A couple weeks ago I uploaded a tech blog defining various terms related to a discussion I was having with Alien Jon and Arashi on the Poi Theory group related to inversions and the like. I biffed it a little on defining plane facing, so here is a correction.

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Coming out of a long discussion on Tech Poi and Poi Theory on Facebook: in trying to define inversions and all the various related types of movement, three new pieces of vocab I was unfamiliar with came up. Here they are for the purposes of education and opening up the debate to everyone.

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Sorry about the crap audio--my mic decided to go on the fritz today, I'm afraid :-P Here's a couple interesting ideas that came out of a brain decompression with Alien Jon at Spin Summit this past week in Colorado. I've been trying to sort out the difference between inversions, introversions, and their various brethren, but Jon suggested I instead focus on the cross points generated by different combinations of moving the poi between the arms. It resulted in some pretty nifty shapes, so give this one a whirl.

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Watch out--this one's long! Over the weekend I experienced a few epiphanies about toroid flowers and it seemed like a good opportunity to do a video that would pull together all the different toroids I'd worked on in the past year and throw a little bit of theory out there to unite them all together into a more cohesive whole. The basis of it is thinking about toroid shapes as products of tracing the path an observer makes through space as they walk around a sphere that is moving around another object, like a planet or moon.

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A random bit of inspiration: I picked up a book a lot of friends have recommended to me at the closing sale of the Borders close to where I teach poi in Silver Spring called Quadrivium. It includes chapters on sacred geometry and platonic solids as well as a device that was the 19th century equivalent of the spirograph: the harmonograph.

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By popular request, here is the breakdown of how I do the plane-bendy diagonal thing from my last odds and ends video. It's essentially just a corkscrew with a lockout on either side that has been plane-bent to put the lockouts in a diagonal plane. One of the cool things about this, then, is that it integrates well with another diagonal plane-bending move that Alien Jon demoed in the Arizona Transmission video a couple years ago.

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Part 3 of my Arashi wrap-up series from Firedrums. In this video we talk about creating longer and larger versions of the patterns from the first two videos by using cateyes instead of static spin circles to keep the patterns from overlapping with one's body.

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Here's part two of my wrap-up from Arashi's Firedrums class. This covers how you can use the poi plane and cross points to build polygons rather than using the traditional trochoid method of defining polygon sides with an arc and corners with loops/petals. The implications of this are really cool because they allow you to build polygons that present an image in three dimensions rather than the flat shapes we normally work with.

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Here's my first tutorial breaking down some of the tech Arashi laid down in his class at Firedrums. Here we're just dealing with some basic plane-bends that create some nifty diagonal shapes and the concept of using cross points in places we don't normally stick them. You'll see more than a few ideas here that have also popped up in Alien Jon and G vids, so think of this as a basic tutorial on how to start aiming planes as much as we aim flower petals.

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