theory

The Linear Extension Companion

A couple months ago I was sent a request for more intermediate-level tutorials via Facebook and I had kind of mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I knew I could provide the content, but I also knew that I considered intermediate spinning to have slightly different qualities than the person requesting the tutorials may have had in mind. To me, intermediates begin seeing poi as being composed of smaller and more fundamental pieces of movement.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #219: Classifying Toroids

I know this topic has been done to death, but in trying to come up with a way to classify toroids, I came to realize we've barely scratched the surface of them. Here I use the approach of imagining the axes around which we can move the plane of a toroid as being similar to the major axes inside an octahedron and choosing specific axes that are parallel with the arm, hand path, or neither.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #208: Inside the Atom

A couple weeks ago, I posted a video of Arashi teaching a class at Firedrums and in it, I was struck by the fact that his "crane" atom had a strong resemblance to together-L in Maiki Nope's breakdown of atomic planes for clubs and poi. If this similarity bears out, it would mean in essence that there are 3 different atomics that can be spun from a variety of angles, depending on the perspective of the viewer. Atomic spinners: how does this gel with the world you play in?

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #189: Toroid flower inventory and theory

Watch out--this one's long! Over the weekend I experienced a few epiphanies about toroid flowers and it seemed like a good opportunity to do a video that would pull together all the different toroids I'd worked on in the past year and throw a little bit of theory out there to unite them all together into a more cohesive whole. The basis of it is thinking about toroid shapes as products of tracing the path an observer makes through space as they walk around a sphere that is moving around another object, like a planet or moon.

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Poi Epitrochoid transitions part 2: charting transitions and the patterns that emerge

Here's the second installment of my explanation of how hard and soft transitions work with Alien Jon's concept of arcs and loops. Here I demo all the permutations of these transitions through the intratangent circles (concentric) versus extratangent circles (outside--btw, if any mathematicians know what these concepts are actually called, please let me know) for a bunch of different circle sizes.

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Poi epitrochoid transitions part 1: loops, arcs, hard & soft transitions

The first installment of a short series of vids on transitions between unit circle patterns, antispin flowers, and extensions. What the common elements are and how to switch between them. Most of this vid is defining basic vocabulary and providing basic examples of the concepts that will be explored in later videos. A major debt for this is owed to Alien Jon, whose concepts of arcs and loops is one of, if not the critical underpinning of these concepts.

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Video Tech Blog #63: pendulum/CAP Yuta stalls, soft vs hard transitions

poiboi07 posted another sweet tech blog and I'm cribbing the first trick shamelessly from him. It's a pendulum vs. CAP hybrid that one then uses to perform a Yuta-style horizontal stall around either in a complete circle or 180 degrees. I'm finding it's a fun way to do an almost weave style turn back and forth and have added a vertical stall shift to the mix, making it an easy move to switch around in all three planes.

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Video Tech Blog #58: Poi symmetry, the new hybrid theory

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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Poi symmetry: why my hybrid theory is full of holes, Part 2

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).

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Poi symmetry: why my hybrid theory is full of holes, Part 1

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.

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