ghotinori

Congrats Josh! I've been a huge fan of your work for ages. I have three of your prints up in my house. I was so pleased to see you won this contest! All the best to you!

Erie has a pump track!?! Sick, I guess I know what I'm going to do next time I have to drive up there to visit my mother-in-law.

26T for life, cheaper than an e-bike conversion :D

@TheGrey724: Yea, makes sense, there are so many good bike parks in Colorado though, seems like an obvious destination for someone doing a roadtrip.

Cool cool, but what about Colorado?

A fellow Evil fan I see. I've ridden a grip and a half of bikes, but I still ride my V1 Evil Insurgent more than anything, because its a party on every trail. Climbs great, descends great, but where it is the real business is on jump lines and rough landings. So predicable and poppy, I've never even bothered to upgrade the stock shock it just works so well.

Today I learned something about maritime law on Pinkbike...

Didn’t even watch the video, Brage got Blarged

2:36 is the opening drop to the Boyscout jumps in Pacifica. It's probably about a 5-8 foot drop depending on how far you send it, and has a pretty flat lander. Looks like the dude sent it on a hard tail with locked knees and racked himself, poor dude, also that is some poison oak he landed in. Anyways, that's a super fun jump trail, there is a POV video of it in my profile.

Firstly, I want to offer a huge shout-out to Corey for coming out, it takes a huge amount of courage, and it is incredibly important that high profile people come out and that it is celebrated. We need more role models, more inclusion, and more loving acceptance for everyone. There are a lot of people who seem to be confused about this in one way or another, either not realizing that coming out as gay in a intensely hetero dominated world is scary (see the dumpster fire above that I am foolishly wading into), or thinking that someone else's sexual preferences are a basis for judgement, scorn, or other hurtful and hateful actions. There is also now some discussion between if something is a "choice" or a "born trait", which might make for some great internet sparring, but is actually beside the point on multiple levels. This will get a bit philosophical, so bear with me. First, why would it matter if it is a choice? Do you hate or judge people who don't mountain bike because they don't? Consenting adults should be allowed to entertain themselves however they please, so long as nobody is getting hurt. There might be some grey area here legally, but morally there is no justification for directing judgement or hate towards someone minding their own business even if what they are doing is something you perceive as a choice. Imagine there is a group of people who believe that playing with Legos is harmful and morally wrong, and they frequently express concern about people completely unrelated to them playing with Legos, protest at Lego theme parks, and walk around with a sense that they have a moral mission to prevent people from playing Legos. Is playing with Legos a choice? It almost certainly is by most definitions (more on that later) but at the same time, Legos are fun, and it isn't right for someone to levy judgement or even worse spew hate just because they don't think Legos are good for me. I picked a lighthearted example, but the extension of this to cover any denigrated group should be pretty clear. Second, choices aren't what you think they are. This is a really common confusion, and the alcoholism comment really hits this one home for me, but its can be a difficult concept for many to navigate, especially via comments on Pinkbike, but I'll give it a shot. Any complex human behavior is always a mix of genetic factors and environmental influence, there is no "Nature or Nurture", its always both. Alcoholism and other addictive behaviors are well understood to be a response to trauma, usually childhood trauma (see In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts (https://drgabormate.com/book/in-the-realm-of-hungry-ghosts/). Every brain is different, and every trauma is different, and while there are some genetic risk factors for certain behavior disorders, there is also always an environmental aspect to these disorders. The human brain is an almost unfathomably complex network of nearly a quadrillion synapses between nearly 100 billion neurons. Your genome doesn't code the complete description of how your brain is wired, it just doesn't have enough data. Your brain is not a static network, it is changing, every second of every day, since before you were born. Everything you have ever done, and everything that has ever happened to you, has influenced the structure of your brain as it is today, and it will be slightly different tomorrow from today's activities. We all are, without hyperbole, the sum of our entire lives up to this point. What does this have to do with choice? Our choices are highly constrained by our life history, we don't approach decisions in a vacuum. Things like where we were born, who we were born to, where we went to school, what we had for breakfast and so on will influence every decision we make. The perception that someone is making a choice, literally any choice, from a place of "free will" is really an illusion. What even would be the definition of a choice in this context? Having picked one thing but presuming that we could have done otherwise would be a common definition. But you are who you are, and if we rewound the universe to be in the exact same state it was before you made your "choice", you would choose the same thing again. If the conditions were slightly different, it wouldn't be the same "choice". This might sound like fatalism, but it's not. It is simply saying that events are either deterministic, or random, but neither of those gives rise to our perception that we are choosing something by "free will". If people aren't really free to choose, then on what basis can we judge or condemn them. The burden is on all of us to make the world the best place we possibly can, and approaching all other humans with loving kindness is a solid start. I think its time to stop looking for justifications for judgement on both sides of this realize that we are all so much more the same than we are different.