yo-yo #100(!) - Play Simply No Jive

100 yo-yo's! yay!
i'll grant you it's really a totally arbitrary milestone AND several of these posts have embedded two or even three yo-yo's at a time, but whatever... clearly, i'll accept any opportunity to feel psyched up about myself.

actually though, this IS a significant one for me. i began this blog with my first tom kuhn 3-in-1 no jive yo-yo, and though i've gone through so many other amazing pieces which have inhabited my collection, that really still is the most important one. it doesn't do anything special, it's a little beat and honestly, it's kind of hard to make it do "cool stuff". regardless, it happened to be the yo-yo i was throwing when i began to fall into my own style (whatever that is).

i really fell in love with the unembellished simplicity and modesty of the no jive from the first throw. and since then i've worked on and off to put my own stamp on it (both metaphorically and now, physically). i've tried to hit some hard stuff on it. i've tried to come up with some new moves that work BECAUSE of its limitations, rather than in spite of them. and i've accumulated a pretty staggering collection of no jive variations (my wife would probably call it pathological). this one makes 75.

for anyone who gets excited about yo-yoing, there will have been that one model which you just see as "classic". typically, it'll be one of the first models of which you were aware - maybe the imperial you first saw at toys r us or the dark magic you saw in the video which first got you hooked. regardless of its specifics, it becomes the central icon around which you build an understanding of what yo-yo's are and what they are for. that's how i feel about the no jive. though it wasn't the first i owned, i think of it as the penultimate "simple" yo-yo; the best thing we collectively came up with before yo-yo's (and yo-yoing) got complicated. mind you, i have no problem with complicated - some of my tricks are pretty complicated. but i've always had this need to stay tethered (so to speak) to the idea that yo-yo's are basically toys - meant for fun. rancid milk is genius in its obfuscating angular geometry, but so is shoot the moon in its carefree simplicity.

when i learned that i could go ahead with the idea to make a small run of personalized no jives, i really wanted it to be something that would fit with what i loved about the yo-yo from the start. in 2012 i did a video i called "play simply" to commemorate the end of my year of playing only the spyy "eh", the title of which was adapted from the patagonia slogan "live simply" (patagonia was cool with it and even threw the video up on their website). i used to have an aikido instructor who insisted that "simple doesn't mean easy". at the time, the distinction was lost on me, but now that i'm older i come back to it often.

alot of the hardest things i've ever done (with yo-yo's or without) have been fundamentally simple and clear. there isn't really too much technique involved in dropping into a bowl or overhead wave, playing through a lead sheet, or blasting through an attack with irimi-nage. with each of those, the key is to commit and be present. 360 flips are great, but i've met a lot of guys who have have them dialed and won't drop in on 8ft. similarly, would anyone argue that charlie parker's "ornithology" more meaningful than miles' "flamenco sketches" because it's got more notes? with love to bird (who could also play slow, i know), sometimes i wonder whether the function of complex technicality is to distract from the fact that we're conditioned not to see the value in the simple stuff. it shouldn't be surprising. our culture is imbued with the olympian mentality of "faster, higher, stronger" (by which we've really just come to mean "more"). and though that attitude has taken us to the moon and bought us many wonderful appliances, we've paid for it with, among other things, sunsets devoid of contrails and the time necessary to appreciate them.

this past xmas, my dad gave me a cool little gift - a wooden yo-yo from yosemite featuring an engraved image of the park icon "half-dome". yosemite has got to be my folks' favorite place under the sun, and the yo-yo was given to suggest it as a destination for an upcoming family trip. personally, i just really liked the natural scene on a wooden yo-yo, and a week or two later i had a vague idea of what i wanted on the no jive. i sketched out an embarrassingly bad concept on what was basically a napkin, and it was immediately clear that i did not have the skill-set necessary to bring this to life. so i did what anyone needing some sweet art for a yo-yo would do - i hit up my pal jason week!

after some back and forth, jason took my shoddily-conceived idea and made it legitimately special. he included nuances i would never have thought of, like taking an actual profile of me playing from my instagram and incorporating a palm tree as a nod to the traditional carvings of yo-yoing's past. he kept the semi-circle motif that calls to mind the original no jive logo and made the suns rays look less like a citrus cross-section and more like the old starburst mandalas. he took my crappy attempt at a breaking wave and made it look at once like a little a-frame i'd like to surf AND a tiny version of the hokusai wave on my arm. even the no jive lettering on the sand evokes the original classic font. tl;dr: jason week is amazing, and he took this from being a pipe dream of mine to being one of the raddest looking yo-yo's i've ever seen.

despite all i say on here, i do tend to overcomplicated things - thoughts, processes, motivations - to the end that i become very inefficient, confused, and forgetful. i get caught in cycles worrying about the silliest minutia while neglecting the fact that it's a beautiful day or forgetting to put on pants. i spent a lot of my early life trying really hard to be good at specific things, and placed virtuosity above what is fundamental. as i get older, i'm starting to feel at home with the basics, and their importance is more apparent. after playing mostly fixed axle for almost a decade, i think i'm starting to get a pretty decent throw. i'm starting to get a sense for what the yo-yo will and won't allow me to get away with. most importantly, i'm starting to understand my own thought processes while i'm playing.

since i first met it, throwing the no jive has helped keep me grounded. i can't hit anything on it without giving my full attention to the moment. i love that it comes from maple trees like i've got in my yard, and that it has exactly one moving part - it. it's nice and quiet, and i can throw at night without bothering anyone. yeah wood has its inconsistencies and that can give you a little vibe, but tuning it up like i do one of my ukes is part of my routine and part of the fun. plus, you know what else has some inconsistencies? me. you know what else has a little vibe? the frickin universe (see post below). embracing those qualities is way more fun than seeking desperately to escape them.

when i throw wood, i really try to kind of come back to myself - by which i guess i mean that i try to play for the same reasons as before i "learned to play". i try to go outside or on my porch and feel the yo-yo on the string and take joy from it. i try to let go of the distinction between me and the yo-yo. or the breeze. or the rain. maybe i do hard stuff or maybe i do easy stuff, but i try to keep my mindset clear, and though there's no fear of a concussion like there is at the top of a skate ramp, i try to commit and give myself to a moment in the same way. when you've been playing awhile and made connections with other players, it's hard not to tack something onto your playing; experiences you've had, tricks that have given you trouble, people you miss, times when you've felt profoundly successful or unsuccessful. i cherish yo-yoing, and the feelings and memories i associate with it, and though i don't seek to forget that stuff when i'm playing... i do try NOT to hang on to it, which, for me, is what the phrase "no jive" has come to mean.

thanks again for reading any of these blog entries over the last few years, and i hope you dig this particular yo-yo. if so, i have a few of them, and you can get one here: http://edhaponik.bigcartel.com/

yo-yo #99: anti-yo fluchs

if you could reach deep into your brain, among all of the thousands of words you've collected during your life as a verbal, literate (i'm assuming here) human being, which one word would you most WISH described your playing.

you don't have to answer that. it's the same for almost everybody. and due to its universal application to both awesome yo-yoers and awesome yo-yo's, it is probably in the top 10 most frequently-bandied words used on any given yo-yo forum. the word, of course, is smooth.

some people want to play fast like mickey. some people want to play slow and stylish like jon rob. but everybody wants to be smooth. and everybody wants a smooth yo-yo, which is made complicated by the fact that almost nobody agrees on what that really means. i've said before that i want my playing to reflect the universe in which it happens. well, matter (and maybe existence, itself) is pretty much composed of vibration. even an inert yo-yo sitting on a table is crackling with vitality; the atoms, electrons, quarks, muons and gluons which compose it chasing each other around in a frenetic, chaotic, and somehow symmetric dance. the tiny world inside a yo-yo may really be just as random, weird and UN-smooth as our own macroscopic lives, but it's all relative i guess (yuk yuk).

just a few years ago, the community saw even expensive luxury metals released which would earn that ultimate death-knell moniker in forum reviews: wobble. this yo-yo, the anti-yo fluchs, was cursed with such a label (at least by some), which went on to haunt its creators, sonny patrick and kiya babzani for years. the fluchs was released on christmas, 2004, right around the time i fell back in love with yo-yoing for my 4th (and present) obsessive wave. by the time i was aware of it though, it was sold out, and i didn't actually get to play one for almost a year, when i traded tricks in a durham parking lot with a local player with the user name "creek". even he said the fluchs wobbled, a sentiment echoed throughout the dave's skill toys review page and at extremespin.com. regardless, i was still a month away from receiving my bare bones and g&e2, and this was by far the coolest yo-yo i'd ever played.

on the anti-yo website, there was a brilliant anecdote describing a western cowboy's conversation with a barkeep about the fluchs's "charles & ray eames influence" and it's unique slip-matte finish. anti-yo was about the coolest yo-yo company that ever was, and the fluchs has maintained a well-deserved cult following, due equally to its story, its aesthetic, and its play.

i got this particular all-pink one a few years later from nick correa, the modder known as feralparrot, who incidentally invented the "schmoove" mod which was applied to doc pop's version of another anti-yo in yes, absolutely's "the end". (if that sentence makes sense to you, congrats - you're a yo-yoer.) i have it set up with some old red baz pads and a clean half-spec bearing. as you can see, the fluchs featured a super-thick dif-style axle with the bearing coasting right over it. anti-yo applied some white plumbers' tape (basically, sticky caulk) to dampen vibrations since the threaded taps are just a hair too thick for the axle. i've played a few shaky fluchs, but most of them were just great, and this one plays downright awesome. it's quite smooth indeed, but what does that even mean, right?

obviously, most players discern the smoothness of a yo-yo by the amount of disruption they feel. since around 2008 though, when yo-yo bearings and (more importantly) bearing seat design became nearly standardized, we've seen a precipitous drop-off in the number of un-smooth yo-yo's out there. it's almost to the point where new metal yo-yo's hardly need a review; they all mostly play the same. of course there are little variables which still matter (profile, wall, gap, weight distribution), but the quality of play and consistency is in a whole new ballpark compared with when this was released a decade ago.

these days, it's expected for your yo-yo to be the smoothest thing out there, and if you nail it against the cobbled sidewalk, eliciting some untunable vibration... it might be time to shelve that sucker in the case-row reserved as your "yo-yo cemetery".


i kid. as evidenced by the fact that this is the 99th yo-yo i've mused over, i've played a lot of shaky, wobbly throws. i've come to the conclusion that, unless you are completely inept or incapable of focusing on anything BUT your yo-yo's vibration... it really doesn't matter that much. most PEOPLE are a lot more shaky than the toys they complain about. if you're a good pianist, for example, you can still play a crummy old upright piano. certainly, you won't sound as "good" as you do on your beloved steinway, but what does that mean? maybe it's out of tune... so play it like thelonious monk, seeking out the notes BETWEEN the keys. maybe the bass doesn't carry at all... so play songs which allow you to HAMMER with the left hand. someone who understands how to play, and just as importantly WHAT to play, can direct their tools toward the use for which they are most suited.

we've all got our preferences, but if you require a "dead-smooth" yo-yo to make your play seem alive... you're doing it wrong.

what will always matter more than how a yo-yo plays is how YOU play it. your yo-yo can stagger and shake like it's undergoing electro-shock therapy, but a good player can make it LOOK as smooth as nickel-plated butter. and playing smooth is easy. you don't even have to agree on what it means. just WATCH the players who you think are smooth and do what they do. talk to them and dig into their understanding, which inevitably informs their playing.

i always get hyped up after watching sid seed (rodrigo pires), one of the most impossibly smooth throwers alive. he just seems like he was organically grown in some free-range alien farm to be the ultimate yo-yoer. one time i asked him about one of my tricks, and his response was "in a trick like that, don't stop the yo-yo when you want to change its direction". that, to me, sums up sid's playing perfectly. he makes it seem like the yo-yo just WANTS to go where its going. just on its way, holding its little bindle (that folky satchel-on-a-stick thing), a rolling stone blowing in the wind of sid's fancy. similarly, doc pop's "alpha style" was pretty much the beta version for what would become modern "smooth 1a". and the philosophical underpinning of that style was simply to minimize stops and starts; to keep the yo-yo moving.

after you've tried desperately to emulate the players you find smooth, what should you do? clearly, you should watch the players you would not call smooth and re-evaluate your diagnosis.

two good examples are john bot and drew tetz, admittedly two more of my favorite players (and dudes). in my opinion, neither of them are particularly smooth in the way most people use the term (at least most of the time). both of them CAN play very smoothly and have certain tricks that highlight that, but they also bounce around a lot. they'll make quick, angular, erratic movements or snatch the yo-yo out of the air. some of their tricks can have a downright sketchy (even spazzy) feel to them, but there's more than one way to be smooth. one thing that always kills me about those two players is how fluidly they move between ideas. look at john's picture trick story-sequences or drew's movements from stall to stall in "crisis". and i'm not talking about the physical movements, but the mental ones. to do those tricks, your brain has to ooze dynamically from mount to mount and hold to hold in a way that is the quintessence of smooth. any interruption and you will overturn that dumptruck, miss that kickflip or drop one of the 8 string segments you're using to build starfox, and the whole idea will collapse. we assume that being smooth means looking smooth, but it means BEING smooth, and those guys are smooth as hell.

you can be smooth outside and smooth inside. you can be smooth in the way you throw a sleeper. in the way you iterate through mechanical repeaters. in the way you catch the yo-yo. you can be smooth in the way you build a trick... or a routine... or an event... or a relationship... or a lifetime.

to me, being smooth is about continuing on with intention, and APPEARING to be smooth is about communicating that feeling to an audience. our tricks are composed of ideas, and presenting those ideas (to others or just ourselves) so that they flow seamlessly and make sense is the basis for aesthetic yo-yoing in general. sometimes maybe those ideas are meant to be janky and abrupt. other times they will be light and fluid. smoothness is about CARING that the trick will go well and investing in it, but not so much that your mind gets attached and entangled, sacrificing the next integral motion. it's about practicing such that your physical being has learned and forgotten the specifics on where and when to act, and your mental being is always willing to embrace change.

when you get down to it, smoothness is mostly just yo-yoing in the way you want to yo-yo; which is seated in being comfortable with the good and the bad of who you are, what you are throwing, and why you are playing.

yo-yo #98 - alex's personalized el ranchero

"emancipate yourself from mental slavery
none but ourselves can free our own minds" - bob marley

"folks don't even own themselves
payin' mental rent to corporate presidents" - public enemy

 

it's 7:53 on a sunday. i have lived my life in such a way that at 7:53 on a sunday, i am awake, full of coffee and eggo waffles and typing on a computer. the chief culprits in this situation (my kids) are in the next room, zoning out to any one of the half-dozen identical disney channel shows capable of transforming otherwise vibrant 5-15 year-olds into paralyzed drooling zombies.

it has me thinking about where we direct our attentions in this bizarre modern life we lead.

you wake up one day and you are 36, and you remember like it was yesterday, shuffling downstairs at 7:53 to watch the tail end of "Gummi Bears" before "Muppet Babies" came on at 8:00 (i'll grant you that would have been on a saturday). and then, presumably, you wake up a 65 year-old and wonder why you ever sat around blogging at 36. and then, i guess you wake up at 84, and you're dead, so you don't wake up at all. our lives are composed of the fruits and waste of our choices, but they are also seasoned with the motivations for those choices - by the strange ways in which we justify our behavior.

we assume that our behavior belongs to us, but in general, i find that to be the rare exception.

a couple of years ago, i wrote myself this little rule:
"15. don't yo-yo with the goal of being admired. don't worry over whether you're 'somebody in the yo-yo community'. be 'somebody in real life' and then be the same person in the yo-yo community."

it sounds so simple, but it's a pretty tall order. i've often said that yo-yoing is significant as an inward exploration, but that it's also a kind of dance; a performance. how can you dance without considering how people react to you?

the danger is in beginning to change the way you behave so that others will accept you. that's pretty broad and maybe silly, since changing our behavior so as to be accepted is a deeply-ingrained, evolved human trait going back to our first attempts at society. and though our rules have changed somewhat, society (whether we try to define ourselves BY it or AGAINST it) still bosses us around, sending us to one side of our mental/spiritual cage or the other. maybe by recognizing that we're in a cage, we are freed a bit. the matrix has you, neo.


these days, i think we've taken it a bit further, and "the middle way" seems to have shrunk down to a treacherous ridge overlooking precipitous drops on either side. do i connect or disconnect? do i identify or ignore? do i affiliate or reject? even within the strange microcosm that is yo-yoing, we coagulate into factions which go to every imaginable length to draw borders between themselves. who can resist this tendency when in the last few decades, humanity has armed itself with impossibly powerful weapons against feeling excluded or alone. enter: facebook, instagram, the disney channel, starbucks... clyw?

i catch my daughter taking selfies sometimes (read: constantly). i completely understand that this is just something that kids do now. 20 years ago, no kid would want to waste multiple exposures of their precious and limited kodak film on their own visage when they could just look in a dang mirror. when a photo is as inexpensive as a few kilobytes, however, take a hundred. take a THOUSAND. put em online and see how many "likes" you can score. i ask her who she's trying to impress, and she's adamant that it's "no one in particular", and i've seen enough of instagram to realize she is not alone in this strange fixation.


i want to laugh derisively at this strange self-obsession, but then i stop and think of #trickcircle. over the past few months, how many hundreds of yo-yo videos have we put out there? i know, personally, i've done a couple per week, lately. and yet how many of my peers' contributions do i actually WATCH? only a few, determined by what i know of the person or if i've heard it's something "special". how many tricks have i seen that have made me say "ok i need to try that NOW"? maybe a half-dozen. i think for the most part, we are obsessively/compulsively sharing, even though as few people pay attention to our tricks as they do to my daughter's selfies. and sure, sharing a trick is a bit different than sharing our face, but is it really? our tricks reflect our ideas and in our community, our ideas reflect our identities... and, by dark proxy, determine our worth.

the other day, said daughter was dying a purple streak in her hair, and i documented the moment with an iphone snapshot. almost immediately, my 5 year-old son commented "you HAVE to post that on instagram"... 5 years old. it was a wake-up kind of moment. is my kid really being taught that the only value in a moment is its "sharability"? is he already parsing the frames of his own existence to subconsciously search for marketable moments? it was as though we had momentarily stumbled upon a rich vein in a mine, and his first impulse was to sell the gold rather than just appreciate its glow. it kinda shook me, not just because my 5 year-old had that impulse, but because before he said it, i was thinking the same exact thing. we sell our moments and we sell our tricks. we get paid in likes, and it makes us feel significant.

it makes me want to throw my phone away in revulsion, but that's a knee-jerk reaction, and i know that there must be a way to find balance on that narrow ledge. when we look at the parts of our life that are sharable or salable, we are effectively ceasing to live in these moments and instead paying with them as a kind of existential currency. but to whom?

pretty much all of our choices in this world represent a kind of payment these days. 300 years ago,  you paid a tithe to the church, and today you pay it to starbucks. the latte's are probably tastier, i'll grant you, and there's much less chanting in latin (grande, venti, trenta...). we pay with our time and we pay with our money, and what we get out of the exchange is our own sense of identity. we buy a pair of retro vans so we can be "that guy who wears retro vans - maybe he cares about skateboarding's roots". we buy the nice selvedge jeans to be "the guy who cares about denim craftsmanship". we buy the sweet new Puffin 2 yo-yo to be "the guy with the super-exclusive bip-bop colorway yo-yo" (and to be cool like palli, let's face it). in reality, no one cares about these discrete choices as much as we do. WE become the world perceiving ourselves. we are paying ourselves to like ourselves through a revolving door of middle-men.

we identify and associate, and as noted, that tendency is as old as humanity itself. the only difference is that the tribes have turned into brands, and the brands have become glossier and more consolidated. the question it raises, to me, is "who am i underneath all of my choices; my collection of affiliations?"

i gave this yo-yo to alex last year. it's an "el ranchero", one of the last models SPYY put out before steve gave up the ghost. originally, it was a cool dark-bronze proto, devoid of any markings. since steve had once made a couple of special pink ronins for my daughter, i asked if i could send this one back to him to be lasered specially for my son. it's pretty funny, because i was super amped on giving it to him, but when he opened it, he was like "oh cool. a yo-yo with my name... next." he's not really jaded, but in our house, yo-yo's are everywhere, and so they aren't really special to him. someday later on, maybe he'll realize "oh man... this was a SPECIAL yo-yo" or maybe he won't. i kind of want to protect the part of him that is oblivious to what distinguishes an everyday toy from the icons of art and craft over which we "serious" players get our collective panties in a bunch. i want to protect the part of him that doesn't care what brand of t-shirt or jacket he wears, how his hair looks, or how he is perceived by a world which he will come to believe cares more deeply about him than could ever be realistic.

incidentally, my kids are still watching the disney channel (i'm a fast typist). during this time, the disney channel owns them. they are letting it happen and i am letting it happen, too. the best i can do is try to teach them that they are going to be owned sometimes (or at the very least, rented), and that everyone has to deal with that as they can. within that, hopefully i can make it clear to them that their choices have consequences; that often the most trivial, unnoticed, and reflexive are the ones that have the greatest impact in determining who they will become... that the cage isn't so terrible a thing if you're aware of yourself within it.

yo-yo #97: silver minute

happy new year! woohoo! it's hard to believe that 365 days ago i was still just shaking the rust off after spending my year with the 'eh'. actually i'm still kind of doing that. fortunately, the rust kind of suits me.

i haven't done much with the blog since then, i know. i've definitely picked up some cool yo-yo's and have imbued others with interesting experiences, so i should have no excuse moving forward. sometimes it's tough to look at a blank page though.

so among the interesting things that happened to me in 2013 were the disintegration of spyy, and my subsequent invitation to join the werrd alliance. i gotta say, after steve emailed the team to say 'i really can't keep doing this', i did not at all see myself joining another yo-yo team. when stu asked, however, it really felt like a good fit. i've been keen on their yo-yo's since trying the first tfl's in 07, and stu is always trying to nudge werrd toward being more of a lifestyle brand than just a yo-yo company.

i can get into that, because yo-yoing is kind of a lifestyle thing. what we've built is as much a way of life as it is a distraction. yo-yoing can speak volumes to the meaning behind being alone. it is fundamentally an introspective and self-sustaining endeavor, and it always will be. if chess is considered "the battlefield of the mind", then yo-yoing is like yoga. even if we play in a fairly sedentary way, our brains are twisting and stretching through the minefields of string geometry we devise. and yet, yo-yo is also a performance, inextricably tied to the aesthetic of dance. just try to play "introspectively" at a theme park or shopping mall. if you're any good at all, you'll draw an accidental crowd which will wonder why you don't have your hat out.

as crazy as it feels to say it, yo-yoing is something that can give your life meaning. when in line at the dmv or slogging through paperwork, i'll catch myself doing familiar tricks in my head, and the upbeat, carefree feeling endemic to the act gives me a lift. it's a rad enough deal that when i get dressed, i pick shirts that will contrast with my yo-yo and string. and it's something that many of us value enough to travel for, sometimes for days (or weeks). it's a part of our lives in which we all seek to improve in some way, and which we hope in turn, will somehow improve US.

on that topic, i was perusing the newest issue of surfing magazine the other day, and i came upon a pretty cool little article which i felt was relevant to this new year's offering. i've often drawn comparisons between yo-yoing and surfing (also skating, martial arts, music, madagascar hissing cockroaches, and pretty much whatever else), and this set of surfing resolutions resonated with me. here they are reimagined as yo-yoing resolutions (don't worry - there aren't 66 of them and none of them has to do with giving up bearings). i figure it's still january - not too late. anyway, here are some resolutions i'm feeling out.

1. loosen up: you know the guy who yells "f--k!" if he gets a snag? the guy who doesn't talk to anyone at contests and gives his fellow competitors the stinkeye? the guy who, even after making his way out of the craziest, smoothest combo has a frown on his face like he just got kicked in the balls? don't be that guy. (side resolution: stop assuming that all yo-yoers ARE GUYS.)
2. dial in your equipment: if after a month, you're still getting used to that new yo-yo's profile, cut your losses and sell it. if you've got a dinged up beater that you never play, sand that sucker down and give it to the kid down the street. this year, you're going to shed that dead weight, not in the name of fashion or fads, but because you really don't need more than a few great throws that fit your style perfectly. you need what you need to play like yourself. the rest weighs you down.
3. throw at least 4 times a week: if you don't have kids, make it 5. true story: the last calendar day on which i did NOT throw was may 21, 2005. i find i just don't have a good reason not to. too busy? for a few flowy combos or a couple shoot-the-moons? c'mon. remember you're a better version of yourself after you've thrown, and it should take no more convincing than that to get that slipknot on your finger. make time.
4. go big: like conde, right? nobody ever made real progress without testing their assumptions; without pushing the limits of what they thought was possible. you can do more with this little retro-winding double-knobbed toy than anyone has EVER done. on some level, you have to believe that. doubt is essential because it keeps your mind questioning, but it's also an anchor you should perpetually try to shake off. try tricks that people would assume are a waste of time and energy; tricks that defy something you assume is beyond what the world (or your skill) will allow. visualize what you'd like to do with a yo-yo... and then do it.
5. break away from the crowd: this can be taken literally as well as figuratively. some of my favorite memories are of swimming alone at the rosen (r.i.p.) early in the morning while most throwers are passed out (or at the tail end of a bender). the circus taught us that crowds attract crowds, and it's awesome to yo-yo with your buddies, some of whom you might not get to see but a few times a year. but you've got to get that space, too, lest you fall into the trap of tying your own play onto somebody else. stylistically, you need room to breathe. take some time away from the internet, away from videos and #trickcircle and see where you go.
6. throw everywhere: this one i made up. in the surfing article, #6 was "surf a wave that should not be surfed", but that doesn't apply easily to yo-yoing. although it kind of does. any surfer with even a shred of sanity will tell you they're afraid to surf big pipeline, but what are yoyoer's afraid of? non-yoyoers. i'm always surprised to hear how many players hate to throw in public, mostly because they don't like the idea of interacting with people who might give them a hard time. yo-yoing, however, is an outward expression as it is an inward exploration. if you can't walk that middle path, you're missing out. also, this is meant to suggest playing where there are NO people - throw on the tops of mountains, on tiny islands, in empty hallways, and on forest trails. for me, yo-yoing is a way of processing a moment; a momentary fist-bump with reality. don't hesitate to do it anywhere.

this is one of the first yo-yo's i got from werrd. it's a silver minute which in the course of my everyday play has been banged off of essentially all of the non-actinide elemenmts (not boron, but whatever). it bears some scars, but still plays totally true. i tossed one of the ctx bearings in there, and it's become my go-to modern yo-yo. when it's not on my finger, it's dangling the descender strap i got from bryan figtree. it's my every-day weapon against my own laziness, creative ennui, and tentative assumptions.

happy new year, everybody! i hope however you choose to do it, that playing yo-yoing enriches your life as immeasurably as it has mine.