It's my dirty little secret that I've been working my ass off on my stalls to make those Yuta-style plane shifting stalls cleaner. While I can do them just fine if my right hand is on bottom, when my left hand is on bottom, the horizontal plane wobbles a depressingly wide amount. An interesting exercise I began playing with today was doing a pair of top-stalls, Yuta-stalling behind me, coming out as though in a bottom stall, bottom stall again, Yuta stalling once again, and coming out as though from a top stall, then reversing the whole thing.

After seeing a Nick Woolsey instructional vid on how to do the triquetra the other day, I discovered a figure I really dug under the wikipedia entry for the word triquetra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triquetra) called a Carolingian Cross, which essentially amounts to a compound interlacing triquetra. I've spent a good portion of the week dissecting the figure and trying to figure out how to render it with poi. Here are three of the options I've played with.

techblog36.mp4

Wow...seriously love this shot, Abject--thanks so much for taking these and for the great conversation on Saturday night! :)

Interesting move combo finds me while I finish up a one-pager on Twitter strategy for work: from same-time opposites do simultaneous top-stalls that stop with the hands right next to each other. Continue the movement of one while isolating the other the opposite direction it just came from, in other words switch to the "split-time" iso vs. extension hybrid with hands together. Playing around after I finish the one-pager shows it's possible, though without a mirror I reckon it's quite sloppy.

Over the weekend I bid a fond farewell to two of my favorite people in the world: Tash Kouri and Sean Stogner. They've been keeping the firespinning community going in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn for the past four years as they've been finishing up college in between starting a hoop performance troop called the Gyronauts and doing more gigs than I can count.

In my last blog posting, I noted an interesting shape based upon the triquetra I'd found in a wikipedia article and was pretty sure could be accomplished with poi--I've spent most of the past evening and day thinking through how and coming up with different approaches to it.

For most of the past year, I've called this trick a trifoil or antispin flower hybrid, yet somehow overnight the terminology switched to triquetra and I didn't know why until Nick Woolsey posted his latest online tutorial.

Last weekend at PDF, Ian (Imperial) and myself collaborated on some poi shots for Abject when he was set up near PEX the final night of the event. He'd mentioned that the shots would be up in a few days and I just went to check. While our shots are not up yet, I did stumble into something that hit me with a major flash of nostalgia: