A cool challenge popped up on the Tech Poi Group on Facebook about two weeks ago: the possibility of doing a triquetra hybrid that would incorporate the plane-bent triangle flower I've showed off now in a couple videos. David Foregger was kind enough to model it using his poi simulator and based on that I was able to sort out this pattern. The triangle here needs some cleaning up, but the gist of the move is definitely there. With the polishing I think this will be a really cool looking hybrid.

techblog193.mp4

At Burning Man, Noel showed me this nifty combo that included elements of a number of different tricks that have showed up on this blog in the past few months and filled in a couple of the gaps between them in some very creative ways. This combo involves doing a pair of inspin vs antispin stalls that one then transforms into a hybrid before using the resulting alignment to create a horizontal stack. Tricky, but fun!

techblog190.mp4

Kris Valles sent me a request a couple months ago for a tutorial on how to do this move out of a Nicky Evers video. It's not terribly hard, but it does teach some nifty body mechanics. It also results in one hell of a shitty night if you get motion sickness from it as I did ;)

techblog187.mp4

Last week, a poi spinner by the name of Joe Graff stopped into DC and e6 and I got the chance to hang out and spin with him in Malcolm X Park. He showed off a type of stacking I'd seen in videos but hadn't quite parsed out, but when performed in person realized represented an approach to compounding horizontal stacks that opened the door for switching up the alignments of poi and hand in many of the stacks that we play with.

techblog185.mp4

This is a little bit of an experiment in interactivity with this vlog. I've played a lot in recent videos with the concept of a hybrid family--a move that will interlock with other moves at a specific or multiple positions. I've take this idea to the point where I can take some of my favorite moves and at each of the 4 compass points be able to transition to a completely different type of move. In this vid I demo triquetra vs pendulum and use it to switch to a point isolation, a windmill, a horizontal stack, and a unit circle hybrid.

techblog183.mp4

A couple weeks ago I started playing with a variant on a stacking move I've seen Mel and Poiboi play with, but changed what I perceived the timing and direction of the pattern to be. The result felt asymmetric and so after learning it on both sides, I set about figuring out how to switch between them using a wallplane flower in antispin. I then realized it fits in well with the hybrid family I demoed a couple tech blogs back and threw in a triquetra vs pendulum for good measure.

techblog177.mp4

Included in this odds and ends collection: a few variants on horizontal pendulum stall stacking and by popular demand some of the Arashi tech I've had on the blog lately rendered with glow so you can see the trails of the poi as they go along. Finally, a nifty hybrid e6 and I worked on this weekend--taking Arashi tech and hybridizing it with trochoid spinning. The result is ultra bizarre, but I think looks really cool.

techblog173.mp4

Here's another hybrid family based upon a particular poi orientation--this one being hands together and poi apart. Triquetra vs pendulum, Mel's horizontal stack, point isolation walking, and stall chasers all make use of this alignment. Like the other hybrid families I've demonstrated on this video blog, it's a great tool for transitions.

techblog171.mp4

Beginning the process of downloading all the tech from the past three weeks. This is a trick that Asaf (Poiboi) came up with that we used for a lot of our tunneling both at Kinetic and at Firedrums. The idea is to take horizontal cateye vs isolation and utilize some horizontal stacking to switch to the same move on the other side of the body. The spacing works due to that quirk of antispin flowers wherein they put the poi a unit circle distance apart 1/6th of the way around the handpath.

techblog166.mp4

This is an expansion of an idea from a previous video: when you take 3 downbeat flowers and perform them at a 2-poi length handpath, 1/6 of the way around the handpath there is a point where the distance between the intercept for the hand and its reflection across the horizontal axis of the pattern is one poi length. If we vary the combinations and phasing of 3 downbeat patterns, we wind up creating the alignments of all the major unit circle hybrids. Here are 4 examples of how this cool quirk of geometry can be used. Major thanks to Charlie for the help in figuring this one out.

techblog164.mp4