently came to our attention that this seemingly charming movie had a surprising muse. Back in 2008 another movie called Chalet Girl was released and although it went unnoticed and unheralded by the mainstream snowboarding and movie media, the similarities between the two movies are striking. Today we compare them…

Yesterday on the Facebook group - History of Snowboarding (which is a good group that you should all join), Snowboarding Legend Mike Ranquet (to use his full name) asked this question: 

“When, why and how did the majority of snowboard magazines turn into the equivalent of ‘Tiger-Beat Snowboarding’? When I look at Thrasher or most any skateboard and or surf magazines they don’t make me feel alienated and old; yet most of the major snowboard magazines do. The snowboard mags have the same MO as any pre-teen/teen gossip magazines; they don’t seem to care about where they came from or where they’re going, just living in the now. Wouldn’t in depth interviews or features including anyone over 30 (or 40 in my case) be of interest to most? 

When I open a new snowboard mag I have no stoke or excitement as too what’s going on because..... well I just don’t care, yet I know that when I open a Thrasher there will be photo’s and articles that I want to look at and read. Skate, surf and even rock/music magazines make me feel young and evoke a feeling that I’ve been harboring for years and it stokes me out, but snowboard magazines make me feel old. I know I’m old (41), but that’s not the point; the point is that these mags should make me feel young but haven’t for the better part of a decade. 

With the exception of the ‘token’ old guy 1/4 page shot here and there, the significant history of our sport has been swept under the rug. Not upset, just confused as to why other board related sports have been able to keep all demographics of its participants interested yet snowboard mags fall short.”

Next thing you know it’s kicking off and there are 145 comments. We wanted to add our own 2 cents to the debate, but there wasn’t enough space in a Facebook comment to get across all the things we wanted to say on the topic so here you go…

Started in 1872, back when science was still struggling to come to terms with concepts like dinosaurs, comfortable clothing and foreigners, Popular Science has spent the last 139 years trying to predict the future. In the early part of last century they really started going to town making some impressively wild snow sports predictions. Clearly the people of that era were made of seriously stronger stuff because some of the ideas they came up with were not much safer than being a Christian lion tickler in ancient Rome. Today we take a look at how accurate they were..

In the 90s the only conversation that anybody had in the world of winter sports was the snowboarding vs. skiing debate. Every single person had a fervent opinion on the subject apparently based loosely on something they thought they’d overheard someone say, one time in the pub. Over the years though, things have become more and more subdued as everyone slowly got a grip. Today the only people who still cling on to the hate are the occasional clueless punter (inevitably wearing a faded one-piece and rocking a pair of monstrously long straight-edge skis) who has somehow skipped an entire decade without noticing. Today there’s a whole generation of skiing and snowboarding kids that have no idea they should have an incredibly strong and misplaced opinion on the topic based on whether they happened to be given a snowboard or a pair of skis by Santa.

We wondered why everything had gone quiet and decided it was time to rehash this debate one more time. To spice things up we also decided that this time we’d actually look at the facts…

At the start of the month at the SEMA show in Las Vegas, Scion Racing released a bonkers modified car absolutely smothered with various snowboard brands. It’s not the first car to be pimped up snowboard style, here’s a raft of other dubious collaborations…

This week we thought we’d try our hand at rewriting the history of skiing and snowboarding by pushing the invention of snowboarding forward by about 50 years and seeing if we can fool anyone…

Today we take a look at Absolutely Radical, the World’s first snowboard magazine. Here are a few things we learned.

• Snowboarding magazines today are 328% more expensive but on the plus side you do get 820% more pages.
• The first edition of Absolutely Radical featured 61% of all the people who have ever received a Transworld Snowboarding Legend Award.
• Modern snowboards are 2.5 times more expensive and yet they are also about $9,500 cheaper.
• Halfpipes are 2.7 times higher, but they are also approximately 2.7 times softer as they are considerably less covered in shit loads of moguls

Come with us now on a journey of historical discovery…

Back in May the Angry Snowboarder wrote an editorial called “Played Out Marketing Pitches” where he rounded on some of the snowboard companies that use pointlessly generic sales pitches such as “by riders, for riders” and “putting the fun back into snowboarding” to sell their kit. One of the things he mentioned in that article was a company called Monson which builds snowboards for a whole bunch of brands who then flog the same snowboard to the public dressed up in a different graphic and smothered in great steaming piles of marketing crap. A few months down the line and with a new season upon us we thought it would be interesting to see how each of the companies  are selling this year’s fresh crop of Monson snowboards. 

As the Angry Snowboarder says in that article, “If you’re going to run a company you seriously need to bring something to the table beyond played out pitches and cookie cutter technology, otherwise it’s just a different graphic on the same old shit”. To test out whether people were following that sage advice we tracked one particular Monson board, the ‘C6’, to see what spin each brand put on their marketing of that board and what price they gave it. We found 11 different ways you can buy the same board, epic lashings of sales diarrhoea and amazingly depending on who you buy from you could spend anything between $300 and $570 on exactly the same snowboard…

After scraping the sordid depths of the snowboarding world with last week’s smutfest we’ve gone all highbrow this week and are reviewing a book. Wear that, newly acquired and now thoroughly disappointed audience.

Normally when we review books we judge them almost solely on the cover and although this one has a nice enough cover what really drew our attention was the weight…