Thursday, December 20, 2012
Monday, December 10, 2012
Can you guess which snowboard video this describes?
- It starts with musical intro and a roll of the sponsor’s logos.
- After the opening credits it launches into the first segment featuring one snowboarder riding for the length of a song, it will be the second best snowboard section of the movie.
- Then there’s a short and mildly amusing candid interlude captured at some point during the filming process.
- The film then progresses into a series of sections, with an assortment of snowboarders, riding to a variety of tracks, with a few more short interludes.
- Then there’s a bit more of the same but a switch to Japan or the Southern Hemisphere.
- Next up it’s the slam section.
- Finally it all ends with the best snowboard section of the movie by the stand-out rider, which includes the biggest single trick.
Sound familiar? It should do because it roughly describes almost every single snowboard movie ever created. It’s what, for the purposes of this article we are going to call ‘the format’. ‘The format’ has been the dominant type of snowboard movie for over twenty years, and it’s been copied and rehashed to a point well past it’s sell by date. We've reached a situation where there’s now a whole generation of snowboarders that don’t know anything else but ‘the format’ and because of that it’s become even more pervasive. Is ‘the format’ something all snowboard movies are doomed to repeat forever or is there another way?
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Thursday, November 8, 2012
It's sometimes said that puns are the lowest form of humour, but for years I've argued that the dubious honour should actually go to the likes of anagrams, pranks, mother-in-law jokes, slapstick and Garfield. At least that's what I believed before I picked up the October edition of Snowboarder Magazine on my last trip to the US. Here are the ten lowest points, in a new low point, for the now proven lowest form of humour...
Saturday, November 3, 2012
Illicit went to the Ski and Snowboard Show and had a go at live tweeting the experience. For those of you that missed it, here's how it went...
Thursday, November 1, 2012
Over the last few weeks ESPN have been releasing some great
articles on the effects of avalanches in the US. They’re now mid-way through a run
of six articles and they’re also mid-way to scaring me into never snowboarding
off-piste again. It’s time to take a look at the stats and see just how close
to a horrible avalanchy death we really are…
Thursday, October 25, 2012
In the last article we wanted to test the hypothesis that the only two things people read about were tits and Shaun White. To test it we combined the two topics into one composite article and bloody hell was that theory proved correct. So far 9,382 people have read the article, 1,272 people shared it on the Facebook, 893 people hit the Like button and 4 people took time out of their busy schedules to complain Based on the evidence we've learned that we should either just focus on Shaun White and tits from now on, or focus on testing scientific theories. We've chose the second option, so this week we test another theory:
It's said that if there were an infinite amount of monkeys hitting keys at random on typewriters, they would eventually produce the works of William Shakespeare. To test this theory we constructed YouTube. Let's see how close we've got to producing reams of great literature...
Thursday, October 11, 2012
The other day, while we were Facebook stalking, one of our imaginary friends mused; "So far what I've learnt from working in Action Sports media is that the only 2 things that sell are tits and Shaun White". Well, we've done tits to death, so here's fifty pictures of snowboarding's very own ginger Brian May...
Friday, September 28, 2012
Earlier this year Nate Fristoe from the consulting
firm RRC Associates presented some worrying statics on the current situation in
snowboarding titled ‘The Rise and Stall of Snowboarding’. His speech resulted
in what Transworld Business described as a “media blitz” or as we’d describe “a
couple of obscure articles” foretelling a decline in snowboarding. Earlier this
month Transworld Business printed Fristoe’s presentation in full. The data was
interesting, there were oodles of charts and everyone loves a good chart, but some
of the interpretations were very questionable. Do we need to worry?...
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Each year the snowboard magazines (or treeware as they're know by the incredibly wanky word I heard for the first time today) churn out a special edition introducing at the newest snowboards and gear. The gear guides that are produced is usually a endless, and not all that exciting or useful array of pictures of snowboards for people to peruse. We felt that the format needed spicing up a little...













