Suddenly, almost at a flick of a Silicon Valley switch, it was like we were able to get plugged into ALL of snowboarding. It, too, was a beautiful thing. Until that point, to be able to see what the riders outside the biggest movie productions were cooking up, you had to either physically be there on the hill, or in their apartment when they played back grainy taped footage they’d got on a VCR.

To get shit seen by an audience beyond your pad or, at a push, your local bar, you had to have not only the bunch of expensive camera- and computer equipment, you needed a network of people to distribute and cheerlead your movie across the territories. People making films those days needed to be damned good at making moving pictures of snowboarding, have a cutting edge roster of riders backed up by sponsors who could support a season of full send, or be an excellent blagger. Preferably a combination of all three.

“Suddenly, almost at a flick of a Silicon Valley switch, it was like we were able to get plugged into ALL of snowboarding.”

But sadly, like a piece of fruit left out in the sun too long, flies gathered, the beauty began to wither and it all got a bit mouldy. All of a sudden things moved from being constantly plugged into your favourite rider’s haps, to being inundated by good – but certainly not exceptional – video footage from all and sundry. And a lot of it is, well, wank.

Don’t get me wrong. I love, and will (often perhaps against my better judgement) want to champion up-and-coming Euroboarders who show some promise. I’m also conscious that I am a large part of the problem that I’m currently ranting about. We get a tonne of young bucks firing us their edits every day, of varying degrees of quality. And the thing is – whether they’re flicking my love button or making me want to write an article linking snowboarding videography and masturbation –  they generally contain pretty damned good snowboarding. But increasingly, I am – and I can tell you are, and probably even they are – becoming desensitised to all this.

Contrary to even a decade ago, nowadays there are SO many people who are bonkers good at snowboarding, and it seems all of them now make edits of their season, or even their days. It’s great, but in many ways it’s reminiscent of that quote by the wisest of the sages: Dash, from The Incredibles. “Everyone’s special,” says his mother. To which he retorts: “Which is just another way of saying no one is.”

A rider committing their best tricks to film, bundling them together and setting them to a tune heard in a skateboard video recently is a great way to clean one’s pipes, but unless the rider in question is pentacorking onto multikinked rails in a warzone, the chances are tricks alone will not be enough to titillate anyone other than themselves and their most special friends. Perhaps leaving such self-stroking on the harddrive, or the apex of the ego’s digital five-knuckle shuffles – the personal Instagram account – would be the way to go.

“Contrary to even a decade ago, nowadays there are SO many people who are bonkers good at snowboarding, and it seems all of them now make edits of their season, or even their days.”

That’s not to suggest I’m railing against online parts, looking wistfully to the past and wishing we could turn back time. That’s another article entirely, but there have been plenty of internet edits in recent years that are still memorable and, basically in my opinion, not wank – Think Alex Tank’s Hypocrisa, Ethan Morgan’s Sponsor Me Tape, the Fat & Furious brothers stuff, Arthur Longo’s Side Hits Euphoria, Christian Haller’s Memoires Memoires and anything from the Yawgoons, ever…

What these and others of their non-wank ilk have in common is in that each case thought, effort, imagination, time, skill and love popped the disco biscuits and have six-wayed their path to online snowboard edit Nirvana. They’ve been the edit making equivalent of cooking a fancy dinner, turning the lights low, and cranking up Barry White.

So, yes. There’s certainly too much wank, but – male or female – as a species we like to wank; wank is nice, and as someone I know once claimed, an excellent way to pass the time on long solo drives. Instagram was built on wankers wanking, and us media types are certainly wankers who have been guilty of promoting the monkey-spanking more than we probably should.

Hey, it’s easy to get carried away! If anything we’re the biggest wankers of the lot because your wank adds to our wank, which makes a super-hyper-ultra-mega-wank that can occasionally mean that we can keep on wanking. But, to paraphrase Jerome Tanon’s The Eternal Beauty of Wanking, is wank truly beautiful?

Your parents will no doubt lie to you and say that wanking is dirty, or can make you blind. Fear not, this is not true. Wanking just means that you haven’t quite got it in you at that moment to do it properly. Try to do it properly.

Make love, not wank.