So if I've uploaded the right video (the computer I'm currently on won't view mp4 videos, so I'm making a guess at which video on the camera is the right one), you should all be seeing a transition from a cross-shaped plane shift to CAP vs. pendulum utilizing essentially an inverted linear isolation and a isolated pendulum to line the poi up the proper way to go into pendulum vs. CAP and back. Really, though, it was just an excuse to shoot a tech blog my first few days here in Kenya. Enjoy! :)

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Having played a little bit more with the concept of toroidal flowers I looked at in #100, I'm beginning to believe that they may lack a distinction between antispin and inspin variants. Specifically, it seems that no matter how I orient the rotation of the poi head to my hand as I turn with them, it results in the same number of downbeats and thus I'm pretty sure the same distance traveled by the poi head.

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Hooray! Lucky number 100! There have been some awesome tricks and some awful ones...some weeks when I had no idea what to post and some when I physically couldn't record enough video for all the ideas I had. Through it all I really have appreciated all the support and encouragement from the larger community out there. Thanks so much for tuning in, challenging me, learning, and teaching me!

techblog100.mp4

I've spent a big portion of the past week trying to polish my plane shifts from antispin flowers to horizontal plane antispins and I wanted to share a couple of the drills I've been doing to get there. Mostly I've been taking same-time opposites flowers and plane shifting out of the sideways stalls and then executing a 90 degree turn. Being as how there are two directions of same time opposites antispin flowers to work with, the big mind-bender I've been working on this past week is switching between these two types with every turn.

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At Wildfire I got a good chance to run my transition theory through the ringer and I got some great feedback from some folks I really respected about it. One of the more fun collaborations was Sunday with Charlie and Justin. Charlie and I essentially hadn't slept and spent most of the day working out the theoretical framework in which hard, soft, and mixed transitions could be applied to plane bending and shifting. We came up with a couple new moves neither of us had ever seen before and laid the foundation for what I hope will be a really nifty expansion of the theory. Thanks, guys! :)

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Before I take off for Firedrums for the week, I wanted to post a little tech bit I got the inspiration for last week. We take G's hybrid stall out of the C-CAP as the root of a plane shift into CAPs behind the back and head. Arms are same-time opposites and poi are split-time same direction. Done cleanly I think this would make for a real eye-popping stunt and it sets up perfectly for returning to the original C-CAP in wheel plane.

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A couple months ago I posted a video using plane-bends to switch between inspin and antispin flowers. G saw the vid and suggested I try the same technique in split-time same direction, so here it is! My right side isn't as clean as my left side, but I still think it's a cool effect. Enjoy!

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Things have been busy down under! If you're not familiar with Aussie poi auteur Pineapple Pete, you should give a look to this fascinating video from a couple years ago showing off some of his experiments at the "Church of Poi".

 First up, a tip last week from a commenter on this blog gave me a critical piece of the puzzle for the isolated weave. It's not perfect, but it's at least recognizable as what it is now. Next, based upon the concept of doing a plane-bent "asterisk" like G does, at a recent spin jam it was suggested that one could think of the radiating spokes as behaving like the petals in flowers, so here are examples of two timing and direction combinations of this idea.

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After demoing the around the head meltdown last week, I got a comment from one person asking about performing the meltdown as a fountain. While I think that conceptually the two are different enough that a straight-up combination of these moves is not possible, there is a way to perform a similar maneuver by using Alien Jon's concept of body zones. Demoed here are a couple ways to play with this concept. Next up, I'm getting to be relatively happy with my transitions from isolation to lockout, so I'm starting to work through an isolated weave.

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