This past weekend at the PEX Summer Festival, Noel showed me this bitchin' pattern wherein one uses an isolated pendulum on the end of a pendulum vs. CAP antibrid to switch the orientation of the hand to poi lineup. This opens the door for some switches into hybrids, some point isolation switches, and even an inverted pattern based upon one that Charlie was playing with at Wildfire. There's more patterns to be found in here!

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Hooray! Lucky number 100! There have been some awesome tricks and some awful ones...some weeks when I had no idea what to post and some when I physically couldn't record enough video for all the ideas I had. Through it all I really have appreciated all the support and encouragement from the larger community out there. Thanks so much for tuning in, challenging me, learning, and teaching me!

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A bit of tech I started playing with at Firedrums that I'd totally forgotten about. After taking Ronan's Constructs class at FD, I started playing with a few of the patterns to see what hybrids were accessible from soft transitions out of the "constructs" he showed off. Here are the first two I found--both are iso vs. horizontal cateye antibrids that come out of pendulum hybrids performed a unit circle distance apart. I tried the first move in the latest Vulcan tech blog, but it was messy as hell. Here's what it looks like cleaned up.

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Another one of those poi avenues that I've either barely touched or just haven't bothered to polish since I started playing with it: contact poi! In this case I've been working on the subtype wherein you're treating the poi head like a contact juggling ball. I'm totally awful at contact juggling (though learning), but I'm still trying to work through this related type of manipulation. Here are four manipulations that Elemensce helped me through at Wildfire and the tips that made them work.

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I've spent a big portion of the past week trying to polish my plane shifts from antispin flowers to horizontal plane antispins and I wanted to share a couple of the drills I've been doing to get there. Mostly I've been taking same-time opposites flowers and plane shifting out of the sideways stalls and then executing a 90 degree turn. Being as how there are two directions of same time opposites antispin flowers to work with, the big mind-bender I've been working on this past week is switching between these two types with every turn.

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This puts together a few threads that came out of Firedrums and Wildfire. It's basically just a couple different approaches to switching which hand is performing pendulum and which is performing triquetra in a hybrid. We can use either 1.5 stacking or a lockout to get us there--or both if we so choose!

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At Wildfire I got a good chance to run my transition theory through the ringer and I got some great feedback from some folks I really respected about it. One of the more fun collaborations was Sunday with Charlie and Justin. Charlie and I essentially hadn't slept and spent most of the day working out the theoretical framework in which hard, soft, and mixed transitions could be applied to plane bending and shifting. We came up with a couple new moves neither of us had ever seen before and laid the foundation for what I hope will be a really nifty expansion of the theory. Thanks, guys! :)

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Another set of ideas that came out of geeking at Wildfire with Noel and Charlie: this time using point isolations matched up with pendulum stalls to create a fascinating isolation effect when switching from side to side with pendulums. We also found the same movement rendered a unit circle apart yields a funky S-curve that could be used for timing and direction changes with the pendulums. Fun! :)

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This weekend at Wildfire included a whole slew of point-isolating moves from Noel. One of which was an interesting 1.5 pattern that I tried to learn and this is what came out. Charlie thinks it's different than what Noel was doing, but unfortunately I didn't get it on camera so I've no way to be sure. Either way, however, here it is: a reverse 1.5 with unit circle spacing that uses poi head/hand contact to switch into a stacking move on each side.

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I've been playing some more with the same time same direction patterns Yuta was showing off at Firedrums and trying to apply the concept to stacking patterns. While technically none of these are true stacks, they share some similarities in concept in how the hands change orientation in relation to each other. Going a bit down the rabbit-hole, here is a pattern that essentially amounts to performing a stack in all four directions and alternating between an antispin and extension transition to do it.

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