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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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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In a follow-up to a video I posted a couple weeks back of playing with triquetra vs pendulum in same time opposites, I realized the transition there that let me hit static vs extension and kind of "unfold" my crossed arms also existed with CAPs if the poi are spinning same time same direction. Here is the transition used both to get from a top-side CAP to bottom and vice-versa.

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Over the weekend, e6 posted an awesome video exploring the toroid flower concept and really cleaning up some of the work with it to the point that the shapes are really reading and finding definition as something unique. It's inspired a lot of experiments this week, but I wanted to start with laying out all the four timing and direction combinations for these types of flowers. You can see Erik's original video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHsUwal8Ms0

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Many moons ago I did a video on isolated throws and catches that began moving into the world of behind the back catches, but it wasn't until recently that I was really motivated to practice enough to add this trick solidly to my repertoire. Here are a couple of the tricks I've been using to make this trick more solid.

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w00t for the new flowcord! Some of you guys may have noticed that about three months ago I switched up the leashes on my contact poi from the colecord I'd been using for more than a year. The reason was I dropped by the Flowspace in Berkeley, California after Burning Man and Sean and I spent an afternoon figuring out how to make this awesome new type of cord they had work with my contact poi. I'm pleased to announce those experiments were successful and now you can buy kits to create these leashes and handles straight from Flowtoys themselves! 

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This is a trick that Cyrille and Poiboi have both made use of a lot that I'm a big fan of--it's a pair of inner arm rolls performed such that the arms start spread out and then come together to perform the catch. As I worked through this, my original conception of the trick was to have the planes of the handles and tether flush with the back of my arm, but I realized as I played with it that instead the planes had to be at a slightly oblique angle as the direction of the head follows the angle of the tether in contact.

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The companion video to Tech Blog 200--this one on how to find hybrid families using QFT (poi) notation. I highly recommend watching this in 720 and full screen so you can see all the numbers on the whiteboard. For some background, I highly recommend checking out my blog entry on the basics of QFT here:

http://drexfactor.com/weirdscience/2011/05/18/beginners_guide_poi_qft_no...

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A few weeks ago, Arashi asked me to post this video I'd taken of the first seven minutes of his class at Firedrums. My camera was running out of battery at the time, so regrettably I didn't get much more, but you all might appreciate some Arashi tech straight from the horse's mouth :)

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I forgot to bring my tripod to the studio, so the vid on finding hybrid families using QFT will have to wait for the next video. In the meantime, here's a nifty transition that takes elements from patterns that Ronan and G play with and merges them together in a fun and creative way. It utilizes CAP vs pendulum and lets you switch which hand is performing which move.

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