Nick "Houdini" Polini

[F[uns]tylin' Eclectic]

Hey there, Blog

I had a session with a mystery footbag player through facebook video chat tonight. There's a clue in this post about who it is, and you can figure it out if you use your head

We had a really good session. Mostly went back and forth with strings and tried to hit stuff that we hadn't hit before. Here are my highlights:

Torch-R-Rack (new)
Superfly bs (new on flip)
Shaft bs (new on flip)
Dolomite bs (new on flip)
Cleared Levitating set (Fairy Symposium Swirling Stepping!) (new)

So that was a fun breakthrough session for my Symposium Double Downs. Have a good night!

[Add Block]

Hard to guess when your highlights for the session are identical. Had to refresh my memory on the names of Symp tricks. Can you film some Levitating attempts?

[h0ag3yb3atZ]

damn, you and nathan are bosses. i've hit flip supe but most of those others escape me at this moment. nice work chief, we'll have to skype and stuff soon and ya can teach me. fairy swirling stepping makes sense in my head, dope.

i am the worst resource for couple related advice*, but your doing so well at life by your own accord, why are you allowing someone else make you shitty, especially when your surrounded by friends at a footbag tournament? Your an asset to anyones social circle and it bums me out you feel unappreciated, i certainly wish i could hang out with nick polini on da reg. none of my biz and we've discussed such things to extent, but even peep bob's last post....life is sacred, we do ourselves a disservice by investing our time in those who can't match our efforts...

*keeping in mind this comes from someone who spent valentines day alone, obviously in sweat pants, drinking a bottle of pinot noir watching 2000's HBO cartoons...somewhere between cat lady pathetic and conan the barbarian liberating, we cant all be that wuss from the notebook and i'm not about to try


also some challenges of our lives:

-superfly>blurry revup, bs dosen't matter just want to see this haha

-more symp torques. also i challenge you to teach me symp torque this year

-a beast with super duper (you may have done this already, do it again beeech!)

-pixie swirl>swifter bs

-torquescrew>blurry whirl rpt, i saw this in jorden's blog a long time ago, don't be a bitch

[F[uns]tylin' Eclectic]

Vojta, thanks man. And I had a session today before I got a chance to read this, so I didn't try it today. But I can try it next session again. It was up to me hip a few times.

Kevin, thanks for the words. You've always given a shit about me and I really appreciate that. I can do a few of your challenges. I still really suck at Superfly, but since Dolomite really doesn't feel that hard, I'm planning on just getting super good at that, then my Superflies should be easier. I can swing the Torquescrew> BW *rpt, Pixie Swirl> Swifter bs, and teaching you Symp Torques. I don't want to hit anymore Beasts, to be quite honest. Beasts made me push myself in a way that I only wanted to push myself so that people would think I'm good at footbag. Even if people would comment and say something nice about the Beast, which was rare, it felt like chasing Beasts were just a waste of time and like it isn't even cool enough to do Beast x3 nowadays. It feels like lots of players are just tired of me being at this "getting there, but not quite BAP" level, and that's getting old for me, so I'm not fucking around anymore.. Second, you have to do Beast x10, which is HUGE, but just boring to me. It's so ADD-restricted. I'd rather hit Pixie Swirl> Torquescrew or Whirling Cloud kick> Far DLO. That stuff is way more fun for me. But I did hit my 10th Beast with a Superduperfly in it. It's at the very end of my part in the Grand Theft Gravity video. I hit something like Spender> Motion Sickness> Superduperfly.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2t4KYZ-fP4[/youtube]

I'm also pretty done trying to get another 10 Fearless. Again, the ADD-based restriction just makes it no fun for me. Even Jorden mentioned it in his post about creativity today. I'll post it below if you missed it:

Tips for freestyle footbag creativity:

1) Assign NO value to moves or trick elements.
2) Base the difficulty of a move on how difficult it is FOR YOU, not an arbitrary system!
3) Completely separate yourself from outcomes of your trick choices (dada curve is not better or worse than ripwalk, rev whirl no better/worse than whirl, stall is no better/worse than a kick etc.) Let's act mature and recognize that this is ACTUALLY a freestyle sport. No boxes.
4) Throw away all forms of (imaginary?) social pressure telling you to do the more common moves.
5) Play restrictive games that FORCE you to avoid common moves.

My favourite creativity game is "osis-rake-swirl". Every single move you do in runs has to end in either an osis, a rake (front and/or cross-body) or regular/symple swirl (reverse swirl ok). Butterflies, mirages, basic stalls etc. are ALL not allowed. Start with 5 moves in a row with each of these elements included. Then increase the number of contacts. Then add more of a balance of strong side vs. flipside. Then add more contacts. Then try to balance out each type of ending trick in the run. Then add more elements (spins, ducks, dexes, sets, etc.) but always only end on either osis, rake or swirl. You'll end up thinking and playing brilliantly. Good luck. (PS post your videos of your attempts at playing this game!)

I'm all about these already, and it's nice to hear someone say these things who is very well-respected in the community. A game with no creativity, based on strictly ADDs is very boring for me to watch.

So I played that Creativity Game with Nathan Bonslaver. But before that, we kicked around and just tried some links/tricks and worked on Spinning Whirls. Here are my highlights.

Highlights:

Vertigo bs (turning into an easier trick for me.. having a bit of a tough time on flipside, but it's getting there)
Spinning Whirl> Blur bs
Spinning Whirl> Reverse Swirl bs
Spinning Whirl> Mobius bs
Spinning Whirl> Drifter bs
Blurry Whirl> Spinning Whirl bs

Really started breaking through to Spinning Whirls in this session. It used to be extremely hard for me to do anything out of my flipside, but now it's just a little bit more challenging than strongside.

Here is the Creativity Game:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeGrnAI9 ... e=youtu.be[/youtube]

[F[uns]tylin' Eclectic]

Lots of life stuff is happening again. Some good, some not so good. I don't even think I'll get to that tonight, because I kinda just wanna get these videos on here then go the eff to beddy.

Yesterday:

The Voodoo was first try (ever) and it felt like the easiest trick in the world. I was pretty surprised. Tried to get my long boring/foundation runs a little tighter. Feeling good now. Tried to mix in Jorden's Osis-Swirl-Rake game, too. I added "-Unusuals" to the end of that, because that's just me.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4535TnREgus[/youtube]

Today:

There was a tornado warning in my town, but I decided to give no fux and play footbag instead. Again, foundation/boring runs/longer runs/Pdx Whirl/OSRU/pushing a little bit of interesting... I had fun with this session.

I did hit a new trick both sides for Kyle in this session: Whipping Rake bs. New one for me. Pretty stylish.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmFxErnkxTw[/youtube]

Need sleep. Enjoy vids.

[F[uns]tylin' Eclectic]

Ok, so a catch up on life stuff plus an awesome session video I had today at the bottom.

The big news is a story. I'm an obnoxiously elongated story-teller, so I'll try to be brief:

I went home last weekend because my mom was getting a new car and they wanted me to have my car there to do a trade-in price (i'll get to it). I was also extremely bored and kind of lonely. I love my parents and I have a great relationship with both, especially my dad, so it's nice that I only live an hour and a half away.

Drove over, went car shopping with them. Long story short, my mom bought a god damn brand new Prius 3. It's freaking gorgeous and virtually silent. So the deal was, my mom was going to give me her old car if I traded mine in and gave her the money that Toyota gave us for it (They offered us 2 grand, because they subtracted $500 for a tony crank on my bumper and another $500 for my fucking bumper stickers. BULLSHIT. We were kind of pissed about it, but we took the deal). When I say that my mom's car is her "old" car, I mean it's basically brand new. It's a 2008 Hyundai Elantra with 50,000 miles on it, bluetooth and automatic start-up and all that jazz. My yellow Hyundai Accent had non of that. So I left my yellow Accent with my mom on Sunday and took her Elantra.

The trade in was supposed to happen on Monday. When my mom was driving home from work on Monday evening (work-home-get dad-drop off my old car at Toyota), she was at a red light and this dumb girl from behind was texting and driving or something, and ran right into my mom, causing her to blast into the jeep in front of her. NO ONE WAS HURT. That was my only real concern. But the girl's car was fine, the jeep was fine. My car was totaled. It had never been in an accident before that. The extremely lucky news is that the girl who hit my mom is getting her insurance company to give us 3 grand for it, which is an extra grand that Toyota refused to give us. Fuck yeah. Karma is a bitch, Toyota. I'll post before and after pics below:

A day before the accident:



I wasn't thrilled about giving this car up. I loved her.



Here she is now. Upsetting looking at this one. Just glad my mom is fine:



Anyway, now that that's finished. Other life junk.

I'm meeting up with my dad to go to a reptile show in a town about 45 minutes away from me. Pretty excited. If all things go well, I should be bringing home a new pet that Dan Boyle might have seen in the wild. I'll post pics if/when I bring him/her home. I'm excited. It's kind of been a dream of mine to get one of these and now that I have my own place, I really have no good reason not to.

Another life thing.. Um.. Nadiah and I are still really committed to each other, and we're trying to make things work out in the long run, but we decided on Monday that we're going to take a break from communication for a little while. Long distance with no time to talk is kinda dumb. I know she still cares though. Last night, I found out I had tornado warnings for my town (hence the title of the last video). It was really fucking bad outside and the scary part was that if a tornado had popped up outside my window, I wouldn't have been surprised. The nice thing about this is that Nadiah texted me when she heard it on the news, just to make sure I was safe. So that was really nice of her.

On a lighter note, I bought tickets for one of my favorite bands, Cloud Cult. My dad is a really big fan of them too, so I'm driving with him to Philly to see them on April 7th. I think the last time I got this excited for a band was when I was seeing the Pixies for the first time in concert. However, I think this show might just be better than the Pixies.

Here's one of their best albums. You can really get lost in their music and the lyrics dig deeper than deep. I can relate to a lot of the stuff they sing about, because several of them got Environmental Science/Biology degrees, so they sing a lot about that sort of thing, plus existentialism. They're just incredible. This is also the soundtrack of my last 4 footbag sessions in the videos I've been posting. A little obsessed.


Footbag stuff! Yeah! <-- Good sport.. The one before "Yeah!"

I hit the dreamiest dream trick I've ever seen. I honestly never ever ever ever ever... ever thought I would hit it when I first saw it years ago.

Levitating Butterfly (Fairy Symposium Swirling Ripwalk).. So Add Block, here's the video of my "attempt" at the set
Hogan called me in the beginning of my session and wanted to talk, but I was already warmed up, so he gave me a challenge of Quantum op Revup. I tried, but it wasn't quite there, so I hit Quantum op Blink instead. So sick.

Here's the video:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaCjmT0o_p4[/youtube]

If you can't tell, Jorden has been a huge inspiration to my game, especially in the past few weeks. It's really cool that he came back to footbag, and is helping so many players push past their previous levels.

Bonslaver might come shred at my shred arena this Sunday. Anyone else wanna join us who is close enough? Figured I'd throw it out there... Even though that's just Ivan I think lol

I'm out, good night.

[Add Block]

Well done! I was hoping you would 'accidentally' hit it - is that the only 3DEX toe set that has been hit? I've seen Furious Nuclear, Rifling and Furious Swirling, but no toe except for yours.

[isirc10]

Thanks for the updates on the life stuff, the footbag is also neat. As much as I'd like to kick this weekend, I've still got robotics stuff to do so I'll pass. Been enjoying your videos lately, keep it up.

[boyle]

Looking forward to seeing this mysterious reptile character. I've got a couple of photos around that I've been meaning to post, will have to put them up sometime soon.

[jay7]

Three dex toe sets from Jay: flailing delusional, pixie delusional (also Jorden), pixie symp delusional, symp quantum delusional, symp delusional swirling, symp delusional rev swirling, fairy furious, symp quantum quantum quantum, triple around the worlding in to out, fairy gyro furious (also Jorden), pixie symp atomic atomic, pixie symp quantum reverse whirling, fairy reverse swirling stepping (also Jorden), fairy symp reverse swirling whirling, pixie furious, toe flurrying, toe symp flurrying, pixie symp furious, phasing surging, Frankensteining. What I can remember off the top of my head.

Four dex toe sets: pixie flailing delusional, fairy symp rev swirling furious, pixie symp delusional swirling.

Nick asked me this question too, figured it wouldn't hurt to write down. Arguably some of these melt into mid time, but they all come from the same initial jump, so I feel like they are all sets.

Key message: a lot of stuff has been hit and lost from lack of documentation, things in footblogs buried beyond recovery, or sessions in Hamilton with Jorden and I . Sorry. I assume Sunil also has had many concepts buried away.

[Ryan_Morris]

RIP safety car It did it's job to the last.

symp quantum quantum quantum

Sweet Jeebus, is there footage of that?

[boyle]

Jay - what kind of tricks are you getting out of these sets? Is there something on the end or is it just to toe stall? I imagine the four dex ones are just going to toe.

[Add Block]

That's a very impressive list. I can't even imagine most of those sets. My question, however, was more like 'Is there a footage of a clean triple dex toe set into a Mirage/Switch?'

[jay7]

Symp quantum quantum quantum - no footage. It was very angle-y. If you recall Evan's recent reverse swirling janiwalker, and see how his butterfly kind of... Wasn't a butterfly, that was the same as the last quantum here. The last quantum butterfly was kind of like a bastardised floating Dada curve. I hit it because Kevin Crowley said he thought it was possible and I took the challenge.

Four Dexterity sets - pixie flailing delusional SS mirage, fairy symp rev swirling janiwalker, pixie dolomite swirling SS osis. Also, the most pathetic one, nemesis-ing clipper, I.e. nemesis in one jump (Jorden's anti matter concept) might possibly belong here.

The only footage I recall was badassery. If I recall correctly, pixie delusional and flailing delusional were in it. Jorden could probably sell you a copy of you wanted.

Obviously with most of these sets, the last component was timid. The harder delusional sets were always ss osis, ss mirage, SS pickup, for example. The easier delusional, I.e. pixie delusional were hit into many things, reverse whirl for example. Often a very scrambled and unpleasing butterfly, etc. I kind of view it like the reverse of day, pixie paradon swirl. Really boring, easy, very fast set with a cool downtime. Since most people only do easy sets, I feel our brains are trained to think "easy set hard downtime". Somehow ending a trick on such a tiny mirage, etc, never feels as satisfying as some Badass complex downtime after a tiny pixie. Didn't stop me from inventing though

[Kylescook]

Jeez. I cant even imagine what 25% of those look like. You kicked footbags ass.

[F[uns]tylin' Eclectic]

Wow, Jay, that's a lot. Props man.

Not much time to update, but there are 2 special new updates:

1) My game is feeling as if it's reached a new level. Defintiley broke through a wall of whatever was holding me back. I think I had a taste of this new level when Greg was here. I've got 2 new videos that I'll post below. 30 contacts is starting to be a normal thing, whereas last year, I'd be shitting trow if I hit 30 with a bunch of BOPs.

2) I went to that reptile show, and I did see the Blue-Tongue Skinks, but they didn't look like they were in the greatest condition, and besides, I encountered one of my childhood dream pets at the show. Poison Dart Frogs! I yolo'ed so hard and bought 3 frogs and a gorgeous pre-made 10 gallon thumbnail tank setup along with a fruit fly cultivation kit. I really haven't been this happy in a long time. They're certainly a challenge to keep though, because they need to live between 70 - 80 degrees and that was tough to maintain for the first few days. But I'm getting the hang of it. I've got some videos on my instagram (@nickthepolini) if you want to see more from them.

Red: Epipidobates anthonyi 'santa isabel' (aka; Pantasmal Poison Dart Frog)
Yellow: Dendrobates leucomelas (aka: Bumblebee Poison Dart Frog)
Green: Dendrobates auratus (aka: Black and Green Poison Dart Frog)




Footbag:

Bonslaver came over this weekend and we had a really fun session. Lots of good runs, hit my first Pdx Ripwalk and first flipside Levitating set. After the session, we went off-roading in Nate's jeep at this popular redneck "mudding" spot across the field from my place. It was actually super fun, so mud on, red necks, mud on.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpkKD0qeiTk[/youtube]

Just a solo session I had tonight but my phone died. Caught 4 good runs though.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOQhZ5FWcxI[/youtube]

Highlights off camera:

Improvement at flip Torquescrew, flip Toe Far Reverse Swirl, flip GYBAS...
First flip FS Toe Blur with Lavers on
Pixie op Cloud Blur bs
Frankenstein bs a few times
Phasing ss Mirage bsos

Good, relaxed yet still creative runs. Cya.

[DC Clinks]

Nick, those frogs look so freaking cool yo. How hard is it to care for them / maintain their living space? Do you just like drop some bugs in at the start of the day or something? Anyways, shred is looking savage mate. WOW'ed at various parts in that solo seshz vid. Keep it up yo, peac3.

[boyle]

Liked the midrun stepping ducking stuff. You don't do many fairy tricks, that could bring in even more variety for you. I was thinking your reptile creature was going to be a blue tongue, I haven't seen one in a while but they are pretty common to see here. I think they like the hot though, and it must be pretty cold up your way at the moment.

[F[uns]tylin' Eclectic]

Thanks both Dans. I had a lot of fun in those sessions. Been having a lot of fun lately.

Dang: To answer your question.. I have to keep my pad around 70 - 80 degrees for them. I am now a fruit fly breeder, and I basically take the fruit flies, drop them in calcium/vitamin powder to dust them (keeps them from moving around too much and also gives my f0rgz extra nutrition). Then Yes, drop them in the tank and them f0rgz eats them. Still experimenting with how many to give. Just dropped in about 40 earlier and there are still a few hopping around, so that might be a good number. We'll see. Glad you think they're cool, too. I love them.

Dan: Yeah, I was going to go for Blue Tongue at first, but meh. They're not as cool as dart frogs, in my opinion. I was always more of an amphibian guy anyway. Until I get my future albino boa (which will happen). Stepping Ducking has been feeling nice on flipside midstring finally. I thought that would add a nice spark to that run.

So here is a really quick video from today's session. It's only 3 new tricks. One of them is on both sides.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nw03OgLEes4[/youtube]

I worked on flipside Rakes for the whole first 2/3 of the session. Then I started messing around and filmed the tricks above. I was feeling creative, so I figured I'd have some fun and see what I could get with my newfound control and understanding of complex sets.

One highlight I hit that was inspired by Kyle was Motion> Torque bs. Not huge, but it's going to serve as a nice bridge to stuff like Motion> Torquescrew bs and stuff.

Listen to Tiger Army.

Good night.

[boyle]

How about ducking torque? I have been trying that lately. Seems quite hard. Also, make it a locomtoion rather than just motion.