Following up on last week's video of the pentagram inversion, here's a similar move that's Zan's Diamond as a toroid and a couple fun combos that can be used with it. Plus which I'm playing around a bit with my format--tell me what you think!

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It took me a very long time to learn airwraps--the usual wisdom, that when you wrap up a pair poi and they automatically unwrap never really worked for me. Even more confusing to me was how some folks could wrap their poi both ways. I'd tried doing it in an introverted kind of place and had an epically hard time of it.

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This was a nifty idea hatched over the weekend: toroid pentagrams and inversions tend to be moves with the same number of beats, so can they be mashed up together? The answer apparently is yes! This took a whole lot of practice and doing to make a reality, but the result is a pentagram being used as one side of a series of inversions--a great mashup of at least three different techniques I've played with on my tech blog in the past few months.

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Following up on some of the threads from #293, here's a few weave-based moves switched into an atomic context with vertical vs horizontal planes. Funny thing: the inversion in atomics utilizes a tangle arrangement whereas these weaves utilize an atom arrangement--in other words, they possess opposite polarities, to borrow a term from Tracy Wilhelm.

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Any time two planes overlap (read: are not parallel), they overlap in one of four different ways: cranes, butterflies, atoms, or tangles. In the first three arrangements, it's possible to keep the poi rotating without interfering with each other. I'm pretty sure that any and all tangles result from the final atom shape. Here's a handy-dandy diagram that breaks this down in an easy-to-read fashion: http://www.drexfactor.com/sites/default/files/atomicclashes.jpg

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After learning both the split opposites and split same direction inversions, it dawned on me that a body could think of these as being different projections of a split-L 3D shape. If this is the case, one could open up into a horizontal versus vertical atomic shape and produce the shape in this video above--there are many more a-coming! :)

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This is a meteor-inspired move from the glowsticking community. Marvin Ong was the first to show it to me and both Kate McCoy and Noel Yee have done some cool expansions on this idea. I'd had a rough time learning how to do it because my one-handed poi isn't terribly good, but I'd come up with at least one trick that had made it easier. Here's how I made it work for myself.

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After learning how to do inversions in Tog-Opposites, I noticed something peculiar about the arrangement of the cross points in all the opposite direction inversions I'd played with--they always appeared to be pointing away from each other while the inversions I'd worked with in split-time same direction tended always to have the crosspoint in the same direction. Question is: is it diagnostic of how inversions work or a cool byproduct of them?

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Kind of random, I know, but I've spent the past few months working out all the different same direction phasings for antispin pentagrams. The end goal here is to get them down in toroids, but I figured starting here might be the low hanging fruit :) The funny thing is that all these phasings are really reflections of each other. If you think of each point skipped has having a number value to it, then 1 and 4 are identical save for the hand that is leading through the pattern. Likewise, 2 and 3 are the same except that the positions of the hands are reversed in each increment.

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I was showed these at Wildfire this past year as I was wrestling with trying to learn inversions in opposites (my problem was I was trying to do them in opposites same time), but now they're presentable! Here they are as a 4-beat split-time thread the needle and as an element of Zan's diamond in split-opposites.

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