[Editor’s Note: Drew Tetz is in Italy, drinking coffee and swooning at the sight of his lovely girlfriend this week. So the newest member of the Werrd Alliance, Jacob Jensen, is filling in with some crazy fixed axle goodness. Thanks Jacob! – S]

Alternating Chopstix Eli Hops

How do you make Eli Hops harder? Do them in a chopstix mount! How do you make them harder than that? Alternate them! This trick is a good example of one of my favorite things. Take something and push it to the next level. Now push it another level further, because one level is for regular ol’ people. You, on the other hand, are awesome. And who’s stopping you from pushing it another level further than that? Step ya game up, son.

Excerpt from Aqueous

Aqueous is a really great trick by Jake Bullock. I made a parody trick called Vacuous back when it came out because I thought of it as the philosophical epitome of everything I hated about trick creation. Later on I changed my mind about it, and later yet I decided, you know what? Jake only ever landed the trick once…I should see what’s so hard about it. So then I got in and really studied it, and discovered that it’s loaded with cool concepts that most people have never tapped into. If you want to know where I look for inspiration, Aqueous is one of the richer sources for me. Way too much of my stuff pulls from some part of it or another, from almost direct copying of maneuvers to abstract approaches I can’t even really put my finger on. What you see here is a small excerpt, and it’s one of my favorite parts, where the very first maneuver in the original trick is finally explained (an unusual chopstix mount using both index and middle fingers, which for several maneuvers appears inconsequential…until it suddenly becomes critical for the dismount of the first “act” to function properly).

Instant Wristmount to Eiffel Architect

I love instant wristmounts. It’s all like, yeah, I’m doing a forward pass like any other dude, but then BAM wristmount. I think the first time I figured out how to do it was nats 2010. I was playing with lots of instant mounts around then. Instant mounts are the bomb, and more people should do them! But anyway, out of that I go into Willie Terrian’s picture trick Eiffel Architect, which is like a super tower. Except I’m not sure if the name “Eiffel Architect” refers to just the picture itself or the whole trick leading up to and including it (which I forgot the rest of once I figured out a quicker way in). Them’s the hazards of learning from videos. BAM BOOM anyway.

Mighty Mousse

This is probably one of my more favorite moves of mine, and was inspired by some of Paul Escolar’s old tricks. The last part, the loop drop to trapeze, was the focus of the trick when I made it, but once I started showing it to people everyone was getting more excited about that slack that stays vertical as I throw and catch it. And I was like, okay, whatever, but then I watched a video of it and I was like…oh yeah, that is kinda cool, isn’t it? I’ve shown the trick to Paul like three times, and each time he sees it he’s like, whoa, show me that again. So I’ve taught it to him twice (the other time he was kinda busy and didn’t have time). I don’t remember if I’ve told him the name of it or that it’s named after him and his old spiky hair from back in the day. I think it’s funnier if he doesn’t know and I just keep teaching it to him over and over again. Plus who can say no to Paul Escolar saying your trick is cool more than once?

Some Kinda Stall or Something?

So now for something more like what you’d be expecting in a Fixed Friday video: this is a shrinking trap stall to full inward z-axis flip with a half turn to…whatever that dismount is. I was originally trying for this trick without the half turn, but we don’t always get what we want, do we? Like it kept doing the turn no matter what I did. So I did it intentionally and it still looks like a mistake. Also I’m punching through the…man, it totally looks different in third-person. When I’m doing it there’s this gap between my left arm and the string/yoyo that I punch through and that forces the dismount out, except I don’t make a fist while I’m doing it because that messes it up. BUT THAT’S WHERE THE MOTION CAME FROM.