if the point of this thread is to air unpopular opinions and make embarrassing admissions then here are mine:
i own a thank you deck (not really my fault but still)
i got brian wenning's stance wrong watching the dc video as a kid (who does switch back 3s off shit?) and thought he was really boring until quite recently (now one of my all time faves)
i also thought photosynthesis and mosaic were really boring. (like both now, but prefer mosaic by quite a lot, which i guess is not the 'right' way around).
a lot of other skaters probably deserve a slice of the adoration i spend on tom penny, but i've made my delusional fanboy bed and i'm not getting up
i don't have that many strong opinions about skating. pretty much everyone on any team is fucking amazing and i enjoy almost all of them more or less. i prefer a gustav tonneson or a dylan hughes to a nyjah or a shane, but if the energy drink elite drop parts, i'll watch with my jaw on the floor.
for ages i was insistent that the way fs and bs nollie tricks are labelled was backwards and refused to go along with it, but now i've converted i can see that the majority were actually right all along.
its a bit hypocritical seeing as i often feel like focusing/throwing my board just trying flat-ground tricks at walking pace, but i always think it looks suuuuuuuppper wack when pros have a full meltdown in public. couldn't stomach AVE for years just based on that intro where he helicopters his board towards that kid. (like him now though). that's one of my fave things about penny - total lack of stress. like that clip where he's trying kf manny fs pivot to fakie manny fs kf out. a really tech trick by his standards and he keeps getting robbed but just finds it funny.
deep down i know the real reason i find the vhs aesthetic so annoying is the simple fact that if kids are fetishising obsolete technologies that were a completely mundane aspect of my own childhood, that means i am officially old.
ethan fowler has awful style. fight me. (please don't).
for the most part, i find it really hard to enjoy those videos from the mid 90s where its all mongo pushing and 8 trick lines with like two ledge basic ledge tricks and a load of filler - all with an exclusively hip hop soundtrack and no attempt whatsoever to edit the footage so that it syncs with the track. would rather watch the worst of the early 90s do-a-late-flip-noseblunt-on-a-parking-block or the worst of the early 2000s do-a-feeble-on-a-10-stair-handrail-four-times-in-the-same-part than that stuff.
...
on the 3flip discussion, i agree with flintstagram, but would reiterate what others have said about the front foot actually having a pretty important role. if you actually flick through your ankle like on a kf then yeah, you'll end up with a double vflip - but if you just kind of stiffen it a little it'll help keep the board ahead of you. the back foot also has to help with that. scoop hard sure, but not too sideways - use your toes to shoot the tail under you rather than behind you.*
*i land less than one in ten 3flips so my advice is probably worthless, but my attempts are always good enough that i at least look like i can 3flip. so if that's a landmark you're aiming for...