I put The Roots collective head out over on my man Tim Baker’s SYFFAL site in a column they call “Old Yeller’d.” The idea is to kill off some cultural sacred cow that’s just gone on way too long. I picked Illadelph’s finest.

Here’s an excerpt:
It’s been a decade since anyone should’ve been paying any attention to The Roots (Phrenology for those of you keeping score at home). They probably peaked before that, and it wasn’t on that heavy-handed, overrated Things Fall Apart joint. It’s hard to innovate with that many crocks on the counter. How many dudes …

As with most of the bikes I build, I wrote up my new bike over on HEADTUBE. It’s a sweet Fairdale Parser Express that I got from Taj Mihelich. He even posted it up on the Fairdale site.

It’s another BMX-inspired ride, what I like to call my “big boy bike.”

Check out the full post on HEADTUBE, along with all of my other bike and bike-related projects. Many thanks to Taj for hooking me up with this thing.

I’ve expounded elsewhere at length about how zine-making during my teen years informed my life’s path, and I’ve mentioned fellow traveler Mike Daily before, but I haven’t really given him due credit. Mike Daily is a founding member of The Plywood Hoods, one of the most influential BMX crews in the history of our little sport. He also made one of the first BMX zines ever: Aggro Rag. Echoing my own feelings about making zines, Daily told Jared Souney in an interview for ESPN BMX in 2010, “Working with the …

Confession: My all-time favorite band is Oingo Boingo. It’s been that way since Keith Vandeberg introduced me to them in the sixth grade. Oingo Boingo showed me that music could be about something, that it could evoke meaning as well as feeling, that it could tell stories as well as be rebellious. I found out much later that mastermind Danny Elfman also scored films. This made sense to me, given what his band had taught me about the power of music.

Erik Blood will soon release one of the best records I’ve …

I’ve sat for hours, sipping coffee, longingly staring at her from across the street. Her shape, her lines, the exquisite design of her angles intriguing, inspiring from afar. I’ve made plans, scrapped them, made others… She will never know how much I loved her.

There’s a building on the corner of 38th and Guadalupe in Austin, Texas that I just adore. It was The Austin Chronicle‘s 2004 “Critics Best Building to Consider for Preservation,” and was for sale for a while last year, spawning dreams of opening an office, coffee shop, gallery, …

Partially fueled by Jane McGonigal’s bestselling Reality is Broken (Penguin, 2011), “gamification”—that is turning mostly menial tasks into games through a system of points and rewards—became the buzzword of 2011 and diluted and/or stigmatized videogame studies on many fronts. Gaming ungamed situations is not all bad though. Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies (1975) were tactics for gaming a stalled creative process. In an interview with Steven Johnson, Brian Eno explained, “The trick for me isn’t about showing people how to be creative as though they’ve never been like that before, but …