Feet of Fury
A skate vid 15 years in the making
Meant to be the hottest skate vid of my adolescence. Filmed from 2002 to 2003. It was honestly my very first big, ambitious creative project. I learned (or tried to learn) Final Cut Pro to create it. I spent some time at the Regina Film Pool with their editing room, but never got much further than trying to find sound effects for the slo-mo tricks we aspired to make over sets of stairs that didn’t exist in our town.
What I think I didn’t have, back then, was the capacity to grasp what I had, and accept that as a freedom from my own overbearing expectations. I didn’t have enough content to make a feature length skate film. So I forced my friends to have laboriously long sessions at all our favourite skate spots, until it wasn’t really fun anymore. And then I forced myself to try to turn it into something it wasn’t, in aforementioned editing room.
After all that work, nothing really came of it. But on visiting home last year, I found the DV cam and tapes we’d filmed it on. And I realized, that after all my time making videos as a travel blogger, I might be able to actually create something my younger self would’ve been proud of. I finally had the sense of how to make something into what it should be.
It’s not the Feet of Fury that I thought I’d make. But 15 years later, it’s at least something. It’s a little bit absolution for all the frustration I made for myself with my teenage ambition. And it’s also a model of how to do work, now: by letting things slide.
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Zwickau
Found split-flap display with single-board computer
Turns out that split-flap displays, like this one from an East German train station, can only move on direction.
Every day that I push code to a repository on Github, it iterates one more destination. But every time I don’t, it has to spin all the way back to the previous one. By missing a day of creative work, I’m only falling behind a little, but it never feels that way.
lets ride
A skateboarding twitter bot from 2003
The millennium is new, and your shoes are held together with tape. The skate spots are loud with the sounds of urethane on concrete. @skaaaaaaaate asks you to come along, bring your deck, and kickflip a sick three set.
burned a new cd with tons of system of a down https://t.co/wOMz462REU
— lets ride (@skaaaaaaaate) January 25, 2018
haaaay Willie stuck a frontside flip on a four set 🤟
— lets ride (@skaaaaaaaate) January 25, 2018
If you grew up in Regina, you might recognize a place or a name or two:
cruising to the blue tit 👟
— lets ride (@skaaaaaaaate) January 25, 2018
Follow @skaaaaaaaate on Twitter, or check out the source code on Cheap Bots Done Quick.