Skate Warrior 1992, 1999, 2020

This project just drips with PASSION. (Some people might say the all-caps is unwarranted but I feel there is no other way.)

I found myself involuntarily smiling and giggling while reading this. Reminds me of so many things like that summer I tried rendering the creation story from the Book of Genesis using Flash. That, too, had a story board! I never finished it but I learned a bunch of Flash tricks. Not to mention some practicalities like how it's really hard to draw with a mouse as well as the computational limits of a hand-me-down Pentium 4 with 256MB of memory.

The friendship aspect also reminds me of the story of a handful of iconic rock bands, how they basically started as bunch of dudes who found some ran-down instruments and wanted to play. And just played and the rest is history.

It's charming exactly because they didn't get paid doing it. In fact, _no one_ would pay them to do this. And yet they did.

Here's a shower thought I recently had. I was massively into skateboarding in the second half of my teenage years, up until I was 20-21 give or take. And while I was the typical computer nerd who wrote cli programs to solve his math homework, only recently I saw a potential connection between the two activities: street skateboarding(the post 1980's ramps and bowls) has a fundamental and striking similarity with hacking. When I say "hacking", I'm referring to the definition of the term:

In both cases people use things in which they were not meant to be used and in some instances some bizarre, strange, odd, ridiculous or completely outrageous results are born. And sometimes absolutely beautiful and mind boggling. Sure, you often end up misjudging your abilities or what is even realistically possible but the fundamental idea is completely valid for both activities. Now that I think about it, I kind of miss those endless summer nights of jumping over fences to get into some school's yard when it was raining outside and carrying and stacking benches and tables over one another and whatnot...

R.I.P. Steve.

Edit: Oddly enough, last year I managed to get my hands on this[1] and it immediately became a decorative element. The picture on the deck itself is a perfect representation of what I just said I think.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/OoeVEF6.png

I mean... the dialogue is hilarious and the acting is all over the place, but in a charming, cult-movie-esque way: I'm enjoying it a lot - a lot more than a lot of films I've paid to see.

I'm also really impressed with the filmmaking: shots, editing, stunts, and effects are all at least decent, and often very good, all things considered. The gunplay has this sort of low-budget John Woo vibe that I really appreciate, and I find it funny that it somehow manages to weirdly prefigure some of the aesthetic and style of The Matrix.

You must have had a ton of fun making this film, and I'm glad you've finished and shared it with us.

Stu Maschwitz is a legend, I have an old copy of his book "The DV Rebel's Guide: An all-digital approach to making killer action movies on the cheap". A little dated now, but it's a great read and a lot of the information and techniques in there still holds up today.

That was awesome. Blogs dude: blogs.

This was sweet and I enjoyed it a lot. If you liked it and are also feeling nostalgic, may I recommend:

https://medium.com/message/networks-without-networks-7644933...

> As time sailed on, the likelihood that I could find a functioning computer with a SCSI connector dwindled to zero.

I just found an Ultra320 PCIe controller on Amazon, and there's all sorts of old hardware on ebay. Taking it to a data recovery company was probably the right call, though. Setting up all this hardware yourself is a hassle, and getting a disk image should be one of cheapest things a data recovery company can do.

From the other side of the iron curtain, a similarly amateur 1988 music/skate video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?tv=cNf7huwox6E