Well, by pure luck I was able to find a 15 year old scanner so I could scan these 30 year old stickers. What am I talking about? LED backlit scanners cannot capture neon inks, and big surprise, there were a lot of neon stickers in the 80’s. Shout out to Diesel Fuel Prints for letting me borrow this compact fluorescent backlit artifact. Diesel Fuel is where Skate and Annoy get’s all their stickers printed BTW. The sticker gallery is currently at 151 stickers with about another 100 in my collection alone left to process and add, and another 200 from contributors! Until then, check out these 151 vintage skate stickers. And yes, the post title is a reference.

I revived the Vintage Skate Sticker Gallery, a feature that hasn’t been live on this site in almost 2 decades after we switched from static HTML to Wordpress. Unfortunately, most of my old scans were similarly in 1999 resolutions so I had to rescan them. So far I’ve got 80 up there, with another 80 that have been scanned but not separated yet. In a strange turn of events, consumer scanner technology has changed to LED backlighting which doesnt play nice with neon stickers. They look like they’ve been in the sun for 2 decades. So I’ve got about 90 additional stickers to scan once I get my hands on a vintage scanner with CFL backlighting. While digging through old hard drives I found about 50 sticker scans from various contributors. On top of that, While cleaning my basement this weekend I found a CD-rom that someone mailed to me (when???) that has about 130 mostly high quality scans of stickers from the late 70’s and some “official dealer” stickers that are rare. so thats’ what… 350 more stickers to add! Until then, check it out.

Soon after Skate and Annoy went online with it’s own domain name after jumping ship from Annoying.com, I had toyed with idea of adding a discussion area or bulletin board as they were called in the online days of Sleestak.net circa ’03 or so… I was never quite happy with the pricing, capabilities, or performance of the early options so I did a lot of investigating and putting off the final decision, until Facebook made all that stuff irrelevant. In the immortal words of TLC and other irrelevant 90’s phenomena, I ain’t to proud to beg. Since the comments section of these posts are barren, and morel like to receive a comment on our FB page, I’ve decided to jump on the height of 2010 technologies and start a Skate and Annoy Facebook group, in the spirit of Edvard Munch. Join, post and destroy!

Well it’s that time of the decade again… What time is it, you ask? It’s time for another site redesign. The old one served pretty well for a long time, but wasn’t really mobile proof and was not very efficient on the server side. Blah blah blah… Time for a stripped down version. It’s a work in progress, not all functionality is present, and there are bound to be some bugs. Features, Reviews, and Galleries are still on the old templates, but should be chaining over in the very near future. Working on this fairly massive, and mostly under the hood change has taken precedent over new posts, but it won’t be long before regular updates are thing again.  The rest of the Skate and Annoy “network” is going to require a little tinkering before the old framework is abandoned, so bear with me.

Holy @#$%!!! I almost gave up on this web site, but at long last, after almost a year (!) we’re back online. Losing almost 8000 posts and 40,000 comments was a shock at first, but after a the initial dismay it became sort of a blessing, like a weight lifted off my shoulders. About 7 months into it, I was able to recover the raw files, but I wasn’t sure if I was up to the gargantuan task of putting everything back together, and I doubted whether or not there was any point in doing it. Skate and Annoy was seeing infrequent updates at the time it went down. It had been online since 1996. But it didn’t really take off until 2003. Not counting the 80’s print editions, that’s almost 15 years of devoting an unnatural amount of attention to a web site with little to show for it except the occasional free product sent in to review, and a ton of bad CD’s. So I decided to let it die a natural death. Except I couldn’t quite let it go. I would still get the occasional tip from former readers. I was still saving tv commercials with skateboarding…

Welcoming Session Killer to the site as a new sponsor, that is in no way whatsoever just me with a new paypal account. Help support Skate and Annoy, go buy this shirt that is so clever it will make you want to punch me in the face. If you could buy a miniramp kit from Ikea, you can bet that it would be cheap, look sorta nice, and then fall apart after 6 months. $25 post paid in the USA.

With the addition of this latest Roller Sports ad from 1975, there’s now 101 vintage skatemag advertisements in the gallery. It’s also easier to sort through the various companies and products available. I’ve added (8) dropdown menus that are visible on the top and bottom of the archive pages as well as at the bottom of single ad pages, underneath comments. I plan on refining the way the previews show up on the archive pages, I’ll probably make the thumbs smaller, possibly ditch the categories and show more per page. Right now they show up just like a blog post, with the latest addition at the top of the page. Use the dropdown menus to sort by company, rider, product type, year, decade, magazine, specific magazine issue, and photographer when credited. At 101 ads, I’m still not finished with the two issues of Transworld and Skateboarder magazine that I’ve taken them from. So far it’s only 70’s and 80’s, but eventually I’ll add some from the 90’s as well. Check out the ski trainer in this Roller Sports ad. I wish there were better pictures of it. I guess I could troll issues of ski magazines from 1975 to see…

I’ve been working on a new addition to the Galleries section of Skate and Annoy. It’s an archive of advertisements from old skateboard magazines. The goal is to cover the 60’s through the 90’s. It’s been interesting going through these old magazines, finding things I’d forgotten about and other I still have no idea ever existed, like the Brian Martin pro model on Action Sports Skateboards. It’s funny to see some of the ads that the smaller companies put out in hopes of breaking into the industry. Like everything on the site, it’s a work in progress. I’ve scanned about 300 ads so far and uploaded only 64, but now that the mechanism is in place it’s really easy to add new ones. There are other ad archives out there, most notably the one at Cal Streets, which I profiled in 2008. They’ve since changed they way their gallery is presented, but it’s still a hefty one. I decided to make one for S&A because I have OCD, and I don’t like having to search/link on other sites when doing “research” for posts here. Plus those other galleries aren’t organized how I’d want them. What works so far: Everything is…

I was a big fan of Born Ugly zine out of Richmond Va, and their seemingly herculean efforts to produce a well made, entertaining and most importantly, highly original skate zine based on what I assumed was an amazing, vibrant scene based only on copies of Born Ugly. Well, all herculean things must come to an end, and so it was with Born Ugly. I noticed it had been a while since I’d seen a new issue, so I went to the web site to check it out, and the domain name had lapsed. Actually, what probably happened is that someone was looking for the C.R.E.T.E. graphic and S&A came up in a web search. I got a couple emails from different people asking if I still had the graphic because the web site was down. I figured it was just a temporary thing, but I guess not. In case you’re interested, I still have that graphic if you want to print your own shirt for a DIY fundraiser. A couple weeks ago I got an email from Mickael Broth, half the team that brought you Born Ugly. He was looking for an outlet to continue a column he used…

Many ages ago, when Skate and annoy was but a mere print zine printed on a stolen copy machine with a circulation hovering between 200-300 copies per issue, Broken Kingpins was the name of the section that was sort of similar to Thrasher’s On Board Trash. During our golden Interwebs age I resurrected the name in a few a post titles that were a miscellany of unrelated skateboarding news items, right about the time I was trying to bury Antigravity Press and Earth Patrol Media through sheer number of posts… a war of attrition. Well, I tricked Mark into posting here on S&A off an on for years, and Rich will tell you there was never any contest (but we crushed him anyway!) From now on Broken Kingpins is a section of the web site where I post things that aren’t going to make it to the front page of Skate and Annoy because I don’t feel like commenting or they otherwise aren’t worthy of being on the front page. It’s not that the content, or video, or news item isn’t interesting or engaging, or put together by people whose full time job is to create highly polished skateboarding content…