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A Useful Guide For Interacting With Non-YoYo Players

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Walk the Dog

If it’s too precious for you to Walk the Dog with it, leave it at home.

It’s gonna happen. At some point, if you continue to yo-yo, you will feel compelled to bring your yo-yo outside the safe confines of your own home. Once out in the world, you may be tempted to remove your yo-yo from the secure environs of your inner pocket, even daring to PLAY with it out in the dusty, chaotic world. If this should come to pass, the chances of your being SEEN in the deft manipulation of your yo-yo are probably greater than 50% (unless you are in central Wyoming). At this point, you will have left yourself open to (indeed, INVITED) the questions, comments, and askance looks of the uninitiated non-yoyoing public.

Don’t worry though. Despite your well-considered assumptions, most of these people do NOT intend to do you harm (even psychologically). It’s important to try to put yourself in their tight, tragically boring shoes and see the world through the melancholic gray-brown lens through which they see it. To one already addicted to the tactile stimulation of morphing string-geometry, seeing a yo-yo being wielded out in the wild is familiar and exciting. But to the everyday bloke, a yo-yo is just an odd little toy, and an archaic one at that. It would be like seeing someone play with a titanium paddle-ball or a ball-in-cup toy made from rare, exquisite hardwood (wait that exists) out on the street-corner: curious, but somewhat incomprehensible. It’s kind of funny, because the same folks will literally not even notice someone COMPLETELY ENGROSSED in the virtual experience of their phone or video game system. Like Plato’s Cave, screens have become the way many of us experience the world, while interacting with actual, tangible objects has been relegated to the realm of anomaly.

So you can’t blame these folks for saying something. They’re generally going to make one of three assumptions when they first see you doing your thing:

  1. This guy really wants attention, so I should give it to him
  2. This guy really wants attention, so I should ignore him
  3. This guy is doing something he finds enjoyable, and probably doesn’t need my input.

Suffice it to say, most people go with the first or second conclusion (and suffice it to say, they’re probably right as much as they’re wrong). When they proceed to evaluate what you’re doing qualitatively, they also tend to focus on one of three conclusions:

  1. That looks cool. I can’t do that. That’s awesome.
  2. That looks cool. I can’t do that. That sucks and I feel defensive about it.
  3. That isn’t cool.

Again, MOST people gravitate toward the first two, because yo-yo tricks ARE cool (though not always as cool as we make them out to be), and seem utterly impossible and even magical to someone who hasn’t seen much of them. Now, pretty much everyone has seen a few yo-yo tricks (Walk the Dog, Around the World, Rock the Baby, etc.). Such was the iconic power of yo-yo marketing in the 50’s and 60’s that even a half-century later, those simple tricks remain part of our cultural lexicon. The people who choose to interact with the curious anomaly they see using the antique toy will search in their mind for these touchtones. It’s not weird. It’s not insulting. If you saw a guy doing tricks with a bullwhip, the first thing you’d think would be “Indiana Jones”. He might be sick to death of that comparison, having spent years trying to take his strange craft into new progressive territory, but can he BLAME you for making the comparison? Of course not.

Needless to say, only the people who decide that you want attention (consciously or otherwise) are going to engage you. HOW they engage you usually depends on how they feel about themselves more than your yo-yoing. People who feel content and secure will offer questions or comments like:

  • “How long have you been doing that?”
  • “How do you not get a bunch of knots?”
  • “Wow, I could never do that.”

People who feel less secure but still want to interact tend to mainly want to hear themselves speak. That’s ok, too! These folks are instantly recognizable, and call to mind the Eleanor Roosevelt quote “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent”. As long as you keep your head, they can’t bother you too much. They’ll call stuff out like:

  • “You must have a lot of free time.”
  • “Do your hardest trick.”
  • “Does that thing have a motor in it or something?”
  • “Hey, WALK THE DOG!”

Anybody who’s played in public a bit will have heard all of those several times over. You don’t have to get ticked off about it. The Walk the Dog thing especially seems to irritate serious players, but that’s silly. We tend to think that just because we’ve progressed past Walk the Dog being impressive that everyone else has, too. Some people like to get around it by doing an arm grind or something, but I find people are more satisfied if you just walk that sucker. I understand your yo-yo’s are precious to you, but I feel that Walk the Dog is kind of part of the payment for being a yo-yo player. It draws people in and makes them feel happy at having called out the only trick they know and seeing it done. I don’t (usually) bring yo-yo’s that I care about keeping pristine out and about with me, but even when I do, I make it a point to do that trick when asked. It helps me stay grounded and helps me remember that how I interact with PEOPLE is more important than how I interact with yo-yo’s. Crazy, right?

If you’re playing in public, I think you’re taking on the responsibility of having compassion for the people with whom you might interact. If you’re going to be traveling on a crowded bus, it’s kind of jerky to not wear deodorant. You can’t just get mad at people who aren’t positively inspired by your wafting emanations. Similarly, if you play yo-yo in a public place, you can’t get all defensive because not every passerby thinks your take on Black Hops deserves its own reality show.

This deserves some thought and experimentation, but if you want the Cliff’s Notes version, here are some examples of responses that WILL and WON’T end with you seeming like a colossal tool-kit and ingraining a vehemently anti-yoyo mentality in a member of the general public:

BAD

Them: Heh, you must have A LOT OF FREE TIME.

You: *Rolls eyes and pretends to ignore.

Conclusion: That guy is way too uptight about playing with a yo-yo. Total dorknozzle.

GOOD

Them: Heh, you must have A LOT OF FREE TIME.

You: Not really. I don’t watch much TV, and playing helps me clear my head for other stuff I’ve got to do.

Conclusion: Not watching much TV is odd, but I like this guy. He looks cool and talked to me.

 

BAD

Them: Do your hardest trick.

You: *Without speaking you do some long, really complex combo.

Conclusion: I don’t understand. I feel alienated. I should say something pithy and derisive to deflect the fact that I’m out of my depth.

GOOD

Them: Do your hardest trick.

You: Man, there are a lot of hard tricks. This one is pretty tough. (*Do anything short involving a grind, body-trick, Gyroscopic Flop, or Boingy-Boing – yes, I know it’s not actually your hardest trick.)

Them: Dear, sweet lord in heaven, that was amaze-balls.

 

BAD

Them: I can’t even make it go up & down!

You: Not to be mean, but that’s because you suck.

Them: That was actually horribly mean.

GOOD

Them: I can’t even make it go up & down!

You: You’d be surprised how quick you’d learn. Here, have a sticker. It’s for a website called yoyoexpert.com. They’ve got a huge tutorial section that would have you doing stuff like this in no time.

Them: Cool, I’ll check it out! (HE GAVE ME A STICKER!!! IT’S SHINY!!!)

 

BAD

Them: Hey, WALK THE DOG.

You: Pssh.

Them: Pssssshhh. He can’t walk the dog. And he’s a turdblossom.

NOT GREAT

Them: Hey, WALK THE DOG.

You: I would, but this yo-yo costs $120, and I don’t want to mess up the Ash Berry colorway. But check out this ARM GRIND!!!

Them: That was moderately cool, but did he say $120? And WHAT kind of colorway?? So you’re too fancy to walk the dog with your special MOTORIZED SPACE YO-YO? He’s on the verge of turblossomhood.

GOOD

Them: Hey WALK THE DOG.

You: *Walk the Dog.

Them: Yesssssssssss!!! There is nothing even remotely turdblossomish about this dude.

BONUS ROUND: You whip out a cheap spare yo-yo you happen to have on you and offer to TEACH the guy how to do it. Then hand them a yoyonews.com sticker and tell them where they can learn more.

Them: Verily, I shall be your disciple until the End of Days. You are the YoYoGod, the Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot, and my one true Big Image. This is my sister, and you should totally go out with her.

That’s right folks…it’s just that easy!

Top 5 Most Egregiously Awful YoYos of All Time

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Mail Attachment

I’m not sure how many yo-yo’s I’ve played since I first picked up a Midnight Special in the late 80’s. In any case, the number has been significant enough for me to feel appropriately entitled to write this article, whether or not my opinion has merit. Though most people know me as a pretty positive (and/or flakey) guy, and it may not seem like the kind of thing I’d say, there really IS such a thing as a bad yoyo. A yoyo can be “bad” in a few distinct ways. For example, it can not perform as intended or as advertised. It can be fragile, breaking into a dozen poorly-designed pieces upon its first tentative throw. It can LOOK or SEEM so hopelessly dorky that even massive dorks will, themselves, wish to eschew yoyoing so as to improve their social standing.

I have no hope of possibly encapsulating everyone’s least favorite yoyo’s in any top 5, as this kind of list could only ever be subjective. In terms of play, I bet the old Bandai/Yomega Firestorm could probably run literal circles around the first Flores models. Does that alone make them “better”? Sweet lord, child, NO IT DOES NOT. You have to consider the historical context, and in so doing recognize that by the time the hopeless Firestorm came out, there was SUCH A THING as an awesome yoyo, making its craptastic qualities shine all the brighter in relief. And keep in mind, that piece of garbage didn’t even make the list!

It’s definitely important to celebrate the good in our community. Honestly, I think we do that quite a lot. However, there’s also a place for pointing out the idiotic, absurd, and downright horrific, not necessarily to jeer (although in this case, I probably will) but to say, collectively “Good lord, how did the world allow that to happen?!” And thus, I present for your consideration my Top 5 Most Egregiously Awful Yo-Yo’s of All Time:

Yomega Panther

So heavy. So terrible.

5. Yomega Panther: This was such a trainwreck on so many levels. I’ll grant you I’ve only played it once, at the home of Virginia yo-yoer Tony Basch, who gingerly presented it as a mad scientist might some medical oddity in a jar of formaldehyde. Anyway, that was plenty. Honestly, it’s kind of like when Gandalf ALMOST touches the Ring of Power and senses the Eye of Sauron’s presence within it. Where true evil is concerned, a touch is all you need. So Yomega wanted to make a wooden fixed axle yo-yo, which given their yeoman’s effort spent popularizing transaxles, I guess, seemed like a no-brainer (PUN!). Unfortunately, they elected to take a brick-like wooden profile, paint it black, and emblazon on an exquisitely boring graphic which looks more like a double-jointed kid’s sock puppet than an actual panther. All this would be forgivable, had Yomega not then opted to slap a pair of rubber rims over the gap’s circumference. Ostensibly, the rims were there to “protect the yo-yoer’s hands”, which is kind of funny since their addition makes the yo-yo snag unpredictably and somehow dart directly for the user’s skull (JUST LIKE A PANTHER!). Even at a time when Yomega dominated the scene and decent yo-yo’s were relatively few and far-between, there was no risk of running into any sane person who would admit to liking the Panther, which legitimizes its position on this list.

Duncan Yoffy

To use a larger picture would be to unfairly add prestige to this pile of crap.

4. Duncan Yoffy: I’m sorry, Drew Tetz. I know you can do awesome stuff with it. Honestly, you could probably do awesome stuff with some bungee cord attached to my idiot beagle who, just like this yo-yo, eats cat poop. Is this even a yo-yo? I dunno. It seems like the manifestation of some marketing executive’s 2-day-old sushi-infused dream. You know how Pizza Hut is always coming up with new things to DO to pizza (the Insider™, the Edge®, the CheesyBites© – HOW BOUT YOU JUST MAKE A GOOD PIZZA)? The Yoffy is basically the yo-yo equivalent of the P’Zone©™®, and was just as gross. I really want to know how the idea was initially pitched. “Ok guys, let me ask you… what is it that kids love more than anything? RAINBOW RIBBONS, right? And we KNOW they love not being able to make a yo-yo work…” It was a marriage made in the putrescent, bile-stinking sewers of heaven. Needless to say, the Yoffy is pretty much an Imperial, but with one of Mork’s suspenders replacing the string. As such, the only hope this thing ever had for redemption was to be picked up by Drew as a novelty. I’m being merciful in placing it at #4.

YoYoJam Big Kahuna

It hurts so much.

3. YoYoJam Big Kahuna: YoYoJam is kind of like the Jurassic Park of the yo-yo scene – just because you have the TECHNOLOGY to wrap a yo-yo in purple lightning bolts does not mean you HAVE TO USE IT. Indeed, when running down the list of yo-yo’s which cause me to barf in my mouth a little, roughly half of the offenders are YoYoJams.

The Triple Jam. The JamBoo. The Phat Boy. Oh sure, YoYoJam knows how to make an ugly yo-yo. But unfortunately (for this list), most of their stuff plays pretty well. There have been some fragile models (original X-Con), some horribly named ones (Speed Maker?), and some abysmal players (Evo) in YYJ’s history, but nothing that represents the perfect storm of awful play and aesthetics which would land them the dubious distinction of inclusion on this list… Nothing that is, except The Big Kahuna. This model was released way back in YYJ’s early history, and they’ve certainly righted the ship since. Still, this thing was a sucktastic wrecking ball (or would be, if wrecking balls were thin and cylindrical with heavy, bladelike rims). The Kahuna had no response mechanism aside from its tapered gap, which was so narrow and unforgiving as to snag unbidden more often than not. As a result, the yo-yo would dive-bomb its user at random, bludgeoning his knuckles and palms into a pulpy, quivering mush. Add in the hot-stamped party font and the striking graphic (which may or may not represent a breaking wave), and we’ve got a winner. By which I mean loser. To their credit, YYJ discontinued this guy after just a few months, but that’s still a few months of kids beating themselves about the head and neck with a sharp, ugly yo-yo.

Throw Down Lucha Libre

I had no idea that turds came in “white”.

2. Throw Down Lucha Libre: It’s hard for me to put this on here, because at one point I was sponsored by Throw Down, but the Lucha Libre definitely finds a home on this list. It’s not every day that a yo-yo is released which is so hopelessly bad that it results in the complete obliteration of the company which made it. The Lucha Libre was intended to be a delrin version of the popular Luchador, an angular metal model which sold out in 3 different versions. The first prototype of the LL I received was way too light, but played great. It had one of the enormously thick Dif-e-Yo style axles and recessed silicone response. I was worried that the plastic bearing seat would develop problems, but other models (the Gung Fu and the Silk) had similar guts and were reasonably well-liked. Without consulting its team on the design, however, Throw Down elected to go with a cockamamie, over-complicated design, using a thinner axle, spiked hex-nuts, metal shims, and [most unfortunately] paper-thin walls around the bearing seat. The final version was never tested by the team, and I received a pair of them in the mail on the day after they released at Yoyonation.com. The first one broke within an hour of playing it, cracking in a concentric circle around the hex nut. As became clear to everyone who bought it, the Lucha Libre would fall apart under the lightest contact imaginable, either in the way I experienced or with the bearing seat itself snapping off. I heard of LL’s breaking when they hit the ground, when overtightened, when regular-tightened, when CAUGHT. How does a yo-yo break when it hits your fleshy palm?!?! Throw Down’s owner was a good guy, and he promised to refund or replace any and all broken Lucha Libre’s. Unfortunately, in the span of a few weeks, at least 90% of the run had fallen apart in this way. Financially, Throw Down was just as fragile as its yo-yo’s, and there was no way it could afford to replace an entire run of failed stock. The company folded under the weight of its impossible promise and broken reputation. A sad but cautionary tale to all manufacturers who would try to bypass adequate testing.

Rev G YoYo

All hail the undisputed King of Suck!

1. Revolution Rev-G: This is so obvious that I’m afraid it may be an anticlimax, but I guess that alone tells you something about the legendary Rev-G. Personally, I have never been more disappointed with a yo-yo than this one, and that includes the Lucha Libre, which ended my first yo-yo sponsorship. I first tried a Rev-G in my local shopping mall around Y2K. Most yo-yo’s were still pretty cheap back then, and its $80 price point put it right up there with the Cold Fusion and SB-2 in terms of “luxury” expectations. And honestly, I’ll admit that my late-90’s ridiculously-wide-jeans, bleached-hair self thought the Rev-G looked pretty flippin’ sweet. For one, it had a carbon fiber body. CARBON FIBER. Like in Formula One cars and the bones of those Avatar aliens! And yet again, it not only had rubber o-rings stretched around the rims, but also came with a protective, adjustable, silicone finger sleeve which further cushioned your squishy hands from that evil bully, yo-yo string. It was like Yo-Tape that you could use again and again… or would have been, if ANYONE had EVER wanted to use the Rev-G more than once. Sadly, this is the kind of product you get when otherwise intelligent people get together to design something they know nothing about. Revolution was a kite company. Know what would happen if I tried designing a kite? Me either, but it would probably involve some kids in a park with subdural hematoma and a whole lotta lawsuits.

There were a couple things wrong with the Rev-G to put it in this echelon of suck. Most notably, it just didn’t work. Like the aforementioned Kahuna, it had a super-thin gap and a huge diameter, making it uncomfortable to hold and difficult to catch. It was “rim-weighted”, sure, but the whole structure was way too light and unstable. Like some horrible belligerent drunkard, it would wobble and convulse and constantly try to pick a fight. And despite its “aerospace” billing and luxury accoutrements, it was easily outplayed by far less expensive yo-yo’s. Most people will buy an expensive yo-yo, and after doing so will attempt to defend it from criticism, even if it stinks. No one wants to feel like a big dummy for being duped into dropping $80 for a carbon fiber paperweight (which is only heavy enough to hold down like 8 papers). Incredibly though, I have NEVER spoken to anyone who has played or owned a Rev-G who had anything good to say about the way it played. (Granted, it’s hard to talk to most of the people who bought one, since they have changed their name and left the country, their reputation in shambles). Over the years, the Rev-G’s legend has only grown, as like a mighty Spartan warrior, it has fought and clambered its way over the corpses of the most atrocious yo-yo’s to sit, unchallenged, atop the throne of ultimate lameness…

And there you have it! Hopefully, I didn’t tick anyone off too bad. I’m actually a big believer in having fun with any yo-yo. Still, I can’t imagine that even in a vast internet world populated by flame-spewers who will say anything for attention, no one will cop to really liking any one of these. And I have to assume that most of the people responsible for their design either inadvertently blew themselves up in a makeshift lab somewhere or else are incarcerated. If nothing else, each of these yo-yo’s certainly represents a “crime against humanity”. Got a problem with my picks? Have a better awful yo-yo in mind? Let me hear it in the comments. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go heat up this P’Zone.

Top 5 Old-Timey YoYo Players Who Could Still Wipe the Floor With You

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Bob Rule Barney Akers Dale Myrberg Tommy Smothers, Harvey Lowe

It’s tough living in the 21st century. We’ve so thoroughly ensconced ourselves within our hives of technology and so overwhelmed ourselves with information, that our sense of history has become a bit skewed. For example, just looking at my iPhoto, I notice that of my 18,000 digital photos, more than half are somehow from the past year! 16k are from the last 5 years! Similarly, in the yo-yo world, we see so many new releases, so many champions, and so many unbelievable new tricks that 5 years ago can seem like a galaxy far, far away. And while recent history could not feel more vibrant, learning about the characters which defined the vast majority of yo-yoing’s history can seem about as easy as programming a Betamax VCR with a Sanskrit manual.

Thus, for my first Top 5 column, I thought I’d flip back through the annals of Yo-Yo History to dust off some names which some of you may not be familiar, but who, regardless, irrevocably changed the history of our little obsession, and who could still mess your face up pretty good:

Larry Sayco

5. Larry Sayco – I got to meet this guy a few years back, and he was scary-awesome. He was probably about 75 then. He may have lost a step, but he’s still out there shredding, selling the same molded plastic yo-yo’s he makes in his workshop to sell at small shows throughout New England. When I visited him, he flawlessly demonstrated the into-the-pocket trick “Coin Deposit”, not only on himself, but into my own pants as well. He also had blindfolded trapeze on lock, despite using an impossibly thin wood-axle looper.

Dale Myrberg

Dale Myrberg in 1997, knocking a dime off Alex Garcia’s ear with behind-the-back loops.

4. Dale Myrberg – Dale has been in the game professionally since the mid-eighties, and his performance experience has yielded the kind of consistency that just freaks out modern players. He pretty much embarrassed me at Worlds a few years ago when he challenged a bunch of modern players to try his tricks on stage using golden age yo-yo’s. As modern fixed axle luminary Drew Tetz related: “In the last year before shoe-judging, Dale wandered into the Fixed Axle Throwdown entirely by accident. He started walking out, but Jack [Ringca] grabbed him and let him know that he was a sudden wildcard entry into the final round. Dale took two Russells out of his pocket and said “Just tell me when to stop,” before launching into two solid minutes of every ridiculous old school trick you’ve ever seen, the majority of which was linked into two monster combos by continuous regens.” Check out his textbook-melting Split-the-Atom into Coin Deposit in this vid (and just try not to make the same incredulous moan the guy filming it does).

Dale Oliver

Dale Oliver in the 1950s, apparently working on 3A tricks.

3. Dale Oliver – As close to a living legend as we’ve got in yo-yoing, if you haven’t hung out with Dale, you’re missing out big time. His stories span a lifetime of sharing yo-yoing with the masses, and are as unbelievable as his skill. Tales of traveling through Mexico on yoyo promotions with Tommy “Punchy” Hatcher, a guy who was on the Duncan payroll for the sole purpose of beating up demonstrators from rival companies; stories about being asked to relinquish his lifetime membership to the Playboy club and refusing…there is very little that Dale hasn’t done and even less than he’ll admit to. You might think a guy who has played a lifetime of yo-yo would be pretty jaded about modern playing, but no. I sat next to Dale during the 07 Worlds finals and he was hooting as loudly as anyone in the room about Yuuki’s legendary freestyle. Game recognize game.

Bob Rulew

Bob Rule, looking amazing at the 1962 National YoYo Contest at Disneyland in Anaheim, California.

2. Bob Rule – A student of the inimitable [#1, wait for it], Bob, to me, represents the quintessential Duncan Yo-Yo Man. He, along with comrades like Bud Lutz, Jack Russell, and Bill Cafe, surely put on enough miles to circumnavigate the globe while demonstrating yo-yo in the US in the 50’s and 60’s. Along the way, he pioneered moves like Hydrogen Bomb (shown here by Dennis McBride, another guy who could easily be on this list) and bewildering reverse-spin tricks. Could he do Superman? Nope… no more than you could strategically build yo-yoing into a national fad through a series of playground demos and drug store contests. Which would you say is the more impressive trick? Unlike grandmasters like Dale, McBride, and YYJ’s Bill de Boisblanc, Bob never really made the move to transaxles, even today preferring a Duncan Ignite. Even so, he’d crush you under the weight of 50+ years of crazy gimmick-tricks like you were one of the adoring grommets at his Five and Dime contests. Check out Duncan’s classic footage of Bob (and some other greats) at the first National Yo-Yo Contest in 1962 to get a sense for how humble Bob is, and if you haven’t already done so, go lose a few hours nerding out over the throwback photos at his archive site.

1. Barney Akers – Yes, I realize this guy’s dead – what of it? I’m reasonably certain Barney’s immortal spirit could return from the grave and give your hard-earned skills a swirly anyway. Barney Akers was the ultimate innovator and demonstrator of the 40’s and 50’s, an era when yo-yoing was being actively and permanently emblazoned into American cultural consciousness. Imagine coming up with the tricks and techniques which defined the play of that generation… Now imagine it at a time when there was no access to the internet, the best trick anyone for 500 miles had ever seen was Rock the Baby, and even the most basic yo-yo trick vocabulary had yet to be be invented. Oh, and you have to be able to demonstrate using a Duncan Bo-Yo (the ones shaped like a bowling ball). That’ll give you an idea of the kind of challenging landscape Barney Akers faced. Except where a normal human yo-yo player would see difficulty, Barney saw wide-open opportunity, which I guess is why his own indelible stamp remains on yo-yoing even 30 years after his demise.

I’m not trying to knock the modern world with this Top 5, promise. I live here and keep all my stuff here too. And yoyoing is SO GOOD right now. It would be easy enough to watch Janos and think “Man, our tricks are way more tech than those guys could ever dream of.” And of course they are… THAT WAS THE WHOLE POINT. Their tricks are what continue to make ours possible. They paid for our passage. The multiple lifetimes of practice these players (and their contemporaries) put in was done with the faith that yo-yoing is meaningful, and with the hope that it would be taken deeper and further. If you’re evaluating the skill of those who came before you without considering its historical context, you’re not actually evaluating their skill at all! So the next time you throw a casual session, maybe throw a Sleeper down for Barney (and everybody else who threw it down before you). I never got to meet him, but I bet he’d get a kick out of the crazy stuff we’ve come up with while standing on his shoulders.

Fixed Friday – Pictures

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So I’ll preface this by saying “it’s been fun”. It’s been fun, and I’m intensely proud of having made this column a weekly feature on YoYoNews.com; proud of helping to document “the state of fixed axle” during what has been a fascinating resurgence. When I first fell in love with throwing wood, information on its necessary skills and disciplines were few and far between. Progression had stagnated to the point of a dare or punchline, and seeing which long combos could be hit on a No Jive or a Butterfly was the only “fixed axle style” out there. Drew and I set out this year to simply have some fun and see where we could go, but that attitude evolved as we developed a lexicon and identified the directions that best fit this weird medium. Along the way, we had some battles, wrote a preposterous amount of text, and posted up some 2 hours of thematic video. In the back of my mind has been the idea that some guy or girl who finds themselves obsessed with chasing the simplicity and tradition inherent to fixed axle will have an archive of conceptual ammunition to go on.

This week, I wanted to go back to one of my favorite wells, albeit one that is not normally a natural for fixies – picture tricks. Generally, these depictive string formations are much better suited to bearing play, if only because they take a long time to develop. Remember though, that the original picture tricks were classics like Eiffel Tower, Rock the Baby, and Texas Star. Even Sleeper, Creeper, and Shoot the Moon are visually named, suggesting that all of yo-yoing has its roots in pictures.

Luke Hildebrand sent me a black version of his diminutive delrin throw, the Emmett. Despite its small diameter, it’s pretty solid, and I figured the steel axle would give me enough sleep time to pull off some of these. It did not disappoint, and I’m pretty sure this is the only metal-axle fixie I’ve thrown on FF this year.

I start off with a tough one called Deadpool. To me it kind of looks like the wisecrackin’ Marvel Comics character, so bizarrely portrayed by Ryan Reynolds in that Wolverine movie. Unfortunately, doing this on fixed means, you have about AN second to hang out in the actual picture if you intend to get it back to the hand, so this one came out kind of like a “morbidly obese Deadpool”, but it’s the thought that counts. This trick uses a mount similar to Drew’s classic 20th Century Fox/Flying Ice Cream/Spiderman-in-a-Propeller-Beanie sequence.

Next up, we’ve got my own interpretation of a John Bot classic. Although I initially named it “Space Invader”, I soon realized it was just a frontstyle version of his trick, Cat Star. I do like dropping mine into Eiffel and then braintwisting out. John was the first player who really showed me that picture tricks could be a modern style in and of themselves, and I found his “story tricks” to be absolutely brilliant. My Bionic Rudolph trick uses the same basic mount as his StarFox/Bandit-Elephant sequence, but ends in a seasonally appropriate bit of Xmas flair.

The 4th trick is not picture-ish at all. Whatever, I was just messing around with the Emmett.

At :30, we have one of my favorite tricks ever, Star Within A Star. I heard that this was a boom-era Sky Kiyabu invention (although I could be wrong). Possibly the most awesome work of symmetrical string geometry I’ve seen, and I love how you can pause in the Triforce picture before completing it. Immediately following it, we have a variation I call Sands of the Hourglass, which is kind of my own take on the classic Hailey’s Comet (1-handed Star mounted in trapeze).

The next two tricks are some of my more complex ones, and they require a degree of delicacy on fixed axle. At :50 is Flux Capacitor, which I’m sure I’ve highlighted on FF before at some point, and then after that is a weird trick I call Conjoined Twin Towers. I really don’t fully understand how it works out, but you basically get two Eiffels which are totally interwoven, and yet it drops neatly out. Yo-yo’s… how do THEY work? 1:10 shows another John Bot gem, Takeshi’s Ray Gun. Easy to get into, and brilliantly simple in concept, I do homage to John in my next trick, the star-to-trapeze formation I named “Johnbotulism”.

Pretty much every old-schooley thrower has some variation on the Flower trick. They are perfect for small demos, and say what you will about the pitfalls of princesses and ponies… little girls love the flower trick. They also dig on the Flutter-By trick, which I get into at 1:40. That one has a habit of snagging on the way out, so it’s a bit sketchier for a school or library show. And, speaking of things that flutter, my last trick for this week was named by Drew Tetz as “The Great Blue Heron Or Something”. Seeing as it looks only vaguely like a bird, the “Or Something” is absolutely integral.

And that’s a wrap. Mind you, I don’t think we’re done with Fixed Friday by any means. Though I’m taking a vacation for a couple weeks, I’ll still revisit this column in the new year. It might not be a weekly or bi-weekly thing, but as thematic ideas become apparent, we’ll be there to try our best to document them. Thanks so much to anyone and everyone who has checked out this corner of YoYoNews.com all year, who’ve left us feedback and suggestions in the comments, and who have, themselves, pushed fixed axle play forward through all of the videos, instagrams, and support of small manufacturers. As I said at the top, “it’s been fun”.

Fixed Friday – Scorchers

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So I’ll apologize in advance for the apparent cop-out layup. Except it’s Thanksgiving weekend and my engorged body is incapable of either throwing myself into a ton of hard tricks OR actually caring about it… so consider that apology for what it’s worth.

One of our dear readers – we HAVE them! – inquired in my last column about whether we might dedicate an entry to “long-sleeper tricks”. He offered that while we have produced much content in the realm of 1-and-done stall moves, stop-n-go’s, and the like, FF has largely ignored the bizarre art of hitting protracted tricks involving many string-hits (bear in mind, such tricks max out around 10s on fixed axle). Although we have kind of overlooked those tricks, I think if you’re willing to go back through the archives, there have been several examples to the contrary. Regardless, there is certainly a good reason for our focus on the shorter stuff. I’ll get to that, promise. In any case, this vid combines #throwbackthursday with #fixedfriday, and is essentially a compilation of some of the longer tricks I’ve done on wood. Even more than that, I guess it serves as a fun little scrapbook chronicling my own development as a fixed axle player. Hope you dig.

I remember talking with Jack Ringca (who has always been a pretty awesome fixed axle player, himself) in 2006 about doing Cold Fusion on fixed axle, and specifically on a classic wood-axle Russell. That conversation lit a fire in me somehow. I decided to make that challenge my own, and I rolled it up a hill like Sisyphus for half a year before finally hitting it. I found it WAY easier on either a Proyo or No Jive, both of which have immeasurably smoother axles. Part of hitting a long trick on a fixie is simply throwing hard, and with an untreated Russell axle, I will either snap a string or scorch the wood with a single throw. This can be ameliorated by allowing some Vaseline Intensive Care Lip Therapy to cure on the axle overnight (thanks for that tip, John Higby). Learning to cope with those fickle Russells helped me to understand the importance of a smooth axle and, subsequently, ensured my eventual head-over-heels love affair with No Jives. Mind you, I still burn No Jive axles sometimes, and even the smoother, harder TMBR ones (hence the column’s name). It sucks, but at least it smells great.

In 2007 or so, I had no idea what to do with a No Jive beyond just trying to do the same tricks I did with a bearing. Somehow it felt as though doing a long trick on a wood yo-yo translated to being “a good yo-yoer” back then, and I was eager to chase down all of my favorite tricks on that medium. Branding, Hook, Suicides, Brent Stole, Gyroscopic Flop (initially suggested by Jack as “impossible on wood”), Mach 5, Pop N Fresh, and eventually, Spirit Bomb. I found it more tantalizing to be the sort of yo-yoer who could hit those modern classics on wood than to invent the next round of “post-modern classics”, myself (to be fair, I was still making up lots of tricks, but nothing remotely classic). Ironically, most of my stall-based stuff that actually IS progressive and relevant was born out of my missed attempts at longer tricks.

I have come up with some tricks that are at the edge of what a fixed axle will typically allow, in terms of spin-time. Smallpox Blanket comes to mind, but Would even more so. The TMBR Irving Pro is probably more capable of long, technical tricks than any fixie out there, and I’ve never hit that particular trick with any other yo-yo.

In terms of the classical canon, Spirit Bomb represented a line my mind drew in the sand from the start. While not a particularly long trick, it was the first one I came to that I really didn’t think could be done on fixed axle (when in fact, it can be done on almost ANY fixed axle). That line gets erased and redrawn, I’ve found, but it’s always there somewhere. At IYYO in New York that year, it became a fun challenge to hit Spirit Bomb on a No Jive. I was amazed that some guys (Red, Yuuki, Tyler) were able to hit it first try. Adam Brewster, Brandon Jackson, Joey Fleshman took a few go’s each (Adam also hit Superman!). And others (André, Sebby, Samm Scott) took the better part of a night to nail it at ECC, but they all got it dialed. It took me over a week of trying before it finally made sense, and it really opened me up to the truth that a) my technique was really not very good, and b) WAY more than you imagine is possible. That second realization is pretty much entirely responsible for anything/everything cool I have done with a yo-yo in the last 5 years. If even a small part of you believes that you can do something, it’s almost as though you already have – you just have to go through the motions and do the math. Fixed Axle Spirit Bomb became an obsession to me, and I made it a point to be able to hit it on ANYTHING, up to and including the O-Boy in the video, the woodies I made in Steve Buffel’s garage, and Colin Leland’s first ultra-thin TMBR prototype.

For awhile, my standard of impossibility was reset at Kamikaze, but in early 2009 I hit it on a FHZ with a Technic axle, and then again with a No Jive. Pure 143 seemed like a lion, but if you can manage your response through the bucket, it’s really just a kitten. Rancid Milk is a fixed axle killer, and I’ve never been smooth enough through the intro to take a shot at it, but Colin poked his head through that glass ceiling with a purpleheart Irving Pro. And while I thought White Buddha and McBride Roller Coaster (did he invent that trick on a transaxle? Jesus, I hope so) were easy tricks, they just seemed too LONG for wood. With the TMBR axle innovations, though, I could knock them over with spin to spare (OK, not much). Breath is one of the few tricks out there that I’ve never seen done on fixed axle, know could be, and that I’d really like to see. I can get through it on a bearing, but I’ve never been fluid enough to even make a reasonable attempt on wood. Maybe someday. If you beat me to it, I’ll send you a yo-yo and a high five.

By and large though, I’ve moved away from this content, which is why the video is populated mostly with content from years past. Tricks, to me, are like surf spots, and pulling off Kamikaze with a No Jive is a bit like stroking into Pipeline on a 10ft balsa longboard from the 60’s (minus the legitimate threat of crushing death). I’ve pulled up to those long tricks and worked through them with my wood yo-yo. Been there and done that and taken the moving digital postcard to prove it. There’s a value to it, absolutely, but you don’t need to keep coming back. While a long trick on your Imperial feels cool and may momentarily validate your sense of yourself, it’s hard to argue that it’s really the best use of the tool. What we’re finding in the past few years is that fixed axle yo-yo’s ARE BETTER at doing some types of tricks than their bearing counterparts. There are unexplored coastlines full of tricks to explore with high response and short-spin, and that’s where I want to go.

It was, however, extremely fun to look at these relic videos and recapture some of the feeling of hitting these tricks for the first time. To imagine that Cold Fusion ever felt hard on a wood yo-yo is just crazy now, but hitting it that night for my first No Jive video felt inexplicably awesome. I hope it will suffice for this column, and I wish you all the best as you load for bear to take aim at your own monsters this week.

Fixed Friday: Archery

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Yeah, you read right.

Although I fully recognize that Drew Tetz’s nasty chopsticks brainchild may not obviously apply to the high-friction craft of fixed axle play, the sadist in me wanted to see whether I could make it fit. And at the end of a week full of sawing against the grain, I can confidently say: “kinda?”.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you’ll need to do some prerequisite research. Archery is a trick (and subsequently, a family of tricks) developed around 2007 based on the use of 3 fingers. So named due to the legend of the naughty middle finger sign having come about from archers’ use of the finger to kill, Archery tricks generally involve the use of the first two fingers and thumb. It’s most commonly associated with the final triple-trapeze trick at the very end of Drew’s yo-yo, and I spend much of this vid focusing on that. I also wanted to share a trick I’ve been doing a lot lately called ‘Soliloquy’, which has a couple of 3-finger pieces to it. Specifically, this week is less about the Archery concept in general, and more about Archery Stalls. It’s one of my longer FF vids, but honestly some of these tricks were so hard for me that I had a tough time editing things out.

This week got pretty frustrating, and I knew from the start that I was biting off more than I could chew. Whatever though, they can’t all be Rock the Baby weeks! After going through Soliloquy a couple of times, I started trying out some stalled variations of the Archery mount described above. At first I found Archery Stall to be nearly impossible, but like so many tricks, it was just an intimidating learning curve on the approach. After a little time and a lot of misses, I was successfully stalling out in the 3-trapeze Archery hold nearly every time (figuring out how to hop into it from a static stall also helped a bunch). Unfortunately, the ultimate application of fixed axle Archery was pretty much immediately apparent. Because if you can stall out in the Archery trapeze hold… it stands to reason that you can kickflip it. In retrospect, reason ended up having very little to do with it.

The first or second time I hit the stall, I showed it to my wife, Stacy, saying “Ok, so I can hit this like once every 50 times… How many times do you think I’d have to try to land the Kickflip on all 3 fingers? 5,000? 10?” She was nonplussed and turned Sons of Anarchy back on. She watched a lot of Sons of Anarchy this week.

I don’t know how many times I actually tried the flip, but it was a lot. I landed it to one finger at least 100 times, which honestly does feel awesome… unless you’re going for 3, in which case it’s a total failure. I landed it on two fingers about 10 times, which is BRUTAL. As of press time, I have hit the full Archery Flip three times… and the feeling of vindication was every bit as sublime as hitting Spirit Bomb on an O-Boy. What you learn going though the process of hitting any really difficult trick, however, is that the part of you that is able to hit the trick is nowhere near as significant and impressive as the part of you that is willing to TRY it. Hitting the Archery Flip was really just a matter of patience and statistics; the right confluence of variables. That doesn’t really say anything about me or my skill. But the combination of naiveté and determination which led me to throw myself into something that I reeeeeeally wasn’t sure I’d be able to hit… actually is pretty awesome.

I was psyched to hit some other cool stuff too, including the Insta-Archery Stall at 2:35. I first saw Insta-Archery (I think) from Randy Jansen shortly after Drew released his video, and I’ve seen Jacob Jensen do it as well. Insta-Archery is just like regular Archery, only you have about 0.01s to get your fingers into all the right string-nooks. And to land it in a stall, you need to be as fluid as you are fast. I’m pretty sure that if I had Sid-hands instead of my own stubby digits, that trick would be one of my favorites… although I guess a lot of my playing might be awesomer if I had Sid-esque qualities. I also think Soliloquy is a cool trick, and I love the two-handed Archery-style mount it starts with. Some of the inverted Lunar stuff in the middle of the video is fun to mess around with as well. I tried to figure out a true Archery Lunar Landing, but everything I tried had weird doubled loops and was very awkward to put into Shoot-the-Moon. (We’ll call that one homework for all you loyal readers – someone is reading this, right?) The Archery Flip to 360 Shuv-it out is buried in the vid, but (I think) pretty slick; kind of the ultimate Drew Tetz combo trick – just needs Sawchucks.

A lot of this week was spent chasing a white whale in that Archery Flip, but as is often the case, I happened upon some really cool applications of the broader concept in the process. It’s not lost on me that pretty much all of this week’s entry is just obsessively perusing through Drew’s conceptual playing and trying to fit the pieces together differently. Major fist-bump-bro-hugs to my brother-in-arms on that score. Are you a fixed axle archer, yourself? Tell us about your variations and tribulations in the comments below.

ALSO, we are quickly coming up on a full year of Fixed Friday entries. I’ll discuss this a bit more later on, but after 46 entries, it’s getting kind of tough to think of new weekly themes. If you have any suggestions, we do take requests… unless they’re as hard as Archery Flip.

 

Fixed Friday: Dragons & Eels

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I am spectacular at 5a. By 5a I [of course] mean 360’s, Nunchucks, Butterfly, the occasional Shoulder-Pop, and basic Freegens, which are really all I have ever mastered in order to demonstrate the style to kids. I have HEARD that some innovative players (Miguel Cohumnum, Takeshi Matsomething) have developed tricks outside of this range, but I can’t say I’ve really explored them much. Ok, so that may mean that I’m actually NOT so great at 5a. Despite the attempted interventions and clarifications I’ve received from the style’s founder, I’ve just never really gotten it to the extent that I’ve been inspired to make up 5a tricks of my own. I basically suck at it. That said, for whatever reason, I’ve always dug some Slippery Eel.

Slippery Eel is essentially counterweight yo-yoing without the counterweight. It originated as a fairly lame through-the-leg trick, and kind of stagnated into ignominious irrelevance after Steve figured out that a casino die on the string had more extensive applications. (For my part, I’ve tried attaching a casino die to a stapler, a skateboard, and most recently, a beagle with essentially zero effect upon the “creative floodgates”.) I’ve seen a [very] few cool essays into the realm of fixed axle 5a, but I’m not naive enough to think that my own perfunctory understanding of the basics would serve me much there. Eel tricks though, I dunno… I’ve got some ideas.

Eel’s obvious application to fixed axle is its allowance for real ambidexterity. This was one of SB’s inspirations in developing the Freehand style. His experience as a juggler was kind of at-odds with the “strings-attached”, dominant-hand-dominated mechanism of traditional yo-yoing. When you think about it, a lot of the stall tricks (particularly repeaters) we’ve explored this year tend toward symmetry, but are restricted by the yo-yo being tied to the throw hand. It’s a lot of fun to unhook that slipknot and experiment with using both hands to throw, catch, stall, regenerate, etc. This is true of modern 1a, too, of course, but in fixed axle, wherein the frequency of throws and catches is ramped up, the changes become more numerous and more challenging.

Exhibit A is just a warm-up, but if you’ve never tried fixed axle Eel (and I assume there are roughly 7-billion of you), you’ll want to get the feel down. This is just a series of trapeze stalls, changing hands in between and throwing in some somersaults. I find it really helpful to use a full-length string (I usually shorten mine) tied with an extra loop at the end. This gives me a bit more surface area to hang on to, which is dead useful when we get to the dragons at the end.

2nd trick is obviously Zipper Stalls, but you’ll notice something fishy (or EELISH – oh snap!). In this example, before every stall catch, there’s a hand change. It actually feels pretty natural, although I have an easier time starting out with the left hand for some reason.

After that I get into a couple of no-hands Kickflip-Suicide variations. First up is a simple and unimpressive flat spin, but it’s good to get under your fingers before moving on. Catching the loop and the loose string takes some getting used to. Next up is a sort of “Half-Cab”, which in skateboard jargon just means a fakie 180 ollie, so the orientation of your board and feet have changed directions at the end. Fun, but much cooler is the 2.0 version which follows, going from a Double or Nothing to a hand-changed trapeze. (I’ll note here that one of the coolest things about throwing a responsive yo-yo in Slipper Eel is your ability to end any trick with a Skyrocket.)

Moving ahead to 1:04, we start to get into some more laterally symmetrical repeaters in the style of Salvador Dali Windshield Wipers (originally given the unoriginal name of Glide Symmetry). The first example is kind of a reverse-suicide, catching the string on both sides (as opposed to the loop). Next is the closest to the classic Wipers, only changing hands before each stall (much like the Zipper example earlier). Same thing at 1:24, but offsetting the sequence so as to do reverse-trapeze stalls on both sides. I find both of these to be pretty easy and extremely addictive.

At 1:37, the video moves into a series of tricks based on what I call “Catch the Lashing Dragon’s Tail” (I’m never going to come up with a canonical T’ai Ch’i move, so I have to get mystical where I can). CtLD’sT (or just Dragons) involve grasping the short segment of string trailing behind a nearly-wound yo-yo. The first example is a trick I’m calling “Streamer” due to the catchable fly-away string segment behind the yo-yo. This is a little like a trick I did last year called Hydrangea Bomb, but grasping that string as it comes around injects a little leap of faith. I actually found that you DO get pretty good at this with a little practice, but don’t get it dialed on a yo-yo you’re nervous about banging up a bit. See if you can hit it in both directions.

As far as Dragons go, Streamer is pretty darn easy, as the yo-yo is stalled. The REAL Lashing Dragon Tail has to actually LASH, and for that to happen, the yo-yo has to be in a state of full spin. The 3 final tricks show some variations of this, including over-the-shoulder, from snapstart (SnapDragon! ©™®), and the original version catching the string with a kendo-esque two-hand clap. These tricks are waaaaaaay easier if you took my advice and tied that second loop at the end of the string. Dragon tricks are actually pretty difficult (nigh impossible) with a 5a setup, because the counterweight tends to initiate a FreeGen (awesome in its own right).

I really feel like these examples are just the edge of the wedge with respect to what’s possible (or even what’s obvious). The application of Eel concepts to fixed axle is a natural to me, and I’d love to see some of you kids come up with. While we’re at it, I’d love to see some more fixed-specific conceptual 3a, 4a and 5a.

 

Yo-Yo is the “eh” by SPYY & TMBR and the song is “Harold of the Rocks” by Primus.

Fixed Friday: Babies!!!

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Howdy all. Ed here with an unapologetic change-of-pace this week.

I was at the skatepark this afternoon, and it occurred to me that my skating is pretty much all centered around the expression of joy and simplicity (ok, and falling down). I’ve been on a board since I was about 7, idolizing the Bones Brigade, Blind crew and Girl team through the successive decades. However, though I’ve skated for as long as I can remember, my skating has not “matured” in the way you might assume it would. Although I learned kickflips, shuv-its, and street-plants, I pretty much never saw any value in tricks I vaguely deemed “too technical”… and so I never mastered them. What I did see value in was in crusing, in bombing hills, in dropping in and carving deep. Big ollies and rock n’ rolls are about as “tech” as my skating ever got… and yet I have never stopped LOVING it.

It’s interesting for me to reconcile my skating with my yo-yoing. On the one hand, no one in the know would ever classify me as a technical stylist. However, I’m certainly surpassing the yo-yo equivalents of ollies and carves. For me, Fixed Friday has been a double-edged sword. Its design gives Drew and me a platform to share a style which we are consciously trying to move forward. This column has been the launch pad for new tricks, new concepts, and collectively, a new approach to old tools. I’m really proud of the 40+ episodes we’ve pulled together this year. But Fixed Friday also serves to pull me back; to ground me. Whatever else I’m working on, it MAKES me take some time each week to appreciate “roots yo-yoing”. For all of the Dumptrucks and Fakie-regens, and Insta-bucket Stalls I do on a given Friday, I generally do twice as many Shoot-the-Moons, Loop-the-Loops, and Ferris Wheels. It reminds me that I initially gravitated to fixed axle, not because it offered any fertile creative territory, but because the sensation of the string sliding against a wood axle is just TOPS.

Rock the Baby is the quintessential classic trick. I’ve probably been asked to do it 100 times, and if I dug, there are probably as many ways to show it. Virtually any mount can be Baby-fied, but some variations have almost transcendentally crossed over into autonomy, becoming unique tricks in their own right. A few are shown below, but don’t assume the circle is complete. As is always the case with yo-yo, there is room for you to reach into the void and pull out your own classic version.

Don’t overlook the value of Rock the Baby, because to do so is to overlook the value of the innocent joy which started all of us down this weird road to begin with. No, it’s not a difficult, technical trick, and no it probably won’t “impress” people, even if they ask. But it will make them HAPPY, which is an altogether different sort of power, and every bit as real.

First off, there’s no wrong way to rock. From the front, back, side, whatever. I’ve taught a few hundred kids to do this trick, and one of the ways that seems to work for the less coordinated is the over-thumb method. Make a LOSER sign with your throw hand, and then pull the string through and over your thumb like Bow-&-Arrow. Young kids tend to have trouble with the pinching, and this avoids it (but it does make Dizzy Baby more difficult later on – speaking of Dizzy Baby, that’s shown next in the context of Throw the Baby Out the Window).

John Higby is one of my favorite people ever, and he showed me the next two variations (he does a bunch in his show). Itsy-bitsy Baby requires that you know the length of your string to the inch. You can make 2 or 3 triangles, but the yo-yo has to fit, which makes it a trick worth practicing if you actually want to perform it. Not the case with Lazy Baby, which is a delicious intentional cop-out, and as easy as the name implies.

The next four tricks have been around since the golden age (not the Chuck video), and used to be pretty considered pretty difficult before rim weight and transaxles made a 15-second sleeper automatic. Joint Custody always gets a chuckle (or the stink-eye from divorced people who actually have to deal with that reality). Rock the Baby Down South is one I vaguely remember from an Arne Dixon video, and I have no actual idea if I’m doing it correctly or if it originated with him. I guess you could also call it Rock the Baby in Jamaica, but I live in North Carolina and drive by 3 Confederate flags on my way to my kid’s school (sigh). Rock the Baby in the Eiffel Tower is still pretty tough to do well, and I can totally see it separating the men from the boys in the 60’s (pretty sure about 10 girls total played yo-yo then, too… SIGH).

At Worlds ’10, there was a great Rock the Baby trick circle featuring some incredible players. Some of the hilarious ideas shared were Kohta Watanabe’s Minimalist Baby (using an inverted 7 to form an incomplete cradle) and Hidemasa Semba’s trick, which may have a name, but which I’m calling Slack Parenting. The brilliant Nate Sutter has also repeatedly shown one of his versions, Rosemary’s Baby (essentially Rock the Baby in a pentagram).

I showed Infant CPR a few weeks ago under the name Wake the Baby. Basically just a Pocketwatch that you rock and then wake up. The next two are also mine. Plush Safe He Think is a random reference to the painter JM Basquiat. I thought the trick was worth including because the yo-yo passes through a Trapeze-Baby as a means to fold the string (which I later Tunnel out of). I do a similar thing with the next example – part of my trick Hyacinth – but fold in the opposite direction. It’s worth noting that Babies can be embedded into tricks and move the formation along. The Doc Pop trick Trap Door could be thought of as a similar example.

Chinese Cradle is one of my favorite picture tricks, and it has an interesting story. Back in the 50’s and 60’s, there were way more yo-yoers, but way FEWER people calling themselves professionals. Those that did had an actual job – traveling around from town to town and from school to school, setting up small contests and building up the infrastructure of a micro-community which was developed incrementally over time. Some of these pros were more legitimate than others, and some of the rivalries were pretty intense. Chinese Cradle was a sort of “calling card” trick that only an initiated few (generally the legendary Duncan Men) actually knew, and rarely (if ever) taught. In Helen Zieger’s book “World on a String”, she shows the trick but offers no explanation for how to get into it. When I visited Larry Sayco in his workshop, he confirmed that no one would teach it to him (which is crazy considering he could do Bank Deposit into my cousin’s pocket 1st try at age 89!). I asked Dale Oliver about the trick a few years back, and he said that there’s no place for trick exclusivity in the modern era, which was a relief.

I finish up with another of my favorites from a bygone era. Rock the Baby on the Launch Pad is a variation on Pop the Clutch, and is best done with a fairly long string. Throw hard so as to get a good launch, but recognize that you might well nail yourself in the elbow!

And that’s the news. I know there’s not much there that pushes the envelope, but if you really believe that’s the only reason to play yo-yo… I gotta say I think you’re missing out.

Yo-Yo used is an unfinished Tom Kuhn No Jive I got from Chuck Short and the song is “Film” by The Bad Plus. Have a great week!

 

 

Fixed Friday: Pocketwatches

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Hi, Nate! (Oh, Hi everyone else, too!)

This week I’d like to spend some time looking at a concept put forward by the inimitable Nathan Sutter, longtime member of Duncan Crew and Team SPYY, a fellow alumnus of 365yoyotricks.com, and runner-up at this year’s Fixed Axle Championship of All the World. Nate has put forward a slew of incredible yo-yo elements throughout his career, including (but not limited to) Plastic Whip, Figure Nate, and Shoot the Moon Down Under. At the WYYC this year, he also showed off his Pocketwatch concept, which led to at least 2 consecutive hours of string-burning trick-circlage on that god-forsaken carpet. He also demoed the idea (in an unresponsive context) during his fantastic Alternative Freestyle.

I’d been meaning to explore this idea more since returning from Worlds, but it took me a few weeks to allow the mental carbonation to settle. Pocketwatches are one of the most abrupt and fundamental ways to go from dynamic (spinning) to static (not), which is a key vein running through the fledgling fixed axle style. Although you can get into Pocketwatch with any kind of yo-yo, I feel that it’s best suited to the fixed realm. For one, there’s no distracting bind required to get into it on fixed, and since many of the regenerations out are inherently off-kilter and tough to control, it’s useful to have a yo-yo that’s bent on returning to your hand.

The basic idea is to allow the yo-yo to wind part-way up the string, then grab it before it gets to your throw-hand. Pulling down on the yo-yo abruptly should cause it to cinch and hold, creating a temporary “string-lock”. You can then “do stuff” with the yo-yo partly wound (yet not spinning) until you give it the centripetal force necessary to break the string-lock and spin to life once again. At first, I saw this as a cool novelty concept, but couldn’t really see where it could go. However, as it happens, this concept takes everything fun and kendama-ish about Mark Montgomery’s radical A-minus tricks from a few years back, AND adds the bonus of being able to recall the yo-yo easily.

I hope you enjoy these variations.

The core Pocketwatch concept (demonstrated by Nate in the FS link above) involves flinging the yo-yo around casually with the air of a gentleman waiting for the bus. As you’ll see, most of my examples focus more on trick applications – how can Pocketwatches be applied to, say, a whip, a wrap, a hop, a laceration, etc. Most of the vid is pretty stream-of-consciousness, but there are a few points I can elaborate on. First, if you’re gonna try these tricks (or, more preferably, your own) be prepared to break A LOT of strings and yank the bajesszus out of your throw-hand middle finger. I probably used 10 different yo-yo’s in filming this quick video and had to wrap my finger at one point (what a weeny).

One thing you’ll find is that there are some striking similarities between your everyday Stall-based play and Pocketwatches. The rhythm feels similar, but more importantly, a dead Pocketwatch can be mounted, at which point it effectively IS a stall. What’s different is that while a Stall has tons of potential energy behind it (being almost fully wound), a Pocketwatch’s energy is blocked by the string-lock. This means stuff like kickflips are possible, but anything involving a regen into another hold is more difficult. Also, whereas you can’t really do Eli Hops, Lacerations, and other “dynamic” tricks within a stall, it’s pretty easy to do them in a Pocketwatch setup, provided you’re careful about keeping things straight.

One trick that I think is worth mentioning is “Eat Pray Love”, which was developed collectively at Worlds by Nate, Drew, and myself. I love the way it goes from the Kendo prayer-catch to the “Love” hold between the elbows. It’s one of the few examples in this vid where the cinch is seamlessly integrated into the rest of the trick (the underarm cinch at 0:12 is another).

I can’t claim to know ANYTHING about the Moebius sub-style, but Pocketwatches definitely lend themselves to taking the string off your finger. I go outside for a couple of Pocketwatch Moebicides (am I using that term correctly?), and I really like the idea of looping with one hand, suiciding to the other, and then continuing to loop.

I reference one of my favorite simple kendama tricks at 1:32 in Faster Than Gravity. Snap-start into a vertical Pocketwatch, and then let the bottom fall out. The catch is actually really easy, and you can drop into a normal Trapeze or a Lunar Landing.

The wrap combo at 1:50 is also pretty fun. Needless to say, my wraps are nothing special and totally elementary, but how often can you really DO ANY WRAPS with fixed axle? Using a Pocketwatch hold enables you to forget about that whole pesky, yo-yo-must-keep-spinning issue. You can always just restart it later!

Another of my new favorites is the Hard Restart at 2:18. If you slam it straight enough and hard enough, you can blast through the string-lock you’ve created and bring a Pocketwatch immediately back to a fully-spinning Trapeze. Bear in mind, depending on your restart, the yo-yo may be spinning the regular way or in reverse when you do this. Another way to actively reengage the spin is to wind the yo-yo OVER the string-lock and do some loops, gravity pulls, or Planet Hops before SLAMMING the yo-yo down and through the cinch. Just as offstring players have shown us through the years, there is a LOT we can explore here.

Near the end, you’ll find a fun reference to Adam Brewster’s Folding Gates concept. 5 years later, I’m still fascinated by what he was doing in Bend and Fold. It’s hard to do folds with a stalled yo-yo. I messed around with this in a Tunnels context in the Static 1a Applications vid, but the yo-yo wants to squeak and squirm around so much, it’s pretty tough. But the Pocketwatch hold keeps it in line a bit, and a simple fold out of a GT Pocketwatch is pretty manageable.

Needless to say, there’s some other stuff in the vid as well, and all of it is PATENT PENDING!!! Although, I probably owe Nate royalties anyway, since it all starts with his concept. Hope you enjoy playing around with this concept. Let us know what you find in the comments!

Fixed Friday: Applying Fixed Concepts to Bearing Yo-Yo’s

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Yeah, you’re gonna be mad at me.

It’s cool. I’m a grown man. I can take it. I know I’m raining on your fixed axle parade; your special day. The one day each week which you KNOW will not be sullied by the loud, tacky swagger of ball-bearing infidels. And here I am playing with a bearing… in a metal yo-yo, no less. On YOUR Fixed Friday. Needless to say, I will accept the beatings with understanding.

Hear me out though. While I recognize that this column is all about pushing FIXED play forward, we need to constantly keep in mind what that means. I was at Worlds this year, and I saw some cool stuff. One kid came up to me and said “Hey ed, check out this stall!” proceeding to bind his Chief into a slick cross-armed 1.5 before regenerating into the rest of his day. Alexis JV’s 1a final was so replete with beautiful regens that it almost felt like he could have done it on wood. And I saw kickflip suicides on every yo-yo imaginable, up to and including an off-string. It was incredibly vindicating to see concepts we’ve pioneered and advocated for here (and I do not, for a second, claim that Drew and I have been the only ones doing it) osmoting its way into other hardware.

No yo-yo style can exist in a vacuum. Every cool element you see, you should consider “how can I use that?” I’m not even just talking about specific trick elements. Think about the feeling, motivation, and presentation of the tricks you observe and consider whether they might serve you in a different context. Playing a lot of fixed axle yo-yo will CHANGE the way you approach yo-yo’s in general. Somebody commented the other day that my play with an unresponsive transaxle yo-yo is starting to look a lot like fixed. I’m actually kind of surprised anyone would assume it WOULDN’T after the last few years. My tricks have gotten shorter, or else have leaned toward regenerating repeaters. I seem to end everything with some kind of stall. We’ve all seen sweet modern 1a tricks attempted (and landed) on wood. And there’s no doubt that the influence of modern 1a is inextricably embedded in fixed play. So this week’s video is all about how even throwing a wide-gapped, all-metal, low-response yo-yo, you can evoke the rhythm and dynamics of fixed axle.

Ok, so on to the video. Obviously, as mentioned, you can do a Kickflip on any yo-yo. Actually, I find the wider the gap, the harder it is, because the yo-yo bangs around from side to side and is difficult to control. Still, your everyday Bind-to-Kickflip is easy enough to where I think it should be just as much a staple of transaxle style as fixed. If you need to up the ante, try the Kickflip to Casper which follows (or skip to the last trick, which will melt your face).

Next up we have two fun takes on Zipper Stalls, which is one of the few tricks I’ve pioneered that people actually know. Using a bind-return yo-yo is no reason to dissuade you from the regenerating Zipper theme. In the first example, we basically have a bind-regen Zipper which is easy enough to follow (just have to have smooth Planet Hops off your binds), and following that we’ve got a cool bind-to-Lunar Zipper variation. Zipper is probably the first true repeater I learned (off of Ken’s World around 2002), and one of the most underrated tricks. There remains much to explore within the element, even within traditional 1a.

Scooting ahead to :55, we have a great trick showed to me by Jack “Una” Ringca a few years back. I have no idea of its origins, but he called it “1a Shoot the Moon” for obvious reasons. Although this one will saw through your fingers on a humid day, it’s a fun trick which emulates everyone’s favorite vertically-inclined loop trick and evokes a classic feel with which passers-by will connect. You can even end it in a Lunar… sort of.

Drew’s Dumptrucks are some of the coolest trans-regen transitions ever, and while controlling spin direction is more obviously essential with a fixed axle, there’s no reason not to migrate them to your bearing play as well. 1:10 shows a cute little repeater using Dumptrucks as the conjunction. I’m sure with a bit more exploration, we could see Crisis-level truck combos integrated into modern 1a as well. I’ll… leave that to you guys.

Snap-Starts are not only my favorite way to rewind a dead yo-yo, they’re also among my favorite tricks! I’ve dedicated an entire column to snaps and they are integral to at least a dozen of my tricks. Since their efficacy is in how quickly they deliver the wound yo-yo back to the hand, a lot of bearing players overlook them, thinking they need to snap, bind, and then catch. Unresponsive Snap-Starts, however, are perfectly immediate if you just load up a backspin bind before snapping. This enables all manner of Snap-Stalls, too, which are just as rad with a Center-Trac as they are with a walnut sleeve. Also note the Sky-Bind-to-Stall in the middle of that snap-start melee. Some other neat slack-binds yielding simple stalls and redirects in a bit make up a lot of the video’s second half. Sky-Binds to Lunars (1:42) feel especially nice after a fun 1a combo.

At 1:59, I show an application for that one trick that all the kids are trying to learn these days… oh, the kids aren’t trying to learn Andre’s Inner Ring Grinds (or IRG’s or Thumb Grinds, or Grings) anymore? That’s ok, cause guess what! A 180 Ring Grind sets up a Lunar-bind perfectly, and if you really want to nerd it out, rotating it frontside before regenerating is pretty much a lazy man’s Dumptruck.

I can never remember what the bind at 2:12 is called. I get it confused because though it’s not the Guy Wright Bind, Guy Wright showed it to me, so, well you get it. Anyway, consistently stalling out of it is almost impossibly tough, but a quick, spin-reversing straight-string redirect off trapeze is pretty manageable. After that we’ve got trick called Knuckle Grinder which is one of the few tricks I developed on fixed which transfers to unresponsive play with zero changes. Trapeasy is up after that; just some redirects off of slack binds which you can do once or as many times as you like.

It seems like almost everyone has a cool unresponsive Stop N Go these days, but comparatively few people try Eli Hopping out of them. My go-to is at 2:45. Bear in mind, a wide-gapped yo-yo is WAY harder to Eli out of in this way. You have much less control on the walls, which lends itself to crazy tilted hops. What I love about this one is since I switch the position of the yo-yo before the hop, the spin is back to normal. So in theory, I could hop into trapeze and repeat the whole Stop N Go, but that would be both kind of redundant and, how you say… really, really hard.

For some reason I moved outside for the last trick, which I’m calling a Hardflip Suicide© (yes, I talked to Drew, it’s cool). I ran into this one while brainstorming more Kickflip applications. I hit it the 1st time… then it took about 200 tries to get the 2nd. Now I’ve got it about 1/4. The weird integral (but subtle part) that you can see in the slow-mo is that the bind/mutation you put on in the beginning is actually rejected right before the catch. This has more to do with the way you throw the loop around and the way you hold your throw hand than anything else. It’s comparable to 3D Drewicide, but obviously with that extra twist, and also to his brand new Butterfly Horse nightmare scenario, Shuvit, which uses string tension to load up the loop’s movement around the yo-yo sideways.

Ok, so I deviated from the regular column this week. Mind, it’s not because I have no more cool ideas for fixed axle, or because the movement is breaking down, but rather because it is WORKING. I went in this direction because we’re starting to see the style we’re exploring migrating more and more into everyday tools and mainstream contexts. It’s so vindicating to see, and definitely helps me to reevaluate taking inspiration from styles I hadn’t considered. And when you think about it, is the ultimate goal of Fixed Friday to build up walls and create a fortress of solitude inside which the holy fixed-axle pupa may fully mature in a safe haven? Or is it to explore the tricks and ideas which come most naturally to fixed axle, pausing every now and again to see where they apply and how they connect to yo-yoing as a whole?

… Honestly, I’ve forgotten, but whatever these tricks are SWEEEEEEEET!

Fixed Friday: Buckets

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Hi ho, everybody!

I hope it’s been an awesome week, and that you’re ready to kick off those hard shoes, slip on your best organic type-8, and rock out with a refreshing late-summer fixed axle spin session. I read someone on the internets this week describing fixed axle yo-yoing as a “current fad”. As somebody who’s been pushing it (sometimes obnoxiously) for about 7 years, part of me took that as a compliment. However, I don’t see it the same way, exactly.

To me throwing fixed axle is a two-fold path. It’s obviously a great way to connect with our heritage; with the roots of yo-yoing. Our art began on the high-friction noble disks of yesteryear, and every day I try to take time to  appreciate the scope and breadth of what yo-yoing has become over almost a century of innovation. Fixed axle is also a really natural way to push forward though. Playing modern 1a is its own challenge to be sure, but sometimes it can be difficult to see the creative potential. There are so many great players throwing down so many amazing tricks these days, it’s easy (albeit unfair and untrue) to slouch into the belief that you can’t come up with anything new and significant. With fixed axles though, it feels like there is room for a game-changing trick concept almost every week. For years, wood was relegated to the creative prison of the antiquated and/or novice, which has set the stage for the revolution we now enjoy. I literally wake up in the middle of the night thinking “Oh my crap, I can just Dumptruck into that Wrist-mount!”, after which my wife slaps me. Similarly, the empty space in our fledgling fixed axle style is perpetually beating us about the head and neck, and it’s comparatively easy to feel innovative.

Has it gained popularity? Absolutely. At Worlds, pretty much everybody wanted to be Drew. I saw more butterflies and kickflip attempts than I have in summer meadows and suburban skateparks. But I like to think what we’re trying to build is not so much a fad, but a valuable and lasting counterpoint to the mainstream. If it makes you happy to feel like a hipster, go for it. But I think it’s safe to say that what we’re not trying to define ourselves against the current so much as check out newer, smaller connected streams.

In any case, this week I wanted to go back to where we started and look at a standard trick element and it’s applications to fixed axle. Going back to our original model, the video starts with basic concepts and technique, and then gets into some more interesting applications at the end. This week is all about Buckets (and their kissing cousins, Triangles).

In the initial trick, I show a pretty standard entry into a move I imagine most of you have tried by now: a Drop-in-the-Bucket Stall. Discovered by Thad Winsenz, Buckets are an essential aspect of modern string geometry, but are so ubiquitous that they often they pass almost unnoticed in freestyles. In fixed axle, they demand a bit more attention, and will readily reward the unfocused with a snag, a whack, and a knot. That said, they work great for stalls. Since a lot of the string is accounted for, you may want to practice with a slightly longer string than you typically play with in order to make sure you can regen out of the holds.

One of the key discoveries from a few years back that made Buckets way more useful was the Instamount concept. There are several ways to get into a bucket directly from breakaway (or a laceration). In the 2nd trick, I show one of my favorites. As the yo-yo comes around to your non throw-hand side on breakaway, use that non-throwhand index to pull a string segment out over your throwhand thumb and an adjacent segment with your throwhand middle finger. This will open up a nice little 3-string formation, and as you might guess, the one in the middle there makes a perfectly serviceable bucket. While the traditional mount can waste precious time, I can get directly into this version, even with an Imperial.

If you elect to hit the string closest to your body instead, you land in a really cool and immediate triangle. A Green Triangle is essentially a bucket mount minus one extra bend in the string. They have different feelings, but very similar DNA. The tough thing about triangles on fixed axle is that the doubled string at the bottom can easily cause a snag. This is usually easily avoided by reversing the yo-yo’s spin. It’s tough to see, but on that Instatriangle, I threw with a reverse breakaway for that reason.

Next up, we stall that Instabucket out in a trick I call Infinite Instants. I’ve shown a version of it before. In this one, I stall out an Instabucket, regenerate to a Man-Bro stall on the other side, rinse, repeat.

At :30, we get into what may be the ultimate Butterfly Horse trick, Manly Bucket. I have no idea who came up with this gem, but it was first shown to me by Danny Severance on his trusty purple FH2 in 2008. It took me awhile to get it dialed on a No Jive, but man – nothing feels better. It’s pretty easy in concept – just a totally traditional Bucket entry… only you have to do the whole setup during the breakaway. Not a huge problem with an unresponsive yo-yo, but a knuckle-seeking No Jive (or Danny’s FH2) will be dying to punish your hubristic hands before the yo-yo gets to your shoulder. It’s an exercise in control, and as the next few tricks show, it can be stalled out directly or after a hop.

At :50 I come back to another triangle. Though this is not a bucket, the wrist-whip which begets it demonstrates how closely related the elements are. I like this mount way more than the ever-present Brent Stole, but like that Instatriangle I showed earlier, this one will usually require a reverse throw on Breakaway.

Around the 1-minute mount, I start getting more interesting. My bearing play is replete with pinch-mounts (maybe that’s why I love Lunars so much), and this Pinch-n-Roll move is one of my favorite ways into a Spirit Bomb Wrist-Bucket. To hit that on a No jive, I find I have about 5-6 tries max before I need a new string. TMBR’s are certainly more forgiving.

Seth Peterson and John Bot taught me the pull-mount Bucket that leads to my trick Hyacinth at Indy States one year. It’s one of the most aesthetically interesting mounts I’ve ever seen. At 1:20, I go ahead and turn the thing upside down while stalling it out. Was kind of surprised to discover that it works! Anyway, I did the whole Hyacinth trick on 365, and again for my video Big Deal last week – which you should go watch!!!

Ladder Mounts I learned from Jeff Coons of the Millbury Crew. I think Andre does his a bit differently, but they arrive at the same place. The beauty of the Ladder is that most of the segments are actually “safe zones” which you can drop without a knot. Not so with this middle one, which is a true Bucket. (The segment from your throwhand thumb, incidentally, yields a triangle – go figure.)

I come back to Instabuckets at 1:39. It’s me this week, so there’s gotta be a Snap-Start trick. You could just as easily hit this from Forward Pass, but this has more panache! Same mount as that original Instabucket, but you gotta be ready to grab that segment to land it off a snap.

Last two tricks, I think, are pretty cool. It’s possible to Dumptruck out of a bucket, but I had a hard time coming up with a consistent example. Dumping INTO an Instaucket, however, is pretty simple and feels great. I’m calling them Dumptruckets©™®. (I heard what you said, Drew Tetz! Next year, all the kids will want to be ME!)

And finally, speaking of mashup repeaters, we have a trick I’m calling Planet Bombs. Basically, an alternation between a Wrist-Bucket stall and an undermount stall, this one has a distinctly Planet Hoppish feel on account of the no-flip regens so common to stall tricks.

Aaaaaaaand that’s it! I hope you found something you could sink your teeth into, conceptually. If you have a chance to explore some alternate concepts in the fine art of bucketry (or if you have some applications you hold dear), I hope you’ll let us know about them in the comments!

 

 

Fixed Friday: Fixed Axle Championship of All the World!

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Well, first off I guess we have to apologize for last week. The World YoYo Contest came and went, and afterward neither Drew nor I were in a position to do a coherent column. Actually, I’m STILL not, but I promise you’re not gonna care! This week, we’ve got the sweet, sweet footage from our annual fixed axle free-for-all, the Fixed Axle Championship of All the World!

2013 marks the 5th year of the contest’s modern incarnation, which previously existed as the Fixed Axle Challenge (presented by several different companies, most notably Russell) before being demoted to “Fixed Axle Breakout” in 2007. I was at that 2007 breakout, put on by Ben McPhee, having just started going hard on No Jives over the previous year. Like 3 other dudes ended up showing. Ben helped me out with my moons, we did some silly “challenge” tricks, and called it a day. I spent the next two years gravitating more completely into the swirling vortex that is fixed axle play, and by 2009 I had put out some videos and was volunteered to run the breakout if no one else wanted it. Fixed axle seems like skating (or any number of weird niche activities) in that it goes through alternating periods of popularity and dormancy. During the advent of bearing yo-yo’s in the late 90’s, for example there was a staunch and stalwart fixed axle resistance movement led by Steve Brown, Chuck Short, David Capurro, and Jason Tracy. By 2004, there was again enough interest to generate the classic video “Fixed Axle Fun: Unlimited” at Worlds.

When the 2009 breakout was attended by Drew, along with Joey Fleshman, Jeff Coons, Shawn Fumo, Justin Weber, John Bot, Andrew Robinson, Dana Bennett, and others, it seemed fixed axle was due for another peak. At the very least, we felt we had enough radical players to have a sweet little best trick contest. After a few minutes of deliberation on format, Drew suggested that it be peer judged and (I THINK) it was Shawn Fumo who offered “Why not vote with our shoes?”

And so began what has become (in my humble opinion) the best tradition at the World Yo-Yo Contest and the most fairly (and amusingly) judged contest format in the history of yo-yoing. Drew beat out Jeff Coons for the win in 2009, and we [somewhat] jokingly hailed him as the Fixed Axle Champion of All the World. Sadly there was no trophy that year to commemorate his win. The next year, we took it a bit more seriously. We established trick criteria for the 4-round, bracket-style contest, and I commissioned a legitimately cool, playable trophy from yo-yoer/woodworker James Buffington. Randy Jansen took it home, edging out another talented field. Colin Leland, having just started TMBR, was the obvious choice to craft the 2011 trophy. I’m not sure anyone expected him to bring it home with him, winning the first Fixed Axle Championship of the modern era on the main stage instead of a salon. Last year, I caught a series of lucky breaks to win the raddest trophy ever (also by Colin), edging out a late-entry Ben Conde in the finals as he tried a trick which defied either description… or any likelihood of being hit. But, as the video will show, Big Ben has no problem going back to that well. Honestly, I don’t think anyone gets nearly as excited about who happens to win as they do about the joyful atmosphere and crazy-rad tricks… which is just as it should be.

Major thanks to Drew and Steve, who kept the dialog rolling on stage, to Ben and Nate, who’s first-ever head-to-head fixed axle freestyle battle was nothing short of spectacular, to Iron Mod Champion Adam Reeder who saved me with a sweet trophy at the last minute, and to Ben McPhee who took great photos of the whole affair. It’s really awesome to do this contest year after year. Everyone wants to throw down great tricks, but it’s almost as if the competitors are more stoked by seeing their friends crush it than by doing so themselves. I think part of that is a product of having everyone laughing and interacting on stage together, but it’s also a testimony to the chill and joyful mindset endemic to fixed axle play. (At least that’s what I’m going with.)

Voting with shoes is funny, but some of the Fixed Axle competitors need to invest in some Odor Eaters. Just sayin’. -Steve

Fixed Friday: Freestyles

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Happy Friday, fixed folk. As I’m sure you’re aware, we are just a few days away from that merriest time of year (no, not Arbor Day): Worlds!!! Say what you will about Orlando, Prague, dance parties, etc. All drama, geography, and pageantry aside, Worlds is the time of year when the best and friendliest in the world meet up to throw down. It’s the best.

I have never been much of a contest player. I mean, I’ve competed in contests, and I did alright once or twice, but I’ve never really understood it. As such, I completely agree that I’m unqualified to talk about what a good (much less a “winning”) freestyle should be composed of. My lack of competitive-savvy is probably directly tied to what I love about the annual Fixed Axle Championship of All the World (as Drew discussed last week). It’s judged by your fellow “competitors”, all of whom are as stoked to watch their friends nail a trick as they are to pull off a banger themselves. It’s based on randomly-selected criteria. And, as a 3-try best trick-off, it’s generally much easier to quantify than your average freestyle.

However, for the first time ever this year, the final round of the contest will consist of a freestyle. This allows whoever has made it to the end to really show a chunk of their style in a performance context.

If you’re any kind of yo-yo player, you have to be able to show off your tricks. You have to be able to perform. Otherwise, your experience will be limited to exploring the mysteries of string geometry in your room. And sure, that’s valuable, but the other side of that coin, expressing your joy for the art to an audience, is equally valuable and can serve to inform your more inward “progressive” playing, too. Not all performance is competitive – it just seems that way in yo-yoing sometimes. Fixed axle freestyles are becoming more and more of a “thing” these days. At least 5 large contests (besides Worlds) of which I am aware have had a Fixed Axle division in the last year, and most of those were based on freestyles. Although the word “freestyle” is an amusing misnomer (usually being composed of carefully selected tricks), it’s still worthwhile to develop a sense for how you might put tricks together in 1-, 2-, or even 3-minute chunks. We’ve all seen dozens (if not hundreds) of modern freestyles, but fixed axle represents some interesting obstacles.

For one, most of the fixed tricks we delight in are pretty hard and decidedly low-percentage. I’m certainly not suggesting that Mickey, Marcus, and Chris have easy tricks, but I find it much easier to throw together a sequence of my own “unresponsive string-tricks” which I am likely to hit than my own “fixed axle tricks”. I bet the world champ would say the same thing. You might hit that cross-armed kickflip suicide just one in ten tries, but MAN it feels amazing when you do. That said, no one wants to see you miss 9 times on stage. The difficulty is just inherent to the medium (it’s probably why you love it enough to read this drivel).

The rhythm of fixed axle yo-yoing is also totally different from mainstream contest play. Today’s modern metals have the angular momentum-to-drag coefficient ratio to blast through minute-long combos, even without a regen. By contrast, a “long” fixed axle trick takes about 10 seconds. But, since stalls are so utterly endemic to progressive fixed axle, it’s much easier for me to see tricks linked into organic wholes. Also, take a look back at some of the past 30-odd episodes. What percent of the tricks have been repeaters? 50? The natural tendency toward stall-regen repeaters also makes it easier to plan and link combos.

I approach the idea of a fixed axle freestyle the same way I approach any other performance. It should consist of tricks which I can hit consistently. The tricks should be organized so that they flow together relatively seamlessly. The material should be original. And it should be fun to watch.

… That’s a pretty tall order, and I certainly fail to live up to it in a few parts of my vid this week. First of all, it’s worth noting that this freestyle leaves out a few tricks which I would probably throw in near the end. 1.) I want to reserve some interesting stuff for Worlds and 2.) Most of that stuff is hit-or-miss. The vast majority of the tricks I put together this week are elements which, independently, I can hit very consistently (say 4 out of 5 times). Even so, having a 2-minute freestyle composed of tricks you’re 80% likely to hit is still VERY dicey, and as you’ll note, I have some misses (notably on Dali Winshield Wipers and that last Under-Moon Tough Love Lunar).

I tend to front-load my freestyles a bit. That is to say, the first minute is generally tougher than the second (or third). As I said before though, none of this video is really very hard at all. It’s when you put it into a fluid context and take away stops that it becomes challenging. This hypothetical FS starts with a snap-to-cross-1.5. I like that initial move because I have it down pat and it’s kind of unique. Most freestyles don’t begin with the yo-yo unwound. After that is a little Zipper-Stall/Milk-the-Truck combo ending in a stall GT. Next I get into some Lunar/Crash Landing stuff. This can be pretty inconsistent, even if you do them all the time. It doesn’t take much to send a Shoot-the-Moon off a centimeter, which is the difference between a catch and a miss.

It’s a good time to talk about yo-yo’s. You’ll note that I’m using a Duncan Profly this time. Fixed axle yo-yo’s are SO varied in terms of what they can do, and you really have to think about the character of the freestyle you’re attempting before selecting one. TMBR’s are some of my favorite fixed axles out there, but I know I would have a harder time connecting a lot of these tricks together with one. They spin way longer and stall fine, but I tend to lose a little juice on my regens with the thin axles and wider gaps. If I was going for a freestyle full of longer, 1a-style fixed axle tricks, you can bet my EH, Lovejoy, or Irving Pro would be the call. It might also be reasonable to switch yo-yo’s mid-stream, planning your long-spin tricks near the end (and suffering the deduction associated with a switch-out).

Anyway, fter that Moon combo, I start to get into the meat of the FS, which is basically a series of sidestyle elements. In order, I go from some Stop-N-Go/Stop-N-Pops into some Dumptrucks (yes, these are Drew’s and yes, they go against what I said about originality – whatever, I like going to that 2.0), then Salvador Dali Windshield Wipers, a little 1-hand repeater I call Yin-Yang, some Radial Nerve Bonks, and finally some Instabucket stalls. That’s functionally the end of my plan. As I said earlier, I’m definitely withholding a few tricks, which will hopefully account for the extra 20 seconds. I generally have a tough time planning an ending to my freestyles, to their detriment. If I hit what I have planned in the first 1:40, the last :20 will typically consist of a few harder tricks which, if I make them, will leave an impression. Unfortunately, they also make an impression when I don’t.

Competition at the FACoAtW this year will not be “fierce”, but it will be tight. Getting into that final freestyle round would be awesome, but there are a lot of guys on equal ground right now. The inherent inconsistency of the fixed axle medium makes the whole event a wonderful toss-up, and I can’t wait.

Note that since Drew and I will both be at Worlds, there will probably not be any kind of organized FF column next week. However, you should definitely tune into the live feed on Saturday at 3:00pm, as that when the FACoAtW takes place on the main stage. The up-side to no column next week is that we will probably collect enough footage for several weeks of FF dissection/discussion! If you’re going to be in attendance and want desperately to shred your stuff on stage, talk to me or Drew at Worlds and we’ll see if we can get you in there. Actually, talk to me anyway because I’d love to meet you.

Hook us up with any nuggets of wisdom you’ve accrued in planning fixed axle freestyles in the comments!

 

Fixed Friday: 1-Handed

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It’s Friday, stinkers.

As this goes to virtual press, I am almost certainly dragging my pop-up camper (with the minor assistance of my minivan) across the breadth of my beloved state of North Carolina, toward the serene inevitability of the Atlantic Ocean. But even though I’m probably two tires deep in the East Dismal Swamp – which is a very real place – we can still hang out via this column, right?

This week, I wanted to focus on things you can do when your left hand goes pins-&-needles after sleeping weird on it, while you are baking with an enormous unwieldy oven-mitt, or after you have a horribly tragic accident while juggling battleaxes. One of the great things about fixed axle (and responsive yo-yoing in general) is that even when you reduce your number of available hands by 50%, you can still have a rad session.

Most of you #fixedfriday faithful probably gravitated to “the way of the static axle” BECAUSE of the constraints, as opposed to in spite of them. That is to say, you were looking for the creative challenge inherent to short spins and tug response. Constraints are actually really good for creativity. The pseudo-defunct term “0a” refers to looping tricks done with 1 hand, which for years, was what most modern players associated with fixed axle yo-yoing. As evidenced by Drew’s Planet Hoppery a few weeks back though, there’s a lot you can do with these simple motions. Around here, we put “da funk” in defunct©™®, and the limitations of a single hand just means you have to dig a little deeper to get inventive.

Trick #1 might be old hat to you by now, but it’s worth revisiting. There’s nothing like simple inside loops to express the carefree, gleeful character of fixed axle yo-yoing. It’s THE original 0a trick. To stick a bit of a post-modern twang on it, try going right into an inverted Lunar hold after a few. Incidentally, this also works great as a means to switch from forward loops to a “downward” trick like Hop the Fence or Zipper Stalls.

So you’re down to 1 hand… but no one said anything about your legs, right? The 2nd trick is one of my most simple 365 entries from last year, Man & His Pants. The name is obviously taken from “Man and His Brother”, which itself, is short for “Man on the Flying Trapeze With His Brother”… which, when you think about it is a really weird name on par with “Seth P Makin’ Da Zines In Da Back (For Da Girls)“.

You’ll have to forgive me from 0:17 to 0:56. I received a call from my younger brother, John, and since I was doing 1-handed tricks, I elected to take it. Whatever, I can multi-task. I’m pretty sure I featured the Snap-Start move at 0:17 in my Tape Measure video, but it’s July, and who can even remember? In any case, this is actually one of my favorite Steve Brown tricks called “I Like Your Style, Ed Haponik“. Yeah, I have a Steve Brown trick named after me. My lip gloss be poppin.

Next up, we’ve got a fun fixed axle take on the classic Plastic Whip. I’m always surprised to find how few people do sidestyle P-Whips. I learned them from Shawn Fumo, and I find them so natural. They also work nicely as an intentional stall-whip. The hardest part is regenerating stably out of it.

Shoot For the Moon is probably the most wonderfully iconic, quintessentially “perfect” yo-yo trick of all. We’ve said it again and again. I could probably have saved a lot of time and flash card space by just doing a few Moons for this week and calling it a day, because you’re not going to find a better use of a free hand (stop it, you). However, on the off chance that you’re somehow sick of standard Moons and want to up the ante, try doing Over-Unders, alternating between StM and Nate Sutter’s Under the Moon variation. It’s a great way to work on improving your control.

The sequence around 0:48 is unfortunately a bit tough to see what’s happening. Essentially, you’ve got 1-hand trapeze stall, followed by a 1-hand bro stall (essentially the same “reverse Lunar” hold as described in trick #1). Then, I go back the other way to a 1-hand Double-or-Nothing stall, followed by the 1-hand equivalent of a 2.0 bro-stall. Basically this is a sort of 1-handed Rewind. You could go up to 3.0, but you start to run out of string, which is necessary for the regeneration.

At 1:02 we have another great Steve Brown trick. Steve has a great directness and simplicity to his trick construction, which is hard to find these days. I love how outside the box this catch is. Most of us want the yo-yo to keep spinning with every fiber of our being. Even in this modern fixed axle thing we’re doing, we only want the yo-yo to stop in very specific circumstances (i.e. on the string, in a stall). Whatever though. I can snap-start, so why not just catch the yo-yo in the middle of WHATEVER, knowing I can reinvigorate it a moment later. It’s a great trick.

Next up (1:09ish) is a Drewish Dumptruckish kind of thing. Just a regular breakway into a throw-hand chop stall (technically this is YET AGAIN the same catch as trick #1, but it feels different due to the breakaway). A typical Dumptruck would have the yo-yo flipping over in space before regenerating so that the spin direction change is cancelled out (that was the most insane audience-specific jargon-sentence I have ever written). In this case, you’re just turning your wrist out, which has the same effect, allowing you to continue the breakaway stalls ad nauseum.

It seems like months ago I discussed the concept of Straight-String Redirects (it was). 1:19 is another example. 1-hand undermount stalls can be tough with that pesky opposable thumb in the way. This is a great drink-in-hand-while-grilling trick – perfect for mid-summer.

The next two tricks are simple underarm things. In the absence of a 2nd hand, your arm (not unlike your leg) can be pretty useful. The first example is a simple bicep stall, which is great for showing off your guns to the ladies… who are always impressed by muscle-bound guys hell-bent on showing off their fixed axle yo-yo prowess. The second one features one of my favorite holds. I love the precision of that weird bent-arm, over-the-shoulder chopsticks catch. Especially with a wood yo-yo, if you bump it even a little, it’s going haywire. That said, it’s actually pretty easy and segues nicely into a Lunar Landing catch.

I’ve done quite a few 1-hand Stop N Go’s where you find yourself in a 1-hand trapeze, pull up into a stop, and kind of throw it back down. This one is a bit different, as it starts from a standard Plastic Whip. Definitely doable with the average fixed axle yo-yo, but balancing the tension to work for both the whip and the stop can be  tough. The final trick is a sillier version of the same. I love it, but it definitely needs to be fleshed out and cleaned up. After the stop, the idea is to get the yo-yo bouncing up and down, kind of like a cross between the classic trick Frog in a Bag and Gravity Pull. Bounce as much as you like. When you release the yo-yo, it should fall free, but bear in mind the bouncing can twist the string a bit, causing it to catch a few times. It’s a work in progress.

Alright. If you’ve taken the time to work through all of that, then I’m at the beach and my camper is fully unfurled. Have a great week. I’m going surfing.

 

 

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