This past week, Zan posted a great video on diagonal planes that included an exercise that does an amazing job of cleaning up diagonals--seriously, well done :) Playing with diagonals has me thinking about having planes offset by degree differences other than 0, 90 or 180, and here is an example of plane switching between planes at are offset by degrees based in 3 or 5 rather than 4. Next, over the weekend, Chris Rovo showed me a pattern he'd been working on wherein an atomic flower switches to atomic weave and over to another atomic flower.

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Over the weekend, Zan posted an excellent tutorial video on diagonal planes, those bizarre bits of techery that came out of EJC this past summer. Zan breaks it down in such a way that it'll help you figure out how to keep your planes straight, some very basic diagonal transitions, and how to execute some pretty mean-looking turns with them. If this stuff intrigues you like it does, me give this vid a gander:

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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Over the weekend I made a trip up to Pittsburgh to listen to a good friend spin some sick dubstep and while there I got to catch up with a few of my very favorite fire spinners. Here's Chris Rovo throwing out some incendiary tech at the after party.

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I'm taking a week off from last week's theory-intensive video to show off a couple tricks I've been playing with in the interrim. First off is a combo: meltdown - under the leg throw - 1.5 - antispin flower - spiral wrap. If you can nail the throw, the rest of it flows together incredibly smoothly. Next, after seeing the videos coming out of Russia from the Antispinners crew, I'm working to make my antispin flowers and stall switches to change direction cleaner.

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Over the weekend I made a trip up to Pittsburgh to listen to Mr. Jennings spin some sick dubstep and while there I got to catch up with a few of my very favorite fire spinners. Here's Conway busting out some gorgeous tech poi in the backyard at the after party.

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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).

A couple weeks ago I posted a video conjecturing a new framework for understanding how poi hybrids are constructed--namely that they are examples of poi motion retaining multiple combinations of timing and direction. I've had a couple holes in this theory pointed out to me and I've come to see additional holes myself, so I'm putting together a breakdown of why my theory was flawed as well as laying the groundwork for a new theory based both upon this feedback and my own explorations.