Hot Pockets Grill Out
Tim’s Cool Clips #5!
Mini Video 76 – Sweatpants – Wiskate.com from Josh Ellis on Vimeo.
I recently took a trip to Minneapolis with the friendly fellows from Cream City Skatepark so they could skate in the Top Shop contest at Third Lair Skatepark. On the way there we stopped at Oshkosh Skatepark and Stevens Point Skatepark. Dudes did skate moves there and they are in this video. Bonus! A little Minneapolis street skating at the end.
Skating by: Chase Hopper, Jeven Dedee, Danny Stemper, Gabe Chan, Max Murphy, Drew Rickaby, Tj Bohach, Bill Kaschner, and Matt Nordness.
Watch ‘er in HD here.
Extra bonus! Another park video from wayyy down South. By Gabe!
Happy Hour with Brenton. from Gabe Chan on Vimeo.
Max Murphy’s Traffic Report for Traffic Skateboards.
Traffic Report 6/22/2011 from Traffic Skateboards on Vimeo.
He’s also got a short interview up with some photos right here.
Wiskate.com over the years (click images for a larger version):
We’ll have to call this one an “artist’s re-creation” since I haven’t been able to turn up a copy of the first version of the site. The text is the real “hello world” first update that I found in an “old news” html file in a folder though. So shy, so wide eyed. Note the sweet Hi8 video grab faux film sequence of Nate doing a noseblunt in that Racine warehouse. Photoshop 3.0 surely had some great filters. That isn’t the actual 1998 header though, and I really don’t remember what the original logo did look like. Probably horrible and dumb.
Wow, the utter essence of Photoshop pre 2000. The extreme horniness for bad filters can never again be matched. Again, video grab of Nate noseblunting. Pasted onto a goddamn faux floppy disc label! My mind is blown. The tan fog and “100100100101001” (digital, get it?!) in the background are just icing on the early internet cake. I might have to bring this logo back, I’m so in love.
I think this was the very first thing that appeared at the wiskate.com URL. A sort of placeholder from when I moved the site from it’s original not so easy to remember address to the much more serious real domain name. It was sort of a big deal to have a registered domain back then! Maybe. Again, note the sweet Photoshop 3.0 filter action. At least I didn’t apply a lens flare.
It seems I kept the tan fetish alive after I redesigned the site for the new address. I actually think this layout is pretty decent, especially for how old it is. Notice how often video clips were added. I must have had much higher stamina at that young age. The little banner ad to the CKY site (I think we traded links) certainly is a nice touch.
The ever so lovely “jizz logo” era. This is when the site was at its peak of popularity probably mostly due to the fact that there actually weren’t many skateboarding websites on the internet at all at that point. This also is when I started filming with Greg a lot, Ben was really getting a lot better, I met a lot of other good Milwaukee dudes, and I got my first (and only, I still use the same one) 3 chip video camera so the quality of the video clips was much improved and traffic kept quickly increasing. In fact, it got so popular that we were kicked off our host and were m.i.a. for awhile while I figured that situation out. I ended up hosting the video clips on a different server for a site that posted video of live shows of indie and punk bands. I think I paid them only once and they soon stopped updating their site. Their site did stay online in an abandoned state for several years afterward and they never again asked me for money. Bonus!
As soon as I saw the baby punch in Nate’s sketch book I knew that it had to be used for a new layout. I’m not sure what’s up with the Halloween year round color scheme, but those were much scarier times. I think this is when I got more serious about trying to make a video and I wanted to save the good clips, so this is when the neglect started.
Speaking of scary times! I had almost forgotten about this layout, no trace of it exists on my computer and I think it was used for less than a year. The little banner and news update for the premiere of my video is a nice piece of nostalgia. The “I PUT OUT” license plate still blows my mind to this day. I’ve yet to witness a better personalized vanity item
Here we have the evolution of several (thankfully) unused layouts into…
…this stupid thing. I’m sure most of you remember this quite well since it was used for three maybe even four years. In fact, some remnants of this layout still were used in some of the backwater sections of the site up until just a few months ago. I wanted it to be as obnoxious as possible and I think I quite succeeded because it bums me out just to see it. This layout represents the ups and downs of the site quite well. It featured times of updates several times a day, and also periods of no new stuff for months. Most of those updates were just non-skateboarding nonsense, but a little bit of shredding related stuff did sneak in there once in awhile. All those updates are still available if you navigate to the older pages via the page number links on the bottom of the page.
I don’t have any screen shots of the various versions of the message boards that were on the site over the years, and for that I am thankful. That level of stupidity deserves to be forgotten.
That brings us up to date with the various versions of wiskate.com over its decade long existence. This current layout is already way too old but I certainly don’t feel like trying to make a new one. At least I’ve done about 10,000 times better at adding new video stuff and skate photos this last year. In fact, I’m quite sure that there has been more skateboarding stuff featured on the site this year than the last five previous years combined. Less nonsense, more skateboarding. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.
More weekend fun.
Let’s start this right where we left off…more pictures of Tim skating. On the left Tim took my idea of the “steering wheel wallride” to new heights. It totally looks like he isn’t going to land it in this picture, but land it he did. I promise. On the right is a golden hour bean plant off a rock. I hope he doesn’t get vibed for skating a rock.
After an entire day of the Tim horniness frenzy, it was time for some fine dining. Grilled cheese and mashed potatos are a surprisingly good combo. Especially when they are lit with some golden hour sunlight. As we were eating, Vance randomly skated up. Neal and Vance were roomates awhile back in San Francisco and had a nice little unexpected homecoming. Look at how happy they are!
Speaking of homecoming, this piece is entitled “The Meeting of the Scabs”.
Tim took both of these photos, but since he did it with my camera I guess I get to post them. I set up the flash and camera settings for him, so I guess you can blame the totally blown out highlights and so-so exposure on me. It was a collab, if you will. Magna x Sanji. These wacky hippie jumps are a treatise about the sexualization of women in the media. Get it?
This photo is from Sunday. The crew was even larger, we skated way longer at more spots, yet I somehow took only about five photos. Even The Carn, Jazzercise, and the Zone were up from Illinois. I suppose I was concentrating more on the filming than the photo taking. It’s hard to do both sometimes.
Basically to sum things up, Carn complained a lot about my tour of “the worst spots ever”, we found an abandoned backpack that contained a bootleg copy of Leprechaun 2 and a crack pipe, and the Zone went off. But that’s not unusual. The Zone going off, not finding Leprechaun 2 and a crack pipe. We finished off the amazing day skating downtown and finding out that some very old spots now have a new and exciting twist to them. Fantastic!
At least I did get to meet Wonky 2. And arrived home to a very drunk and excited Tim totally raging. I forgot to mention that he did too many wallrides on Saturday, so he and Neal took Sunday off to drink. An acceptable trade off.
Should I mention that the bowl is pretty much done at Cream City without having a photo of it to post? Should I mention that it’s fucking insane and old dudes from far and wide should surely be making a trip to skate it as soon as possible? No, I wouldn’t do that.
A little “weekend update”?? Let’s get started.
Friday night was a visit to the ‘ol ‘ol. Lord Cru and I tried to mix up the adventures by declaring it wacky hat night and then telling no one else about it. I rocked my $3 from Wal Mart safari-esque hat, and Cru went with the $1 from a rummage sale Left Eye from TLC hat. Too bad Cru was a total pussy and wore the hat for like two minutes and then took it off while crying about being too scared to be a kook. Talk about blowing it, check out how good he looks on the left! On the right, we had Rog from What’s Happening make an appearance.
Here’s my stupid hat I dutifully wore all night, but I think that I owned it. A bunch of people told me they liked my hat, which I’m not sure is good or bad. Gabe went out to his car, found a hat, and joined in the stupid hat menagerie like a true friend would. He later left the bar, drove halfway back to Chicago, and then after a mandatory White Castle visit at 3am, decided to drive all the way back to Milwaukee so he could skate with us the next day. That’s what we call dedication.
Saturday morning arrived sooner than later and it was virtually perfect outside. Everyone rolled up to the Horny House and got geared up. Cru even wore his good bustier to celebrate the amazing weather.
Here’s a little overview of the posse. People came and went all day, so the group was an ever changing mass of man soup that constantly changed frequencies like the Enterprise’s shields fending off an attack by the Borg. There was a whole lot of rolling six men deep in the Accord this weekend. In case you didn’t know, if you’ve known someone longer than a year it’s not gay.
This is where we changed gears and the day became all about Tim. I think it was because it was just his birthday, or something. He got a photo and footage at pretty much every spot we went to. What a happy boy!
At the first spot of the day, straight out of the car, Tim got this no comply pole jam. This spot gets my vote for the new daily crew warm up spot. On the right Tim takes the handplant wallride to fakie to new heights. This would pretty much be one of the best spots ever. That is, if the ground wasn’t basically made of gravel. But that’s how things always go, isn’t it?
I have so many pictures that I’ll have to split this into two parts. Part two coming soon!