I know this topic has been done to death, but in trying to come up with a way to classify toroids, I came to realize we've barely scratched the surface of them. Here I use the approach of imagining the axes around which we can move the plane of a toroid as being similar to the major axes inside an octahedron and choosing specific axes that are parallel with the arm, hand path, or neither.

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Here's an interesting idea inspired by Mel's recent video of his workshop on snakes: I'd noticed that when he was practicing tracing along his arm that it was somewhat reminiscent of a box mode antispin flower that had been somewhat squashed. This reminded me of a concept that had been thrown out on the old Tribe tech poi group: the snake eye. This was a trick wherein you'd take a snake but perform it in antispin, theoretically creating cateyes around your shoulder. While Mel's arm tracer definitely doesn't produce a cateye, it does seem very compatible with snakes. Here's the result.

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Last video we rolled through three different approaches to defining CAPs. Here is an alternate approach to breaking down such motions: a couple years ago, Alien Jon introduced me to the idea of spinning composites. Compositing is chaining together increments of poi movement that overlap in hand and poi position to either create repeatable patterns or transition and shift seamlessly between patterns.

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The question of what constituted a CAP recently came up both in the Tech Poi and Vulcan Tech Gospel groups on Facebook. Here are what I'd consider to be the three main approaches to describing a CAP--in my next video, I'm going to detail a slightly different approach to this question and some of the cool patterns that come not from trying to classify all the CAPs, but from taking the lessons that learning CAPs provide and applying them to more complex types of motion.

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I forgot to bring my tripod to the studio, so the vid on finding hybrid families using QFT will have to wait for the next video. In the meantime, here's a nifty transition that takes elements from patterns that Ronan and G play with and merges them together in a fun and creative way. It utilizes CAP vs pendulum and lets you switch which hand is performing which move.

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200 tech blogs! This one is on how I've been working to create the hybrid families I've been frequently featuring in my videos over the course of the past year--I have two methods I use these days and this is the more visual one: finding the "lines" of the poi tricks to figure out how to switch between them. Sorry for the weird cuts--I had to get it under 15 minutes :-P

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Months ago I did a couple tech blogs on toroid flowers, that is flowers that are created by constantly plane-bending the poi around a circular hand path. The resulting corkscrew motion then loops back in upon itself, suggestion a circular tube and hence a toroid. Charlie and Ted had suggested to me that there was an antispin variant on this flower and showed it to me at Fall Wildfire last year. It's come up again both because it means our conception of inspin toroidal flowers was off and because it turns out it's closely related to some of the Arashi-based tech I've played with of late.

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Included in this odds and ends collection: a few variants on horizontal pendulum stall stacking and by popular demand some of the Arashi tech I've had on the blog lately rendered with glow so you can see the trails of the poi as they go along. Finally, a nifty hybrid e6 and I worked on this weekend--taking Arashi tech and hybridizing it with trochoid spinning. The result is ultra bizarre, but I think looks really cool.

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This is an expansion of an idea from a previous video: when you take 3 downbeat flowers and perform them at a 2-poi length handpath, 1/6 of the way around the handpath there is a point where the distance between the intercept for the hand and its reflection across the horizontal axis of the pattern is one poi length. If we vary the combinations and phasing of 3 downbeat patterns, we wind up creating the alignments of all the major unit circle hybrids. Here are 4 examples of how this cool quirk of geometry can be used. Major thanks to Charlie for the help in figuring this one out.

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Taking a concept I've done and done to death, I wanted to add some out of phase flavoring to it. Taking the idea of the same time same direction hybrid Yuta taught me at Firedrums last year, I'm switching it up so that each hand has a different axis to perform its petals on and working through them in quarters. It's got a nifty quarter-time feel to it even as the poi stay in same time same direction all the way around.

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