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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This was totally one of those "duh" moments where I spotted other folks doing a particular trick and for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to get my hands to do it. But going the long way round actually turned out to be the better option because it helped me conceptualize how one could approach--here's how you can stagger stalls in a split-time place to produce a variety of nifty moves, including some that strongly resemble stall chasers and horizontal stacks.

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Some of my earliest tech blogs were on 1.5s and figuring out all the different types of them. A recent class from Ronan reminded me of some of this work and specifically a few ideas in them that I'd gotten wrong ;) Here is Ronan's approach to thinking about 1.5s and how timing direction work with them.

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At the Tahoe Flow Festival, Leo showed me this nifty vertical stack that I quickly realized could be used to stack up and down each side of the body. It requires some deft timing, but has a really unique effect.

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A few months back, Alex Powell from the Vulcan published an interesting treatise on his approach to toroids. There's been a second school of thought that's come out of meetings at Wildfire and other East Coast fire events and this is my best attempt to consolidate a lot of the thinking on this type of spinning and make it ready for the masses.

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