Fanzine

Keep a diary of what you're hitting, what's frustrating you, and your goals.
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Muffinman
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Re: Fanzine

Post by Muffinman » 03 Aug 2018 05:25

Love the vlog as always.
Great shred, great talk.
I like how you hit something cool and then just sit down and talk.

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Re: Fanzine

Post by boyle » 04 Aug 2018 02:16

I'm sure most of us would be celebrating like we won the World Cup after hitting some of those tricks, but Ken just sits down, turns the music off and starts chatting away about the next subject, then says, oh I haven't been doing any training!

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Stepping blink= stink

Post by C-Fan » 06 Aug 2018 14:27

Thanks for all the kind words everyone. Doing the Vlog definitely reminded me why I started doing them in the first place. They're messier and less interesting than my old podcasts, but they're also way way easier to get done and out in a timely manner. I also think that the video component makes them more accessible and easier to digest, but who knows. I'll try and film more Vlogs in the future, even if the ratio of shred/talking changes from episode to episode.

Another nice unexpected outcome from the Vlog, was that Rippin and Pete Irish expressed interest in getting a session with Kat and myself. Of course, this sentiment has come up in the past a few times and gone nowhere, and the baby makes things even harder, but maybe if I put down set times and dates I could get it to happen. Especially if I restrict the distance so I'm not putting myself out with time and travel I can't afford with the baby. It'd be pretty awesome to have a 4-5 man shred, and maybe even record a short pod afterwards.

I took Tony's advice and snuck in a shred last weekend. I thought about doing a Vlog, but didn't want to force one since I didn't have a lot of new thoughts since the previous one. Instead I decided to go for pdx drifters and torques, and generally try stylish links I don't normally go for:



I think that last trick is new for me. I know I've hit "blurry" blink before. Either way, it felt cool to me. I'm still getting used to the new video editing program, but it's already feeling more familiar. Doing slow mo wasn't hard, I understand the exporting better now, and cutting clips on my current laptop (instead of exhuming the old one just to edit) is a lot more streamlined. Hopefully I learn one useful thing each editing session, and in a few vids I'll be back up to speed doing transitions and title cards without issue.

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Re: Fanzine

Post by Muffinman » 08 Aug 2018 10:56

Yeah, vlogs are way more fun to watch than just listening to a podcast. Would much prefer seeing your face and expressions, and of course the hacky tricks are nice too.

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9000+ feet back to 5280 feet

Post by C-Fan » 21 Aug 2018 10:43

We spent all of last week on vacation in the mountains with my parents and my sister's family. It was nice to see Griffin interact with his cousins and grandparents and it was also a nice break from work and the normal routine. I was hoping to get in a few sessions of footbag while I was up there and experiment with filming just with the iPhone. Overall mixed success. I only managed to get out to play twice and the second time I got rained out by a thunderstorm not 10 minutes after warming up. Still, between the 1.2 sessions and various scenic tourist shots I did throughout the week I think I got enough decent footage to at least make a short and pretty video. I did a little research on using the iphone to film and that helped ensure my footage was usable and decent quality. For anybody else filming using their iphone the key takeaways I learned were:

:arrow: Film using the camera on the back of the phone,not the camera on the front (selfie style). While using the camera on the front enables you to see yourself and frame shots better, it's also lower resolution.
:arrow: If you're filming using the back camera and you're holding the phone landscape (horizontally), you want the volume buttons facing down and the power button facing up (e.g. the camera lens should be on the top of the phone and not the bottom). This prevents the clip from coming out upside down when the files are viewed outside of the phone. The iphone knows to flip the footage, but when the files are exported they will be upside down if you don't film oriented correctly.

Anyway, I reviewed my footage and it was all oriented correctly and appeared to be good quality, which is a nice relief. Shredwise I didn't hit many long runs, possibly due to the altitude (over 9000 feet) but also possibly due to me being out of shape and generally tired thanks to parenting. So I expect the video will be a montage of big tricks interspersed with scenic mountain tableaus. On a related note, I'm still learning my new video editing software. It's surprisingly hard/awkward/counterintuitive to do some simple things like rearrange the order of clips and I haven't even tried to add music or do transitions or anything like that. But that's part of the reason I'm making the video; to learn the program. Hopefully I can carve some time out during the evenings this week and make some progress.
C-Fan wrote:
06 Aug 2018 14:27
Rippin and Pete Irish expressed interest in getting a session with Kat and myself. .. maybe if I put down set times and dates I could get it to happen.
Good news; this looks like it will happen! I proposed a session on September 1 in Golden and got Rippin, Pete, Kat, and a new player Isaac to commit. Still need to hammer out some logistic details and hope the weather cooperates but I'm cautiously optimistic it will happen. If it does, I'll make a point to get some footage. Hopefully by then I'll have learned a good bit more of my new video program and can edit up some footage in a timely manner.

A few people have asked me about US Open this December and I honestly don't know if I will go. Selling points in favor of going include:

:arrow: It's a short event, so I wouldn't be away from family very long and wouldn't have to use vacation time even.
:arrow: Housing and flights would be cheap.
:arrow: It'd give me a chance to get the bad taste of my Worlds 2017 routine out of my mouth.
:arrow: I could potentially record some podcasts.

Points against me going though include:

:arrow: If the venue is the same as last year, freestyle competition may be indoors on a crazy casino carpet with poor sound and lighting. After my Worlds experience of training super hard only to be thwarted by weird playing conditions, this is pretty demotivating.
:arrow: The event is less than 4 months away, and the only person who has expressed interest in running the freestyle side is somebody who doesn't live in Vegas and has never run even a minor freestyle event. I like Aaron as a person, but he has no experience as a tournament director. As a competitor this makes me pretty nervous.
:arrow: I don't have the time to properly train. I'm not even talking about prepping and practicing a routine. I mean just even getting into basic playing shape.
:arrow: Even assuming I managed to minimize my time away from home, I'd still be asking Haley to watch the baby solo for an entire weekend. That's a big ask, especially after asking her to do it for an entire week during last year's Worlds. It feels selfish to do it again, especially when I haven't trained for USO and the stakes are so much lower.

Closing out this post with video from my only session during my last work trip which was forever ago:



Looking at my recent videos using the GoPro with the lens flaw definitely motivates me to transition to the iPhone camera. The quality is in the same ballpark, it's easier to charge, its easier to export video, I can check/review footage on the viewfinder during a session, and it's always on me. Now that I know which way to orient the camera while filming, I don't see any reason to go back to lugging the GoPro with me all the time.

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Re: Fanzine

Post by boyle » 21 Aug 2018 23:10

I don't know if it's that I had your Worlds experience in my mind, but watching video from the US Open, I thought the carpet was really hard to play on. Almost to the point it might induce something like vertigo in some people. Maybe it's meant to give the kind of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas vibe, but I think it would be hard.

Look forward to the scenic video. I've got a trip away in the next couple of weeks down to the coast to celebrate my birthday. Haven't made a scenery video in a while.

When I got a new phone I got one that was middle of the road kind of range, but the front and back cameras both have similar specs which means there's not that same difference.

Aside from the organising, are there many players that are going to show up? I haven't heard of too many who are planning to go.

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Re: Fanzine

Post by Muffinman » 22 Aug 2018 08:29

Nice. Yeah, I made the same mistake with the selfie camera the first time I filmed footbag with my phone. Good to know about the upright orientation too, though YouTube is pretty awesome about letting you flip clips post-production.

It would be awesome to see video of when you jam with the others. Especially Pete. I haven't seen footage of him since 2004??

The cons seem to be sucky for US Open, but why not just go for fun and not stress over competition? Purely selfish, but would also love more podcast episodes! Love The Symposium so much! I think it's one of the funnest, if not the funnest, side projects in the whole sport. Good job, btw! (Your vlogs are up there too!)

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Seeds for Pods

Post by C-Fan » 22 Aug 2018 12:45

boyle wrote:
21 Aug 2018 23:10
the carpet ... meant to give the kind of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas vibe, but I think it would be hard.
Every Vegas casino carpet is designed to do 2 things: hide drink spills and hide human spills. But yeah, probably not the best visually to play on. I used to make it a point to bring 2 very different color footbags to every tournament, specifically so I could adjust in case the competition surface was too similar to my bag.
boyle wrote:
21 Aug 2018 23:10
Aside from the organising, are there many players that are going to show up? I haven't heard of too many who are planning to go.
I think Penske and Lon mentioned somewhere they were going. I know a lot of players don't like the December dates because they are so close to New Year's Jam in Michigan, and they don't want to choose between the two events. If I had to guess, right now I'd predict a small turnout on the freestyle side that is top heavy talent wise. Like, if you told me all the events finished with Jim in 1st, Lon in 2nd, and then a random intermediate in 3rd, I wouldn't be surprised.
Muffinman wrote:
22 Aug 2018 08:29
It would be awesome to see video of when you jam with the others. Especially Pete. I haven't seen footage of him since 2004??
I've only played with Pete once since moving to Colorado 8 years ago. It was when Evan Gatesman was in town, and I did film. Pete and Rippin had off nights, I played average, and Evan was tearing it up. I remember he hit reverse swirling janiwalker! Unfortunately, I sent all the footage to Paul Agostinelli to edit, and he never did. I won't make that mistake again.
Muffinman wrote:
22 Aug 2018 08:29
for US Open, but why not just go for fun and not stress over competition?
The thought has crossed my mind. If I'm being honest, I'm not sure I could go and not stress over competition. I'm not sure I have an "off" switch for that kind of thing. I'd also feel super selfish if I went without preparing, dicked around in comp, and then came home with like bronzes in everything. If I'm going to ask the wife to watch the baby for an entire weekend, I feel I owe it to them to try my hardest and actually achieve something.

I've also toyed with the idea of going and trying to compete in Net as well, but the way the event is structured I don't think they're doing intermediate events and I don't want to waste any Open teams' time by having them shred me.

Thank you for the super nice words on the Vlogs and Podcasts. I don't tend to get much feedback on them, so its nice motivation/affirmation to hear people enjoyed them. I actually have gotten a couple requests lately from South American players to record something in Spanish, since there's so few resources or media about footbag put out in other languages. While it seems crazy to put any time into making footbag content for an even smaller audience than I already do (if there's only a handful of footbag media consumers, then there's like only a fingernail's worth of Spanish speaking footbag media consumers), I am keenly aware that making footbag resources available in other languages can have big payoffs. When I moved to Japan in 2002 most players complained that they couldn't understand the few tutorials on footbag out there because they were all in English, and when I began translating those lessons and concepts to them it really accelerated their progress.

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Re: Fanzine

Post by boyle » 22 Aug 2018 22:45

You should visit Colombia some time, not sure if you've been there, I don't think so. I had a bit of a pie in the sky idea the other day, which would be fun, but also frowned upon by my dear wife, of going to US Open, to the South American Championships in Medellin, maybe Christmas in Chile, up to the New Year Jam and then back home.

Won't happen though, but maybe in future years something like that would be quite cool.

I think that's a good idea to compete at net, then you can just sort of pop over and do some freestyle, which provides some kind of "off switch". Is it worth taking the whole family to Vegas? I had some friends that stopped there recently with a 2 year old, I think they enjoyed it, though it was part of a bigger overall trip.

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Re: Fanzine

Post by SlashC » 24 Aug 2018 23:17

Kat and I have enjoyed the podcasts! Getting on the symposium is the new BAP imo.
Rory "Tophat" Dawson

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"You can ask a stranger, my legs is fast and danger!"

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If Ken determined BAP/HOF...

Post by C-Fan » 31 Aug 2018 08:31

Dan- I actually have a funny story about how I came super close to visiting Colombia, but I'll save that for a Vlog. Short answer though is that I've never been to South America. My honeymoon in Costa Rica is the closest I've been to that continent.

Rory- I think you'd make for a really entertaining guest on a pod. Recording the pod audio is usually fun, but the editing side of it was really tedious and technically challenging. I'm surprised an app or free basic podcast program isn't out there in 2018. If anybody knows of one, please share with me.

I know you were joking, but the idea of a "new BAP" determined entirely by me would be pretty cool. Also probably pretty controversial. Same for Hall of Fame. I think I could make a smaller, tighter Hall of Fame that has more entries like:

"Allan was instrumental to keeping the online footbag communities running for years, as well as doing behind the scenes technical work at multiple worlds, pioneering trials footbag, and achieving a high level of play as a player."

and fewer entries like:

"Person A spent the summers of 1983 and 1984 touring schools with the WFA and doing demonstrations of consecutive kicks."

or

"Person B has been married to some other Hall of Famer for 20 years, and they showed up to a lot of tournaments back in the day. Everybody liked her and the cookies they baked were legendary."

On a related note, I always enjoyed the concept of "Mount Rushmores" for sports. Like, if you were to make a monument to the 5 greatest or most important players ever from a sport, who are the 5 you would choose?

Back to reality. On Tuesday I got in a quick shred at my normal spot. I didn't get to play very long, but I was proud of myself for carving time out and leaping on the opportunity instead of playing video games or cleaning the house or something. I've played around a little bit more with my new video editing software (Shotcut), but haven't made a ton of progress. At least now though I can quickly edit footage from my iPhone using my main computer, and not have to exhume the old computer just to make a short session video.

Speaking of which, here's footage from my Tuesday shred:



As the first clip makes clear, I'm still figuring out how to frame my shots. I could make it a lot easier by flipping the phone and using the selfie side, but as I covered in my last post that reduces the video quality too. At least with the iphone I can check after each clip to see how it was framed, unlike the GoPro.

The bigger footbag news is that I have a session planned for Sunday with Irish, Rippin, Rippin's new protege, and Kat. Even if not everybody shows up, it should still be fun. Hell, even if nobody shows up it'll still be a scheduled footbag shred session, and I don't get those often. Hopefully though people show up, we play well, and I get some footage out of it I can share with you.

Have a nice long weekend everybody!

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Re: Fanzine

Post by boyle » 31 Aug 2018 14:49

That session sounds great. So who's getting their heads carved in stone? What are your categories for selection?

You would imagine it would be something like

Kenny
Vasek
Rippin
?
?

Depends if you want to look at just competition history, tricks invented, other players inspired, awesome videos, school tours done with the WFA between 82-83, and involvement outside of competition.

Yes, those criteria sounds much better, but any organisation that already has a significant amount of members will vote in more people like them...

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Re: Fanzine

Post by Muffinman » 06 Sep 2018 04:53

Ken wrote:"Allan was instrumental to keeping the online footbag communities running for years, as well as doing behind the scenes technical work at multiple worlds, pioneering trials footbag, and achieving a high level of play as a player."
Absolutely yes!
We were talking about this the other day about how cliquey HOF seems to be. It was founded by Ted Fritsch as I understand? It seems to be made-up primarily of people who may not even know players like Allan? Technically you and I are also eligible for HOF, since the requirement is 15 years, right? :p But it's disappointing that Allan isn't in there.

Great video as always. Thanks for the shout-out :)
If there was some way to help out with the editing of podcasts, if that was something that would help you get more done, I'd be totally willing, though I don't have much experience with audio editing.

What video games do you play? I know you used to play a lot of Team Fortress?
I have a dad friend who absolutely loves his Switch because he can play on his work commute, which is basically his only free time away from his kid.

For a footbag mount rushmore...
-Kenny
-Vasek
-John Stallberger
-Mike Marshall?
-Steve Goldberg?

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HOF criteria

Post by C-Fan » 07 Sep 2018 13:13

In shitty news, the shred last weekend never happened. Despite me proposing a solid date 3 weeks ago, despite me checking with everybody one week before the session, despite getting commitments in WRITING from various players, despite proposing a location that was closer for everybody to get to except for me... despite all this people flaked out the day of. The flakiness of our community really holds us back. I remember talking to Steve Goldberg about this a long time ago, and him saying something along the lines of "the key to having a scene is having a regularly scheduled session, always the same time, always the same place." There's something to that. But yeah, I was pretty annoyed to have people bail the day of the shred for no good reason. Now that I have a toddler, scheduling my time is very hard and also very important. I really can't afford to have people waste my time like this. Just ugh.
boyle wrote:
31 Aug 2018 14:49
What are your categories for selection?
Depends if you want to look at just competition history, tricks invented, other players inspired, awesome videos, school tours done with the WFA between 82-83, and involvement outside of competition.
I was listening to my favorite NBA podcast a couple days ago, and they were complaining how the Basketball HOF has no known criteria. One guy said something very interesting though. He said his litmus test for whether or not somebody deserved HOF was: "can you tell the story of basketball from his era without him?" I liked that a lot. Take Jerry West for example. He only won one championship, but he took the Lakers to the Finals nine times. You can't tell the story of the NBA in the 1960s without talking about him, even though he didn't win a bunch of rings. I think a similar litmus test for the Footbag HOF would work well. Like, Mulroney had a very short window of activity in the sport (96-2003) but during that span of time he was the dominant story. You can't talk about turn of the century freestyle without talking about his impact on the sport.
Muffinman wrote:
06 Sep 2018 04:53
What video games do you play? I know you used to play a lot of Team Fortress?
I've been playing a lot of Quake Champions lately. It's like a more braindead TF2, but often quicker and more intense. Unfortunately it suffers from a lot of flaws including a low player base, a steep learning curve, and a lack of support from the developer. I could easily see myself losing interest in it in a couple months and just going back to TF2.

Thanks for your offer to help on the podcast; I really do appreciate it. I don't anticipate recording anything in the near future though, especially since I've lost any motivation to plan meetings with other players. I'm also working on a video project with my new software, Shotcut. It's not the most intuitive program, but I'm learning a lot by doing this project. Hopefully I can finish that up soon, and then we'll see what appetite I have for other footbag projects.

I have some thoughts/concerns about USO this year, but I'll save that for another post or a Vlog. Short version is I'm probably not going, since it looks like the freestyle side is more focused on setting Guiness World Records than ensuring basics of competition logistics are getting done.

Nice milestone I hit today: 25 weeks of no booze. I guess next Friday officially marks half a year, which is way more than I thought I'd pull off when I started this.

Closing out with my favorite video ever made of me, which just turned 4 years old. Thank you Ivan for making this, and thank you YT for not killing the audio track like you do with almost every other video I care about:

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Re: Fanzine

Post by acxel22 » 07 Sep 2018 16:17

go to USO, I'm working hard to go, hope I can make it and see you there

Scheduling sessions with non regular kickers is also a no-no here, last time I got to kick with someone is 3 months ago in Montreal.
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44 days and counting

Post by C-Fan » 11 Oct 2018 10:16

First real snow of the year in Denver today. That always feels like a milestone. Speaking of milestones, here are updates on a good one and an embarrassing one.

:arrow: 209 days no booze
:arrow: 44 days no footbag.

The booze one is surprising, since my initial goal was 1-2 months and I'm almost at 30 weeks now. At this point I'd like to shoot for a year, since that'd be a pretty impressive feat of discipline. The footbag streak (still active) is depressing. I haven't been injured or even that sick during that span of time but I just haven't been able to carve time out to play. Some of that's been out of my control. Griffin has been sick so he skipped his naps over the weekend, and house/life issues have required attention. But yeah, now that its snowy weather I don't see this improving any time soon. It's a bit of a bummer because I still think about footbag all the time. I still air shred, I still choreo routines in my head when I get obsessed with new songs, I still watch new footbag videos. In short, I still feel like a footbagger. But if I no longer play, am I really? It's probably been 17 years since I had a calendar month pass with no footbag. Not a milestone I'm stoked about.

I recently had a flash of inspiration for a footbag video project. I found a cool series on YouTube made by a skateboarder, and I wanted to completely steal the entire format but do it for footbag. Unfortunately there's a bunch of hurdles I'm not sure I can surmount, including:

:arrow: To do this project justice, I'd need a really good editor. I'd want to do things like having insets of other video clips spliced in, and maybe overlays for trivia. I could probably do a bootleg version myself, but the quality wouldn't be to the standard I'd want. Even then I'd have to improve a LOT and I don't have that kind of time to dedicate.
:arrow: Ideally this would be a series of videos, which would mean footage from multiple sessions. Given that I'm playing less than once a month now, that's a big footage deficit to start from. Add onto that the arrival of winter weather and I'm not sure I could get outdoor footage from multiple sessions even if I had the time to play.
:arrow: If I were to copy the skateboarding series, I'd have to hit some elite level stuff..and given my age and how out of practice I am, I could totally see me dedicating a session to this project and not being able to hit what I'd need for the video. That'd be pretty depressing.

So yeah, I think I'm gonna shelve that project for now. Maybe in the spring I'll revisit this and give it a go, or maybe I can work on scripts and even filming some material if we have unexpected random good weather throughout the winter and I can find the time to play.

Anyway, let's close out with a video from almost exactly 7 years ago. I think I was going for weird tricks that month, and I'm glad I did since watching it now half this stuff is a complete surprise to me. Made for a fun watch, since so often I find my game fairly predictable:


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Re: Fanzine

Post by Muffinman » 12 Oct 2018 11:57

Nice.
Would love to see that video (series)! Ivan came to mind... He's done videos for you in the past, hasn't he?
I know how you feel too. Being injured so much, and at times for multiple years at a time, being able to play at all isn't something that I take for granted any more, whatever the factors be they time, health, age, family commitments, work, whatever. That's a double-edged sword of filming so much and having such a complete archive of your game on video is that you can find gems like this but then also realizing that you may never be that good again, especially if it's hard to find time to play regularly D:

I hope I get to shred with you again in the future.
Being older also means less motivation to go to events, for me anyway, when I would prefer to go on a normal person vacation. Even though I've barely ever gone to any events!

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Re: 44 days and counting

Post by Tripp » 14 Oct 2018 05:21

C-Fan wrote:
11 Oct 2018 10:16

:arrow: If I were to copy the skateboarding series, I'd have to hit some elite level stuff..and given my age and how out of practice I am, I could totally see me dedicating a session to this project and not being able to hit what I'd need for the video. That'd be pretty depressing.
I know the feeling. Sometimes the camera is a bad thing for me. I sometimes set my own expectations too high and I'll get caught up using my entire session trying to get one certain thing on film and end up failing.
Josh Gayhart ... keeping footbag tuff since 2002.

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Fall (ing apart)

Post by C-Fan » 17 Oct 2018 10:47

Muffinman wrote:
12 Oct 2018 11:57
Being older also means less motivation to go to events, for me anyway, when I would prefer to go on a normal person vacation.
I'm starting to feel you on this one. I'm also coming to realize that my time off is no longer really "my" time, as many holidays are going to be about taking Griffin to see family. I'm basically a glorified baby-transporter for those trips.

We're solidly into autumn in Denver now. It's a weird time of year, since we don't really get fall weather so much as alternating bouts of summer and winter weather until we finally properly get into winter. Having grown up in New York, I think of Autumn as temperatures in the 60s, light jackets, leaves changing colors, etc. In Denver though fall is more like: 3 days of snow followed by 2 days of sun and temps in the 80s, rinse and repeat. So of course right after I get my sprinkler lines blown out and post on Modified about the snowy weather, we got 2 days in the high 70s. I took advantage of this and broke my footbag dry-streak. The first day I tried to film a pilot of my new series, just to see what it'd be like. As I predicted, it's pretty hard for a bunch of reasons. First, I have to be able to hit some pretty hard stuff, and there's no guarantee that I still can at my age and current level of conditioning. Second, I have no cameraman so framing shots and varying angles to keep it visually clean and interesting is also a challenge. Third, even if I manage to record the footage I need (tricks, breakdown of tricks, history, tips, etc.) I still need to edit it all together. I think what I might do with the footage I recorded is make a stripped down demo video of what I envision, and then share it with some video editors and see if I can entice them into helping with the project. Similar to how they do an animatic before producing a cartoon show. I think if I could get an editor to commit to help, it'd motivate me a lot more to try and film more segments and actually make this a series.

The day after I got in another session. My goal was a laid back shred, since I hadn't played for 46 days before breaking my dry streak the day before. I ended up having a pretty frustrating time, since all my equipment was falling apart. The shorts I grabbed have no elastic left in the waist, so they kept slipping down mid combo. I don't know why I hadn't retired or thrown them out already. My right G-Unit also started to fall apart, with the top of the sole coming away from the shoe itself. I'm not sure what to do about this, since I have no more backup pairs. My bags are also all starting to spring leaks. Maybe this is a sign I should take some time off, and then in the spring order some new bags and get back into it.

Here's the footage from the session. The barroque is pretty awful, but I didn't have much footage so I left it in there. The drills were fun though:


To close out on a more hopeful note, I've been excited to see the South American scene gaining some steam lately. I helped judge an online competition Sergio organized, Dan Boyle has mentioned Medellin is looking to bid on the 2020 Worlds, and Paloma is bidding on 2019 Worlds in Mexico. I might not be able to travel or compete for these given my current life situation, but maybe I could put my Spanish language skills to use somehow to help with promotion. Or hell, if I did somehow manage to make it to one of these tournaments, it'd be cool to use my Spanish to help players navigate their environment more easily or even help with local media promotion. Of course, there's a ton of "ifs" involved with all this, but it can be fun to daydream.

boyle
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Re: Fanzine

Post by boyle » 17 Oct 2018 23:39

I'm excited about the prospect of Medellin. I don't know how complete the bid stage is, but if they can get a bid going this year and be working on it from now until 2020, I would think it would be a great event.

Yes, there are a lot of positive signs from the scene there. The guys I met back in 2012 are still playing, and getting better as well. They are regularly in contact with each other, doing demos, promoting the sport.

I'm not as confident in the Mexico idea, as Paloma doesn't actually live there and I don't know of much of a scene in Mexico. Chile just played a friendly match there yesterday. This time of year is probably not a very good comparison, but I believe the city gets very hot in mid summer.

I don't know if there are any bids though, so let's see. I do have in my mind the idea of going to Worlds next year, but that may not happen. Francisca has already said if it happens in Medellin that will go, same kind of idea, help out in anyway we can.

I think a great thing you could do, (if not competing), is to be a kind of "head judge". That's something freestyle football does well, most of the time. They usually have judges who are quite well known players with a lot of expertise, and they are known well ahead of time. Having a head judge type person would also take pressure of the organisers, because they could then get all the judging under control throughout the event. The thing they don't do well is when they bring in someone who doesn't have any idea about what they are watching (maybe like a name soccer player, something like this, or a break dancer).

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