[Svperstar]

About 10 years ago I read a bunch of former roller bladers and skateboarders talking about the death of rollerblading in the 1990s.

It is much easier to do tricks on rollerblades, also it was viewed as a "gay" activity in a much more homophobic time in society. There was a picture of a rollerblader in a skating mag and they photoshopped pink makeup on his face and made his rollerblades purple.

Skaters started calling rollerblades "fruit boots" and that killed it for a lot of people who didn't want to associated with something seen as weak and "gay".

[the_third_wave]

What happened is that I moved to the Swedish countryside and as such was confronted with hills and unpaved roads. When I lived in the Netherlands I used skates for transport in lieu of a bicycle because they're far easier to take along on public transport. I skated to the station, skated into the train, skated off it after 1.5 hours and 150 km, skated to my job and repeated this on my way home. I was just as fast as if not faster than most cyclists. Every now and then I skated to my parents, an 75km trip which took a while.

I never - and I mean never - heard anything about "skating being gay, that might be an American thing? To even consider homophobia (fear of homosexuals?) in this context is completely foreign to me and probably says more about the polarised society in the USA than about anything else.

Skates are practical means of transport in flat countries with good infrastructure like the Netherlands. They are not in the part of Sweden where I now live, otherwise I'd still be on them every day. A bicycle works fine here so I reverted to my original means of locomotion.

[ahartmetz]

You might have just given me a solution to a problem I thought about this weekend: a place I need to visit for work is >= 1 km from the next public transport stop - the walking is a little tedious. I was using my car for pandemic (currently: train strike) reasons, but I want to stop that again after, and I do own rollerskates... still from the 90s.

[the_third_wave]

Go for it, wear some wrist protectors and you should arrive in one piece. That is the only protection I use given that it actually work as intended and broken wrists are fairly common in all forms of skating.

[faeyanpiraat]

The first thing hitting the concrete when falling is your palms, so having a glove with plastic protection will help not losing any skin from your palms.

Also wear a helmet.

[noduerme]

When I was a 13 or so, in the early '90s, I took an "extreme rollerblading" class on the weekends. The class started by teaching various kinds of stops (T-stop where you drag one skate behind you sideways, spin stop ...no one ever used a brake), and then moved on to going down stairs, performing jumps, and so on. We were required to wear elbow, knee and wrist guards as well as helmets. But one thing they taught us early on was how to fall correctly, or come to a falling stop. You want to try to go down with a kneepad first followed by the wrist guard, so you're using the knee to brake. This was something we practiced.

It's been over 20 years since I was on rollerblades and I don't even know if I'd have the balance anymore, but I wouldn't do it without at least one knee guard and both hard wrist guards.

[the_third_wave]

I nearly entirely rely on the T-stop, most of my skates never had any brakes and I removed it from the ones which did since it is only in the way and of questionable efficacy. The disadvantage of dragging a skate is the enormous wear it puts on wheels but apart from that it serves me well. Knee protection might work for some but I never felt the need and just feel those things are in the way, the same goes for elbow protection. Having skated for decades without damaging either knees or elbows I'll probably be OK but by all means use them when you're just starting off, I did this as well.

[motardo]

> The first thing hitting the concrete when falling is your palms

Yes, if you're young and have good reflexes, you can break your wrists. If you're old with slower reflexes, you can't get your arms out in time so you break your hip instead.

[scrollaway]

If you're looking for good gloves for rollerblading I recommend looking at motorbiking gloves. They're a bit expensive but they can be super comfortable and have a ton of protection around the wrist and knuckles.

[the_third_wave]

Motorbike gloves do not include the essential part of wrist protectors, namely the hard plastic backbone which is meant to catch the fall and keep the wrist joint from overextending. If you want to wear them, fine, but make sure to use wrist protectors - with a rigid backbone - as well.

[elliekelly]

This is exactly why I stopped rollerblading. I had a coach who made us all sign “contracts” promising we wouldn’t rollerblade because so many players were injuring their wrists.

[hjfhjkh]

Homophobia is the accepted term for this kind of thing in both Dutch and Swedish, so you shouldn't feign surprise that "fear" comes into the terminology.

The Netherlands and Sweden are among the most LGBT-tolerant countries in the world. Not having to worry (much) about homophobia is a huge privilege.

The way you are talking, it sounds like you are neither gay nor have you ever given much thought to the plight of gay people in the large parts of the world where homosexuality is not tolerated, including the many places where it is still a crime.

The "polarized" US is not as gay-friendly as the typical European country, but other places are much worse.

[dochtman]

Yes, homophobia is a thing even in NL; what I think the GP post was trying to point out is that there’s been no connection between inline skating and any particular sexual orientation in NL. That rings true to me as another Dutchman who owns inline skates (though only for three years).

[silverpepsi]

Well there's a more fundamental dependency we don't have an answer to -

Is it common in either language (or perhaps English is used in this context) to make fun of things that disgust you by calling them gay? Growing up in the Midwest of the US in the early 90s, I knew to call things 'gay' if I wanted to discourage my friends from doing them much earlier than my Christian parents allowed me to find out the secret of males/females having different genitalia. (A much younger neighbor boy finally leaked the secret to me when I was 12.)

[odessacubbage]

it's easy for people to look at 90's/2000's vernacular and assume a level of explicit bigotry that simply was not necessarily present. kids will always be drawn to an easy shorthand to use as a pejorative, preferably one that distinguishes them from earlier generations and makes their parents mad. they will probably start using the term through osmosis without even understanding its webster definition because that won't be their definition. gay/fag has basically been superseded by cuck/cringe/simp etc and those terms will similarly be replaced by something else within 5 years but functionally all these terms end up fulfilling the same purposed which is very quickly divorced from their actual dictionary meaning, should one even exist.

[foldr]

Not sure. We all knew what it meant when I was a kid in the 90s. That doesn’t mean that people were thinking homophobic thoughts every time they called something gay. But the underlying idea that being gay was icky and bad was perfectly well known to all of us at the time.

Society finally seems to have figured out that using ‘gay’ as an insult is homophobic and wrong. However, on the way to that realization, we did have to go through a long period of various groups of people insisting that they had their own special definitions of ‘gay’, ‘fag’, etc. that allegedly had nothing to do with the ordinary meanings of these words. It retrospect I think it’s clear that protests of this sort were all entirely specious (with the exception of young kids who simply didn’t know what they were saying).

[comprev]

There is a surprising amount of homophobia in Friends - possibly one of the most famous TV shows of all time.

Like the extensive racism in Fresh Prince, the homophobia in Friends is brushed aside because "it was the 90s"

[pastage]

Yes in Sweden I did it in 1990 even though I grew up in an evironment were being homosexual was normal. Still being gay was not cool in society, and they were gravely mistreated. We still have a long way to go.

[teekert]

To come to OPs defense, I also used the term gay a lot as a negative word growing up. I never knew any gay people, we just used it as an alternative for softy. My parents never explained what being gay meant, I had no openly gay relatives. I understand now it is painful for gay people and I probably did know some, they just laid low, partly because of using gay as a negative. Needless to say I don’t use the term like that anymore. But it was never consciously anti-homosexuals. Like Eminem who did a duet with Elton John to prove his point. Doesn’t make it right of course. I apologize for using the word. I also used to think nothing of black face, even defended the tradition, now I changed my mind.

[mkl]

You spent >3 hours a day just commuting? I can't imagine doing that. What did you do on the train?

[the_third_wave]

Read, work, speak to people, look out of the window, drink some tea, nothing at all - there are many ways to spend time in a train. The commute would have been just as long (if not longer) by car but that would be time wasted instead of time for myself. Seeing those traffic jams from behind the train window (in the morning, by the time I went home the evening rush was already over) just was the icing on the cake, imagine sitting there in a tin can, waiting for the tin can in front of you to move, with another tin can behind you waiting for you to move...

[emodendroket]

If my commute were 3 hours, regardless of mode, I'd either move or find a new job.

[the_third_wave]

I did, eventually, first by going to Canada and Alaska to paddle the Yukon down to the Bering strait, then to Sweden 'cause I met a Swedish girl. Had I not met her I'd have moved to Canada instead, that was my original plan. But... the job was fun, it paid well, I was single, I bought a house which I sold for twice the price after 6 years (before I moved to Sweden) so in that respect everything worked out as intended. I would not do this at this time and place given that I'm not single, I have children, I live on a farm in the woods and I have gigabit fibre which makes it possible to reach the world at the speed of light...

[fxtentacle]

In Germany you can buy a yearly subscription for your daily commute train and that comes with a reserved seat and table and power plug for charging your laptop. From my observations, people are usually finishing powerpoint slides and answering emails during their commute.

[the_third_wave]

I had a Dutch "OV Jaarkaart", a pass which is valid in all forms of public transport in the whole country, at any time. No reserved seats and no power plugs in the 90's of the last century, laptops were not as common as they are now and I got quite a few looks when I hooked up a Sony mobile brick to mine to remotely dial in to my box in the IT cave we called home. I usually wrote articles and proposals, hacked on random stuff or tried to build software I'd found on freshmeat.net or elsewhere.

[masklinn]

> You spent >3 hours a day just commuting?

Sad to say but a lot of people have car commutes in that range. The Bay has tens of thousands of "supercommuters" whose commute is 90mn or above.

In Europe train commutes in that range are probably more reasonable: you can sleep in the train (super common for the early HSRs), or it can count as part of your work-day (e.g. handle your mail or whatever, a good train seat often works just as well as an office desk).

I've known quite a few people who worked in large cities but wanted to live in the countryside (or at least in smaller cities, way out from even what's usually considered suburbs), they'd take regional or even high-speed train into and out of paris. Not necessarily cheap (especially if you take HSR), but frequent rider and (usually) company contribution made that surprisingly realistic.

[sameerds]

Not the GP, but I used to commute two hours each way for college in Mumbai (including a switchover and long walks to/from the train stations). Used some of that time to finish assignments if I got a seat!

[vanderZwan]

More likely twice a week: at the start of the weekend when going home to parents (and their washing machine), and at the end of it when going back to uni.

[the_third_wave]

Nope, 5 days a week, left home around 07.00, came home around 21.00. I even had a washing machine all of my own together with a house to put it in. I actually had a washing machine as a student as well, it was old but it worked - until a house mate destroyed it, that is.

[hamburglar]

What did you teach that washing machine? :)

[runarberg]

When I lived in the Mission in San Francisco 10 years ago, I found rollerblades to be the best way of traveling medium distances in the city (e.g. to the Civic Center). I didn’t have a safe place to store a bike, busses are super slow (and if I’m going longer distances, I can take them off and hop on a muni). I never heard of the homophobia angle either.

[foldr]

‘Homophobia’ is the standard term in English for prejudice against gay people. It does not mean ‘fear of homosexuals’ (regardless of etymological considerations).

[Supermancho]

> It does not mean ‘fear of homosexuals’ (regardless of etymological considerations).

It does mean "fear of being perceived as homosexual". There are backwards people. The stigma that some may ascribe, is rarely removed. If they are in a position of power, this can hurt you professionally or socially, despite modern moral standards.

[hamburglar]

Fear of being perceived as a homosexual is a type of homophobia, but homophobia is not necessarily a fear of being perceived as a homosexual.

[Supermancho]

I don't think most people are arguing about that. Some post that puts forth "it doesn't mean this it means that" can be charitably added to with additional interpretation rather than "wrong. it's THIS". Dead-end true-scotsman argument.

[foldr]

I think you’ve got slightly the wrong end of the stick. No-one thinks that rollerblading went out of style because people were afraid of gay people. So the OP’s inaccurate (or at best overly narrow) assumption regarding what ‘homophobia’ means is leading them to misunderstand the claim about what happened. These days the term ‘homophobia’ is very rarely used to refer to a literal phobia of gay people.

(The OP said ‘fear of homosexuals’, not ‘fear of being perceived as homosexual’.)

[hamburglar]

Except I am literally responding to your very specific claim:

> It does mean "fear of being perceived as homosexual".

It doesn’t mean that. It can refer to that, but that is not what homophobia means.

[emodendroket]

"Homophobia" also refers to more generally negative attitudes about homosexuality, not just the fear the name suggests.

[smnrchrds]

To add to this, -phobia suffix is used to express aversion, not just fear. For example, hydrophobicity.

[xyzzy21]

It's definitely an American thing.

The primary cause of hating disco in the 1970s was that it was gays, blacks and latinos who were associated with it. And that and corporatization of music by the very same boomers that's kept disco dead in the US since. And yet the REST of the world kept disco and reincarnated it into several genres of electronica.

So I wouldn't be surprised.

[brandall10]

I was a skater from '85-'89 in the San Fernando Valley.

I remember there being a narrow lane of what was cool... most activities that weren't skateboarding weren't, because it was a lifestyle, and if you weren't fully dedicated to it and had a good sense of what was currently accepted in the brands/decks, clothing, how you setup your board, etc, you could quickly be labeled a poseur. And this was a moving target. If you skated a Hawk board in '85 it was okay... but by '87, you should have been riding Santa Monica Airlines, and legacy brands were not cool. By '89 it was H-Street and having an SMA deck could be a questionable choice.

Some of my friends and I bought some rollerblades as they hit the scene but didn't really get into it in any meaningful way, just riding in our neighborhood and at the local skating rink. We wouldn't be caught riding them out in the wider public lest we could be seen and ridiculed by one of the other skater gangs in the area.

[hef19898]

I used to be a street skater in the mid nineties in a small German town. Was pretty cool, doing all the street skating stuff. And we made sure to not be associated with "Rollerbladers", the guys and girls (obviously girls were different so) using the stoppers to brake. It stopped being cool so, no idea why exactly. Hell, we even had people with home made half and quarter pipes in their backyards back then...

[neilv]

That sounds like, instead of those skaters being free individualists or rebels, they were excessively controlled commercial consumers.

If so, how did that happen, in that case?

[klipt]

That sounds like a riddle. Do the trendsetters control fashion, or does fashion control the trendsetters?

It's probably a complex dynamical interaction.

The fact that the favored brands kept changing though, suggests to me that the corporations weren't exactly in control (otherwise the first winning brand would have presumably preferred to permanently monopolize the market).

[neilv]

Why does fashion of the kind "this is the look right now" and "that look is so last season" exist?

To what degree would we do fashion naturally, if there weren't parties looking to exploit fashion dynamics for selfish advantage?

[klipt]

Dr Seuss explained it in "The Sneetches", it's all about status signalling.

> if there weren't parties looking to exploit fashion dynamics for selfish advantage?

What parties are those, the elites using fashion to signal higher status, the people selling the elites the latest fashion, or the underdogs trying to catch up to what the elites are wearing so they can attain high status too? Aren't they all following selfish motives?

[brandall10]

The shift usually was to newer, smaller, more underground I guess companies with the best up and coming skaters. Skate mags/vids were a big part of this. There was always a sense of transition and growth, esp for street as people did more aggressive things.

So yes, there was a commercial aspect to it, but from a marketing sense, it was driven by being iconoclastic, being super in tune with where the industry was heading and style/trends/tricks/skaters was heading.

Being a rebel is chucking away societal norms, and I do feel that was how most skaters felt back then… you were definitely in a bubble.

[analog31]

I suspect that it has to do with any trend that gets too big, and the only antidote is to make the rules into a moving target. This happened with punk rock when I was into that. At some point, the punk bands rebelled against punk fashion, and started showing up in worn but otherwise regular looking street clothes.

[odessacubbage]

inliners got a reputation for waxing the absolute shit out of spots which is considered a somewhat major party foul, especially in the more cloistered, local centric skate scenes of the 90s and early 2000s. bmxers were disliked for similar reasons; pegs absolutely destroy ledges. there is also the perpetual problem of access to a limited resource, i've observed my dad going through similar flame wars concerning motorized and non motorized access to backcountry trails, albeit he called hikers the trail gestapo rather than fags. i imagine similar cultural clashes can be observed around lake and beachside hobbies and the tensions between skiiers and snowboarders, bolt vs trad climbers, etc are well documented. skateboarding has always been run by and for 16 year old boys, which is the way it should be, and they labeled these things with the vernacular they knew. if it's any consolation, that kid with the shaved head & blind jeans who called you a fruitbooter in 1995 probably called his dad, his biology teacher and anyone else within earshot names that were several magnitudes worse.

also in a final twist of irony, skateboarding's transition into an olympic sport with leagues and rules has put it under the control of world skate, a rollerblading organization.

>https://skateboarding.transworld.net/news/from-bad-to-worse-...

[pram]

That reminds me, absolutely everything had loads of wax when those Soap grinding shoes were popular too lol

[bobbytit]

Yeah, I think the fruitbooting label killed it more than just that one joke.

[fao_]

> Skaters started calling rollerblades "fruit boots" and that killed it for a lot of people who didn't want to associated with something seen as weak and "gay".

Their problem, a lot of fellow queer people rollerblade and they have a hell of a time.

It's actually extremely funny how homophobes will stop having fun specifically because something gets coded as queer. Like they're deliberately cutting off their nose to spite their face.

[toxik]

I think people who don’t want to be called gay are homophobes. It seems like you implied that though. It’s very normal to not want to do things that make you unpopular.

[fao_]

> I think people who don’t want to be called gay are homophobes. It seems like you implied that though.

If someone stops doing a hobby just because they are being called gay, that is homophobic, yes. Someone who is not homophobic wouldn't give a shit, and wouldn't view being called gay as implicitly bad.

If people started insulting them in a non-homophobic way, it is unlikely that that would be viewed as a reason to stop the hobby by many people. In fact, in 'nerd culture' the insults are viewed as a badge of honour of sorts -- these people do not stop programming, electrical engineering, and hyperfocusing on Star Wars just because they are being insulted. This largely only happens with hobbies that are considered gay or otherwise 'feminine', because being called one of those are viewed as worse than just being insulted, and the reason for that is implicit homophobia.

There's a good tangential argument here as to the social and cultural forces that led to 'blading' being dropped en masse: https://toldandretold1.medium.com/the-great-blading-bubble-h...

[Buttons840]

Or maybe they just don't want people to be mean to them. If someone kindly tells me I do something that seems gay, but is otherwise kind to me, I probably wouldn't care. If someone is calling me gay to be mean, there's probably other mean things they're doing too, and I won't like it.

[cortesoft]

Do you mean "I don't think"? The rest of your comment makes it seem like you do.

[grawprog]

Yeah, that's pretty much how it was. I remember not wanting to rollerblade much after my friends started getting into skateboarding for that reason. That and they were inconvenient because you had to carry your shoes around with you or the rollerblades once you changed to your shoes. It was easier, and cooler looking, to carry a skateboard. I do remember enjoying them though. They were fun to rip around on.

I did grow out of skateboarding though, then that longboarding craze came out and I never really got into it.

Funny enough, these days, I'd probably be more willing to go rollerblading somewhere than skateboarding if I had the chance.

[cowmix]

I had no idea, how stupid.

This makes me want to get a pair now.

[watwut]

Skateboarding has a culture of hating anyone else having fun and liking something that is not "properly difficult". Now they hate scooters for being "too easy".

And it is ridiculous every single time.

[pram]

Scooter hate also isn’t new, they were popular in the very early 00s

[WalterBright]

When I was young, skateboarding was considered something only kids did, something you grew out of. Of course, the boards in those days were pretty primitive, just roller skate wheels on fixed axles.

[ThrowMeXY]

It's definitely an American thing. It did not stop me from roller blading here in Europe, but it's always in the back of my head.

Proof: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/tvshowbiz/video-1217603/Th...

[NicoJuicy]

I bladed A LOT when I was younger, still take it out sometimes.

And your argument is new to me ( Belgium), I've never witnessed any harassment.

[amelius]

> also it was viewed as a "gay" activity in a much more homophobic time in society.

There's hockey on rollerblades, I'm sure there's nothing "gay" about that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roller_hockey

[boomboomsubban]

There is, I'm sure plenty of roller hockey players are gay.

That said, though roller hockey uses rollerblades, I would view it as a separate hobby from roller blading.

[mdip]

I'm surprised I've never heard of this, but looking back,... it fits.

Back in the late 90s, myself and a few friends popped on our first pair of inlines[0]. I think years of attending "skating parties" as school events designed to give parents a day out and kids an opportunity to be a problem made switching from quads to inlines very easy. We discovered we could much more easily pull of various tricks on inlines that were more challenging in quads due to the range of ankle motion that inlines allow.

My friends and I became a bit obsessed. At one point, I dropped $240 for a set of high-end indoor ABEC-9 bearings. I owned several sets of wheels with different hardness/size and some nice wrist guards and knee/elbow pads, the latter used only when trying to learn tricks that were obviously challenging -- the rule is that it is far more cool to do something dangerous in a manner that maximizes injury if you fail, I guess (no helmets -- that was way uncool!). Kind of amazed I didn't end up with a closed-head injury as a kid with that thinking... I did land a concussion at one point.

I can say somewhat reliably that, at least where I'm from, I don't recall anyone ever indicating that the reason they don't skate is because "it's gay![2]", or specifically pointing out that "I must be gay because I use inlines" -- not that having the "SO GAY" thrown around at me was all that unusual. I don't think you could have guy friends in HS in the 90s without a constant barrage of "you're gay" accusations.

I think the hurling of "gay" had a lot to do with: It takes a reasonable amount of skill to learn -- and there are a reasonable number of people who will give up. As popularity increases, the number of people who get frustrated increases. Not wanting to be left out of a trend, they employ shame/reverse-fanboi-ism to knock those who have mastered it/enjoy it down a peg and encourage them to do activities that the shamer can participate in.

There was a bit of "parent's make it uncool" to it, too. My 50 year old dad took up inline skating for a year. But I think it's more than just "when old people start doing it, it's uncool". This happened in my HS in the 90s with skiing. Where I live, ski/snowboard clubs in HS are common (despite having very little worth skiing on other than an abundance of snow). I watched during High School as skiing became "uncool" (in my HS, I'm sure it was "gay!") -- far more than half of those in ski club were snowboarding. Snowboarding was a much less expensive way to get on the slopes. Parents pushed their kids that way when discovering that purchasing a pair of usable (new[3]) skis, boots, poles and bindings was twice as much as the proliferation of lower-end boards that we started seeing early on. And the nerdier kids tended to have wealthier parents and tended to buy skis. It's, arguably, more difficult to learn to ski, as well[4].

It happened with hover boards, though for different reasons... almost the opposite. They used to be very expensive, but then a mess of them were dumped in the US. Enough of them caught fire to give the whole category a bad name and many had a design aesthetic that would universally appeal to a 12-year-old girl, but nearly nobody else. You'd think it would be possible to ride a device like this and not look like a person with too much disposable income and is so lazy that they'll risk explosion over walking but I haven't seen anyone on a segway-like-hoverboard (Ginger!) that didn't result in me thinking that, myself. This would have been a device pretty much made for a guy like me -- I was initially excited when the prices were reaching $300, but by then the bottom fell out and I had no interest in ever owning one.

I own/love my OneWheel (Pint), which seems like a hoverboard/e-scooter/skatebaord but is in a category on its own. I'm wondering if these will (or haven't already) landed in the category of "uncool". I believe there's potential for it, but there's a few things that are unique about these that I can't say confidently I have any idea what the future holds. They're expensive. They're really strange to learn to ride -- everyone I have taught has said the same thing "10-15 minutes of feeling like you will never be able to learn this thing, followed by an almost immediate jump to confident riding" (shortly thereafter, confidence exceeds actual ability, you nose-dive, and don't ride it for a little while/have a quick trip to the ER).

The only differences with this product and others that were fad-worthy is that the age of riders is extremely variable. I've met a lot of riders in my area -- many are older than 40, most above 30, one is 70[5]. I rarely see someone riding one (regardless of age) without a helmet. I think it has one major inoculation to the incoming "LAME!" label. People make the mistake of thinking this thing is "self-balancing", easy to ride/master and safe. I'd be tempted to respond to the challenge by offering my board up with a simple "It's self-balancing -- wanna give it a try before knocking it?" and then posting the results to YouTube. That's a challenge that doesn't work with inlines.

FWIW: if my kids are any indication, "That's so gay" is the thing that's being shamed. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of homophobia among the older boys in HS, but I felt pretty good when my son's friend called a video game "gay" and my son turned right around and said "it's the GAYEST!" rolling his eyes, shutting down his friend -- my oldest is 6'2" and is popular with the girls at his school. While you may never really know at this age, I don't believe he's ever questioned his sexuality. And he's a really good kid -- certainly not innocent of these kinds of things, himself, but very clever and has a good heart -- it made me a little proud watching him shame his friend trying to shame him using a slur.

[0] I'm being pedantic but Rollerblade brand skates were pretty shoddy, even staying way away from the skate-shop high-end inlines -- there were very few that had aluminum frames, all used the lowest end ABEC-5/7 bearings (nobody puts good bearings in, even today) and K2 made a much more comfortable boot.

[1] "Girls only like guys who have great skills!" - Napoleon Dynamite

[2] The author's observations of the late 90s, at least where I lived, is accurate -- "gay" was the chosen slur for anything that was "extremely uncool".

[3] The smart ones scoured Salvation Army stores (no Craigslist), purchased a banged up set that still beat the rentals, and took it to a ski shop to get sharpened/serviced. My mom was smart ... I had $30 skis that were amazing.

[4] This was not my personal experience, but I jumped to skiing for a reason -- I learned very quickly to ditch the poles. I was very confident on inlines by this point and an adjustment in thinking made me realize that inline skating and skiing involve the same balancing skills/muscles. I had not been into skateboards, and had learned to balance while moving sideways.

[5] And he's a bit of a terror on it -- I have broken ribs and taken some falls that, at 70, would have stood a chance of killing me.