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.

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 First up, a tip last week from a commenter on this blog gave me a critical piece of the puzzle for the isolated weave. It's not perfect, but it's at least recognizable as what it is now. Next, based upon the concept of doing a plane-bent "asterisk" like G does, at a recent spin jam it was suggested that one could think of the radiating spokes as behaving like the petals in flowers, so here are examples of two timing and direction combinations of this idea.

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 This week I'm going back and revisiting a couple ideas from the past couple months to follow up on them both to show progress and where some of those ideas have taken me. First up is the isolated weave: I've had some progress on this both by practicing standing isolations in all four individual positions of my arms during the course of the weave and with a helpful piece of advice from Charlie on switching from one side of my body to the other. Next, the CAP vs static BTH hybrid poiboi07 and I had chatted about a couple months ago.

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First up, I'm revisiting a trick I posted several weeks ago: PoiRsquared's request to see an opposites crosser to polyrhythm hybrid transition. I hadn't realized the crosser he was describing was actually what I would consider to be a meltdown and had to shelve the move till I learned how to do an opposites meltdown. Well, I've got it now! Included is a step-by-step breakdown of how I got to it and finally, a demo of the transition PoiRsquared originally requested.

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After demoing the around the head meltdown last week, I got a comment from one person asking about performing the meltdown as a fountain. While I think that conceptually the two are different enough that a straight-up combination of these moves is not possible, there is a way to perform a similar maneuver by using Alien Jon's concept of body zones. Demoed here are a couple ways to play with this concept. Next up, I'm getting to be relatively happy with my transitions from isolation to lockout, so I'm starting to work through an isolated weave.

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 I'm back to drilling isolations in hopes of getting down the elusive isolated weave, but shooting for lower hanging fruit in the form of the iso to lockout combination guys like Nevisoul and Ronan have made famous. I'm specifically working on getting the isolated bit in the middle locked into the iso position like they have to make it really pop.

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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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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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Though I've long admired them, I haven't until recently taken the plunge into really learning float throws. Here are a couple variants I spent much of the holidays working on. The first is a plane-shifting throw wherein you switch the poi into horizontal plane at the height of the float and catch them as they rotate. The other involves reversing the orientation of one's hands before catching the poi such that you catch them with one hand behind your back. Needless to say, both of these still need a lot of work.

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 First up, the first hoop trick to make it into my tech blog! My friend Katie/Surprise showed my a funky isolation trick that I dug that seemed to have this odd stopping point. Remembering some bits learned from a recent Hoop Path workshop, I realized a body can keep the hoop constantly in motion by jumping one's grip. The demo here is terrible--it's with my old hoop, which weighs a ton. Nonetheless, I swear this one is doable (incidentally, if any hoopers out there know what it's called, please drop a line in my comment box).

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