HEYDAY
SKATEBOARDING

I got annoyed when looking for clips today. I opened up about 25 tabs in Firefox to check out my regular run of sites. My laptop grinded to a near halt as they all began loading simultaneously. I felt my stress level rise. The happy expression on my face flattened out. Then something happened that until a few minutes ago I couldn’t stand… one of the sites started playing music. This is something I’ve hated for a long time because I already have my own music playing on my computer constantly. I clicked through the tabs and found the culprit… Skate NC, or Skate North Carolina. I looked at the site and saw some sort of new design, plus an autoplay quicktime video. I stared for a minute and thought… Why is Travis always changing his sites?

This isn’t something new. He’s been doing it since he ran Eboarding. Back then he’d redesign his whole site, add a minimal amount of content, then redesign again. In between there were big wait times… sometimes months. Where was the skateboarding?

I’m being a bit of a hypocrite here. If you happened to visit my site back when Travis ran Eboarding you’d see the same thing happening. I started with Camsk8 on Geocities, redesigned a bunch of times, moved to camsk8.com, then to Alteredskate, and finally here to Heyday. What am I complaining about then?

I’m complaining that someone did something different than what I wanted or expected. I want to listen to my own music and stop it before playing any videos. Travis (or whoever posted the video… Skate NC seems more like a group effort nowadays) wanted a video to play on his site as soon as people showed up. What I wanted and what he wanted both have advantages and downsides. Why was I annoyed over that? The thing I like about Skate NC is they have original content. I get find stuff on that site that I can’t find anywhere else. That’s what I was getting when that video starting playing.

As my stress levels dropped back down I thought for a second, what if Skate NC doesn’t mean Skate North Carolina? What if it means Skate New Creatives? Travis likes creating things. Sometimes it’s through skateboarding, sometimes video, sometimes it’s websites. I guess maybe the skateboarding isn’t more important to him to all the time. I mean, we all do things other than skateboarding. If you end up checking out Skate NC you’ll see the new creatives I’m talking about. They build spots, they make up tricks, and they make original layouts to present them on.