Whole Lotta Links

January 11th, 2021 · 12:00 am · 2 Comments

Didn’t do a Q.S.S.O.T.Y. thing last year, but obvs it would’ve been Brandon Turner — hard to think of a more inspirational moment in skateboarding from 2020 than him rolling away from Wallenburg. Jenkem has a 15-minute mini doc about Brandon’s journey back to full health and sobriety. Watching him return to that bridge is nuts.

Here’s a YouTube comp of T.J. footage off the Thrasher Instagram from the summer, which is just him cruising around midtown and Soho. Those middle of Broome Street lines are so sick.

A couple New York clips in Thomas Dritsas’ new part for Thunder. The bench to Big Belly trashcan on Wall and Water Street has fully turned into a full-fledged marquee spot this past year, huh? Shout out to the contractor who installed the mailboxes at the ender. Looks sturdy.

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4PLY Mag Presents – 2020 #QSTOP10 Analysis

January 5th, 2021 · 12:00 am · 11 Comments

Words by Pete Glover C/O 4Ply Magazine

Somewhere in the pocket-protected part of the intersection of skate nerd and regular nerd resides ragtag assembly of international spreadsheet jockeys that comprise the team of skate-data enthusiasts known as 4PLY Magazine. Between slappy sessions and carpal tunnel flare-ups, we spend our free time generating datasets from skate media, writing code to process that data, and then straining to convince ourselves this is all somehow important. The urge to take an already quantified ranking system like the weekly Quartersnacks Top Ten countdown and crunch the numbers into submission was just too compelling. And thus the complete study of the #QSTop10 materialized.

Having carefully inputted all 490 tricks that comprised every countdown slot into the trusty 4PLY supercomputer, we can now dig deep into 2020 and answer the really important questions: What tricks are trending? What skaters are happening? What percentage of clips come from Instagram? What was the longest line? How many skaters are named Alex?

Utilizing the power of percentages, we analyzed the countdown code on 4PLYmag.com.

In the meanwhile, tease your brain with a few choice countdown factoids:

– A skater who tied for most appearances in the countdown (with 6) wasn’t even on the Thrasher long list of 36 S.O.T.Y. contenders.
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What A Time

December 28th, 2020 · 12:00 am · 6 Comments

Last Monday Links of the year ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Top 10 will return on Friday, January 8th. FWIW, this week, all of it would be from Davonte Jolly’s Godspeed video for Illegal Civ (a drive-in theater skate video premiere was a fire idea btw) + the new Yardsale video.

To pine for warmer days, check out the Public Skateboarding video by Tom Albin. 31 minutes, all filmed in New York, and as wholesome of a friends video as you could possibly get. Friend edits to “Never Too Much” always hit.

Boil the Ocean has embarked on its annual journey of picks for the year’s ten best video parts.

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