Two weeks ago marked a very auspicious anniversary for me--I filmed and published my 400th tech blog! When I published my very first tech blog on September 8, 2008, I could scarcely have imagined that six years and some change later that it would have grown into the institution that it has. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that despite offering a host of other content and trying to experiment with the form that my tech blog was and still is the cornerstone of my offerings to the poi world.

A huge thanks is owed to all of you out there who come back week after week to watch these videos and share them with your friends. Without you I’d just be a random guy on YouTube talking to the camera.

These videos have allowed me to teach and travel all over the world. To meet incredible people and get to experience dramatic breakthroughs in a variety of peoples’ lives. They have given me the opportunity to hone my skills as a teacher and develop a reputation that has enabled me to live the kind of life I think most people can only dream of. On occasion I’ll see people asking about material I’ve covered in past videos on online forums and when I go back to try and find these videos, I’ll often unintentionally come across videos long forgotten with tricks I still find beautiful to this day. In some ways it’s like going back through a time machine and seeing the spinner I was when I was only a year into this journey. One day I know I’ll look back on them to see a history of my career documented in video that will be a record of the past incomparable in value.

To mark the occasion, I’m going back through and picking out some of my favorites--I’d thought about going back through all 400, but truth be told it’s too big a task for right now (though I promise it will come in the future) so for now, I’ll share my favorites from my last 50 videos and try to make this a more regular exercise. Some of these videos are here because they’ve been viewed so many times. Some are here because they’re personal favorites.

1. SpinOptic Poi Review

I first learned these poi were coming in January of 2014. Charlie had been hinting to me for weeks that he had a huge project in the works and showed me 3D printed versions of the new balls and described the product to me in depth at last years Winter Fire Arts retreat at Wesleyan University. Charlie knew he had a groundbreaking product on his hands and was terrified that someone else would steal it out from under him. I signed an NDA that meant that for most of the year, he was the only person I could talk to about the project. We had frequent conversations on the topic throughout the year as delays and technical hurdles pushed his launch date further and further back (I was originally meant to review them in July) until he overnighted me his prototypes when I was out in LA for Thanksgiving.

I was astounded by the product he’d created and the care he’d put into their design. Getting to play with them for that review was such an incredible pleasure. I watched in rapid anticipation as the numbers on his crowdfunding campaign to bring them to market climbed up over the course of December, frequently wondering and hoping that he’d make it. Then, on New Year’s evening as I was getting dressed to go to dinner I saw that the campaign had crossed the finish line and send Charlie a joyous text to mark the occasion. I can’t wait till these hit the market and everyone gets to play with them.

This video was also one of the most popular tech blogs I’ve ever published, breaking 1,000 views in less than 24 hours (usually this feat takes weeks) and 2,000 views in three days (if this does happen to my videos, it usually takes months). It was a pleasure not just to get to play with the prototypes, but also to see how fervently people wanted information on them. This was one of those cases where I really felt like I created something that fulfilled a need as well as helping out a dear friend.

2. The X-Man

I’ll confess that most of the time, I have no idea what videos I create will strike a chord with people. There are some tricks or ideas that I’m sure will be a huge hit and others that I wonder if I should publish at all. This was one of those cases where the popularity of a move completely took me by surprise. Shane Delacruz demonstrated this move for me at last year (also at Winter Fire Arts--seriously, this festival may be one of the best-kept secrets in the flow world. Puppyhammer and QFT were also invented there) and at first there was too much going on for me to make sense of it, so I took video of it and filed it away for later.

Several weeks later, I had a day to film inside the dance studio at my local rec center and I was out of ideas. I actually learn new things at a phenomenally slow pace and I’ve long since gotten into the habit of when people show me things I find interesting at festivals, that I video them for later because I rarely can learn them on the spot. As I was going back through months of these videos, Shane’s combo caught my eye. It was difficult to puzzle out the individual bits and pieces of it, but after running and re-running it several times, I finally caught all the necessary bounces.

Really, the X-Man itself isn’t all that interesting--it’s not terribly different from a reverse Superman, but Shane’s series of one-handed bounces are what made this move and video interesting and it taught me a lot about direction changes with one hand and that thumb and pinkie end poi can be manipulated in vastly different ways. Aside from the SpinOptic review, this is my most popular video from the last 50 tech blogs I put out.

3. Partner Poi Slides and other transitions

Yeah, so I’m going to cheat a little bit on this one and offer up not a single video, but a series of them (spoilers: I’ll do it again before this list is done). Morgan Howe and I first started to do partner poi together last spring when I visited Vassar for Monkey See, Monkey Do, their juggling club’s annual flow arts convention. We would collaborate again at Firedrums and Wildfire, at first just casually playing around with partner weaves and then gradually realizing the depth of the content we’d gotten ourselves into. After August Wildfire when we’d started to play with Slides and Pivots thanks to a class from our friends Justin and Christina, the two of us independently started thinking through the logic of these partner transitions and how they impact the direction of the weaves and facing of the partners.

Morgan and I once again saw each other at PacFire and both had prepared charts to model our thoughts on Slides, incorporating turns and stalls into them as well. We quickly realized that despite there being 64 different possible transitions that could be done between them, that the rules that governed successful transitions could be narrowed down to two verbal commands with two possibilities to them apiece, opening up the possibilities for partner poi improv among other things. And we proceeded to work the entire weekend at getting each and every one of them and recording a series of videos explaining the concepts.

One of my greatest pleasures in my poi career has been geeking sessions with close friends, exploring the possibilities of the things that we create and opening our minds to the possibilities of what else can be created. Getting to meet and collaborate with Morgan has been one of the great highlights of my past year. Every person should get to be so fortunate as to find another mind to collaborate with that meets it in curiosity, depth of thought, commitment to solving problems, and just the utter joy of the work. We continue to mine the depths of partner poi whenever we see each other in our own unique way and it makes me excited for what we’ll get to share with the world in the coming year :)

4. 3 Point Iso combos

I’ve been a huge fan of antibrids since I took a class from Ronan McLoughlin at Firedrums 2010 that he entitled Constructs. It was another attempt at classifying types of movements that seem to piece together ideas from both the hybrid and CAP world that inevitably emerge once you move beyond the point of simply thinking, “what are all the shapes I can combine together?” Alien Jon refers to the same concept as composites and that tends to be the word I’ve used for it as well. Ronan was the first person to make me think of it in terms of the lines that poi produce at different points in the pattern, demonstrating triquetra vs pendulum in such a way as to really emphasize the straight horizontal line on both sides of the pattern.

Fast forward a couple years and composites/antibrids are a cornerstone of my own personal poi style (though ironically I didn’t realize it was something unique to me until Mireneye pointed it out) and one that I continually go back and revisit, even amid the explosions of 3-poi tech and contact poi. Antibrids always feel a little bit to me like coming home.

Instagram is rapidly becoming my platform of choice for quickly publishing brief ideas--individual tricks and combos that can be done inside of 15 seconds. I’d posted several antibrid-based tricks over the course of many weeks on my IG channel to find them getting a much better response than I’d anticipated and decided to go ahead and put together a tech blog on them. This was another one of those cases where I’d assumed there would only be a small pool of interest on the topic and that this particular video wouldn’t perform very well and was pleasantly surprised when it defied my expectations. Part of me feels as though this style of spinning feels somewhat old fashioned given the advances we’ve seen in recent years, but I’ve got to admit that I still love this style of spinning and can’t imagine stopping any time soon.

5. How I make my Tech Blogs

I’ve been doing this for a long time now, and I have learned many, many lessons both on what to do and what not to do. This was my attempt to put absolutely everything I knew out for the wider world to see. Whether people were interested in where I got my ideas, how I film, the editing/production process, or even just benchmarking what the performance of videos looks like, I wanted to put together a universal resource for anybody seriously interested in creating their own videos. I’ve written twice now about videos I thought would perform poorly and then performed well--this series did exactly the opposite. It took quite a lot of work to put together and remains to this day a surprisingly low performer in terms of views.

I’m not sure whether it’s that there are better resources out there on video production, that they’re too long and wordy, or that people really just want to see poi tricks from me more than they want to understand how the videos they watch come to exist, but these videos seemed to miss the collective zeitgeist by a fairly wide margin. I think this is really a shame given that a lot of the information in here is stuff I’d really wished I could have found when I first started making videos and even a few years into the process. I do hope these videos wind up finding an audience at some point because it’s super useful info.

That’s it! Thanks for taking this stroll down memory lane with me. Do you have favorite tech blogs from my last 50 that I haven’t mentioned? Share them with me in the comments--I’d love to hear what struck a chord with all of you out there. Here’s to 400 tech blogs and 400 more! :)