My Blog

Staff Manipulation DVD - OUT NOW!

mcp — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 14:59:46 GMT

Yeah, so My dvd is finished, and avalible for yous to buy from : http://manipulation.firestaff.net/buyonline.html Or you can find out more about it at: http://manipulation.firestaff.net It is in PAL, so unless you check your DVD player (if you're american) it probably won't work on your NTSC equipment. It WILL work on ANY computer however. Buying it direct is best, but other real and online stores you might know and trust will be carrying it soon. It's got amazing inspiration sequences on it, that even I go back and watch again... they make me think i have to go out and practise more... It's got spinning tutorials, contact tutorials and doubles tutorials, all starting from absolute beginner. And they're the most well made tutorials I could make. I have explained it as well as I possibly can in this DVD, especially the contact moves cos I loves them. The tutorials are at least ten times better than anything on this site, even the really good ones I made. Featuring slow motion, freeze frame and multiple angles, not just for coolness value, but concocted to show you in the most obvious way how the moves work and YOU have to move to make them work. I didn't really like having a PayPal donate button on this site, cos it felt so cheesey, nor have I given in to Google AdWords, so if you maybe liked my free tutorials, learnt a lot and wanted to give something back, you could consider purchasing the DVD... And you get something for your money as well! Alternatively, you can wait for the Intermediate/Advanced DVD's that I'm in the process of making, about Doubles and Contact exclusively. They're going to be my masterpieces, at least, that's my dream. The final say on Contact... and as for Doubles, covering a huge previously uncovered area, but doubles moves so fast... it's not exactly going to be the final say... :D Can't wait for them to be finished... :D Meg also: Who knows what the deal is with blatent advertising of this DVD on tribe, like on forums?

Lab Reports - new website

mcp — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 16:11:19 GMT

Definitive List:::: http://lab.firestaff.net

I'm back

mcp — Tue, 29 May 2007 08:35:04 GMT

email reponses and housekeeping will start shortly...

heathrow

mcp — Sun, 06 May 2007 08:27:02 GMT

in heathrow, almost all the sticks I own are in a bag goin' through baggage handling, and I'm going to san fran mutherfucking cisco! YEAH! Hawaiiiiiii, and L.A.. :D Yeah: :D

British Juggling Convention

mcp — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 22:44:56 GMT

I am outta here for five days. First holiday of the year! YEAH!

Fire and MCP @ winter with mcp

mcp — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 09:02:01 GMT

right: me @ my event (mcp @ winter with mcp): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0ZapchDDH8 The full fire video! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wEG6R5-USA

LAB 08.meg

mcp — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 13:15:45 GMT

a lab video not from New Year but from various bits of footage. All doubles - mostly all just showing weird patterns. Muchos boring. Sorry. http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=5061805837378230359&hl=en-GB if you want to download from google video, use keepvid.com

Will @ winter with mcp

mcp — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 12:03:03 GMT

:eek will @ winter with mcp... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6JMapcGXPU wait for it to process and wait for me to upload a downloadable version... will's spinning speaks for itself....

Winter with MCP - Fire Teaser

mcp — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 16:00:56 GMT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNvVhdsBVZ8 fire teaser

Alex @ winter with mcp

mcp — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 16:00:16 GMT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpkjGmpvLng :D

aidan / ado-p video

mcp — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 10:28:31 GMT

http://videos.tepookatoys.com/media/private/aidan-winter.wmv yup, a whole video dedicated to the irish iron fist! I thought afterwards that maybe the song is a little cheeky, but the boy is a good dancer, and I wouldn't make an entire video of him, if I didn't like his style. Well really I made it so strugz wouldn't keep complainin' at me. More new year videos to follow, in longish order. gootube: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Uwub_Mxzu7g

Beginners Double Staff Tutorial Article

mcp — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 13:53:23 GMT

http://mcp.tepookatoys.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=205&Itemid=11 or on HOP: http://www.homeofpoi.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/771587/page/0/view/collapsed/sb/5/o/all/fpart/1 Rockin'! That's the last of the articles. :D

Beginners Contact Staff Tutorial Article

mcp — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 12:03:35 GMT

http://www.homeofpoi.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/769495/Main/769452#Post769495 or on hop: http://www.homeofpoi.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/769452/page/0/view/collapsed/sb/5/o/all/fpart/1

Absolute Beginners Single Staff Spinning Learning Guide

mcp — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 15:04:29 GMT

http://mcp.tepookatoys.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=202&Itemid=31 or the same post but on hop: http://www.homeofpoi.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/767484/page/0/view/collapsed/sb/5/o/all/fpart/1

reply to silence that went astray

mcp — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 22:52:04 GMT

reply to silence that went astray. Fucking university, I wish I'd quit it and gone to circus school... But that's not a choice I can take back, and I get the impression my degree will be something to fall back on when I'm older and too arthritic to move much. Doing something for 5 years is a long time. Maybe in that time you'll get bored of it and have a change of heart... well good. You're allowed to do that. I didn't want to have to use my degree when i left uni, but now I find myself in a job of work and everyday says to me that I shouldn't be doing it. Everyday I have to remember where the money I'm earning is going to take me and that's it's all just a means to an end. I'm certainly intelligent enough to be anything I want to be, but university destroyed any interest I had in my favourate subject. but led me to other arts. Some of which I have absolutely no natural ability at, just overwhelming motivation. ideal job: Working at google and spending all my time writing staff animation applications. Then getting interested in AI, cool technology and making things again. But the adrenaline memory of my last performance hasn't worn off yet, so I'll be doing this for a wee while longer... :D

final video: new interface...

mcp — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 16:37:29 GMT

L.A.B. Report: LAB 06. WoW Me n'Simian. Happily Mostly Simian doing stuff that I still don't quite understand after having watched it like ten times during editing. g'damn. Enjoy: http://videos.tepookatoys.com/media/made/lab-06-final.wmv ~40mb.

interface video teaser

mcp — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 10:36:47 GMT

my new video teaserrrrrrrrrr.... :D http://videos.tepookatoys.com/media/private/interface2.wmv

:D

mcp — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 13:40:24 GMT

MCP - "You Down With MCP?" http://www.rhymetorrents.com/disc5/22%20-%20MCP%20-%20You%20Down%20with%20MCP.mp3 Laughing my face off. :D

WHIPS!

mcp — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 22:12:28 GMT

Woohoo! My snake whips arrived today! Two beautiful neon orange and black snake whips... and they crack like a motherfucker! I can give up poi happily to do dual whips instead... :D

burning man

mcp — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 17:12:34 GMT

Where to start? phew. Went to Burning Man. (!!!) this is a small section of what I learned and saw there, related to spinning and generally in order that it happened. Day one: Arrived. Secondered a big ass tent. Went immediately to the hookadome, which had had a big fire jam at it previously, but it had dieing down in a free for all spin at the side. Met Kenrom, Rif, for the first time, met many others again. Met Julian immediately! Was happy to find him. His style is very very cool now. Super technical doubles with very clean definative martial style body movement. He’s ace. I did some spinning. Tiny doubles which were fun but kinda scary to do throws or contact with cos they were soooo tiny. (Plus whitegas) Spun single staff badly, having forgotten how ginormous my big staff is. Didn’t see much of kenrom, apart from noticing his style was very ‘guy’ ish. And that he didn’t do much contact. Day two: Got up ridiculously early thanks to jet-lag. When out and practised while the sun rose over the playa. Was quiet and fun. Was just about to get involved with double crosses when noel and greg and aileen got up and I got to eat breakfast instead. Most of the contact staffers had agreed on today at center camp as a meet up to spin loads of contact. And that’s what happened. I met Zan for the first time at center camp. Which was sweet, and some weird dude by the name of fire-phoenix. (of which much could be said if I didn't want to be positive.) Zan had some nice doubles throws to btb catches. Plus his continuous hugs are alright. Turning them is kinda fun. I ought to try the hugged anti-spin bfly, since the parallel has become so much easier. Zed from australia was there! Amazing coincidence! He has some nice cross stuff and some more uber one staff contact shenanigans in what’s quickly becoming the new australian double contact style and new doubles contact style in general. I spun quite a lot and got quickly dehydrated by the sun. Why anyone would make center camp with a giant hole in the middle is beyond me. I thought giant shade structures were supposed to provide, like, shade… Rif had an ace new move: doing the steve, caging it and going into a minimal beat steve… really nice continuous move that could go in and out of the normal caged steve. Can’t wait to get this solid. That and the semi caged jesus. Really sweet moves. Wayve had a kickass cartwheel he hadn’t perfected yet. While lester had the neckwrap cartwheel fast, from upright and with some funny arm movements. It was plenty sweet. After a while rif and dave got carried away with crazy stuff with their legs. After a while (or possibly it was the next day) julian turned up with his awesome body rolls. Wayve mentioned on the sunday about getting it to go down the body from the steve, doing a quick kicked throw to the other foot and getting it back up the body to finish the steve. this I HAVE to learn. It makes it the most awesome idea ever. But back to thursday eh… Thursday was mostly a day for getting most of the practise I need to do out of my system. I didn’t watch or notice many other people. Ima (or emo as he came to be known by the pyronauts) had a really nice fingerspin extension to the bfly doubles anti-spin. After exhausting myself, I went back to camp took some mushrooms and watched some fire performance, wandered around the city with my friends, then watched the hot and sexy fire show, which was dissapointing mostly, apart from keith barefoot and people getting set on fire due to using whitegas, which is always pretty funny. Wandered around more looking at weird stuff. Then went back to camp and slept. Keith barefoot: Simple cartwheels, but lots of them done fast, some bad b-kicks and some other general gay jumps. But he has very very good awareness of his body and an extrovert sort of movement style. He's an excellent performer. Like Alex (Fckinippy) but bigger and more so. (And since alex is the MOST dancey, extrovert consumate performer type I know, that is really saying something) Day three: By the time I got up it was too hot to spin. Plus I’d left my doubles and favourate contact staff with molly yesterday. Went to see the pyronauts, and tried to see icon that day, rescued my sticks later that night. Spun a lot of double crosses, which are ridiculously fun. But hella easy to destroy all planes with. Chatted to Rhymo some on all these days. He has a gorgeous poi style when he slows down and dances. Plus he can bust out some crazy fast glowsticker wraps. Good guy. If he mixed up his speed and danced more, and took some of the performance style of keith barefoot he would be immense. (If you read this rhymo, yer ghey! ;) ) After a while got too tired and dehydrated and went back to camp. Decided tonight was a spinning fire night so I went to find the pyronauts to spin with. They were going to spin in the antheon dome, so I hung out at their camp, chatted with ima, and we made a super quick plan to spin together. Somebody I leant my doubles to had dunked them in fizzy juice. So I pre burned them at the pyronauts camp. Then we went to the dome. Vatra wasn’t there so we spent the time spinning, spinning a lot. I practised practically everything I know again and again. It was great. Shaded, cool. And with some alright sort of music. Ima showed me his uber weird octagon anti-spin and that was pretty far out. I asked him about a pentagon and he couldn’t do it that day. But on saturday he had it down. Yes, he is that cool. Spun lots more. At this point got bored and went with bliss to watch her bellydance show. Then went back to the pyronauts camp and found out they had done a show, just two hours late. They were off to spin some fire after that, so I joined with them and we split into several groups who waited for vatra and those who didn’t. I spun for a bit beside the cathedral. That was alright. Some okay spinning done. Then went back with dave and co and saw somebody spinning well on the way back to the camp. So we borrowed some paraffin off some gay heavy metal dudes, and spun there a little, passing the staff to each other half way through. I met sage here! And saw here spin! Wooooooo! SAGE! No wait, I’ll say it again: I met SAGE! unfortunately I really desperately needed the toilet during this whole time, so I can’t kinda remember how she spun. It was either that or the extreme excitment I felt at seeing sage that has blocked memory... Loads of pyronauts showed up at this point, and I got to see sean spin again, who’s fantastic. Then an immense fire eater. Really really good! He had good chat too. Was a good night. Loads of people recognised me which was hella weird. But made me think, and makes me want to write some hippy crap on the frontpage of my website. Which I will do soon. Went back to the pryonauts camp with dave. He’s cool. He seems so young sometimes, and his strange way of talking annoys and alienates me sometimes, but I like his spinning style, and his insatiable love of contact, so all is good. I can get over the hippy stuff. Plus I don’t care about planes that much anymore, so that doesn’t annoy me so badly. So I decided I like and respect dave on the way back to camp. I'm beginning to like his style more and more now too. Got home about dawn. Slept for three hours. Saturday: Was hella tired this day. some practising happened. I was tired. drank a lot of water. Finally met mikey icon. He is very quiet. Had some nice horizontal doubles stuff, utilising inside planes. Went on a long mission to the pyronauts. Spun for mikey and the philadelphia experiment on the way back. Mikey needs to smile more when spinning I think. He doesn’t seem to enjoy it so much. And not just in a I’m concentrating so I don’t have time to enjoy it kinda way. Did a lot of doubles contact with dave at the pyronauts camp. He just picks stuff up like it’s nothing, damn that boy. Plus he did all the new moves I showed him with an extra staff held in his hands. Some of them were uber gorgeous. Makes me wonder if I should start on the long doubles, everything was hella easy when I used lesters long doubles in SF. But inside planes and fun that that are too appealing. Maybe later. And it’s fun that it’s sooo hard with short doubles. Makes my contact even better. Went back to pyronauts with stuff to spin in conclave with. Met up with arashi finally. Gave him his staff. Walked to conclave. Spun in conclave. Watched the man burn. Went to sleep absolutely exhausted. I was comatose for most of the burn, didn’t spin very well. Slept VERY well. Sunday: got up. Went to center camp. Spun lots. Aileen wanted to leave early. So I stayed to spin a little more. Got distracted by dave and did lots of doubles contact. And some interesting single staff combos. Like the variation on the reverse layout. He told me about the various things you can’t see him do in his video. Went with dave to the pyronauts camp. Finally met up properly with Arashi. Got my bicycle, got distacted by him and went back to center camp (after saying my goodbyes) to spin again. Arashi was interesting to talk to, as ever. Has some deeply interesting ideas about contact. And a deep wish to call anti-spin angel rolls, devil rolls, but I reckon in order to mirror accurately, they should be called demon rolls. Learned a lot. Remembered a new body roll I’d recently found, and tried to do the travelling forwards anti-spin fishtail into a big body roll, not yet to be thou. When they go up and down my body, I’ll be real happy. Went back to my camp and did other things. Jumped off a house. Destroyed a house. Almost saw a house fall on somebody. Did a lot of two by four manipulation. Had fun. Left burning man.

The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile

mcp — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 15:32:22 GMT

Reposted from drew from http://www.thememoryhole.org/edu/school-mission.htm _________________________________________________________________________________ The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile It's no secret that the US educational system doesn't do a very good job. Like clockwork, studies show that America's schoolkids lag behind their peers in pretty much every industrialized nation. We hear shocking statistics about the percentage of high-school seniors who can't find the US on an unmarked map of the world or who don't know who Abraham Lincoln was. Fingers are pointed at various aspects of the schooling system—overcrowded classrooms, lack of funding, teachers who can't pass competency exams in their fields, etc. But these are just secondary problems. Even if they were cleared up, schools would still suck. Why? Because they were designed to. How can I make such a bold statement? How do I know why America's public school system was designed the way it was (age-segregated, six to eight 50-minute classes in a row announced by Pavlovian bells, emphasis on rote memorization, lorded over by unquestionable authority figures, etc.)? Because the men who designed, funded, and implemented America's formal educational system in the late 1800s and early 1900s wrote about what they were doing. Almost all of these books, articles, and reports are out of print and hard to obtain. Luckily for us, John Taylor Gatto tracked them down. Gatto was voted the New York City Teacher of the Year three times and the New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. But he became disillusioned with schools—the way they enforce conformity, the way they kill the natural creativity, inquisitiveness, and love of learning that every little child has at the beginning. So he began to dig into terra incognita, the roots of America's educational system. In 1888, the Senate Committee on Education was getting jittery about the localized, non-standardized, non-mandatory form of education that was actually teaching children to read at advanced levels, to comprehend history, and, egads, to think for themselves. The committee's report stated, "We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes." By the turn of the century, America's new educrats were pushing a new form of schooling with a new mission (and it wasn't to teach). The famous philosopher and educator John Dewey wrote in 1897: Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. In his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers College, Elwood Cubberly—the future Dean of Education at Stanford—wrote that schools should be factories "in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products...manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry." The next year, the Rockefeller Education Board—which funded the creation of numerous public schools—issued a statement which read in part: In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way. At the same time, William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, wrote: Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual. In that same book, The Philosophy of Education, Harris also revealed: The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places.... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world. Several years later, President Woodrow Wilson would echo these sentiments in a speech to businessmen: We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks. Writes Gatto: "Another major architect of standardized testing, H.H. Goddard, said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government schooling was about 'the perfect organization of the hive.'" While President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, James Bryant Conant wrote that the change to a forced, rigid, potential-destroying educational system had been demanded by "certain industrialists and the innovative who were altering the nature of the industrial process." In other words, the captains of industry and government explicitly wanted an educational system that would maintain social order by teaching us just enough to get by but not enough so that we could think for ourselves, question the sociopolitical order, or communicate articulately. We were to become good worker-drones, with a razor-thin slice of the population—mainly the children of the captains of industry and government—to rise to the level where they could continue running things. This was the openly admitted blueprint for the public schooling system, a blueprint which remains unchanged to this day. Although the true reasons behind it aren't often publicly expressed, they're apparently still known within education circles. Clinical psychologist Bruce E. Levine wrote in 2001: I once consulted with a teacher of an extremely bright eight-year-old boy labeled with oppositional defiant disorder. I suggested that perhaps the boy didn't have a disease, but was just bored. His teacher, a pleasant woman, agreed with me. However, she added, "They told us at the state conference that our job is to get them ready for the work world…that the children have to get used to not being stimulated all the time or they will lose their jobs in the real world." _________________________________________________________________________________________ John Taylor Gatto's book, The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation into the Problem of Modern Schooling (New York: Oxford Village Press, 2001), is the source for all of the above historical quotes. It is a profoundly important, unnerving book, which I recommend most highly. You can order it from Gatto's Website, which now contains the entire book online for free. The final quote above is from page 74 of Bruce E. Levine's excellent book Commonsense Rebellion: Debunking Psychiatry, Confronting Society (New York: Continuum Publishing Group, 2001).

8 things, pparently.

mcp — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 08:38:37 GMT

That you don't know about me. 1) I can totally beat you at squash. I was school captain, you were not. 2) My hair is naturally curly, but from my dad's side. 3) I used to have a dog named Kora, she was a staffordshire bull terrier. Staffies were bred to be the ultimate fighting dogs, but they're also very friendly, and extremely good guard dogs. 4) I have seen the taj mahal with my own eyes. 5) I can do double dyno's. Which is to say: hanging from something and jumping to a higher place using JUST your arms. Which is fun. 6) Vince the dog is my favourate clay animation character. 7) I've been on TV. On Channel 4, in a documentary. 8) "Mr Vampire" is my favourate vampire film.

lab special report.

mcp — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 19:36:24 GMT

http://videos.tepookatoys.com/media/experiment01.wmv phat ~100mb ^ really just a typical session. But filmed. And with the best bits left out cos the camera ran out of battery. inspiration from other sources: http://videos.tepookatoys.com/media/illicit.wmv heavy ~ 220mb

5 gay questions.

mcp — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 15:14:34 GMT

1. What is your favorite thing about the United States of America? Currently? San Francisco. Usually: The fact that it makes English the dominant global language, even thou it's probably a minority language really. 2. Do you ever feel the need to reproduce, and do you think you will later in life? why or why not? I don't feel the need to reproduce. Sometimes I get so annoyed with how people raise there kids that I get the urge to train a child 'right'. But it would be a lot of work: 16 years of constant work. I mean it's not like you can trust schools to educate your kids, so you have to do that yourself. And letting them hang around with their peers too much, well you might as well just let them be raised by wild dogs. I'd have children just to try and raise super beings. And yes, to train them from an early age in martial arts, gymnastics, circus, music, dance and science. I'd do everything my parents didn't. Then they'd probably become english teachers. Little bastards. 3. The aliens have landed in your backyard. They are lurching about in the grass dripping acid from thier mandibles and making high pitched shrieking noises. What do you do? Collect the acid and sell it as magical alien juice? ;) Steal their space ship and find out if their friendly or not from a geosynchronous orbit. They probably won't notice me doing it, being too busy with trying to communicate with the locals / and or eating them. So I'll have plenty of time to work out the controls. I would consider then nuking george bush from orbit. That oughta take care of him. Then going and finding some space vampire sirens. Or becoming a being of pure energy, y'know, which ever came first. 4. Is pretentious art bad art? Is popular art bad art? What is the relationship between the accessability of a piece of art and its quality? Art is Art. You can have art that's more like art. That doesn't say much to you or doesn't seem very interesting. But it might be mindblowing to somebody else. It is Art after all. It's subjective. There's definately good art and bad art, but they don't singularly belong to the pretentious and popular categories. Art used to be purely about asthetic beauty, it was just about how beautiful our brains perceived something to be, and was therefore universal and unassailible. But nowadays that isn't enough. Art has to have some meaning going on. I find it annoying that people think you have to know some poncy critics long winded explaination of a peice of art in order to fully appreciate it, or that you HAVE to read the artist explaination of a peice of art in order to understand it. Art should stand by itself. art is life. <pout> 5. What would you like to be remembered for after I kill you and absorb all your power? You not being as cool as me even thou you killed me and stole all my powers? I don't care what I'm remembered for, (within reason) just that I am. -- not my best answers. But worth a laugh.

for greg and noel

mcp — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 15:02:40 GMT

jesus, if you guys ever did any research into your hobbies, you might have found this and various baton videos which teach ONLY contact... speaking of which, is there a baton twirling shoppe in SF that I could ask you to visit for me? I forgot while I was there... <slaps herself> note: I'm going to implement this in DCG in prolog... EBNF just doesn't cut it... Was bored enough last night to try and make a systematic model of contact staff. i.e. A way of writting down moves in a notation like siteswap for juggling. Though my notation is not very much like siteswap. feel free to level abuse about the anal nature of such an undertaking, as well as better ideas for names / notation... So we have six main classes: Points Contact Types Planes Grips Entry and Exit Turns 1) Planes Denotes which plane a move can be done in. Horizontal - H Vertical - V 45 degree - / All - A {H,V,/,A} 2) Contact Types Denotes what type of contact a move makes use of. This can change during a move and use conbinations of types. (like steve = roll + spin) Types are added together with the + symbol to denote that they use two or more types. Roll - rl Wrap - wp Spin - spn Step - stp Stall - stl {rl,wp,spn,stp,stl} 3) Points The points on the body at which contact can be done. (This are the 'clean' (ish) points, expecting to be the center of the area mentioned. They do not include such concepts as being upsidedown (where your groin might become a contact point) or stupidity, like butt cracks.) Also known as saddle points by some. Head Shoulder Upper Arm Forearm Elbow Wrist Hand Chest Belly Upper Back Lower Back Back of Neck Front of Neck Hip Thigh Knee Lower Leg Foot Some of these have interesting things about them. But that would be a digression. They also don't have any symbols / shortened forms yet, I don't know if that would make it too hard to understand... 4) Grip 3/4 out - 3/4O 3/4 in - 3/4I centre - C inwards refers to when you are holding the staff kunckles up horizontally with more of the staff across your body, than outside of your personal space. outwards is the opposite. 5) Entry and Exit The Grip and Plane notations can also be appended to the entry and exit information. Shoulder - S Waist - W Under Leg - UL to denote the otherside of the body use the hyphen -. (Not applicable to UL) to denote an BTB (or behind other bodypart) entrance use the anglebracket > {S,W,UL,-S,-W,>S,>UL,->S,->W} Behind the shoulder (>S) I think does work, because you can twist your arm around enough to get there. Up for debate in other words. This basically makes use of the five holes theory, so when I say a waist entrance it means anywhere from above your leg and to under your arm. The same with the shoulder, it encompasses the space from above the arm to the side of the head. 6) Turns 90 - ; 180 - : 270 - :; 360 - :: can use numbers or notation. Turns are put between moves and are assumed to happen instantaneously, though of course in reality they do not. direction is not specified, oh dear. Er well, lets say backside and frontside. With the foot on the same side as the entry staying still. (and the other rotates around it.) I'll probably need to do a defination of backside and frontside at this point huh? Movement Notation finally to make it all fit together: [PLANE]: [ENTRY] ! ([POINT],[CONTACT TYPE]) [TURN] ! [EXIT] and one final special notation: * for a direction change. and inwards spinning - I outwards spinning - O so it would look vaguely like this: A: >WI!(shoulder,wp)(upper back,spn)(-shoulder,wp)!>WO simply for a halo roll. (I forgot to mention that you can denote the otherside bodypart with a hyphen as well) And the exit seems to be assumed to be with the other hand... ahhh this is sooo geeky I might puke. Might put in a special way of notating continuous moves, or something, as well as the beats of a movement... I haven't 'tested' this notation yet... so that'll be fun... Matrix: H/: -SI ! (-shoulder.wrap)(->shoulder.wrap)(back of neck.wrap)(>shoulder.wrap)(shoulder.wrap)(front of neck.wrap) ! SO Jesus: A: WI ! (shoulder.wrap)90b(upper back.spin)90b(-shoulder.wrap)90b(chest.spin)90b(shoulder.wrap)90b(upper back.spin)(-shoulder.wrap) ! -WO Cont Back of Neck things / cont halo rolls... A: SI ! (back of neck.wrap)180b(upper back.spin)180b ! SO obviously you can take the bits in the ! and do that continuously, you can stop turning and do spins on your upper back for a while... fun fun fun...