"Let’s review what the Poster Posse is currently bitching about."
When the great Sam George speaks, we listen. When he types, we read and marvel. The former Surfer Magazine senior editor and current The Inertia contributor, has seen more, done more, learned and forgotten more about this surf life than anyone and, thus, surf website commenters woke up this morning feeling sad.
In a scorching op-ed, Nia Peeples’ ex-husband absolutely savaged “petty, whiny, constantly complaining cry-baby” observers, declaring:
Take a quick scroll though the typical comment section on popular surfing sites (with the exception of the one you’re currently visiting, occasionally shamed for its generally positive tone) and let’s review what the Poster Posse is currently bitching about. Professional competitive surfing really takes a beating, the WSL World Championship Tour, especially, held accountable for crimes ranging from holding contests at shitty surf spots like Pipeline, Sunset Beach, Supertubes, Bells Beach, Margaret River, Teahupo’o, Punta Roca, Saquarema, Cloudbreak and Lower Trestles (all premier breaks that the average poster would have no chance of ever riding even a medium set wave), to blatant criteria inconsistencies, Filipe Toledo’s distain for big, dangerous waves, the patently unfair mid-season cut, Joe Turpel (on a purely existential level) and calling off the Pipe Masters because the waves were deemed too big and dangerous for Toledo’s fellow competitors, most of whom indicated that given the choice they’d rather not paddle out.
George includes two more long lists of surf website commenter depravity including “the great wave pool whinge,” the attack on adult learners and sponsors who drop surfers (“return on investment, uncool man,” the silver haired guru mocks) before defining the social sickness leading to such antagonisms before pointing out that things, in this surf life, are really good and generally above complaint before dropping the hammer:
A while back I wrote a feature strongly making the point that virtually every middle-aged surfer without a sponsor’s sticker on their board were riding their three-fin thrusters wrong. By the third response, however, the conversation had already degenerated beyond a discussion of surfboard design and took a sharp turn to the personal, with the angry, anonymous poster declaring that I was an eff-ing kook, pointing to my failed marriage to actress Nia Peeples, who played “Keani” in the cult favorite North Shore.
No comment.
Oh.
Ummmm, please disregard the Nia Peeples’ ex-husband line above.
As you were.