10 year solo commentary

After half a year of filming and practice, it's finally out! I'd planned to make 10 year something special in 2016 December, so it's been developing for a long time.

DL link + unedited clips

Usual abbreviations: mirr pp rev = mirrored powerpass reverse, fl = fingerless, PD = palm down, PV = palm vertical, ia = indexaround (ma for middle, ra for ring, pa for pinky) etc, RH = right hand, LH = left hand, fc = fingercross etc.

In order:

Mirr pp rev power RH and PD fl ia LH: In 2016, fel2fram asked me to put PD fl around in fl sequence. Besides learning the tricks on each hand separately, the transitions are hard since the tricks have different plane of rotation. .

Arm bounce x 5: Used x 1 in WT17 R4, took 10 min experimenting then 30 min filming to get x 5. Difficulty rises steeply after x 6...

1st grid: PD fl arounds x 10 (ring, thumb, index), thumb clip is from early 2016, index from late 2017, and ring from early 2018. I'll show real record of PD fl ia later.

2nd grid: index fxxk and curled index bust x 10, PD fl ma and curled mid spread x 12.

1p2h combo: some ideas from OhYeah, and different variations of my WT17 R5 and R6 material. Became pretty consistent at this combo, filmed over 2 dozen times with second filming session having 14 drafts in 40 minutes - main issue was pacing.

['inverse' mirr pp rev - pun kan] cont: only rank A+, but it looks cool so I included it. I want to use this pp in different ways soon.

Async 2p2h: 2p2h with mirrored effect. Because 'chance of not dropping' is squared in 2p2h (e.g. success rate of 1/5 on each hand becomes 1/25). and you have to retrain stuff you already learnt, async 2p2h is way tougher than just the separate breakdowns. Trained this daily for about a week, so I think far better 2p2h combos are possible.

pinky fxxk - basketball spin: You tell me 'but pinky fxxk and basketball spin have different angles, how is that possible?' Well, fuck logic, PS is about bashing head against brick wall until wall breaks. Despite saying this, this took only 30-40 min to learn and film, but it's a pretty surprising transition so I wanted to show it.

pun kan aerial - wrist (?) spin: Pun kan pop spin variation perhaps. Not much to say other than 'I want to do it in cont some day'.

Forward to reverse combo: Was reminded of this concept by Ennis' WT17 R3. Timing was hard to adjust since I had to deliberately do some tricks faster, but it turned out pretty well. Filmed this for 1 1/2 hour for many drafts, on first day I made error in reversing the breakdown which confused me when timing was always off .-. Recorded on December 14 2017 shortly after WT ended - oldest clip in this solo.

PD fl around fall-rise-fall: Not much to say other than 'really hard' and 'I will make these tricks spin less diagonally in future'.

DC comssa fl: Inkless, tipless, gripless as usual. The cheat aerial is a bit big, but lazy to refilm (clip from 2017 November before I developed better technique for mirr pp rev stuff).

'Sync effect' 2p2h async: 2p2h with visually similar variations - inspired by Zombo's old async 2p2h wiki article.
RH parts: inv sonic 34-24, index-pushed RA rev 13-23, midbak to 24 > PD ma, pp rev 23-12-T1, pass rev (under mid, over ring) T1-34, sonic (over ring) 34-T1, PD fl ta rev T1-T2.
LH parts: sonic 34-24, thumb-pushed RA rev T3-23, midbak to 23 > PD ma, mirr pp 23-12-T1, pass rev T1-34, sonic (over ring and middle) 34-T1, PD fl ta rev T1-23.

2p1h fl idea: Pen first held in T1, then shifted to 23 quickly while main mod is in air.

3rd grid: aerial minicombos of PD fl ta, curled index bust, index fxxk, and PD fl ma. It'd be a lot harder to do PD fl around aerial with pen spinning completely horizontal, maybe later...

2p1h combo: Using ideas from gollumsk8 and fizz. Really hard to control, I want to see 2p1h developed further but I can understand why hardly anyone does it.

2p2h + 1p2h fl: Overall the hardest clip in solo. RH: mirr pp rev - pinky pop, LH: fc square pass fc aerial (the aerial is pushed by crossing middle and ring, then goes right into another fingercross); followed by LH fc21 tpass rev 124. Rank SS followed by rank S+, trained the not-aerial version of the 2p2h for 1 1/2 weeks, then the aerial version for 1 1/2 weeks, and the 1p2h transition for a few days, minor miracle to land this clip in only 30 minutes...expected it'd take hours.

RH combo: You can fit a lot into 9.5 seconds (RESPECT?). The linkage with indexspin, curled indexmid bust > thumb-mid cross sonic T3-12 > sonic rev 12-34-T4 was from adding my touch to mesi and dary's material, but their execution is worlds above mine. Thumb-mid cross PD around > thumb-mid cross pinky fxxk > thumb-index cross inv tpass rev from adjusting my WT material. Had really good day filming this, was landing it once every 70-90 seconds consistently...

Rev minicombo: Fxxk - ss rev (too noob to use in 9 year solo), PU fl pa rev - ss rev, and bakriser - arm bounce - fist ss rev. Rev fl has a lot more stuff possible, it's not developed much.

1p2h combo 2: Start inspired by OhYeah's WT17 R2 ending, applied to square pass (not that hard). Fc23 around LH + 1p2h twirls RH inspired by OhYeah and Sirapob, next bit is 1p2h twirls both hands PD using RH index + LH ring and mid inspired by katts WT17 R3 starter; PD to PV transition inspired by something Kay did in 2013-2014, 2h pass variations from OhYeah's stuff again. Fc21 LH to bust RH for ending, should've made it more obvious. Took months of practice to train this combo, way harder than the 1p2h combo near beginning.

LH fc combo: Ideas from zarne and scream, pacing of fc is hard.

1p2h twirl aerial fall-rise: rank S sequence for 1p2h. Daily training for a year to get not-aerial fall-rise one in my WT17 R6, then a bit more practice to put aerials on every part. Not as smooth as I want.

mirr pp rev pinky ss +0.5 spin pinky ss + wrist bounce: making it into 'real spiderspin' is ridiculously hard, the 2nd one actually isn't done properly but I didn't want to delay release any more. I'll start training this trick seriously now.

1p2h combo 3: Not much to say, just making a powerful impression of 1p2h with fc23 on LH, pd fl around on RH. Ending is really annoying with left arm bounce.

RH combo 2: Some ideas from f2f and dary. Start idea from coffeelucky's PU - PD sonic stuff but applied to fxxk, breakdown is: pinky fxxk ~ devil's shadow to 14 (mid in ring out) > ia 14-13 > pass rev 13-23 + fingerswitch thumb-mid cross 23-T3. Also tried doing b1b2 fxxk variation, but pen leaves hand too much. Moonwalk sonic ~> mid ring mirr pp rev > thumb-index cross fl TIA to T4 > T4 charge + fingerswitch to thumb-ring cross > PU fl ra ~ fl TIS rev.

Mirr pp rev power RH + LH indexspin rev 2.0: Under 3 seconds, hardest individual fl sequence I ever filmed by far. Over 3 hours spread out on 3 days to get this clip (I was trying easier variation with LH basketball spin-ish trick a month before going for this clip, and it felt like I was trying to hit bullseye on dartboard in a dark room without knowing which direction walls were). Indexspin rev with index angled upwards is way harder than basketball spin. Doing this clip again would be tougher than refilming all of my WT17 combos in total, I give it a high rank SS+. if I ever do this in cont I can quit happily hah.

Decent numbers of PD fl pa, mirr pp rev pinky ss, mirr pp rev - pinky pop: I've filmed PD fl pa x 8 and mirr pp rev pinky ss x 17, but they weren't as clean as these clips. Good way to conclude anyway.

Random thoughts:

Well, finishing major project that begun 1 1/2 years ago and involved more practice+filming than WT17 feels a bit strange, as though part of brain is suddenly unoccupied. Don't worry, I have some cool stuff planned later, and I'm starting to orient my practice towards making combos for WT19.

I hope this solo will leave a lasting impression on your hearts and minds, and inspire you that there's always more things possible. A lot of people say 'there's nothing left to do in PS', 'PS is dying', 'PS has reached its peak already' and stuff like that - I want to show them that limits of human skill still have much further to expand in this amazing artform.

trick difficulty 'theory' and fl trick ranking

tl;dr - Difficulty rises exponentially, so rank SS is incomparably harder than rank S, same for rank S to rank A, see first 4 videos of this playlist.


There's a many fl variations so I made letter rankings to explain difficulty to other spinners. Estimates comparing different tricks listed later (based on my own experience).

Pen spinning is hard, because doing a combo of multiple links/tricks generally has difficulty rising exponentially, i.e. combo of link A > link B > link C with 1/3 chance of doing each link, chance of completing is (1/3)^3 = 1/27. It's also why you need many drafts to get decent execution.

In first learning cont, chance of progressing to next one (going from bust x 3 to bust x 4) is low, maybe 1/10 or worse. For someone who can do 10 busts, the difference in bust x 5 and x 9 is big. As you get better, this chance improves, so the difficulty rise becomes more linear (someone who can do bust x 200+ finds bust x 20 and bust x 40 easy), because chance of doing next bust successfully is high.

Trick difficulty is related to how many 'points of failure' that can occur when doing the trick. For bust and spread, there is one motion/point that can lead to failure, and that point has big margin of error. Fl ia ss, fl ma ring ss still only have one point, but that point has smaller margin of error. Mirr pp rev pinky ss has 3 or 4 points of failure, each of which has very small margin of error.

There's time when I felt trick getting from 'exponential' to 'linear' chance as I improved. For tricks with one point of failure (bust or even a harder trick like fl ma ring ss), that happened around x 10-12, so doubling from x 12 to 20+ was a lot easier than doubling from x 5 to 10. For a hard trick with multiple points - mirr pp rev pinky ss I've raised to x 17, I still don't feel this.

So, in comparing trick which keeps rising exponentially with one that has become linear, the exponentially rising one is incomparably harder at higher numbers. Mirr pp rev pinky ss x 5 is comparable to fl ma ring ss x 30 in difficulty, so mirr pp rev pinky ss x 15 is comparable to fl ma ring x 70-100, right? This isn't true because mirr pp rev pinky ss rises as exponential from 5 to 10 and 10 to 15, whereas fl ma ring ss rises linearly after x 30-40.

Roughly: fl ma ring ss x 5 similar to fl ia ss x 15-20, fl ma ring ss x 10-15 similar to fl ia ss x 50-70.

Rank A fl ma ring ss: decent spinner with foundation in fl trains daily 30-60 min for 6-12 months can expect to get about x 10. Rank S mirr pp rev pinky ss x 5 is comparable to fl ma ring ss x 25-35.

Rank SS: difficulty of mirr pp rev pinky ss x 10 (x 9 to 13) in sequence of < 3 seconds (2 or 3 tricks).  Rank S+ is fair bit harder than S but not quite SS, so it's quite variable. Logically, rank SS sequence of ~ 3 seconds makes fl ma ring ss into trash, because it has difficulty of 100+ fl ma ring ss in 3 seconds.

The benchmark rank SS is mirr pp rev pinky ss (+0.5 spin pinky ss), x 2 is harder than mirr pp rev pinky ss x 10, and x 3 is comparable to mirr pp rev pinky ss x 17-20.

SSS will have the difficulty of mirr pp rev pinky ss (+0.5 spin pinky ss) x 6-8 in 3 seconds. I'm not anywhere near this yet, but I hope that in future, I can use rank SS as finishers, put multiple SS in one fl combo, reach rank SSS and higher, so I'll keep practising.

WT filming strategy

I'll probably discuss this stuff more later since it covers a lot of different ideas, but I'll start with my thoughts on material difficulty (in terms of how hard it is for the spinner doing the combo).

I'll discuss more about WT meta in some other posts, but remember this for now - execution, difficulty and originality are worth same points, so there's no real reason prioritise any criteria over others.

Anyway, from conversations I've had with experienced WT/WC participants in past, there seems to be a lot of last-minute filming (10 hours or more) on night before deadline, to land breakdown that needs stars to align to be performed. Naturally, this leads to frustration, physical strain on hand, and often compromises execution. Also, since material was prepared and trained for a short time only, there's recycling.

Basically, this last-minute 10 hour filming is detrimental in every regard, and often makes spinners tired from competitions due to stress. So, I want to promote an alternative approach to making 'serious combo' (which is a pretty obvious and logical approach to take, but few people seem to do it), which is similar to what I used in WT17 - sample video below:

You could spend 10 hours on 1 night, but it's preferable to spend 1 hour each on 10 separate days spread out over 2-3 weeks, with breakdown planned a few weeks in advance with easier material. Each time you filmed and landed a few successful takes, upgrade the difficulty and/or originality a little bit (in 1 or 2 places in combo). This would keep breakdown at a manageable difficulty - i.e. you can land it once every 20-40 minutes. You can have 'ultimate hard breakdown' as final goal to reach, while starting with easier versions; or you may naturally think of harder variations to use as time goes on.

This gives several benefits:

• More time to develop ideas and higher chance to get interesting ideas with different material
• Better execution due to more drafts and more practice because brain uses sleep to integrate motor skill learning
• Better idea of what combo's impression and visual effect of various linkages are, since you get to see more drafts done - which allows you to adjust accordingly
• Less frustration from drops
• Less pressure since you'd prepare earlier and know you have backup drafts to fall back on 
• Less RSI and strain issues

Assuming you'd get 2 or 3 drafts every filming session of ~ 1 hr each, you'll have 20-30 drafts of gradually improving breakdown/difficulty/execution over a 2-3 week period, which will have material developed over a longer period. In WT17 I found that 20 drafts wasn't enough to get level I wanted typically (usually needed 30 or so). Of course, this would require more discipline in regularly taking a short period out of each day to plan and record, even if the actual number of hours used is similar.

I'll probably discuss material distribution (in terms of how to arrange combos which give different impression for multiple rounds of competition) in future when I propose possible adjustments to WT criteria's wording.