Mashing up the isobend-4 toroid with all the even-petalled flowers, here are all timing and direction combinations, including both wheel and wall plane together opposites. For the background on isobend toroids and how they relate to antibend and probend, check out this video here: http://youtu.be/IrS-NdpnEHo

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The tradition continues! Got outside to get some flow on and try out some new ideas on MLK Day in Dupont Circle here in DC.

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Took at little while to finalize all the details, but I'm proud to announce my winter 2012 poi workshop tour! In the next three months I'll be visiting, Boston, Springfield (Missouri, not Illinois), and Atlanta!

Though I've long admired them, I haven't until recently taken the plunge into really learning float throws. Here are a couple variants I spent much of the holidays working on. The first is a plane-shifting throw wherein you switch the poi into horizontal plane at the height of the float and catch them as they rotate. The other involves reversing the orientation of one's hands before catching the poi such that you catch them with one hand behind your back. Needless to say, both of these still need a lot of work.

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 After working through trying to do a mode change in same direction with Charlie's 9-square theory, I came up with an interesting solution that involves using soft transitions across a unit circle grid to switch between box and diamond mode. The idea for this is centered on isopops from hooping and more specifically how you can change circle size by treating them as adjacent circles rather than dilations of the same circle. Included is a demo of how this technique can be used to switch between iso vs cateye antibrid to static vs triquetra antibrid to iso vs extension and back again.

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Lots of requests lately for a fire vid, so here's one of me performing at an informal spin jam on Thanksgiving night. Note when I whiff a BTB 5-beat waistwrap and My ubersloppy diagonal plane attempts ;)

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This past week, Alien Jon posted a tech blog featuring a funky approach to creating compound circles that bears some similarities to Nick Woolsey's concept of no-beat windmills and how they relate to poi. As I've been playing with it, I've found it's also a funky way to create polyrhythm hybrids.

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I must have done at least a dozen takes of this video...there are a lot of ideas I wanted to cram in here and kind of sketch out the line of thinking that led me to each of the conclusions outlined here, but it's hard to do that inside of ten minutes. Ultimately if this doesn't make sense, let me know which parts specifically and I'll do my best to clarify in later videos.

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Yesterday I wrote about the many holes that had been poked in the theory of hybrid construction I posted a few weeks ago, among which are its incompatibility with any timings other than split-time or same time and the fact that it can't account for a static spin versus extension hybrid. Thus begs the question of how exactly we can define hybrids in a way that is extensible (ie, that works at any size shape we can image).