This is one of those really obvious a ha moments I can't believe I didn't catch onto earlier: most of the transitions out of triquetra vs pendulum I've played with thus far have been at either the top, bottom, or side positions of the move. But if you attempt a transition at 45 degrees off of the top position, the poi heads are in the perfect position for a quarter-time transition! Here are three patterns that make use of this phenomenon.

techblog253.mp4

While I was in Boulder, Alien Jon and I spent an evening playing around with some movements based around creating right angles with inspin stalls and pendulums. Here are a couple variants we played with and a couple transitions one can use to get in and out of them.

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This was a fun journey: over the weekend my friend Sean Stogner in New York reminded me of a move Marvin Ong and I had worked on in center camp at Burning Man this past year. It's a variant of the diamond split into two triquetras but each hand is working a different split, so they overlap in a quadrant. After experimenting with switching which hand was doing which split, I realized it was leading toward a third-order motion in which the hands would chase each other while the poi phased between quarter and split-time same direction.

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This is something Charlie showed me nearly a year ago and that I hadn't really been working on that hard until recently. Geometrically, it's possible to go through each vertex of an octahedron without repeating any segments and Charlie had created an exercise wherein one does plane-shifts between each of these vertices to define an octahedron via constant 90 degree shifts. Here I demo two of the easier variants in same time same direction, split time same direction, and Charlie's preferred method of quarter-time. Be forewarned: this shit is hard!

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I started playing with this trick earlier in the week...it incorporates elements of the quarter-time floats/stalls that Poiboi and Mel have been using, but drops in and out of a horizontal cateye vs isolation antibrid at each end. I've been sticking pendulum vs CAPs in the same spot and figured I would just skip the middle figure. I like that it has an interesting start-stop dynamic to it.

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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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After posting tech blog #71, I realized I could easily take the top stall that was giving me so many problems and use it to transition into the pendulum stall down maneuver I already had down to create kind of a funky waterfall effect. As was pointed out in comments, this move also provides an excellent point of entry for Ronan's pendulum stall stacking move from BJC--that transition is demoed here as well.

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For a few weeks I'm going to change my format a little bit and rather than doing a weekly update with all the tricks I've been working on, do updates for individual tricks. It should keep my running time down and mean more frequent updates. Sound off in the comment section and tell me if you like the change or not.

techblog71.mp4

My first doubles video! Be kind...:)

Not the greatest doubles routine in history--I get tripped up in this one a lot, but I at least wanted to show off some of the fun stuff I've learned since I picked up doubles back in February. I recorded this one right after my most recent poi flow video on Sunday afternoon at the Malcolm X park drum circle.

flowpractice9-28-09doubles.mp4