The Darkshredder's struggle

[Darkshredder]

yeah. I hope playing with someone kind of helps with that, Ben. It was a lot of fun playing with you this summer.

duty as in I watched that finnish video in the vid section today (check it out if you haven't already) and I was like "I want that. I want it now." blurriests and mullets and scorpion tails. Ugh it's just so painful to know that I won't be at that level for a while. So yeah I felt that violent need to reach that. Note the past tense of that. yeah it went away. Going to class helped a bit. And I think when the bag hits my foot its warm goodness will overcome me and I'll come back from my dark place. And enter a new dark place. Because I have a mission today

symposium drifter bs
gyro DOD (inspired by a chat I had with Ben the other day)
infinity reverse swirl /butterfly rev swirl
rev up

and more. . . stay tuned for an edit. One or all of these WILL be hit before dinner.



***

EDIT:: rev up and symp drifter. Not bs because I was busy trying longer strings. My style was very calm today which was nice. Very deep dexes, bag landing right where it should on like 60% of my xbd stalls. Ducking was feeling good. I hit a good link that went something like weaving clip > spinning butter > ducking clipper > weaving butter > spinning butter. Not too difficult but it seemed to flow real well and it was completely stream of consciousness.

every ducking pdx mirage I threw out was hit and every toe DLO was hit. Strange. But a welcome surprise. Same with symp reverse whirls and mirages. Pixies and fairies are still a bit of a chore with the new lavers, but it'll come. I can't get the set both high and controlled. It's always one or the other. So smoke is a pain in the ass to hit midstring and I'm not even thinking about hitting assassin and phoenix right now until I know the mesh is flexible and perfect.

anyway, fairly good session. Wish I played a little longer (only played for an hour and a half) and a little better. My stamina and accuracy dropped REAL quick. And my CD player broke. That was the big thing. That sucks amazingly. K well I gotta go so I'll talk to ye later.





PAT THOMSEN

[BenRea]

yea dude, gyro DOD!!!!

woo!

symp drufters, nice man, i havnt even really thought about those, not too many people do them.

priiiizopsss

[Darkshredder]

I didn't try gyro DOD yesterday unfortunately. Completely slipped my mind. Ugh. Need to write this stuff down. Sucks too because gyro was feeling really good. Today. After class and after I go to the store. K I have mouthwash in my mouth so I've gotta get it out. peace.

[Darkshredder]

I'd like to dedicate a trick I hit for the first time last night to Erik Chan and Ben Rea and um. Whoever else fancies themselves a reverse whirl do-er. It was done while a couple friends of mine were eating Wendy's (The Baconator) and we were watching tv in the common room.

zulu symposium reverse whirl (add in the term far wherever you deem proper and necessary)

I was wearing my shorts still from the session I had and I took out a footbag and told them to choose a name from a few trick names I'd tell them and then I would do it for them. So they had me hit torque and weaving osis (they liked the sound of it) and grab your balls and squeeze. . . for obvious reasons. And then I was just goofing off and trying to hit the zulu symp rev whirl. Did it after breaking a sweat and missing part of a show about rocket launchers.

anyway I really want to hit this again soon. I liked the feel of it, the dex may not have been as legit as I would've liked it.

[BenRea]

dud i hope your aware that we need to buy a campsite. for 2 nites. i can pay half. and we need a tent, which i dont have. i think we are lacking some preperation

[Darkshredder]

while discussing Beowulf today in class a sudden burst of footbag came into my head. . You know the kind.

it was a reverse whirl string that was long and went vaguely something like:
ripwalk > far reverse whirl > diving reverse whirl > stepping reverse whirl > blur > pixie reverse whirl > far symposium reverse whirl > dyno > reverse tomahawk > far symposium reverse whirl > pdx whirl > symp reverse whirl

all stuff I could link together. It'd probably just take a while to get the entire string down. I suck at coming up with preformed runs and then actually doing them. It's a skill I should actually get better at as it would definitely help me if I ever choose to compete one day. . .

anyway I thought it was a cool thing and it made me head and back tense up just going through the motions in my mind.

24 hrs before I leave for Syracuse and WAKAHAKEEEEEE and get a Mosher bag! WAH!? it's going to be epic to try and make it through all my classes tomorrow without lashing out at the teacher to make him go faster.

[DTank126]

....reverse whirls? Your just all over the place! Cool rev whirl combo though. You should try, like, ps rev whirl>stepping rev whirl>(rpt) or something, idk im bad at challenges. Im basically just posting to tell you how your a bastard for being able to go to wakahakee... alright, looks my work here is done.

peace

[BenRea]

i'll call you more lata about the deets but what time do you expect we will leave?

[Darkshredder]

I'm going to be coming in to Syracuse around 4:30 or 5. yeah you and I will be the last ones there for sure. BUT we'll probably be the last shredding . We're definitely going to have to push the limits of rt. 90 speed.

@ doug. I accept your challenge. I was practicing my flip stepping rev whirls today during my super shitty 20 minute session and I can definitely do them. Can I step out of it? Meh. That's the real trick. I'll give it a shot. I'm going to have a late-night hack tonight I think and I'll go for that. Thanks

one piece of excellent news is that I don't think I'll have to bring any books or things to this place and do work at night or something.

reading this over I realized that today's badness in performance has kind of been a trend the past few times. Huh. Well the odds are that I'll play well for the weekend, then!!!!

[Darkshredder]

I have an msn account!

again

[Darkshredder]

I'm stitching my first 32. I have the first flower done and almost have it connected to the second pent with surrounding hexes. I messed up before class and got so pissed off that I couldn't get the needle back through the hole that I complained to my roommate and went off to class. I'm looking at it right now. Just sitting there next to my Mosher and TT. Laughing at me. I haven't been this frustratingly obsessed with something since I started freestylin'. It's crazy. I'm pretty good at keeping the stitches level and about the same length but I'm having a hard time visualizing where things go in relation to one another and I always put things in backwards. And I have no idea what I'm going to do when it comes down to the last pent. I have no idea how to blind stitch and Mosher's tutorial has been down. I don't like/can't figure out the others I've looked for. Shredzilla's is pretty good. It's just I don't trust myself with his non-blind stitch technique.

As far as freestyle is concerned it's okay. I haven't been pleased with a session in a long time. I think I warm up too long. I go tiltless guiltess for practically a whole 40 minutes before starting to even work in tripless a few fearless. That's not what I've done in the past and I have no idea why I've started. But I noticed it yesterday and so I'll see what I can do.

some things that I'm worried about is that I know a lot of concepts and things and I tend to get lost in drills and the same types of comfort links so I can't get to certain things like nuclear for like a week. I tried to hit barfry yesterday on my strongside and couldn't. Not even close, even. My flip was better and I hit it. That's just stupid. Just three or four weeks ago I could hit barfry on command and if I couldn't then the set at least was high enough. Flipside and strongside is reversing for me all over the place:
1) atomic
2) spinning and spinning ducking
3) nuclear
4) pdx whirls

anyway some interesting new things I've done in the last few weeks:
1) whirling set
2) LOTS of ducking/diving/weaving/zulu to toe tricks. Pretty much everything I could think of.
3) midstring assassins and phoenixes
4) midstring quantum sets
5) fume - with an unbroken in Mosher bag
6) torquescrew
7) reaper bs
footed mantis
9) vortex bsos
10) beta blur bsos (a goal of mine that was accomplished pretty quickly after wakahakee)

I'll take my friend's camera and take a picture of my bag if I ever get it done. If I don't tear it apart first.


oh and I'm going to the NYC jam. Alone. Well I'm GOING alone. I hope to stay with the BSC while I'm there. And the cool thing is that I'll get there on time and not 6 hours late or some junk like at Wakahakee.

I'm off to go to the campus store to buy a pair of scissors so I don't have to keep stealing my roommate's. And then shred.

[Darkshredder]

short term, two month goal: push the concept of trailing to its limits in my game.

before I watched the rick moran video in the vids section a few hours ago I realized I had tried something like that a looong time ago trying to mimick the matrix bullet dodge. It was kind of like to ducking what trailing is to spinning. So not quite the same. But yeah. I'm definitely going to see if I can get good at trailing. So in a list, here is a - a list of things I will try to hit next session:

trailing clipper bs
trailing butterfly bs
trailing gyro clipper bs
trailing gyro mirage
trailing osis (wooooah. this'd be sweet looking)

this is all assuming I can DO trailing. it might be harder than I think. But I imagine if it were hard people would be doing it a lot more. Right? Flawed logic I suppose. Well I've got a weird talent for doing tricks with strange movements so this might come relatively easy to me. We'll see.

[Darkshredder]

had a great session today. Real happy with it. Can't remember if anything new was done, but it was still a whole lot of fun. It was one of those deals where I said, "Yes. I'd like to bsos gyro mirage and tap all in one string." and it'd get done. I was also doing a lot more tripless links. Like. Pure tripless. So that was good. Short strings and it made me really tired, but it's gotta get done so I did it. I think one of the planned strings went something like dimwalk>ripwalk>blizzard>smoke>ducking butterfly>spinning pdx mirage>and then I bailed back to guiltless with a bunch more tripless thrown in as I powered through.

just about every DLO was hit, toe and near. Every torque was hit. About half of my pixie ducking tricks were hit.

I came up with a repeat I want Chris Dean to hit. Pdx tap > fairy beater rpt. I'd do it but I have no flip fairy and my pdx tap is very hard to get on command. I've really only done it when I've tried for a good half hour just dropping attempts.

I've thrown out my first attempt at the 32. I messed up after the second pent was surrounded by the hexes and put in one too many. BUT my new bag I'm working on is looking super nice. It's soooo good. I'm having trouble hiding the knots I tie to connect the two ends of the string after you finish each flower. They kind of stick out and can be seen in the bleed hole. If anyone has any tips or a proper way to tie it that'd be sweet. I think if I finish this one my next bag will actually be shreddable!!!!

I doubt I'll sell my bags unless people actually really want them (I'd sell them for reeeeal cheap. I'm thinking $15), but I'm thinking of names. Here's what I've got:
Street Hacky Sacks
Legballs
Darkbags

[BenRea]

pat, dont sell your bags. werent you the one that said "if i ever got into stitching i'd just make them for myself"????????

dont hop the bandwaggon

thats my 82 cents

nice names though

[Darkshredder]

yeah I did say something like that, didn't I. Selling bags would totally be selling out. . . wouldn't want that.

so I sesh'd with the Rea today. Had to go back to Syracuse to get some books, get some snow tires on my car, and say hello to my dog who is getting old and dopey. Sad.
- anyway we were going to go to our stock spot at the park but it was raining like a beast so we decided to go to the mall about 5 minutes away and play under a parking garage. It was pretty wet and hardcore. I had a spinny, stepping run in the middle of a puddle at one point and it was like the battle between Neo and Smith in the last Matrix movie, with droplets of water all over the place and me doing dexterous things. And when you shred things go by in slow motion to you (as you all know) so for me it was quite epic and sweet. Sooo yeah. Sucks to be Ben's Holly bag. Got a little wet. It was like playing with a pancake. Excellent bag, though.

it stopped raining and there was a huge dry spot outside one of the entrances so we jumped over to that and started playing more. Had some on-lookers. Got mauled by a group of kids wanting to play.

Ben gave me a sticker that says "Footbag is Life. . . shred on." and so I have one on the back of my car and another sitting on my lap as I write this. It'll either go on my wii or on my stitching drawer So my car is even more the footbag mobile. And I'll dangle my first 32 right by my fuzzy cherries I have hanging under my rear view mirror. Now all I need is a shred mat I can fold up and put in my trunk so that I can pull it out, put it together, and play where ever I stop my car. EVEN ON THE GRASS (I imagine).

Anyway it was a great session. Fun playing with someone again. I still think I hold back a little when I play with other people. But I'm trying to push over to a new level in my game right now so I'm trying to hit more tripless things. This came out a few times during the session and I'm sure Ben noticed. Overall, I think I go into this lax mode of "huh. I wonder what this person would like to see me hit" and so I don't try for harder things, just longer strings. Meh. NEXT time.

well I'm deciding whether or not to play Zelda or stitch. Tough decision. I've got about an hour to kill before a guy in another dorm is able to do stuff tonight. Peas.

[Darkshredder]

news:
I'll be in Kingston visiting a good buddy of mine who goes to Queen's. All weekend pretty much. I love kingston. It's going to be a whole lot of fun. I hope I have enough money!
One more pent to go on my first bag! It's sucky. Has a lot of wrinkles and one hex is kinda small. Meh. I had a lot of fun stitching this, slowly but surely. I may finish it tonight if I get around to it. I'm kind of bogged down with work trying to clear things up for the trip this weekend.

I didn't say enough about the session the other day. Ben is really coming along well and I don't say that enough. Just "yeah played well" doesn't really cut it. He mentioned something like "Man I've come a ways since I started playing with you" and we had to laugh at that. He has. I mean the first day I played with him he had a style and a grasp of trick technique that made me take a step back and go woah, son! But this summer and the month and a half SINCE there has been quite a bit of improvement with him. My only qualm, as it were, is that he doesn't really solo shred for THAT long (understandably, though. He's a footbag nerd, but not as much as me ) and I just wish he could hack a bit longer when we do get a chance to play. It always seems like I'm getting ideas for things and about to get into the "new trick" mindset when he's kind of sitting or clumping his things together to get ready to go. The man's got a life, what can I say! Oh well. It'd be cool to shred with him for like 3 hours like I did a few times this summer with Doug. Those were awesome. Sooo painful but so much fun.

anyway that's my rant about that.

Like I said I'm going to post a picture of my bag here and in the bags I've stitched thread in a few days. So check that out. It's got a weird color scheme. Orange pents with light blue and red hexes (mostly blue with the occasional and random two reds pinned together). I have a feeling it'll be small, too. I close it up and look at it and it looks like it's about the size of my Mosher bag, and a little smaller than a super broken in footfighter mini. I'll see if it's playable at first but if it kicks weird or comes out odd when I roll it around in my hands then it goes in my car. It's weird stitching my own bag. It doesn't feel like it'd be good (my first one. It probably wouldn't ) but I mean. Even mine in general. The feel of seeing a bag take shape from the first panel to the last and then shredding with it seems really foreign to me. Kind of cool, though.

I'm off to read a bit, let my footfighter dry a little, and then I'm going to play for a couple hours.

[BenRea]

thanks for the kind words pat. i wish i could shred that long too but i just cant. i feel it would not really be beneficial to my game, or fun for that matter. and you're right i do have a life and its called crew. i cant risk injuring myself at this point in time and 3 hour sessions tend to do that. My stamina sucks too, it always has. im sure footbag has improved it but i think i just have small lungs or something.

[Darkshredder]

crew's awesome. The guy I'm going to see used to do crew and footbag, too. But then he quit both. Not sure why. School? Nah. Um. Well whatever, his loss. I think he still has a bag Tom made for him a year or so ago and I'm sure he's not using it. Maybe I'll nic that from him. It was white and yellow as I remember. Or was it white and pink. Either way it'd be very visible. I'm liking the lighter, contrasting colored bags these days.

my session was fine I guess. Nothing new. I had this one string that just seemed to keep going, mostly because I just kept trying to hit phoenix > diving illusion (Ben inspired) > pixie ss whirl (as a sick 3) but I kept missing the diving illusion and bailing to other ducking things or BOPs so it just ended up being this breadtangle of bails and far-reaching osisiii and some fancy footwork to also work in spinning things because I figured why not.

and I had another drifter run where I hit almost every drifter trick I know: regular, toe, pdx, smoke, fume (still no flip) , and a last ditch attempt at vortex which got caught after the dex on the support leg. Calf'd it. I don't do vortex nearly enough. oh and I guess I didn't do tapping drifter or catacomb. soo I guess it wasn't all that great.

I had a long tripless combo which may be a new record. It started out with one of my favorite links: maverik > blur. That was awesome. The thing is that I didn't have too many ripwalks or sidewalks when I go for hard tripless. Instead I try and do stepping ss osis, loads of ducking pdx mirages, spinning BOPs, and the occasional torque.

now my legs hurt and I have loads of work to do tonight so I'm going to get back to that.

[Darkshredder]

Footbag #1 has been closed

good god. I used the "leave the last side loopy and then pull the whole bag inside out" method of closing and I have to say. . it was like fucking giving birth! It was the most intense experience of the whole stitch and I think I'm still dizzy from hyperventilating.

the outcome? Meh. So-so. I didn't fill it because I knew I'd messed up on the loopy flip through and I also heard a snap somewhere when I was cinching on the last pent as well. So I'm guessing it would tear if I tried to kick it filled to 50+ grams. That'd just be a waste of filler. I've already started outlining and cutting out the panels for #2. Started that the other night. I doubt I'll do any more stitching tonight because I wasted a ton of word-time trying to finish this bag. I'm not even sure why I'm posting.

Oh but funny story! So we're learning about motion and gravity in my Astronomy class. And the other day the professor was explaining twisting force and velocity and all that. i.e. torque. And I don't know. I was zoning out for a split second while he was explaining something and then all of a sudden he said ". . and that's why it wouldn't work. There can't be reverse torque." And I held back a laugh and coughed (kind of loudly). Pff. No reverse torque. I had a good mind to go up there and show them what a reverse torque LOOKED LIKE. And then I'd appologize and explain that it was a crispy reverse torque because a downtime reverse torque would cause me to land wrong and dislocate something (which almost happened a few times this summer).

and they'd say that they understand and it was a good effort anyway.

anyway check back here in a few hours and I'll have a picture of the bag uploaded onto this blog and the new bags thread in bags and equipment.

[Darkshredder]

AAHAHAHHAhAAHAHAHAHA wow. look at this shitty shitty picture. It is my bag. Numero UNO, SON!

alright so this deserves an explanation. So my roommates needed pictures of each other for one reason or another, one for a conference he's going to and another for his parents or some junk. So they went out and got new batteries for the camera and came back and the first thing they did was they took a picture of me sitting on my bed. And then they took a picture of me grabbing my footbags and throwing them at them. And then I go, "Hey wait. Rob. Take a picture of this footbag." and he stood like 5 feet away and took the picture.

*sigh.

so anyway that's the bag. It's funky. It doesn't have fill so it's kind of chunky and strange, but that's alright for the aforementioned reasons.

hey and I had a session today. I hit a couple good repeats. Stepping ss mirage > legbeater rpt. and diving symp mirage > legbeater. the latter was cool because I don't think I've ever done that trick before and it seemed to be pretty smooth today. Actually, all symposiums seem to go pretty well today. Odd. K well it was an alright session. Heavy duty skooling of gyro and DLO. Forgot to keep skooling trailing.