Anthony Lister art. I found this guy through the Drawn illustration website – great series of superhero paintings. And lookie here, he seems to have some skateboarding connections.

Ready for another online zine? Tweaker appears to be a UK based skate zine and not a Midwest USA zine for meth heads. Tweaker is one big Flash application that mimics a real magazine, but with a few multimedia tweaks, if you will. The traditional folded over letter-sized paper aspect ratio is preserved, and corners peel up when you mouse over them. Some of the photos can bring up an overlaying sequence, some pages have video embedded and some pages can scroll. I’m not a fan of Flash-based simualtions of printed magazines, but in this case I think it might work. It’s more immersive because it not only looks like a printed zine, but it has the ability to do things print can’t do, or at least not until they get digital paper perfected and available cheaply. One example is embedded video out takes from Winstan Whitter’s “Rollin’ Through The Decades” documentary in an article about a famous street spot. Tweaker is in beta right now so it’s a little buggy and slow. For instance, you can flip a page with the video playing and it will continue to play even after the page turning effect is over. It looks cool, but the sound can interfere with next page. There’s a mixture of street and park skating, old and new, plus a little bit of the now mandatory artsy-fartsy content. The fact that they bothered to make the beta version live confirms my opinion that this thing is going to be very labor intensive to publish. I hope they figure out a way to make it work. Check out Tweaker.

[Source: The Goat]

(Cue the Devo Corporate Anthem) Hey all you Rad Daddy Warbucks, TheStreet.com has some pros and cons on investing in Zumiez stock.

I confess to getting a kick out of analyst reports describing Zumiez customers as “antimainstream kids” and referring to the company’s focus on the “action sports teen lifestyle.” Before going over all the positives, let’s get one thing straight — Zumiez is very much in the mainstream. It’s not some bastion of coolness or a hush-hush hangout where the skaters go. Rather, it’s a chain of stores in the mall where kids go to spend their allowances…

…The fact that Zumiez is pulling customers in while the competition loses them is a pretty obvious indicator of who has the right stuff in their stores. There are a number of forces at work here. First, Zumiez has identified what’s cool and, more important, captured the attitude necessary to convince customers that even though they’re shopping in a corporate chain located in a mall, it’s still cool. Yes, teenage tastes are fickle, but Zumiez has staked out an attractive niche between the more vulnerable one-brand clothiers (such as American Eagle and Abercrombie (ANF – Cramer’s Take – Stockpickr)) and “old school” skateboard shops that cater to a cultural group (this is where the Street likes to use the term “lifestyle”).

So go put your parent’s money where your mouth is.

OMG! UR SO HOT! The blogosphere is on fire with hottest skateboards on the web this week – the Dead Rappers series from Jeremy Fish and a soon to be released Wii controller-looking board from Black Market, a company that seems to be doing a second rate impersonation of World Industries circa 91. Actually, this Wii deck is BM’s best work to date. A bunch of gaming sites are tittering all over it. Speaking of tittering, I just said BM!

[Source: Wii – Kotaku Dead Rappers – everyone]

The BBC has an article a Brit who has set an as yet unverified world record for speed (112mph) on a jet powered street luge. I don’t know if there is a separate category for non jet powered luge or what. They have video as well, but for good pictures you have to go to Gizmodo’s exclusive interview with Joel King. I don’t know how a gadget site scooped us on this, aside from the fact that we don’t pay any attention to street luge. At least we scooped them on the World’s Biggest Skateboard. Joel King bills himself as the Gravity King, which makes me the Duke of Sketch. [Photos: Top and Bottom Right – Richard Eaton. Bottom left and center from the BBC video]

Check out the fancy video camera that guy is holding at the edge of the pipe. Who needs expensive prosumer electronics gear when a point and shoot still camera can give you glorious 160 x 120 pixel imagery at 15 fps? Not our friend Troy Sliter. Check out his moving picture footage of Rune Glifberg going over the mouse hole at Portland’s Pier Park during the 2007 Oregon Trifecta after the jump.

[Update: More reader video added in comments]

Jacob Marcinek of Tranny Whiskers is one of those guys with too much free time on his hands. Sounds like a college student to me. Fortunately for the hard core skateboarding gamer, he has created the BEST SKATEBOARDING VIDEO GAME, EVER. Forget everything you’ve heard about Tony Hawk’s Proving Grounds and EA’s Skate, because Radical Mathematical blows them all out of the water. What could be more fun than using your grade school knowledge of math to navigate through three totally awesome levels of skateboarding? Nothing, obviously. As you can see, even the graphics have eclipsed the cutting edge. I would go so far as to say that Radical Mathematical is so advanced that it is more of an extremely accurate high tech simulation than simply a video game. What are you doing still reading this? Check out Radical Mathematical.

A couple of months ago we posted about blind skateboarder Jennifer Tissot, and now we have another. The Chicago Sun Times has an article with a title straight from Cliché Headlines 101 about another blind skateboarder. What else, but “Skater’s blind ambition.” Duh! The article is pretty straight forward and short. 14 year old Tommy Carroll who lives in the suburbs of Chicago, went blind in both eyes at the age of two. He enjoys other sports like cross country running, and is on a local skate team, Agent Skateboards. Check out the team. If that is the Jerret Barry (Jarret Berry?) then Agent has the lock on Extreme™! minority team members. One of the more interesting notes (besides Tommy, the blind skateboarder) is that his parents are the ones who “helped steer him into skateboarding, figuring it was something he could master.” That’s a pretty progressive attitude, considering a lot of parents of seeing children don’t want their kids skating. The best part of the article is the video link that actually shows Tommy carving around, doing a nose pivot on the coping and even catching air.

Thanks to Mike Timble for the tip. [Photos and video capture: Chicago Sun Times]