How NFT's are creating new brands that could make serious money in the future

Giancarlo here was a stock analyst, advising real world investors on gaming and gaming oriented companies in particular.  When he dug into NFT's in late 2020 and early 2021, he decided to give up on stocks, and focus on the NFT/crypto space, and start this YouTube channel.  He's a really smart guy, and in my opinion, giving some of the best info on how the NFT world works, how it's evolving, and may play out in the future.  If you're interested in NFT's, art, collectibles, or crypto/digital art, definitely check out this video.  

Steve Crandall on the Unclicked podcast

Longtime hardcore BMXer, driving force behind FBM for over two decades, TV announcer, and all around cool human, Steve Crandall.

I think it was 1994 when I met Steve Crandall.  At the time, I was roommates with Chris Moeller and Timmy Ball in Huntington Beach.  Between Chris being one of the best known dirt jumpers, and owning S&M Bikes, pretty much everyone in BMX from other parts of the country and world called when traveling to California, asking to crash on our couches and floors.  So it was normal for me to come downstairs for breakfast and have complete strangers sleeping in the living room.  One morning I was pouring some cereal, and Chris was making tea, and he pointed to the couch, "Those are the FBM guys over in the corner."  

I don't remember much else of that weekend, except we did a lot of riding, and little partying with those guys.  From then on, I'd run into Crandall at events every once in a while.  Then, many years later, when I wound up homeless in Richmond, Virginia in 2018, Crandall sent me a message out of the blue.  "Meet me at Powers Bike Shop later, here's the address."  He did what he could to help me out, along with Chad at Powers Bikes.  I actually was trying to make some money and live there, but I couldn't get momentum.  But there is a really cool BMX and art scene there.  Got to know Steve better, and finally spent a day at the DIY World Championships event, one of the greatest days of BMX I've seen.  Anyhow, watch/listen to this podcast.  

It's 2022... Why people invest BIG MONEY in monkeys that don't exist

A couple months ago, I started looking into these things called NFT's.  I read some article on a magazine I found on a bus, about some musician named 3lau, who used these NFT things to fund a cool project.  Within a day of my dive into the learning about NFT's, I saw these weird ape faces.  Of all the NFT's, the funky Bored Ape Yacht Club characters are the ones I liked the most, just as art.

At the time, early December of 2021, the Crypto Punks, minted on Bitcoin in 2017, were still the coolest, and most expensive NFT's, in this weird new genre'.  But in this fast moving NFT world, the Bored Ape Yacht Club, still only about 9 months old, have crept up, surpassing the Crypto Punks in "floor price," the lowest price you can get one of the collection for.  In the same time period, crypto has sunk down nearly 50% from its high price level.  But a floor priced Bored Ape NFT will still cost you about $200,000.  They all sold for about $130 to $150 worth of Ether in late April and May of 2021.  Some have sold for a couple million dollars. 

Investing money in the S&P 500 stock index on April 30, 2021 would have earned you about a 3.46% return on your investment today.  That's about half of the current inflation rate.  But dropping $150 on a digital picture of a funny looking monkey at the same time, would have earned you about 130,000% ROI, minimum.  What the fuck is going on? 

Starting about four years ago in this blog, I started trying to warn people of a huge recession I saw heading our way, being the economics/futurist geek that I am.  For 30 years I've been learning about obscure, ultra long term trends.  I've been watching these for over 30 years now, and I saw these weird trends starting to converge.  What that told me is that we were heading not only into a big economic crash, but a really crazy period of several years.  So as this stuff happened, and I struggled to survive my weird personal circumstances, and blogged about what I saw happening in the mainstream economic world.  

Since I've been a homeless blogger/artist, I was struggling to charge my laptop and get on wifi during the Covid era, often sitting outside a place with free wifi.  I didn't have enough time online to do much research on the stuff I was already interested in, let along new things that caught my attention.  As I was watching The Fed throw trillions of newly created dollars banks and the corporate world, to bail everyone out from the recession that started in late 2019, and which the pandemic took to horrific levels.  Completely oblivious to me, an art movement was growing, actually exploding, in the crypto world.  That was a world I had not dove in to learn about yet.  

In late 2020, these things called NFT's, non-fungible tokens, were getting used to make money for artists.  Crypto Kitties and the Crypto Punks had been around a while.  Enterprising people in the crypto world started projects to put out huge collections, usually around 10,000 NFT's, of computer generated pictures of something.  People in crypto world were starting to collect these pieces of art that are tied to a blockchain transaction.  While the real world looked at NFT's and said, "What kind of idiot would buy a piece of "art" that doesn't even physically exist.  But the crypto natives, used to paying for digital goods, like skins in games and crypto coins themselves, that don't really exist, physically.  Money started being made as these NFT projects started selling out, and flippers made millions as these digital collectibles soared in price.  As this was happening, in late 2020 and early 2021, celebrities started hearing about these things, and started buying them.  The whole NFT art thing exploded in the crypto world and the mainstream art world in the Spring of 2021.  

A group of former punk rock and hip hop infused skateboarders and BMXers, who were all crypto natives, from Miami, started an NFT project.   Their brainstorming led to the idea of a club where bored apes, rich from crypto in 2031, and bored at life in general, hung out.  The got graphic artist Seneca to draw up the basic ape designs, and about 70 other artists to do the rest of the artwork.  The project launched pretty quietly in April of 2021, as crypto itself was hitting insane levels.  A couple weeks later, word of the apes popped in some Discord group, and the things started selling, for .08 Eth, or about $130-$140 each.  

Every one of the big NFT projects has a discord group, and a "community" you can be a part of.  Most of these start with NFT speculators looking to cash in and make a ton of money flipping them for 10X or 20X returns in hours or days.  But as the Bored Ape Yacht Club went on, and dozens of other projects came out with penguins, little dogs, and all kinds of other little Profile Pic (PFP's) NFT's, Bored Apes had a community that actually began to turn into a community.  Then celebrities started picking up Bored Apes.  Steph Curry, Shaq, Serena Williams, Jimmy Fallon, as well as entrepreneurs like Mark Cuban, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Tai Lopez bought Apes.  Tai is giving one away right now, if you find his Discord group.  Yeah, GIVING away a $200k NFT.  

OK, I was going to write a big, long blog post, but I killed my laptop when it got hacked on January 1st, and I can't get enough time online to write much of anything using the library computer.  I was also going to start dropping my own series of cheap and moderately funny NFT's in early January.  All that got delayed.  Reality is, I totally dig the Bored Apes, and would buy one in a heartbeat if I had $200 grand.  Since The Fed and central banks of the world have pretty much killed the whole investment world, a Bored Ape NFT, even at $200K or more, is still probably a better investment than pretty much any traditional investment.  

All that aside, NFT's are definitely a place to look if you're an artist who wants to make a living.  I'll get there one of these days.  Getting hacked was just another baseball bat to the gut, metaphorically, and I'm used to that.  I'll write more on NFT's when I get a new laptop.  

Right now I have a no budget art show to get up, and a big drawing to finish.  Later folks.  

Punk in Drublic documentary

Just watched the Punk in Drublic festival documentary on YouTube. Really cool if you're an old punker. I'm having trouble trying to embed it on the library computer, so you'll have to go find it if interested. Like most people who got into punk, I guess, I was always one of those kids who just didn't seem to fit in the world. Punk rock was a place where all the weird kids found a community of other weirdos. And that was a cool thing. Out of that intellectual and creative weirdness came the DIY movement. The world doesn't want to make the songs, magazines, records, videos, or events you want to see? Do It Yourself. So we did, each in our own ways. 40-45 years later, that spirit is still alive. Cool beans.

A couple more blog milestones: 750 posts and over 130,000 page views

Here's some of the craziest BMX footage I shot, about 5 years after that gig at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.  The 2-Hip King of Vert at Mission Trails, in early 1992.  

 In late November of 2008, I found myself living in the spare bedroom of my parents' tiny apartment in Kernersville, North Carolina.  I  couldn't find any job, and I  had just spent a year on the streets of southern California.  I was massively depressed, and hated North Carolina from the minute I got there.  BMX, skateboarding, and everything I was into, didn't seem to even exist in NC.  

But, for the first time in my life, I had a computer in my room, hooked up to the internet.  I started "surfing the web" each night, as we used to say.  After a couple of weeks, I decided to write about 20 or 30 blog posts about my time working at FREESTYLIN' magazine in 1986.  I found out online that main trio from the magazine, Andy Jenkins, Mark "Lew" Lewman, and Spike Jonze, had come out with a limited edition, collector's box set book about  FREESTYLIN'.  I wasn't mentioned in the book, and neither were a few other guys who worked there or contributed to it in the early years.  

So I started a blog called FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales, and decided to write 20 or 30 blog posts about my time working there.  It wasn't so much that I was pissed, it was more like, "Hey, I worked there, too, and I have a few cool stories."  That short stint working at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' had changed the course of my life.  So I started a really ugly blog.  No photos, no videos linked, because I didn't know how to do that.  It was just white type on a black background.  I started telling weird little stories of my life working at the mags.  

At that time, I didn't understand the internet and online world at all.  I would go to the library in Huntington Beach, and rent a computer, to check my email or Google something once a week or so.  Up until late 2007, I was mostly driving a taxi seven days a week, and never really got online.  So in 2008, when I hit "publish" on each blog post, it seemed like I was sending that little story out into this big black hole of the "world wide web," and maybe, someday, someone would stumble across it.  

After a couple of weeks I started getting emails from Old School BMX freestylers.  Then one blog post went viral in the Old School BMX online community.  I didn't even know there was an Old School BMX community online.  A bunch more old friends, and a few new ones, connected with me online.  Most of them told me to keep blogging.  I've been blogging pretty regularly ever since, I've published over 2,400 blog posts, in fact.  I recently figured that, at 600 words per post, that would be about 1.4 million words, comparable to 17 or 18 novels.  Crazy.

My biggest blog, until recently, was the original Freestyle BMX Tales, which I did from late 2009 to 2012, I think.  I wrote over 550 posts, and it managed to rake in over 125,000 page views.  In 2012, after my dad died, I got depressed and deleted all my blogs.  That's one of the dumbest things I ever did.  I immediately regretted it.  The current version of Freestyle BMX Tales is the third version of that blog, and much smaller than the original.  

I've actually tried about 50 blog ideas over the last 13 years.  But now this blog is my biggest ever, with 750 blog posts, and over 132,000 page views.  Not bad since I've mostly written about BMX freestyle in the 1980's, which only had about 1,000 hardcore riders in those years.  

So thanks again to everyone who has taken a bit of your time, and read something I've written.  I'm going to keep plugging along in this blog, and other places, as long as I can.  

Here's my "Addicted to Blogs" post from a while back, where I looked into the blogs I've tried, and added up the stats on them.  Links to the surviving blogs are in this post.

How a decision changed the direction of my riding in 1987

Here's a short New School how-to video on the BMX Half Cab.  I didn't invent the Half Cab, but when I started down a new direction with my riding in 1987, Half Cabs soon became one of my favorite and strongest tricks.  I was doing 7-10 foot Half Cabs in 1988-89, and nearly clicked lookback Half Cabs in 1989.  For real.  But Half Cabs weren't even considered a "real trick," back then.  It was just some weird thing I did, since I rode with skaters all the time.  

At the Oregon AFA Masters contest in the spring of 1987, a trick by NorCal rider Tim Tracy became the trick of the weekend.  That trick was the Backyard, and it was the first scuffing trick that went viral in BMX flatland.  Whiplashes were still new then, and the whole idea of rolling forward tricks was  just beginning to change the course of the evolution of BMX freestyle.  

People have always done tricks on bikes.  But what we know as freestyle began around 1980, with Bob Haro's demos at BMX races.  Flatland tricks then were things like rollback 360's, and front wheel 360's on flat ground.  The idea of BMX trick riding began to grow, and Bob Morales, R.L. Osborn, Mike Buff and a handful more, showed us the early tricks.  Front and back wheel hops.  Hip whips.  Rollback 540's and 720's.  360 bunnyhops or "floaters."  Martin Aparijo, Woody Itson and others got into the mix.  Along came boomerangs, flatland tailwhips, decades, Switzerland Squeakers, cherrypickers, sliders, backwards wheelies, lawnmowers, funky chickens, Pinky squeaks, balance tricks, among other tricks.   

Across the U.S., and in a few other countries, early BMX freestyle converts started learning the basics from magazine photos, and then inventing their own variations and tricks.  BMX freestyle began to grow, and with the AFA in 1984, Bob Morales turned it into a sport with flatland, wedge ramp, and quarterpipe contests.  In those early contests, it wasn't unusual to see 50 different riders, from novices to pro, doing tricks we'd never seen before.  Then some tricks, like boomerangs, decades, and cherrypickers became standards that nearly everyone did.  For good or bad, I was always trying to invent new tricks, I didn't really want to do all the same tricks everyone else did.  Some riders specialized in taking the most popular tricks, and really dialing them in to do a tight routine.  Others, like Oleg Konings and Eddie Roman, for example, tried to do mostly completely original tricks and variations.  Most riders did several standard tricks, with a couple original ones in 1984-85-86.

At the Austin, Texas AFA Masters in 1987, an amateur rider, Kevin Jones, from York Pennsylvania pulled up into a backyard in his run.  He had completely dialed in the new scuff trick from a month before, and then he snapped up into a no handed version, we learned later he called it the locomotive. Kevin didn't only scuff no handed, he kicked off and began to glide.  A big group of us in the crowd went fucking berserk, so much so, that all the judges turned around to see what we were yelling about.  We pointed down to Kevin, on the floor.  He had just changed the whole game of flatland freestyle, and somehow we all knew it.  

Back home after the contest, I tried the backyard, and I could get about 4 or 5 scuffs after stepping into it.  I knew that it would take me weeks to get that trick down to where I was average at it.  The same was true of the whiplash, which I first saw done by Denny Howell in late 1986.  The forward rolling tricks were about to take over flatland freestyle.  And I just didn't want to learn them, to just be mediocre at them.  The flatland world soon turned into a "Follow Kevin Jones and the York guys" sport.  The stuff they were doing was really hard, and amazing.  But I still wanted to break new ground, not just keep trying to learn their newest tricks. 

Around that time, the GT team had a show in Huntington Beach, a couple blocks from my house.  After watching a cool show, and getting super stoked to ride, Mike Sarrail and I showed some young kids a few basic tricks to work on.  Eventually the GT guys packed up, the kids rode off, and Mike and I were just doing our flatland.  I had been thinking to myself, "Flatland is turning into a forward rolling, scuff/glide sport.  It's not "freestyle" so much anymore, it's becoming 'clone style.'"  You have to learn a certain style of tricks to even be in the mix in competitions.  I wanted to keep trying new stuff, even if it meant giving up on competitions.  After winning one contest in Idaho in 1985, I'd been placing in the middle of the huge packs for 3  years or so.  I decided to go a totally different direction with my riding.  I'd start exploring what could be done with hop tricks.  But not the stationary pogo hop tricks, those had been done.  I decided to start working on what else could be done with hops on a bike.  I did an endo, and went into a backwards wheelie (on the back peg), one of my favorite tricks at the time.  In the middle of the wheelie, I tapped the brakes and did a small hop, and tried to land back into a backwards wheelie, and keep rolling.  I'd never tried it before, and never seen anyone else try it either.  After a couple of tries, I pulled it off.  It wasn't very hard.  It wasn't a big trick by any means.  But that feeling of landing something completely new, that stoke, was there.  I did a few more, and I started thinking about other types of hop tricks that might be possible.  That was the summer of 1987.  

One of my best tricks then was 180 bunnyhops... at speed.  A couple days later I went to a basketball court in a park near my house.  I started doing 180 bunnyhops, and then trying to bunnyhop while rolling backwards.  My 180's were really low, and I took off of both wheels, rather than pulling the front end up up like a "real" bunnyhop.  Doing them that way, I could do a bunnyhop 180 at nearly full sprint speed.  I would land backwards, and sit down (high seat days), and backpedal to keep up with the freewheel.  Usually I would do a 180 out, or "cool guy turnaround" as I called them, a Martin Aparijo trick where you turn the front wheel partly backwards and slide it around until you're going forwards.  But that day at the basketball court, I started doing bunnyhops while rolling backwards.  After and hour or so, I had them pretty dialed.  I kept practicing backwards bunnyhops for a few days, and by then I was bunnyhopping 6-7 feet, maybe farther, backwards.  That was pretty cool. 

Every weekend in those days, if there wasn't a contest, I was riding at the Huntington Beach Pier.  There were 3 or 4 of us regular bike freestylers, plus a few freestyle skaters.  Pierre Andre', Don Brown, Hans Lingren, and H.B. local Jeremy Ramey, were the main ones.  But since the HB Pier was a known spot, pretty much anyone could show up.  Ed Templeton was a local street skater, and he came by often, as did Bob Schmelzer and Per Welinder.  There was a whole crew of HB street skaters, and Mark Gonzales showed up now and then, too.  On the bike side, guys like Martin Aparijo and Woody Itson rolled up once in a while to session, there was a crew from Lakewood that came by a lot, and anyone else, from Eddie Fiola to Josh White, might come by and ride flatland for the crowds for a while. 

We had crowds every half an hour or so, usually with 100 to 200 people, gathered 'round. Sometimes up to 500 people would stop to watch.  Normal people, even Californians, still stopped to watch BMX and skate freestylers back in those days, most people had never seen freestyle skating or BMX, since it was never on TV back then.  Basically, we were street performers who never put a hat out.  I once figured out that I rode in front of over 140,000 people during those weekends at the HB Pier, 100 to 200 people at a time.  I spent as much time riding with skateboarders as I did riding with BMXers, in those years from 1987 to 1992 or so.  My weekend riding was for crowds, so I added the high speed 180's and backwards bunnyhops into my trick bag.  It wasn't long after that I started doing Half Cabs.  For those not familiar, that's rolling backwards, and then doing a 180 bunnyhop back into riding forwards.  The reason Half Cabs are upper case, is because "Cab" is a name, for the inventor, vert skater Steve Caballero.  He invented a vert trick in the early 1980's called the Caballerial.  He would roll backwards (aka fakie) up the transition, and pop off the wall and do a 360 Ollie (without using his hands).  After spinning a full 360 on the vert wall, he would roll back down the wall forwards.  This quickly became known as a Cab.  When a skater did a fakie Ollie to 180, either on vert or on flat ground, then it was called a Half Cab.  So after the straight backwards bunnyhops, I started hopping my 180's, which in skater lingo was a bike version of a Half Cab.  

Since I rode a freewheel (I hated coaster brakes and freecoasters), my pedals would turn backwards when I was rolling backwards.  I just had to backpedal a bit faster, which was not hard when I was sitting down.  But freewheel gave me an edge doing flat ground Half Cabs.  Because my pedals rolled backwards, I could put a lot of pressure on my outside pedal when I did Half Cabs, so I could really hop.  And since I could do super fast 180 bunnyhops, I could roll backwards faster than pretty much anyone in freestyle back then.  When I put those two together, I started getting a decent amount of distance on my Half Cab bunnyhops.  I kept pushing those, and within a couple months, I was traveling 6-7-8 feet backwards, while turning around mid-air, in my Half Cabs.  I've probably done 10 foot+ Half Cabs at times.  Then, in 1989, the H.B. Pier bank opened up, when some skaters cut and "lost" the huge chain that had blocked it for years (it's supposedly buried in the sand, far out under the pier now).  I started riding that bank almost every night.  Before long I was jumping off the top of the bank (which was small and mellow) doing 180's.  Then one night I did a little lookback attempt in a 180 flyout.  I didn' get very high, so it wasn't very clicked, but it was fun.  Since I landed those rolling backwards, I would Half Cab out of them.  So I started trying a lookback in the 180 jump, then a lookback in the Half Cab turning back around.  Those were really slow, and more of goofy "turnbars" than a lookback.  But then I started trying lookbacks in my big, fast, long Half Cabs.  And I could get them about 2/3 clicked.  I was doing pretty decent lookback Half Cabs by the summer of 1989.  To this day, I've still never seen anyone else do one.  

As freestylers, we've all played games of FREESTYLE, like HORSE in basketball, where one rider does a trick, and then everyone has to pull it, or get a letter.  When I was hanging out at the HB Pier, I would get into games of SKATE with skaters, usually street skaters.  They'd do a skate trick, and I'd try to do the closest bike version of that trick.  That was fun and got me thinking in totally different ways about what I could do on my bike.  I had learned the original sidewalk crack nollies on a skateboard, and then took those to BMX, doing high speed nosewheelies into small curbs and speed bumps. launching low for a few feet off the front wheel.  My BMX was getting more and more skate inspired, as I faded away from flatland. 

One day at the pier I was playing a game of SKATE with some of the local street skaters, and one of them did a no comply.  That was a real popular street trick at the time, and was a footplant ollie 180.  So I did a footplant on my bike, and tried to boost into a 180, and land riding backwards.  I don't think I got it first try, but I got pretty close.  That turned into another skate inspired trick, and another hop trick as well.  I got those dialed, and I think I was the first BMXer to do a flat ground footplant to 180, aka a skateboard no comply on a bike, back in 1989 or 1990.  That's the one trick of mine that Eddie Roman put in the 1990 2-Hip video, Ride Like a Man.  Eddie was doing footplants to 360's, and I had him trying one of those in my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend.  When we sessioned for the shoot of him for my video, I showed him that I had been doing footplant 180's, and he had been doing them to 360, and neither of us thought of doing the other version.

The other big hop trick I was trying all through those years, is the bunnyhop tailwhip.  I've written about that quite a bit in previous posts.  I started trying those in the summer of 1987, and could come close in late 1989 and 1990.  But I was never able to land a single one, and actually get both feet on the bike.  You Old Schoolers know that Bill Nitschke, back in Indiana, invented bunnyhop tailwhips, aka the Whopper, in 1990.  He was a much better rider than me, all around, and it took him a year to learn that trick. 

My frustration with not being able to land bunnyhop tailwhips led to a couple of footplant versions of that trick.  I did one that I called a no-comply tailwhip, where I would bunnyhop and begin to huck the back end of the bike around, and as I was doing that, I would jump off the back of the bike, plant both feet on the ground real quick, and then jump back on as the bike came around.  Since that was just a dork trick, I could land those easy.  They looked kind of cool, especially when I did them on banks.  At the 1989 2-Hip Meet the Street at the Brooklyn Banks, I did a few of those on the small banks, and 3 or 4 other guys started trying them.  I wasn't used to people trying tricks that I did, so that was pretty cool.  I also learned to do a tailwhip footplant on the wall, at that contest.  There was a section of wall a ways back, on the bigger banks, with a tiny, 1/2 inch wide ledge.  It was just enough to help my foot get a little more grip on the wall, and help me stay on the wall a bit longer, and do a tailwhip footplant.  I also used to do a straight footplant booster to tailwhip.  That was probably the coolest trick to come out of my attempts at bunnyhop tailwhips.  I'd ride along parallel to a ledge or bench, bunnyhop up and footplant with my right foot.  Then I'd boost higher off that foot, throwing the bike around in a tailwhip at the same time.  So the bike would be 3-4 feet off the ground.  Then I 'd land on the top tube and pedal, like I would on the flat ground, no-comply taiwhips.  Again, none of those things were considered "real tricks" back then.  Nobody else, except Eddie Roman, was doing anything like a half Cab, or street tailwhip tricks. 

 

Sometime in late 1989 or 1990, after doing big Half Cabs for a couple of years, I realized that I should try to keep going with the Cab idea.  So I started trying full Cabs (rollback to 360 bunnyhop) one night, and then I tried doing them to 540 (rollback to 540 bunnyhop).  I did land full Cabs on flat, in 1990, I think.  I came close to the 540 Cabs, which I was going to call a King Cab, since I had a Datsun King Cab truck.  I could kickstand them, sticking a leg out, but could never land a clean one.  I also tried tailwhip Half Cabs, but could never even come close to those. 

The last hop trick I tried back in 1989-90 was one I really wish I could had landed.  As I wrote above, nollies on a bike became a favorite trick of mine.  I loved hauling ass at a big speed bump, going into a nosewheelie a couple feet before it, and doing a nollie.  In my opinion, it's not a nollie on a bike if you don't hit a bump with the front wheel.  What most New School riders call "nollies" today are nose wheelies, in my opinion.  They do amazing ones, nosewheelies to barspins off ledges, and nosewheelies to tailwhips, but they're not nollies, in my opinion.  But that's the old salty guy in me.

So the other cool nollie trick that I actually tried for a while was a nollie tailwhip.  I'd nosewheelie into a speed bump, pop off the front wheel, and huck the back end of the bike into a tailwhip.  On flat ground, with just a speed bump, not off a ledge.  The problem with learning that trick is that since I was only 2-4 inches off the ground, the back end of the bike would usually hit the ground about halfway around, then I'd land on my stomach, on top of the bike.  That fucking hurt, every time.  I did he bike more than halfway around at times, it was a brutal trick to try and learn, just landing on top of the bike, stomach down, getting poked by pedals, stem, pegs, and everything else, every time.  So I just gave up on that one.  But I know it is possible.  After all, tailwhip Half Cabs, 360 tailwhip bunnyhops, and even a 720 bunnyhop have been done (really check YouTube).  More is possible. 

For those who knew me back then, you might be wondering why I didn't put any of these tricks in my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend.  It's the same reason I didn't put any of our flatland riding at the pier in the video.  I didn't think those tricks were really tricks.  That stuff we did every weekend just seemed so "normal" to me, that I didn't even shoot video of it.  I was trying to get the newer riding, which mostly street stuff.  Plus, I thought I sucked at that point, so I didn't put much of my riding at all in the video.  That's my biggest regret from The Ultimate Weekend, I didn't put any of our weekend sessions in, I never even shot video of that.  Mike Sarrail was one of  maybe the first) guy to do barspin and no handed Miami hop-hops, and undertakers, and Randy Lawrence could learn pretty much any trick in 10 minutes.  But I didn't think that was worth shooting back then.  I had a few unique flatland tricks as well, like no handed and barspin megaspins, and an opposite tailwhip-catch, to double tailwhip normal direction, and a few others.  I never got any of those things on video, and that was stupid. 

Obviously, I had no idea that 10-20 years later Half Cabs, bunnyhop tailwhips, and nollies would wind up being "cool" tricks.  On one hand, those tricks I did 30 years ago that "weren't real tricks," that are now popular, is a cool bit of validation.  I tried some weird stuff that wasn't cool BITD, but eventually, riding circled around and those tricks, like Half Cabs and nollies, found a home. 

My other reason for writing this post is that at any point, there are one or two main styles of riding that are cool, but there are still different directions of riding waiting to be explored.  In today's world of long frames, low seats, and freecoasters, a different bike set-up, with today's skill rider skill levels, would make all kinds of new types of new tricks and variations possible.  Remember kids, it's called FREEstyle.  you are free to completely ridiculous (and currently uncool) ideas, and see what happens.  Just sayin'. 

I have a new blog about BMX, skateboard, and action sports spots:

The Spot Finder

Got Covid, got better

 About 23 months into this crazy pandemic, with Omicron now the variant taking over (sounds like a Buck Rogers era space villain), Covid-19 caught up to me.  Got sick, got tested, as a homeless guy.  Had to sit outside the hospital in about 55 degrees for 2 hours to get test and the results.  They said, "Yep, it's positive.  Try to isolate for 5 days."  It knocked me on my ass (on a strip of fairly isolated concrete) for about 2 1/2 days.  Lots of fluids and rest.  Feeling better now.  Glad I got the 2 vaccines last Spring.