In a strange bit of zeitgeist, I ran cross the same idea from two different poi spinners who I'm relatively sure had never spoken of the idea between each other this past weekend while I was in San Francisco. When dealing with 4-sided polygons in spinning, as one tends to with antispin flowers, elliptical CAPs, and any 9-square theory items, you wind up with two similar but difficult to transition between patterns: box and diamond mode. If we expand these out to octagonal figures, however, the issues switching between modes diminishes significantly in complexity.

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I've spent a bunch of time playing with the CAP vs BTH static spin hybrid this past week and realizing the transitions in and out of it are vastly easier than I thought. In fact, one can make a very cool and clean looking transition from either extension or antispin in the direction of the poi straight into this combo and back out. In particular, I like the way this works with opposites split-time.

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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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For a large portion of the past year, I've had a massive poi mad-on for technique like Ronan McLoughlin's. He's from Cork, Ireland and has one of the most original poi spinning styles I've ever seen. Unlike most poi spinners (myself included), Ronan centers his style around stopping the momentum of the poi rather than keeping it moving, resulting in a dizzying array of stalls, pendulums, and contact work that always leaves me scratching my head.

Sorry about the audio! The mike on my flipcam isn't great, I'm afraid, but hopefully, the ideas I'm playing with here will still come across. I've been working on a way to make the now-cliche stall chase work in horizontal plane and came up with this approach which utilizes plane shifts to give us a brief moment of the poi angles straight out before one or the other has to stall down. Interestingly enough, it also yields a shape that's compatible with the quarter-time stall chasing patterns I showed off a couple weeks ago.

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Christian (Insignia) posted a series of images to his Facebook profile last week detailing a few diagrams wherein a body could transition between triquetras and cateyes in a variety of really fascinating ways. After playing around with the idea for a little while and realizing it featured a geometric concept called a vesica piscis, I worked out where playing with cateyes and triquetras using the concept could take you. Ironically, the shapes are all axially, but not radially symmetric as Christian's diagrams came out.

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Nick Woolsey and G posted a video today that featured G doing a crazy kind of hybrid stall I'd never seen before. I got to playing with it and here is a fun pattern that came out of it, switching between CAP patterns with a split buzzsaw flower.

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I got a request this past week based upon a mixed transition diagram I'd posted to Facebook for instructions on how to do one of the transitions outlined in it: namely switching from root horizontal cateye to ET vertical cateye. Primarily I'm using gravity to help in this case, but there is a way to snap the poi head vertically to do it as a mixed transition with the hand soft--it's damned hard, though.

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Last week PoiBoi07 posted a great vid with some fun triquetra and cateye hybrids performed with the static/isolating hand behind the head. Here is the same hybrid as well as a couple others I've seen that utilize a similar approach, including extensions and C-CAPs.

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Had an interesting revelation over the weekend: thus far all the work I've done on the concept of transition theory (hard and soft transitions) has been restricted to 2D epi and hypertrochoid shapes. While playing with a mixed transition CAP pattern over the weekend, I suddenly realized I could repeat the pattern without altering its character by switching to the plane behind me. Technically, such a transition means going to an ET relative to wheel plane, but it behaves like an IT due to conservation of angular momentum.

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