the Four: December '24

short 'n' sweet like sabby c, sry

Jan 08, 2025

tail drop indy in goleta with an audience. photo by lil bro. want cooler tricks than this? subscribe and have your photo lede the four!

an apology and an announcement for the sluts:

So sorry to dash off what is ostensibly the flagship feature of this ‘magazine,’ but between holidays, hate, desperate job searches, depressive cycles, and, of course, the first-ever-edition of Fucking Love Them (congrats, Campos!) the Four for December is gonna be enjoyed in brevity – we’re going Sabrina Carpenter style people, a k.i.s.s. capsule cop-out.

What’s funny is there’s a whole themed Four to be made here, one which gloms shamelessly onto the classic themes of wistfulness for where we come from and former days forever lost and, let’s be real, probably not as dope as we remember. In other words, all the advert opiate shit xmas unleashes. It’s in the Western New York-set Main Character, with my home town’s signature lot-framing fat rails and that Flower City grime left behind when the lake effect melts; it’s in DC’s No Big Deal, which is fucking Philly through-and-through, a nice reminder of high school and dreams of Stevie-style pop shuvs; it’s in the skate rat viciousness of High Speed’s Hell is Real, with its Kreayshawn-kinetic mashup of Microsoft visual effects, fireworks, flippant disregard for Museum Campus football crowds, and general springtide savagery, a Palace product descriptions in a composition notebook (and, just in case you can’t tell, that’s all a fucking compliment).

But that’d be too saccharine, right? Just like those fucking Christmastime commercials.

Big news ahead too: the plan is to make this shit more real in 2025, which means more stuff for you: trick tips, book reviews, profiles and features, essays, and — first on deck — interviews with people I think are fucking cool and I want to use this as an excuse to talk to.

To the Four!

Four the Sluts: December ‘24

hoddle, ‘still in the grid’

Always nice to have some antipode action. There’s a fucking incredible night cruise that captures the spirit of the whole thing and my nollie of the year to be found in here — fab!

plan b, ‘true’

It is tradition to honor those we have lost with raw cuts up front, and the Mike Ternasky tribute here is worth a watch all on its own.

That said: Perhaps it is bc they are the most brutal reminders of the yawning gap between my own abilities and that of the stars’ — a space that feels like, well, space — but the indomitable skating of the likes of Joslin, Sheckler, and Pudwill often doesn’t reach me in the same way it reaches others. That changes absolutely nothing about how fucking good they are, however; not to flog Homer again, but seeing any of them — or their Plan B brethren — ascend on the spot is akin to Athena on the plains of Troy: things are about to get fucked up, with a style and strength and grace most befitting a deity.

gx1000, ‘yobai’

I’m a fucking idiom obsessive, love them dearly. So it kills me a bit when someone uses ‘gangbusters’ incorrectly. It’s shorthand for a phrase (‘like gangbusters’ or ‘come on like gangbusters’) and its means to kick the motherfucking door in and murder immediately from the jump. So, this.

film trucks, ‘promo video’

Look, here’s the kind of Gallic insouciance we’re dealing with here: slappy noseslide on Gabbers’ arc-of-the-universe ender rail. It’s like Gauloises with the DJ out front.