🚨🚨🚨 WARNING: SEASONAL CONTENT DELUGE 🚨🚨🚨
A lot of videos, a Jake Ilardi video, a frictionless future, a nollie-hardflip-boardslide, and more.
The definitive weekly ranking and analysis of all the skateboarding and other things online that I cannot stop consuming and how it makes me feel, personally.
🚨🚨🚨 WARNING: SEASONAL CONTENT DELUGE 🚨🚨🚨
Rank: 🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨
Mood: 🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨
It's that time of year again, which can sometimes feel like August, but is also right now, where we approach the end of Q4 and the seasonal content deluge begins. This swell intensifies as the already steady, daily stream of media offerings floods the banks as brands deploy additional targeted projects in the final leg of the never-officially addressed but fully accepted race for Thrasher's Skater of the Year award. (Tim Fulton, REAL Skateboards team manager, shared on this week's Mostly Skateboarding Podcast, that former SOTY Kyle Walker is working on a video part for Vans slated to be released at the end of 2026 — that's some forward-looking marketing/athlete strategy.)
That means consuming "content," which is the job of both the average skateboarder and niche skateboarding-related newsletter author, becomes exponentially easier and harder than it has been all year. Easier in that the content is everywhere and you'll want for not in that department, but harder in the reality that there is only so much available space in a niche skateboarding-related newsletter to write about it.
So, with that in mind, I will do my best to provide the probing, completely unbiased, and not-at-all trivial commentary you've come to expect on as much of this individual content as succinctly as possible. And yes, three to four new videos will have been uploaded by the time you read this.
REAL Skateboards - OVAL
Enduring and having endurance are two separate things. In skateboarding, some brands stick around long past their expiration date, which requires endurance, but doesn't mean they have actual staying power. REAL Skateboards endures. They've done this by tweaking the recipe but never straying far from the taste people know and love.
The brand's video library speaks for itself, and they lean on that heritage in Oval, cutting in archival footage throughout. And it's those moments when the past and present butt up against one another that this incremental refresh comes into view, as Andres Garcia, who helms the project, told Jenkem.
Were there any real goals with this project, like specific vibe you were trying to capture or certain angle you were trying to push?
Just trying to show how different the team is now, and that how we go about making videos is changing. It’s not trying to be a revamp of the brand, but a subtle change up. My style is different from previous Real filmers, and we’re trying to be creative with different angles, more panning, and getting closer with the fisheye. Also, we didn’t use much b-roll. If you look back at old Real videos, there’s a lot of b-roll scattered throughout. We just kept it straightforward and let the skating show the personalities of the team.
Also, Momiji Nishiya!
HUF - Box-Truck
For my money, Tyler Smolinski is one of the best working filmmakers in skateboarding today. His output is impressive as much for its vision as its consistency in quality, so much so that I can take what I wrote a couple of years ago about HUF's Forever, swap the titles around, and it'll apply to Box-Truck.
Existential worries aside, [Box-Truck] is a genuinely beautiful skateboarding video. Filmmaker Tyler Smolinski has given it the thing that makes it infinitely rewatchable: heart. Yes, the skateboarding is impressive, but it’s the cinematography, the composition, the way the b-roll creates a narrative, adds a punchline, or is tied together by stray whisps of audio. It’s how shots are left to sit; silences are allowed to build and create tension.
If you let it, [Box-Truck] will make you feel something, as all things with heart do.
Chris Mulhern - [untitled] 007: Bobby, Kevin, Kris and Quel
If Tyler Smolinski is one of this era's best filmmakers, Chris Mulhern is a generation-spanning master. The level of craft he brings to every one of his projects elevates them from "skate video" to — and I say this with complete sincerity — cinema.
Throughout [untitled] 007, we witness the sub-narrative of Philadelphia's skate scene grappling with the imminent destruction, and then outright demolition, of one of the city's premier skate spots in Muni (however, a city-sanctioned revival of the spot appears complete). They commandeer dollies to construct renegade ledges and fly over the gaps in granite, and look cool as hell doing it. Kevin Liedtke, Kris Brown, and Bobby Worrest have some of the best styles on a board, and they each shine here.
That, of course, is all fantastic table-setting for a full Quel Haddox section. If we're to talk about people flying over massive holes in the earth with incredible style to boot, Haddox continues his city-wide rampage. No flatbed trailer or piece of construction equipment is safe.
Cole Nowicki
éS Footwear - TJ Roger's "From the Ground Up"
Since the very beginning of this newsletter — literally the second-ever "Simply Ranked" Friday post in September 2021 — I've been writing about the "moment" TJ Rogers has been having. That moment has been long, and punctuated by so many video parts that he's closing in on dozens.
Some of these projects, like his Petty Crime: A VX Story section uploaded by Brett Sube last week, are not as high-octane as others and look like they were filmed in about four days, but that degree of productivity is part of what makes them incredible. Stylish, flowing, technical, all the key notes are still hit.
In his From the Ground Up part for éS Footwear that premiered online this week, he shows why the company took him on a world tour to celebrate his debut pro model shoe: Rogers refuses to disappoint.
Cole Nowicki
Dime - Enjoy the winter now
The most important takeaway from Enjoy the winter now is at the end of this newsletter.
Apple TV - Pluribus
I've only seen the pilot episode, but that was the most engaged, thrilled, and tense I've been while watching television in ages. We'll see if Vince Gilligan's return to the sci-fi realm maintains, but for now, I'm all the way on board.
João Allen – Victória
Last week, I awarded Kevin Baekkel SSOTY (Scariest Skateboarder of the Year) for his life-threatening stunt-oriented display of skateboarding that closes out Creature Skateboards' Sever, but if there was a runner-up, it might be João Allen.
Be careful!
Maité Steenhoudt – Amore Mio
While talking to 'sletter friend Adam Abada for a "Five Favorite Parts" piece this week on Quartersnacks, Will Marshall gushed about Ben Blundell's 2015 Squad Massage video part, extolling the virtues of "presentation" and how you can pick up on Blundell's personality through his skating alone, without the help of b-roll or sundry interstitials.
The same could be said for Maité Steenhoudt, whom Free accurately described on Thursday as a "little zooted legend." Her Amore Mio video project, filmed and edited by the also masterful Torsten Frank, is perhaps her best work to date and excels by letting Maité go full Maité. In her skating, as well as the skits and lovely bits of b-roll scattered throughout. It is a whole lot of fun, as Steenhoudt appears to be.
SLS x Stake – Professional Skateboarders Battle to Land the Best Trick
Am I going to click on poorly edited YouTube slop-content featuring Louie Lopez and Mason Silva, two of the best skateboarders on the planet, facing off in a game of skate? Of course! Will I feel unclean watching something presented by Stake, a seedy offshore casino, that continues to launder its image through high-profile professional athletes, celebrities, and influencers in an effort to convince an increasingly wayward, financially desperate generation to funnel what little money they have into sports gambling? You bet!
Creature Skateboards – Sever
Peter Raffin and Kevin Baekkel are superb, but what's up with the colouring in this, man...
OJ The Alien (Ft. Dr. Dazzle) – "Wiseguys on Mars"
"A planet's rotation is how long its day be."
Flow to Pro to Ambassador
Rank:
Mood: 🛌
As demonstrated above, there is a tremendous amount of skateboarding being shared online, for free, at nearly all times.
That means, almost by rite, most of that skateboarding will be forgotten about. There's no time to digest. And why watch a full video when you can catch the highlights in an Instagram carousel?
Unfortunately, that brings about the added reality that the many highly skilled skateboarders who are already on or beyond the periphery of attention get pushed further out as the limelight is shone on a select few during SOTY season.
Take Jake Ilardi. The Floridian is a perennial contender on the contest circuit and competes with the best of them in the streets, constantly pushing the discipline to more extreme, technical heights. That might seem like hefty, even excessive praise, but that's because he doesn't show up on many people's radar, despite his skill and tenure in the industry. Did you know that Ilardi released a new video part last week? Titled Siesta, it is a phenomenal showcase of elite ability and includes, as an ender [SPOILER], a bigspin-backside-tailslide-kickflip-out down a hubba. Absurd.
To be fair, if you weren't aware of this, that's not unexpected. Siesta was uploaded by the TransWorld SKATEboarding YouTube channel. TransWorld, which stopped print publication in 2019, is, in 2025, a news-aggregate feeder site for Yahoo, MSN, and the like and occasionally publishes original content.
Illardi's place on the periphery is also reflected in the full title of his video project: Jake Ilardi’s “Siesta” — Full Skate Part (2025). Tacking on "Full Skate Part" is an outmoded SEO play and almost quaint in that sense; not something you do if you expect it to be widely seen. What Siesta does innovate with is its editorial decisions, because this may be the first time I've seen a video part feature the same technical trick three times in a row on increasingly bigger obstacles, which Ilardi delivers with one of his trademarks: the bigspin-frontside-bluntslide.
Why choose just one when you can have all three? That is the type of oddly impressive creative work — yes, creative — that gets lost when we treat skateboarding videos as content. As a thing to watch before watching something else.
In her recent book Amateurs!, writer and critic Joanna Walsh describes our contemporary understanding of content as "something that can be used to fill a gap. And we all know what it means to be content, a kind of flat-affected buzz, without the kick of strong feeling." It's a shame to consider Ilardi's skill and ability as filler, or to think that, for him, creating this "content" offers little more than likes and shares in return, but that's what happens when skate media is treated as expected and disposable.
These are strange times. Navigating them has never been trickier for the career skateboarder. As far as I can tell, Ilardi doesn't even have a board sponsor. However, he is an "ambassador" for the Tampa Bay Rays. So there's that, at least.
Rounding the edges off
Rank: -2025
Mood: 🤖🔫
The future is frictionless. That's the promise. Life, as it were and as we live it, with the roughness sanded down. Humanity's endgame is for our day-to-day to be free of aches, pain, risk, thought; in their place, a series of smooth interlocking pieces, slipping together and apart, together and apart, until living becomes dreamlike.
A state of being fueled by Efficiencies. Fractions of seconds shaved off menial tasks. Tasks you didn't consider menial, and may have even thought of as meaningful and fulfilling, until someone pointed it out.
Just don't ask where those fractions of seconds go. They are gone, we are promised, and not just shuffled around, new labour stacked on the backend of our lives in unacknowledged minutes, hours, and days. That would make us look the fool, especially if those seconds cost more than time.
I recently listened to a communications specialist talk about the exciting potential of "synthetic audiences." A Nielsen article describes them as "artificial personas generated by machine learning models to mimic human responses. When informed by diverse datasets, these 'stand-in consumers' can be used to quickly evaluate new product concepts."
The communications specialist was bullish on the prospect of reducing wasted time and resources spent speaking to unpredictable human audiences by first testing that messaging on AI-generated synthetic ones. In practice, that process would look something like this:
In theory, this is meant to excise the lumpiness (risk) out of marketing. What wasn't addressed is whether it actually does that or if you are even marketing to humans anymore if you're responding to what a synthetic approximation of humans deems impactful.
That same day, another communications specialist spoke about using a GPT to organize those real-life consumer insights. You simply ask the GPT for, say, certain demographic information, the interests of those demographics, and some potential strategies for reaching them, and the GPT compiles information from a database and delivers a full report in a matter of seconds. It will even give you a rating out of five on how accurate it — the GPT — feels the report is, which is considerate.
That honestly sounds handy, but if you receive a 3/5 report, do you not have to go through the information yourself to find what is concerning the GPT and update it? To that end, if the GPT doesn't trust itself to give you a 5/5 every time, can you trust it when it does? Are you saving time if you have to fact-check the machine doing your work?
Before those presentations, a marketing specialist had sung the praises of a campaign that included AI-generated imagery. It was an experiment deemed successful in part because "no one could tell" AI was used. As in, they believed audiences were sufficiently deceived, which has become a signifier of success. Was the process more Efficient, as generative AI and AI tools in general are pitched?
Well, that was debatable. Instead of a regular photoshoot, this project involved licensing hundreds of photos, extensive vetting across multiple legal departments, and working with a third-party vendor to create the image who needed extensive handholding throughout the process.
Was the final product good? Did the marketing specialist like it? The latter was unclear. The answer to both, in my opinion, was no. But because no one on the consumer side said anything about the final product, it was a win. In contrast, the recently ridiculed AI-generated Coca-Cola ad that took over 100 people to make was not, because people knew.
Frank Landymore
I'd contend that using deception as a KPI is a troubling reflection on the tools you've chosen to employ. As are the multiple qualifiers around accuracy and Efficiency. It's worth looking at what is being considered "practical applications" of this technology. When you do, it becomes all the more concerning when this is what some of the biggest companies on the planet have decided is our future, to the degree that investments in it are propping up the United States economy.
As one Bluesky user put it this week, "Increasingly, the central function of LLMs in corporate and cultural life is laundering: laundering creativity, laundering responsibility, and laundering bullshit."
It's that and worse. This is what we're being pitched will smooth the edges off of life, even as companies like OpenAI are being sued for ChatGPT successfully encouraging people to take their own lives and leading untold others into states of psychosis. These companies are being sued for historical levels of intellectual property theft to create a tool that works best in the worst of ways.
They are destroying the planet for a glorified chatbot.
These are functionally faulty products with dubious to dangerous effects. Not to mention they are proving to be a financially ruinous enterprise — OpenAI lost 12 billion dollars last quarter. A recent MIT study found that 95% of all AI companies are unprofitable.
In the frictionless world these people claim their products will bring about, expertise is a burden, your labour a hindrance, and your usefulness is void. They don't want to make you more Efficient, they don't want your life to get easier, they just want your boss to give them money.
They are playing got-your-nose with the future. It's just a thumb.
Nollie-hardflip-boardslide
Rank: 1
Mood: 💥
Nollie-hardflip-boardslide?
Nollie-hardflip-boardslide.
Something to consider:
Good thing:
Natalie Porter
Another good thing:
Jessica Winter
Good pod round-up:
Justin
Ted Degros, Canadian royalty. Put him on the loonie.
Good skate academia round-up:
Alia ElKattan
Substack
Athanasios Tsipis
A cruelty of the fight game thing:
Ben Fowlkes
Until next week… inside of you is a well. It is deep. You can't see its bottom, but you can pull up buckets from its depth. Rich and overflowing. Whatever you need of yourself — courage, calm, confidence — is what the well holds. Return to it whenever you need.
Laser Quit Smoking Massage
NEWEST PRESS
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A collection of essays that I think you might like. The Edmonton Journal called it a "local book set to make a mark in 2024," The CBC said it's "quirky yet insightful" (lol), and it won Trade Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the 2025 Alberta Book Publishing Awards.
Book cover by Hiller Goodspeed.
Right, Down + Circle
ECW PRESS
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I wrote a book about the history and cultural impact of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater that you can find at your local bookshop or order online now. I think you might like this one, too.
Photo via The Palomino.
