YoBeat: Making Fun of Snowboarding Since 1997

I’ve been at this column-writing game for some time now … and like any good Millenial (I think that’s what they’re calling my generation now, Gen-X sounded sooooo much cooler) I’m tired of my job.

Like moving in with a friend or lover, I’m noticing all the funky little flaws that only come out after long periods in close living quarters.  Did you know YoBeat poops with the bathroom door open?  Gross!  And YoBeat farts all the time.  Like, not often — literally ALL the time.  It’s like there’s a valve broken so there’s a steady leak of fart.

Anyway, thought I’d share my laundry list of WTFs with you, my loyal readers.

Promo Shots — Ok, wow, it’s like, totally crazy that Ryan Sheckler did some goofy-ass pose with a YoBeat sticker in hand.  Let’s move on, people.  We can’t simultaneously make fun of him for crying on TV and massage his scrotum for appearing on YoBeat.

Hump Day — YoBeat pulls off some cool interviews in this weekly feature, but the title makes no sense.  All of these interviews are about snowboarding, or working in the industry, or being an up-and-comer.  Not one of them is about humping.

Maybe this “hump day” idea is some sort of snowboard slang that I missed out on while I was working on my previous slang column, and I just don’t get it, but I’ll be damned if YoBeat wouldn’t get way more hits if it had a weekly feature that was actually about humping.

It worked for Transworld Skateboarding for a while, sort of.  Remember that feature they ran on the web with models posing during a session?  Who doesn’t like a backside tailslide with an honest-to-god backside shimmying around on the deck of the ramp?  Nobody, that’s who.

Videos — “Backflips and Boobies?”  Genius.  But didn’t anybody tell the Airblaster guys how to make a snowboarding video?  It’s like they don’t even care.  No film crew, no production assistants bringing the director coffee, no dramatic slow-mo film shots … does this even count as a snowboard video?  I didn’t even hear any music by the Faint or Da Rude.  Airblaster, let’s get cereal and make a real snowboard video.  You know, with 180-foot backflips, 50-stair triple-kink rails and unnecessary editing “tricks” straight out of Final Cut for Dummies.

And as for you, YoBeat, stop just bringing any group of snowboarders onto the site.  This isn’t “The Flavor of Love,” you need to have standards.  More film, less fucking around.  What do you think this is, fun?

Firing Squad — I still think that guy that was snow-surfing over that wintry pond was fucking tits, the technical superiority of Cagney’s “strapping in” photo notwithstanding.

A fun twist on the Squad would be a Make or Miss contest, in which internet viewers decide whether the photo was a make or a miss.  If the voters pick which photo is a make and which is a miss, both photos … fuck it, nevermind.  That idea sucks.

Mikey LeBlanc — Apparently this guy’s a snowboard legend, or something.  I don’t really know.  And he owns some Holding Company?  Holding Clothing?  Did I get that right?  But really, how many features are we going to do on him?  He has a three-part Hump Day (with no humping whatsoever), there was a video tour of his office, he’s backed as a candidate for Maine’s junior Senate seat … I mean, Jesus Christ!  Now I know why I always put quotation marks around snowboard “journalism.”

Sarah Morrison’s Best Day Ever — Isn’t YoBeat a snowboarding website?  Isn’t Best Week Ever a pop-culture-junkie show on VH1?  I don’t get it.

I wish I could be famous on the Internet for publishing a checklist of my favorite inebriated memories and the list of quotes I’m saving up so that my Facebook profile will be sooooo kick-ass.  Instead, I’m like every other teen/twenty-something and it just ends up on some MySpace blog where nobody reads it or finds it interesting.

The n00b — Man, whoever the fuck hired that guy is a dipshit!  Fuck the n00b.  What a dork.