Certainly will be.
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ABPOS
Interesting piece covering Equity Fund buy-outs and the detrimental effect they’re having on the skate industry (and everything else).
https://prospect.org/economy/2025-08-21-private-equity-ripped-heart-out-of-skateboarding/
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Havent read it yet but I can’t help thinking the skateboard industry brought it on itself by moving away from the cottage industry vibe to over expansion, outsourcing etc. But I guess as soon as one company does it the rest are forced into keeping up
Edit and product price would be so much higher, boards would be like £500 if they were all made in the US or locally
Just came across this from the excellent Polish Barrier Mag. She has some great photos.
It’s in Polish but Google will auto translate it for you if you click the vertical … in the top right hand corner of your browser window and select translate.
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Decent piece in the Observer this morning, featuring a pic of @LA, and the recent Notts skate festival that I know @anonymity contributed to
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To appeal to more people, it is trying to shape skateboarding into more familiar sporting terms: a league format (the X Games League or XGL), city-based teams, merchandising and hammed-up rivalries between competitors. It wants to encourage fantasy leagues and sports betting, and it plans to do all this through more standardised scoring using an AI-powered judge. A “Tony Hawk-Eye”, if you will.
As much as I disagreed on GH’s take on Reynolds (Dinosaurs) I’m looking forward to his take on this in 18 months time.
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My contributions were minimal to be honest, @Dent_Face @deegwaad Chris Lawton and the various panel heads including @LA and Farran (can never remember your @ ) are far more integral to the whole thing. Observer piece was decent and the contextual stuff was well researched. Would’ve been nice to have more from the local scene and some better skate photos but mainstream attention in The Observer is great.
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Do you find the big league competition stuff weird @anonymity? A genuine question, likely one for everyone else too.
I enjoyed the article but the quote I highlighted I just found a bit odd and it stuck out like a sore thumb.
Yeah I do/did. I MC’d a couple of SLS events and some big scale Red Bull ones - Trocadéro and Albert Hall and they were weird. Fun though because I didn’t really take them seriously. I think the push now with events is to create a spectator class to bring more money into the ‘industry’ which is different from before. Ultimately, I’m happy to have nothing to do with the skate industry per se beyond the nice requests to write stuff and chat shit occasionally if I’m honest.
Seems like a bit of a wasteful shitshow from my current perspective. I don’t mean things like Skate Nottingham or the recent Wakefield thing obviously.
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listen, fair play
Cool, thanks. I was chatting with a friend tonight and said I’m not sure if I’m being a negative arse or not but a lot of this stuff now is getting uncomfortably close to what I was avoiding when I started skating. I suspect a handful of us on here are fairly similar, if not the majority.
Oh well. I’ll likely be helping out in some way or another with the jam at the end of November at the local indoor (which is really really hard work for the guys that run the park). Maybe see what happens with the opening of the new Derby park. Then come February it’ll be the run of Rollersnakes events from the Game of Skate in Feb/March onwards including Dadlands etc.
In hindsight positive things are happening.
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hehe, it was pretty good.
Paging @buildafire where do we get the Rocco interview zine?
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Had fun writing this story about a new skate photography publication, ‘Wet Proof’ by British design studio An Endless Supply. The debut issue focuses on Shari White’s photography and the series itself is about experimenting with reprographics and skate photography.
The article also has some background on a couple of the other skate projects An Endless Supply have made, with Mark Suciu and Isle, and includes some great words from Natalie Porter of WomxnSkateHistory.
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Good stuff that Farran
Found myself on Gary Warnett’s Gwarizm blog today reading a post and scanned Rolling Stone article about Texan legend Jeff Phillips who took his own life in 1993. I only met Gary a few times but he was always really nice and I know he was good friends with at least a few lurkers/posters.
Rest in peace to them both. Well worth a read.
Caveat - contains frank discussion about suicide.
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nice BTO piece on Kevin Wilkins, and the joy of writing encouraging interest in skateboarding
i was rather lucky to grow up with the words
of Gavin Hills, Simon Evans, Earl Parker, Dave Carnie, Ben Powell, and whoever Unkle Someone was, rattling around my bonce; them at least helping rationalise and make more humourous, the ol whizz plank
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