No, I regret this isn't an entry on Warren Ellis's landmark sci-fi satire comic book series (I'm still figure out a way to make it apply to poi ;), the title is a great excuse to give it a plug. The planetary I'm talking about is the system by which planets rotate around a solar mass and create systems of compound elliptical orbits.

Now here's a bizarre problem for you: how do you correct the way your body is built and moves?

At about the age of 12, I lost the arches in my feet and spent 15 years with orthodic insoles in my shoes, avoiding running long distances because they would cause my knees to swell and lock up for days. Needless to say, it kind of sucked.

So apparently a trend has begun of doing videos for poi footwork and now the godfather of poi, Nick Woolsey has posted one describing how he does his whirling dervish-style footwork. Special guest-stars include Burning Dan and Alien Jon!

Back from Wildfire and lots of videos are popping up...mostly from Christian and myself. Helpfully, both of us recorded a couple lesson sessions and noodling. Here are some of my favorites from the weekend:

I'm off to Wildfire today for what looks like a full docket of awesome classes. I'll have my camera with me, so expect lots of footage of the East Coast's answer to Firedrums. If you're there, I'm teaching weaves at 9:30 tomorrow morning, pendulums at 4, and flowers bring and early tomorrow morning again at 9:30.

Hopefully the forecasts of buckets of rain for this part of Connecticut are exaggerated :-P

A combination of stuff inspired this--first, in pursuit of a unit sphere, I've failed miserably to find a construct that would fit the requirements of it, but many of the experiments I've worked through in the process have proven interesting in their own right. One such example is the 3D pyramid pattern from my last video post, which I suppose is technically a triangular tetrahedron. Taking Cyrille's law that all poi polygons should be symmetrical with two poi, I've been working out ways of using plane-bending and stalls to achieve this end. Here are a couple results:

I posted my blog entry on a 3D unit sphere on my facebook profile and got a really interesting and insightful response from MCP. Check it out:

As much as I bitch about the process of it, it's nights like last night that remind me why I do in fact love conclave. After a late afternoon runthrough of our full choreo, the PDF conclave buckled down at DC's Artomatic to film our submission for Burning Man this year.

Dyami started up this thread on Tribe about two weeks ago: http://techpoi.tribe.net/thread/37590299-0963-4197-befb-3d7fbcf007ce

In it, he's taking Alien Jon's concept of the unit circle and pondering whether it can be applied to 3D geometry to create a similar family of moves that work within the path of a sphere.