StrangeLove

To whom it may concern: Yes, it has been a rather long minute—or 175,433 to be somewhat more in the ballpark—since the last post went up. The reasons are many, none of them great, but it is what it is. The world is on fire, you know? Anyway, the following essay of a sort had been languishing in a state of incompletion for nearly a year now because I wasn't exactly sure where it was going or what I was even doing. If anything, it was space filler. No real purpose beyond luring eyes onto the site in hopes of a sale or two and maybe a few write offs for 2025. Such are the evils that men do under the crushing wheel of late stage capitalism. But, lo and behold, a legitimate reason finally presented itself, so let's get it on as Marvin Gaye would want us to. However, should you snidely subscribe to the comment, "Yeah, I'm not reading all that," then simply cut to the chase and click HERE for instant—albeit not entirely enlightened—gratification.

Whew. Can I utter that? Well, I just did. If 2025 was a marathon, let's just say I'm happy that we crossed the finish line. Okay, yeah, I know, we're not through the tape yet, but it's close enough for proverbial horse shoes and hand grenades purposes. So, what have we learned this year? Absolutely nothing. No, that's not entirely true, there are indeed a couple takeaways to be had, but we'll see about addressing those things in 2026. For now, all I'm primarily concerned with is recapping the wood we decorated with a selection of pictures both pretty and not. Actually, what I'm more inclined to do, is spout off all kinds of nonsense, aka flagrant untruths, seeing as the scourge of our days is that which is simply known as "AI", the next great undoing of modern humankind. Unfortunate, too, considering there are surely far grander ways to go out in a blaze of extinction glory. Instead, the cortices are doomed to simply grow softer, smoother, and progressively less synaptic in nature until it's back to the primordial ooze we go. Whee!

While I don't believe that heading is "click bait" per se, it's also incredibly misleading in that this has nothing to do with the Christmas season whatsoever (aside from being posted within the yuletide window). What it is, however, could be considered a Casey Kasem countdown of our adventures in advertising this past year. And while 12 would have been a nice round number, what with there being 12 months in a year and all, we actually placed 16 ads between both Thrasher and Closer Skateboarding mags. Well, there's actually a couple more ads than that, but the additional two went out into the international printed waters and both were pretty derivative of ads placed elsewhere (give or take some dimensional readjustments for the metric pixel system). Not that you needed to know any of that, but I do like to come correct as possible.

‘Twas the year or so before December 2012 when my friend Nick Halkias finally emailed me with the question he’d long been hinting at but never previously managed to put into motion: Would I be interested in collaborating on a shoe for Nike SB? But not just any old shoe—this was to be the Holiday 2012 release—and he asked if I was familiar with the mythological creature known as Krampus. "First, hell yes I'm interested," I responded, "And kinda, maybe, only sorta I'm familiar?" While most demonic figures had crossed my radar at one point or another, I wasn’t entirely hip to all the fabled facts behind this particular pagan beast. Nick, who had apparently run across a vintage greeting card depicting Krampus and subsequently gone down the proverbial rabbit hole in search of more background on his origins, thought it would make an entertaining holiday story for a Dunk and that I would be the ideal artist to tackle such a project. Woohoo!

This comes way too long after the fact—and probably should've been posted in part before I even embarked on my trip to Japan back in October—but let's face the confusing facts: My woven word webs here are often difficult enough to understand as it is much less the labyrinthian maze of mutilation they no doubt are to someone whose second language is English. And that's not something to boast about by any means. In fact, it's a complete disservice as a writer to the reader. Intellectually, I get that, but am I going to do anything about it and change my excessively wordy and murky ways? Probably not.