It’s a brand new year and I’m trying to keep better in touch with my customers as well as people in the broader flow community, so I’m launching this monthly newsletter to keep you in the loop on the things I’m working on as well as opportunities to connect with the wider flow arts world. This month I’ve got an exciting new resource, an inspiring interview, and information on which festivals you can find me at.

This year 11 people made the top 10 favorites video due to a tie. I've been asked to put together a comprehensive breakdown of how the votes came out this year as well as comparing them to the votes from last year. So first and foremost, let's see who made the list this year:

I got to know you because Greyhound fucked up.

Continuing my series exploring pieces of my poi math paper step-by-step. I've previously gone over the basics of the math and how to use it to model simple flowers and third order motions.

Four months ago, Jon Alvarez asked a seemingly innocuous question on the Poi Chat forum on Facebook that led me to one of the most mammoth undertakings of my adult life: has anybody set down definitions of all the poi moves in one place? The answer is sadly no, but it got me thinking about why that answer was no...beyond whether someone had set up a dictionary or encyclopedia, to the very heart of how we define poi tricks and discuss them online.

Support us at FLAME by visiting us on the web!

So this year we tried something a bit different at FLAME Festival. Rather than decide amongst ourselves as organizers whom we wanted to come and teach at the festival, we put it in the hands of our community. The germ of this idea came from a conversation Ky, Justin, and I had immediately after Pacific Fire last year. All three of us wanted to find a way to pay our instructors, but we were at a loss as to how to do so in a fair and equitable way.

The 2014 Fire Festival Season will begin in 2 months! Here is a calendar of every Fire Festival that's declared dates in 2014 along with a link to the website for each festival. Please check back on occasion as I'll be posting more festivals as their dates become available.

Last week I got tagged in what turned out to be an incredibly badass and informative post by Cory Oliver from Florida. He’d discovered that Amazon has added a feature wherein they will donate .5% of your purchase to the charity of your choice. Currently all the charities they have listed to donate to are those that appear on Guidestar, so regrettably some of my favorites are not there.

A couple days ago, I posted a message on Facebook asking for suggestions on who I could do a future "Profiles in Poi" video on and Rob "Bluecat" Thorburn replied with a very intriguing breakdown. Rob cited a number of spinners whom he classified as old, middle, and new school poi spinners. I dug the idea, but thought a division into four instead of three groups made more sense.