Atomic weaves have a very intimidating name, but there are ways to perform them that won't break your brain. Here is one such weave that feels midway between a split-time thread the needle and a buzzsaw weave.

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This is an update on a previous video. Originally I thought that inversions differed from tangles in that they could be entered into from either a tangle or an atom (clash or mesh), but it turns out they can be entered into from any atom. There are stack and crane atom-based inversions as well.

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The confluence of a lot of work in the past few months--here is a systematized method for learning and drilling inversions that covers all wall and wheel plane inversions as well as all the atomic orientations you can get out of a base-8 system of orientation.

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A lot of the recent work on inversions both in my videos and others has been based on the notion that inversions and tangles are different versions of the same movement. After playing with them both in the quark/atom framework, I'm realizing the entry for them uses an atom quark rather than a tangle quark. Could this be diagnostic of the difference between an inversion and a tangle or a nifty side-effect of another phenomenon?

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It took me a very long time to learn airwraps--the usual wisdom, that when you wrap up a pair poi and they automatically unwrap never really worked for me. Even more confusing to me was how some folks could wrap their poi both ways. I'd tried doing it in an introverted kind of place and had an epically hard time of it.

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This was a nifty idea hatched over the weekend: toroid pentagrams and inversions tend to be moves with the same number of beats, so can they be mashed up together? The answer apparently is yes! This took a whole lot of practice and doing to make a reality, but the result is a pentagram being used as one side of a series of inversions--a great mashup of at least three different techniques I've played with on my tech blog in the past few months.

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Following up on some of the threads from #293, here's a few weave-based moves switched into an atomic context with vertical vs horizontal planes. Funny thing: the inversion in atomics utilizes a tangle arrangement whereas these weaves utilize an atom arrangement--in other words, they possess opposite polarities, to borrow a term from Tracy Wilhelm.

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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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At Burning Man this year, Arashi took me through his approach to spinning in atomics. It took a couple hours, but ultimately I came to understand it was a system with significant differences to other 3D systems I was familiar with--most notably with Maiki Nope's 3D timing and direction system. Here's a brief encapsulation of the idea.

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A couple weeks ago, I posted a video of Arashi teaching a class at Firedrums and in it, I was struck by the fact that his "crane" atom had a strong resemblance to together-L in Maiki Nope's breakdown of atomic planes for clubs and poi. If this similarity bears out, it would mean in essence that there are 3 different atomics that can be spun from a variety of angles, depending on the perspective of the viewer. Atomic spinners: how does this gel with the world you play in?

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