Old Places; Familiar Faces

by Pinky

Well, I am back in New York after 2 months in the Great Smokey Mountains. It has been 6 years since I worked at Dollywood and I must say everyone there is just as friendly as ever! Although I met many amazing people and could tell you many stories about Maniacs I met while there this year, there is
one that stands out in my mind above all others.

About 2 or 3 weeks in Dollywood, I noticed a very tall young man, wearing a purple shirt standing in line for the golf contest that we held 5 times a day. I thought to myself, wow he seems familiar, but couldn't for the life of me remember where I had seen him. I was standing behind the cash register at the end of the contest and look up to find this same young man standing in front of me.

He would be the guy in the background wearing a purple shirt... no, the one on the right.

He introduces himself as Kyle and says he met Ivan and I at Dollywood 6 years ago and with hand over his heart he begins to tell me how much Ivan and I meant to him all those years ago and how his time with us meant so much to him. Of course by now I'm teary eyed and trying my best to place him, I knew he looked familiar... Then along comes his Mom and Dad, and BAM I remember!!!

He was only about 11 or 12 when we met him, I remember his sweet parents always brought Ivan a slushy after he did the Golf contests back then and they were there every day of their vacation because that's what he wanted to do more than anything else while visiting from Florida. I had many delightful conversations  with his parents and him and you know what he spent this vacation doing, at the age of 17? He came back to every Golf contest we held.

I still have a little blue and a purple Alien that he won and gave to me. It is because of stories like this, parents like this and maniacs like this that I SO love not only what I do for a living but what Myachi has done for so many. So, Kyle and Mr. and Mrs. Schaeffer, if you are reading this, I want you to know that you have all now impacted my life as well. I admire the relationship you all have with one another and the kindness that you all showed us during your visit, you were sorely missed after you returned home.

Now to all of you Maniacs out there that we met and spent time with at Dollywood, you guys made my summer. It was hard work and hot like you wouldn't believe but meeting and or reuniting with all of you made it all worthwhile. Thanks again to The Schaeffer family for sending me pics and making my time in Tennessee such a pleasure.

Tracking the Contest Lead

by Crazy Ivan

Sometimes I wonder which end of these contests is more fun, mine or yours.

Last week I put up a new contest on the blog in which I asked our loyal readers to find as many Myachi tricks as possible in a word search puzzle.  To make things extra tough I didn't tell anybody how many there were or what tricks they were looking for.

So for the last 7 days I've been watching e-mails and FB messages rolling in while contenders shuffle for the lead.  I promised an update to several of them 3 days before the contest ended.  Well, we're keeping it open until Friday at midnight, so this is the 3 day mark.

Up to this point, there are 2 major contenders, though there have been at least 16 entrants.  The lead has actually changed hands several times just in the last 48 hours as these two keep finding new tricks and emailing me updated lists.

At the moment, the lead stands at 84 tricks, but I can assure you that there are still more to be found so there's a chance to jump into the lead.  Keep in mind that if 2 or more people are tied (or find all the tricks), I'll be choosing the winner at random, so even if you can't best this total, just catching up with it might be worth your while.

I'll update everyone again on Friday morning and see if there's a mad dash to the finish line.  Until then have fun with it.  And remember, Cwexmiib isn't a word.

The Downward Spiral Has Ended

by Crazy Ivan

So I'll admit that I take a lot of pride in the performance of this blog.  When we have days with very few views, it saddens me and I am inconsolable.  When we have days with a lot of views, I am overwhelmed with joy.

Okay, so maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but I do follow the numbers really closely.  If we're close to a record day, I'll toss out a quick entry in hopes of pushing the numbers up.  If we're having a really bad week I'll blog like crazy in the last few days to try to even things up.  I check the stats on this thing at least 3 or 4 times a day.

This is why it was so distressing to let the blog go for such a long period over the summer.  I was still writing an entry here and there, of course, but with our insane work schedule I wasn't able to keep up in the manner I had before.  Well, I'm happy to say that the downward spiral has ended.

Our peak month with this blog was in May when we had well over 8000 views, but starting in June (the month I went to Dollywood), the numbers took a precipitous decline.  They were lower in June than they had been since March (the month after I started this blog) and in July they dipped even lower, setting a record for the slowest month we've had so far.

To be honest, August hasn't been much better.  I was still at Dollywood for the first half of it, I was mad busy catching up with other stuff when I got back and I haven't blogged at all over the past two weekends.  But that being said, the trend line reversed as of today (and as of 2 minutes before I started writing this entry).  We now have 1 more view in August than we had in July.

Sure, one view isn't much, but the important thing is that it changes the trend.  July was the bottom and now we can worry about building things back up.  August was still a really slow month and will almost certainly end as the second slowest month all time (unless this random entry goes viral), so it will still be really easy to do better in September.  By October we hope to be back up into the lofty numbers we were posting in May.

None of this matters much, of course.  This blog is here as a resource for dedicated Myachi Maniacs and it serves that purpose whether it gets 270 views a day or 270 views a week.  That being said, I'm all about the eyeballs so I'm always stoked about people reading the stuff I'm writing.  Keep it up!

Matrix; Evolutions

by Crazy Ivan

There was a time when the Matrix was largely considered the toughest hand trick in Myachi.  Man, that seems like a long time ago.

Since then moves like the Jedi, the Spidey Sense, the Super-Yoga, the 4 Myachi juggle and the myriad variations on the Matrix itself have long supplanted it, but the Matrix itself still holds a unique place in the pantheon of Myachi moves.  Whether it's the hardest or the 113th hardest, a quick Matrix will stop most people in their tracks.

It's no wonder then that the Matrix has spawned such an enormous family of moves.  Each new Myachi Master is eager to put their own personal twist on the move, to push the boundaries of what's possible, to carve their names into Myachi history by fashioning a new version of this classic move that might live in perpetuity.

Understandably, the names of these various moves have gotten unwieldy over the years.  Because each move is rooted in the Matrix, and because the Matrix is such a beloved move within Myachi, the names always seek to wed themselves to the original.  That worked well for the first few variations, the Matrix Reloaded and the Matrix Revolutions, and our creativity kicked in after that.  Moves like the Matrix Rebooted, the Matrix Rerouted, the Matrix Unleashed and the Glitch in the Matrix joined the more vanilla names like the Behind the Back Matrix, the Under the Leg Matrix, the Bandit Matrix and the One Handed Matrix.

Soon the army of Matrix variations would swell to the point where many went unnamed.  Names like the "Mantrix", the "Slingshot-Trix" and the "Wingtrix" never caught on (for understandable reasons) so there seems to be an unending supply of new Matrix variations awaiting more clever names.  Every new Myachi Master tries to come up with their own take on this move so ever more complex and challenging concepts keep getting crammed into this already forbidding move.

When I announced that this week's Trick of the Day videos would be Matrix variations, the other Masters at the House of Skills got pretty fired up.  I was instantly bombarded with a plethora of questions as to which variations I'd be using.  Would I be using the Matrix Rerouted?  How about the Matrix Recharged?  Maybe the Matrix Rebuked?  I was also inundated with emails (okay, maybe not inundated exactly) asking about this or that Matrix variation and whether it would be included in this week's tricks.

Of course, the answer to most of these inquiries was (by necessity) "no".  There are far too many Matrix variations for me to squeeze them all into a single week.  Heck, even if I did a whole month worth of Trick of the Days dedicated to the Matrix theme I would still have to leave some out (and some good ones at that).

So for those of you hoping to see this or that variation and disappointed when it doesn't show up, I can only promise that another week of Matrix variations will come again in the future.  I can't promise that your favorite variation will be included that week either, of course.  Heck, by the time I do another week on Matrix moves there will probably be at least 5 new variations that I'll have to leave out as well.

An Important Contest Correction!

by Crazy Ivan

Thanks to the intrepid Jackalope, a mistake was brought to my attention on our wordsearch puzzle contest.  Somehow when I was copying and pasting the puzzle, I managed to delete an entire line from the thing.  That meant that a few moves were missing and a few moves were one letter away from being correct.

Anyway, it's fixed now.  If you look back on the original post it's been updated with the other line added.  The missing line was 4th from the bottom so if you've already found a bunch of words, focus on that area to find a few new ones.

Thanks to Jackalope for pointing that out and sorry to everyone who were left scratching their heads when they read something like "Sleeve-O-Lint".

Balancing the Trick of the Day

by Crazy Ivan

One of the first things I had on my "to do" list this week was update our playlists on You-Tube.  I usually drop the Trick of the Day directly into one of the four, but while I was in Tennessee I let this responsibility slip and thus had a few dozen tricks to categorize.

They're all up to date now, so in case you're curious, you can click here to check out the:

• Playlist of Tricks for Beginners
• Playlist of Tricks for Intermediate Players
• Playlist of Tricks for Advanced Players
• Playlist of Tricks for Masters

Breaking these suckers into playlists serves a few purposes.  The most obvious is that it gives a good resource for newer players or people who are ready to move on to tougher stuff.  Rather than having them wander aimlessly through all of the past "Trick of the Day" videos, they can skip straight to the stuff that is in their particular skill level.

But there's another, internal purpose as well.  It helps me keep the tricks balanced.

I've received a number of emails, pms, etc. that have asked for "more easy tricks" or "more difficult tricks".  Because I know that the mix is pretty half and half between beginners and veterans watching the videos, I try to include something for everyone, but sometimes it gets hard to keep track of.

Enter the playlists.  I can glance at any time at my various playlists and see which category is "winning".  Am I uploading a lot more basic tricks than advanced ones?  Am I being too challenging and ignoring the newer players?  Since I do these things 5 days a week it quickly becomes impractical to try to keep track of that stuff in my head.

So as I'm updating these playlists today, I took a few notes on how much meat was in each category.  At the present moment, we have:

• Beginner = 44 Tricks
• Intermediate = 71 Tricks
• Advanced = 52 Tricks
• Master = 21 Tricks

At a glance, that probably doesn't seem like a very good mix.  Obviously the Master category is feeble compared to the others and the Intermediate is racing way out ahead of the others.  But as I look at it, I'm pretty well satisfied with the mix we have.

The goal is for the Beginner/Intermediate to outnumber the Advanced/Master by about 2 to 1.  Why?  Well, advanced players can still have fun learning beginner and intermediate tricks but beginners can't have fun learning advanced or master moves.  As it stands, there are 73 in the latter category and 115 in the former.  That's not 2 to 1, obviously (more like 3 to 2), but it's in the right ballpark.  There are (and should be) a lot more moves in the easier categories.

Some people will look at the numbers and think that the "Master" category is woefully lacking.  It's less than half the size of the next smallest category.  Again, even though this seems like an error it is essentially what I was looking for.  The smallest group of people watching these videos, of course, will be people who are true "masters" of the game, so it is only rarely that I feel the need to add more to that category.  In fact, when I do, I often get accused of "showing off" (a charge I don't deny).

Still others will see the numbers and wonder if there shouldn't be more moves at the extremes.  The beginner and master categories are the smallest and to such a wide degree that both of them together have fewer tricks than the intermediate category.

Again, that's what we're shooting for.  Beginner tricks are necessary (and can be fun for even advanced players) but I think it's safe to assume that most of the people who are logging in to check out the Trick of the Day video are looking for a challenge.  For this reason, the majority of the moves should stretch the limitations of the players watching them.

So to make a long story short, by categorizing the moves in these playlists, I've managed to make it easier to keep them balanced.  But only the difficulty end has been balanced.

I'll be adding some new playlists over the next day or two to address other imbalances in the videos.  For example, I have no idea off hand how many 2 Myachi tricks I have compared to 1 Myachi tricks.  Obviously I want there to be a lot more 1 Myachi moves, but I have no early warning sign that if I'm getting imbalanced there.  Similarly, I want there to be a lot more hand moves than foot moves, but I can't say off hand what the ratio of hand tricks and foot tricks is.

My thoughts at present are to create new playlists for all the "Clades" of tricks (trap; swap; body-cross; strike; etc.) and to create new playlists for 1, 2 and 3 Myachi moves.  I'll also add (or update) the hand tricks/foot tricks playlists.

But ultimately the system is only as good as the input.  I'm calling on you, the loyal reader, to help me decide what else to do.  Obviously, anyone who wants to put together a playlist can (assuming they have a You-Tube account) so what I'm looking for here isn't just ideas for cool playlists (although those are welcome).  What I'm really looking for is different ways to keep the thing balanced.  Having a hand trick/foot trick playlist will make it much easier for me to realize when I've been neglecting foot tricks or focusing on them too much, just as having playlists divided by difficulty level help me to see when I'm doing too many advanced moves.

Any suggestions?  Feel free to leave them in the comments section below or email me at crazyivan@myachi

Contest Update

by Crazy Ivan

Just a brief reminder about the Word Search contest we've got going on.  In this contest, you were asked to find as many common Myachi tricks as possible in the jumble of letters.  To keep it nice and challenging, I didn't bother to tell anybody how many tricks were hidden.

As we enter the second week of the contest (and start the 5 day countdown until it ends), I though it would only be fair to give everyone an idea where things stand.

Of all the e-mails, pms and Facebook messages I've gotten on it, the leader at the moment found 72 tricks.  As Herculean as that effort was, there are still plenty more yet to find.  That means that if you found less than 72, it's time to go back to the puzzle.

Another quick note.  I've been getting a few e-mails from people who find 30 words, e-mail those to me, find 12 more, e-mail those to me, find 6 more, e-mail those to me...  That's not going to work in the long run.  I can't really keep track of what everybody's found in that manner.  If you've already sent me an email with words you found and then find more, send me the list of all the words you've found in the follow up email, not just the 5 or 6 more you've located.

This is just to ensure that the we get the correct winner.  I don't want to miss an e-mail or accidentally count the same trick twice for someone.

So the number to beat is currently 72 tricks and like I said, there are plenty more that have yet to be found.  If you want to see all the tricks that could be on the list, check out Myachi's You-Tube channel and my personal You-Tube channel.  All the tricks that are in the puzzle have either (a) been featured as tricks of the day or (b) were already on Myachi's You-Tube channel when I started doing the trick of the day.

Describing Tricks

by Crazy Ivan

As many of you know, I've been doing a bit of work this week updating the Tricktionary section of this blog.  Over the last couple of days I've added more than a hundred entries along with links to the Trick of the Day videos that I've done for those moves.  Starting yesterday, I moved on to the harder part of the ordeal; writing the descriptions of each move.

Now, for a few tricks, you can get everything out in a few words.  Take the Hulk as an example; "Toss the Myachi up and catch it between your fists".  In a scant 10 words I've essentially told you everything you need to know about that move.  Sure, I can add a few more words of advice to that.  I could warn you about not punching too hard in case you miss the Myachi, I can specify that you want to use the portion of your fingers between the first and second row of knuckles, I could even add a gag line in there about what kind of sound effects you want to make, but by and large, a simple sentence encapsulates the move.

But that is only true of a minority of Myachi tricks.  Most of them require a full paragraph or two to describe and some of them start sounding downright confusing when you put them into words.  A classic example of this is the Snake.  It's a relatively simple looking move, but the best description I can put together for it is:

Starting with the hand in a fist and the Myachi resting between the 2^nd and 3^rd row of knuckles, rotate the forearm and (right) hand in a counter-clockwise direction. In total, the arm will make two full counter-clockwise rotations, the first under the armpit and the second over the shoulder. When done properly, the Myachi will stay on the same spot on the hand throughout the motion.

As confusing as that sounds, I would guess that if you had nothing to go on but that paragraph you could try a hundred times and never actually figure out what you were trying to do.  You might wind up with some strange mutation of the move, but you probably wouldn't be able to figure out exactly what I was talking about.

In the early days of Myachi the Internet was not very conducive to sharing Myachi tricks.  Uploading videos was a pain and even when you did it was at such a pathetic frame rate that you wouldn't really follow a complex move.  On the website we had back in 2004 (my first year with Myachi) there were videos, but they were all but useless.  The video of the 360 contained 4 frames.  In one you saw a toss, in the next the hand was over top of the Myachi, in the next you saw a catch and in the final frame you saw a look of predictable accomplishment.

If you had nothing to go on except that video, you could think that a 360 was just a matter of tossing the Myachi up, waving hello and then catching it.  You might not even realize the hand was orbiting around the Myachi.  Of course, right next to the video was a brief description in text and since the 360 is a pretty easy move to explain we weren't too worried about the low quality of the video.

But this was a huge limiting factor.  Even a move as basic as the Wolverine was almost impossible to share online.

And then, in late 2005, YouTube came along and made video uploads easy and accessible.  That really changed everything for us.  I often wonder if Myachi could have ever reached the level it has had it not been for sites like YouTube.  I wonder how much longer it might have taken, how much harder it might have been if we'd started this company in the 80s.

So when you're reading a move described in the Tricktionary and you're left scratching your head at a sentence like:  Keeping your hands extended outward, cross your strong hand over the wrist of your weak arm and trap the Myachi between both flat hands, just sigh and remember to be thankful for YouTube and web 2.0.

It Was Bound to Happen Eventually

by Crazy Ivan

In my time with the company, I've earned something of a reputation as the "go-to-Myachi-geek" in many matters.  Don't get me wrong, we're all pretty fanatical about our love for the game (it's a requirement of the job), but when it comes to the details, I've always been the resource of choice.  It still cracks me up when Myachi Man will ask me which series a particular sack was in or what a particular trick is called.

Not sure why, but my brain really seems fond of keeping these details.  Myachi Man has the best collection in the company, but when it comes to knowing the names and series, that's my department.  Maverick is the trick-master of the team, no doubt, but when it comes to knowing the names of the tricks, that's my department.

No surprise that with all of this information running around in my head, some stuff is going to spill out.  Somewhere amongst the hundreds of sacks and thousands of tricks, I'm bound to get a neuron crossed from time to time.  On Tuesday, this happened in quite a public and undeniable fashion.

On Tuesday, our trick of the day was the "Grasshopper", a variation of the Flying Fish that is done from a Mantis.  The problem is that I misidentified the move as the "Flying Guppy".

The Flying Guppy is a move, of course.  It's a Flying Fish done from a stall on the forearm.  It's one of the first variations of the Flying Fish that we came up with and it's been a favorite of ours for years.  The Grasshopper came soon after and the cleverness of the name cemented it as a staple trick.  After all, it's a Mantis, but it hops.  Grasshopper is a pretty logical name for it.

But somehow, when I was doing the trick for the trick of the day, I misidentified it in the video and then again when I uploaded it to You-Tube.  I might never have noticed had it not been for the intervention of a couple of hard core maniacs from Jersey who pointed my error out to Kid Myach.

Upon hearing it, I kicked myself (which I'm pretty good at) and jumped on You-Tube to correct my mistake.  I edited the name of the move in the title, description and tags, but I couldn't exactly edit the audio of the video where I clearly refer to the move as the "Flying Guppy".

Because so many Myachi players know the game primarily from online sources, I suspect I've just created a misconception that will last forever.  Some people will call the Grasshopper the Flying Guppy now and despite the editing, I'm sure that there will be confusion here and there for years to come.

In a different set of circumstances I might have simply shrugged off the mistake.  I might have said, "Oh, well, I suppose I just accidentally changed the name of the Grasshopper" and let it go at that.  And I probably would have done that if it hadn't been for two factors:

1. The name "Grasshopper" is so incredibly perfect for that trick and
2. Kid Myach uploaded a popular video almost 2 years ago that showed a number of Flying Fish variations and in the video the Grasshopper is clearly marked, as is the Flying Guppy (though it is misspelled).

So all I can do now is apologize for the mistake and correct (most of) it.  I hope this doesn't turn into something like the "Electron M" fiasco, where a well meaning but misinformed Maniac identified the imaginary Electron M Myachi as the rarest in the world on Yahoo answers.  Despite the fact that this error was (eventually) corrected, it hung out unchallenged for so long that even now, more than a year after the correction, I still get people asking me if I have an "Electron M".

Anyway, sorry for the confusion and thanks to Zach and Rex for keeping track of me.  Stay vigilant... my brain is likely to misfire again in the future.

Big Ambitions

by Crazy Ivan

When I first started this blog at the beginning of the year, I had a lot of grand plans for it. While I knew it would take some time, I wanted to build this blog into the single most comprehensive Myachi site on the web.  I hoped to create an eclectic resource for all Myachi Maniacs the world over.

Now, I can admit freely that I've yet to accomplish that goal.  There's still a lot of work to do and, as near as I can tell, there will always be plenty to still do.  I feel that if I'm doing this right and keeping my standards high, this is a project that will never be "finished", just closer to done than it was the day before.

Among the many ambitious notions I had for this site was the "Tricktionary".  I intended this to be the largest and most comprehensive list of Myachi tricks ever assembled, complete with descriptions, video links and (where appropriate) detailed explanations of how to learn the move.  I knew this would be the kind of thing that would probably take years to do so from the beginning I anticipated an unending workload ahead.

Well, in many ways, today marked a turning point for the Tricktionary.  Until now, the most comprehensive and extensive list of tricks available to the Myachi fanatic was on a fansite created a while back by intrepid Myachi veteran Mantis.  With the tricks divided into Beginner, Intermediate, Difficult, Expert, Master and Grand Master, Mantis had catalogued 173 common moves and combos ranging from the boringly easy to the sublimely difficult.  While there were no video links, he included a brief description of each move that would be meaningful to anyone familiar with Myachi lingo.

But as of today, the Tricktionary has (more or less) pulled ahead.  In the last few days, I've added 131 tricks to the existing trick list and though the majority of them still lack descriptions, nearly all of them have links to Trick of the Day videos I've done over the past 9 months.  This brings the total number of tricks in the Tricktionary to 212 (ahead of Mantis' list by 39 tricks), though only 81 of those 212 have descriptions.

So in that sense, the list on Mantis' site is still the superior resource.  I'm hard at work changing that, of course, and I kind of hope that this surge forward in the "race" will prompt Mantis to bolster his list with a few new moves.  Of course, given that the school year is just beginning, there's a good chance he won't be able to find much time for it.

I should note that even if you check out everything on the Tricktionary, it would still be worth looking over Mantis' site as well.  While there are more total moves on this blog, there's not as much overlap as you might expect.  There are only 100 moves that are on both lists, so there are 112 tricks on this site that aren't on his and 73 on his that aren't on this one.  Pretty good indicator that we're not in danger of running out of moves any time soon.

Of course, I don't want to spend too much time patting myself on the back here.  The more time I spend doing that, the less time I can spend finishing the job.  In addition to the 131 trick descriptions I still have to write there are 19 moves that still don't have video links.  There are also still a few Trick of the Day moves I've done that haven't yet been added to the resource so there's still plenty to do.

I'll likely be adding a few of the descriptions yet today, though this part of the job is far more time-consuming and painstaking than simply adding the names and video links.  It is still a work in progress and it always will be.  212 tricks might sound impressive but it's important to note that this represents less than 1% of the moves that we've come up with so far.

I have a book at home filled with notes and charts where I try to track every trick ever created (or even possible) and while it would be incomprehensible to anyone but myself, I can say definitively that there are over a quarter of a million tricks that can be done.  Some of them might be kind of silly (a Righty Wristwatch to a Pinocchio for example) and some might be difficult almost to the point of impossibility (a Lefty Sole Stall to a Duck to a double wolverine to a righty Clipper Delay for example), but they are all possible.

Given the massive number of moves, I can't finish the Tricktionary in a single lifetime.  Even if I added ten new tricks, descriptions and videos every single day it would still take another 68 and a half years to catch up with the moves in my notebook (I'd be about 104 years old at that point) and I'm perfectly willing to admit that my notebook still has a lot of moves unlisted.  Heck... I haven't even gotten around to adding 2 Myachi tricks to it.  It's safe to say that less than 10% of the possible moves have been described in it.  That would mean that, conservatively, there are over 2.5 million moves.  If I wanted to get all of those done before I reached my century mark, I'd have to add more than 100 a day.

It's spooky to look at the grand scope of this project.  As much effort as I've put into it to this point, I'm less than 0.0000848% of the way finished, and that's kind of depressing.  I'll try to comfort myself with the fact that generations of Myachi

The Dollywood Quiz

by Crazy Ivan

Trying to get the whole Dollywood thing out of my system and I'm afraid I'm not quite there.  So here's the last time I'll mention it on the blog for at least another... I don't know... several days?  I'll try to make it longer but I offer no guarantees.

Throwing Stones

by Crazy Ivan

One of the myriad online responsibilities I take on for Myachi, one is to simply Google the word "Myachi" from time to time and see what I find.  The first few pages are usually the same, but you can find some fun stuff if you keep digging.  Once in a while I'll find new videos, forums, wiki entries, etc. and sometimes I manage to connect with Myachi Maniacs who aren't yet part of our online community.

But I also find the negative stuff.  The forums where people are trashing Myachi or talking bad about a video or something like that.  I guess that's the way of the Internet; anything that some people like other people will go out of their way to dislike.  So once in a while I wind up digging up some age old forum thread about how much Myachi sucks.

Like I said, this is to be expected.  No reason to let it ruffle your feathers or anything.  It's like the occasional negative comment that we get on our You-Tube videos; if you took these kind of things seriously you'd probably be ready to give up on You-Tube altogether.

So when I see a forum thread about how stupid Myachi is, I'll usually read through it and I almost always find at least a few folks that pop up to defend the game.  Occasionally you'll see the original poster getting trashed by a community of people who looked at our videos and our website and decided that it was actually pretty cool.  In almost every instance there's at least one person out there that hops in and defends the game... and it's usually somebody who never saw Myachi before.

But what surprises me is that I very often see these things on skill toy forums.  I've seen Myachi thoroughly thrashed on a yo-yo forum, a footbag forum, a diabolo forum, a juggling forum and a contact juggling forum.  I understand why it would happen on a video game forum or just some random "Pokemon fanatic" forum, but on a skill toy forum?  Skill toy enthusiasts trashing other skill toy enthusiasts?

It kind of reminds me of the birth of "Extreme" sports.  In my youth, if you rode a bicycle, you were all but obligated to make fun of people that rode skateboards.  Skateboarders were almost universally prompted to make fun of in-line skaters.  In-line skaters were all about trashing BMXers.  It was a vicious, perpetual and ultimately useless cycle of dislike.

But then there were those who rose up against the in-group mentality and took the high road.  There were skaters who tried in-lines and discovered that they're actually mad fun.  There were BMXers that got together with skateboarders and helped each other invent new tricks.  There were even people who crossed over and got good at a few different extreme sports.

It was because of those few open-minded individuals that extreme sports managed to flourish.  It was through the minority of cooperating minds that things like the X-Games and Gravity Games got started.  It was the collaboration of people who had similar, if not identical, interests.  If we'd left it to the majority, there was no way that skateboarders would share their street course with a bunch of BMXers.  There was no way they would all be using the same vert ramp and thereby legitimizing one another's sports.

This is what I think of every time I come across a bunch of Poi enthusiasts who are talking about how lame devil sticks are or a bunch of diabolists cracking jokes about foot-baggers.  As a lifelong juggler, I can't help but wonder what skill toy players could create if they were willing to work together.  Imagine an X-Games style competition for skill toys.  Jugglers, devil stickers, diabolo fans, Myachi Maniacs, footbag folks, kendama players, dice-stackers, poi swingers, lasso artists and yoyo champs all under one roof?  I don't know if I'd have more fun as a competitor or as a spectator.

My hope is that the Myachi community can rise above that.  Despite the petty taunts of small minded people who only want to exert enough skill to appreciate one thing, I hope that we can set the standard of being open to all the skills the world has to offer.  My skill toy interests include (but are not limited to):

• Myachi
• Juggling
• Club Swinging
• Meteor
• Poi
• Cigar Boxes
• Devil Sticks
• Contact Juggling
• Staff
• Diabolo
• Footbag
• Chatter Rings (Gyro Rings)
• Lasso
• Finger Chux
• Yo Yo
• Torches
• Astrojax
• Unicycle
• Stilts
• Balance Board
• Slackline

Some of these I'm good at, some I'm okay with and some I stink at.  But I have fun with all of them.  What's more, I appreciate the skill it takes to master any of them.  Now, I left some stuff off the list like Kendama and Dice Stacking, but that's not because I don't think they're awesome.  It's just that I've never tried them.  My guess is that if I tried either I would have a blast with them.

But here's the important bit: Even if I didn't, even if I tried, say, Kendama, and I couldn't master the most basic tricks and didn't enjoy a second of it, I would still appreciate the skill and would support those people who were trying to popularize the game.  I certainly wouldn't jump on the Myachi forum and start trash talking Kendama and people who play it.

Skill is my addiction and I find that once you learn to appreciate that, you can fall in love with even the most mundane arts.  That should be the ideal we strive for.  Since we're often the target of this, we should take it upon ourselves never to be the ones casting the stones.

A Puzzling Contest

by Crazy Ivan

And now for something completely different...

So I hear a rumor that you want to win a free Dodge Myachi.  I also heard that you wanted a completely different type of Myachi contest; something unlike anything we've done on the blog before.  I understand.  It's been a while since the last contest and you're ready to reboot with something crazy and fun.

Well, you know how we are about doing whatever it is that you want, so here it is.  A chance to win a free Myachi.  And all you have to do is hunt for some hidden treasure.

I'm sure you know how this works.  Hidden in the puzzle below are a bunch of Myachi tricks.  They can appear up, down, backwards, forwards or diagonally.  Your job is to find as many of them as you can.  I'm not going to tell you how many there are, but there are quite a few.

MYACHI TRICK SEARCH:

E L G G U J S N M U L O C E L L P H O N E V A R K B J G A G

C K C A B E H T D N I H E B S Q K S F Y U N O D A R E T P B

H S I F G N I Y L F U B N P C L I P P E R K I C K E X L T I

L E Q R E P P I L C G N I Y L F L X P J C Q K L N V L Y B V

H I M T T B X V M I N D G R I N D F L O W O U O O O B R A M

E T R A N S F O R M E R M Y P H A U R G L H S T E P O V E R

J L B G T U N U Q Y T H A A P C S G N I S I R O J O M G N N

C R B N X R V O S Y G Z Z Y E D N I N S P I N H K H V A O Q

C L Z I M U I E I X K J W P R I W E F H N O I S U F N I R S

W I D W S A N X R P H B L O D N S O H D G K I G T D S P T T

O V E N U S F L Y T R A P N E A Q T R A R E C N L U G R C I

G U K I E O O P I A N O A K L V L B H J J O E I L N T U E F

R P N D R T E P I T F T C T A I L W H I P N W L K I D T L F

J N T D E N P N M D S I A S Y Y Y L M A N T I S E E X T E A

J B Q J E O F M E I H E Y I B Z V C I G J K H N U C D J N R

Y Z M X T R Y A K C U D N N I A A K R O M O E Q U L U I I M

N V U E E B T I D N A B E I R R R P A Y E G A R I M I R S P

J C E E K H Y H M R S E W M R C G G J N P R E P P O P K B I

R E Z M S A T A E B T R A E H E Y Y L T X T U R B I N E S W

T E D S U Y N D O L D G Y G H M V C P I S T O N S T W Z D T

R U E I M P E S P A E T O E S T A L L A A P U N I S H E R S

O E E B L V I B O D Y G U A R D W E O O E T H L V V I C Z Z

I Y N O I S U F D L O C U Z O O H C T W P A P R P K V N P E

O Q S L T I K O F E E L T F V P W O U Y B S A M U R A I R Q

L Q Y B E B N R F Y A S E A I I G R S C U E C M O N T F P V

Z C L W A V E E A B G Q T N E R I N R Y D Z A L M V J A J P

R C A G J T S P I D E R M A N T T A M U H I L R I V U I O P

D M Q D T I M S U N A K M U L U D N E P B E H D L R I Q N C

N B G U W I F A X I Q O T W N L T R E X R T U I R A I Y K E

V V B S N B J C N V K A A O E N G S M C Z K C W E X M I I B

So before you get to searching, let me explain the rules.  If you want in on this contest, find as many tricks as you can.  Write down a list of all the moves that you find and email them to me at aaron@myachi.com.  If you find a bunch of them, email me and then realize that you've found a couple more, go ahead and send me another email.

The contest ends in 10 days (Friday, September 2nd at midnight).  Whoever finds the most Myachi tricks in the puzzle is going to be the winner.  If more than one person ties for the most tricks found, I'll select the winner randomly between them.

As a quick hint, all the tricks hidden in the puzzle either appeared as Trick of the Day videos or appear on the Myachi Instructional DVD.  No fair making up a new trick, calling it the "Vvbsbsj" and saying you found another trick.  Only established moves count.

Couple other important points.  Keep in mind that I'm not going to see where you found the words, but rather I'll see only which words that you find.  Don't tell anybody which words you found or you'll be giving them an unfair advantage.  Also, I'm aware that some people might just guess at which tricks are there.  That means that if you include a Trick that isn't actually in the puzzle, I won't count your entry at all.  That way you can't win just by sending me a list of all 193 tricks that might be in the puzzle.

Have fun and let me know how you like the contest concept.  This is a bit different so I want to know whether we should do more puzzle based contests like this in the future.

One Man's Error is Another Man's Treasure

by Crazy Ivan

Amongst the most coveted Myachis of all time are the mismade ones; the mess-ups, the oversights, the patchwork attempts to keep things together when stuff goes wrong. In some companies, the worst thing you can find is that some of your product is mismade. In Myachi, we're always pretty stoked when we run across a blister pack that's mounted backwards or upside-down. When we found out that part of the the 3.2 had Red Lines instead of Starting Lines, far from being upset with our manufacturer, I was stoked enough to hustle into the city and buy a couple.

Well, it would seem that there's another semi-rare (possibly very rare) mismake in the Myachi world. I only learned about it a few days ago so I'm still trying to hammer out the details, but it would seem that in the 5.0 series we had some percentage of the Tidal Wave Reds made with the corduroy lines going vertical instead of horizontal.

Like I said, I don't have details. I've jammed with both configurations and I know that almost all of the Tidal Wave Reds I've seen are horizontal, but there is definitely a significant portion that are vertical. I'm still trying to figure out approximately what percent we're talking about. Is it 10%? 5%? 25%? Clearly this will make a big difference in determining how rare they are and how much their Trade Value needs to be adjusted.

So my guess is that if you have a Tidal Wave Red, you've either already checked it or are planning to as soon as you get done reading this. After all, you might have something pretty rare sitting in your collection that you didn't know about. But if, after checking it, you discover that it's the more common horizontal corduroy, don't be too disappointed. It is still rarer than you thought.

Consider this: If it turns out that a high percent of the TWRs are vertical (say, one out of every four), that means that a horizontal corduroy, while not as rare as the vertical, are still quite a bit rarer than any of the other 5.0s. We made 8,250 of each of the 5.0s, but if 25% of the TWRs are mismade, it means that only about 6200 horizontal Tidal Wave Reds.

One way or the other, the sack becomes rarer and is suddenly the most rare sack in the series.

Profiles in Mania: Downtown

by Crazy Ivan

Myachi's '05 trip to Silver Dollar City was a bit of a strange one.  Over the previous summer the whole team had rocked it out at Dollywood leaving us (and Dollywood's management) wondering how we could do even better the following summer.

Eventually we decided that for '05 we would split the team up.  Half of us would go back to Dollywood and the other half would go to their sister park in Branson, Missouri.  There wasn't much Myachi Mania in Missouri at the time, but I'd just spent the Christmas season in St. Louis so it seemed like a logical place to go next.

It was there that Kid and Animal met this kind of shy, very unassuming dude who distinguished himself quickly by having mad skills and the familiar love for the game we can only describe as "Myachi Mania".

A familiar figure to fans of the Myachi website or the Myachi online forums, Downtown has been a mainstay in the Myachiverse for a number of years. After first learning the game, Downtown did what most maniacs did back in the early days of the movement: he got online.

Back then, Myachi Maniacs were few and far between, spread from California to Florida to Ireland to Missouri. While there were a few schools and even a few towns with significant Myachi presence, the vast majority of Maniacs were the only jammers in their town. That left the web as the only real place to go to learn new moves and interact with other Myachi Maniacs.

"DOES ANYONE WANNA SEE MY DOUBLE WOLVERINE?!"

Downtown took full advantage, quickly earning a mod position on the Myachi forum and taking it upon himself to help out new jammers as they arrived.  In a time when the forum was far more sparsely populated (and still had that "new forum smell"), Downtown took it upon himself to be not only a stalwart, but also a mediator in disputes.  Always seeking the middle ground, he fast gained a reputation for being even-handed and fair; qualities that would later earn him a spot as a forum leader.

But his contribution to the game was not limited to his forum presence.  Of all his contributions to Myachi, Downtown might be best known for his signature film shot, often called the “Downtown Shot”. Appearing first in one of his You-Tube videos, this is a shot where the Myachi is filmed from below the hands leaving the appearance that it floats between fusions and 360s. While it is now a mainstay of Myachi Shred videos, when he first did it, it was revolutionary.



His skills have improved vastly over the years (and if you don't believe me, just watch a few of his early videos and a few of the latest ones on his You Tube channel) and his dedication to the game, sport and community has never waned.  Computer problems have gotten the best of him from time to time, but even when he disappears for a little while, we all know he's never that far from his Myachi.

Getting Back on Track

by Crazy Ivan

It's so good to be home.  All the distractions that I'd longed for over the summer are suddenly at my disposal once again.  My guitar, my keyboard, my juggling toys, my unicycle, my movie collection, my pets, my books and, most importantly, my physical ability to do something other than play Myachi at Dollywood.

But there is, of course, a price for this renewed availability.  It's all the harder to remember that I still have work to do.  Over the weekend I spent a great deal of time napping, walking the slackline, practicing scales and watching Buster Keaton flicks, but I didn't spend any of it working.  I didn't field a single blog post and, much worse, didn't film the Saturday trick of the day I promised.

The trick of the day thing was a byproduct of more than mere divertissement, though I can hardly claim an iron-clad excuse.  I'd left the camera at the office over the weekend and never worked up the motivation to drive up there and get it.  I could have used my webcam, of course, or my iPod (though I'd have had to dub the sound afterward) or I could have just committed an hour and a half to going out and getting the camera.

But I didn't.  Instead I spent the weekend relaxing with my wife (who I've seen every day for the last two months but still haven't spent any time with) and my cats (who are finally back to "normal" after my long absence).  Basically, I spent the weekend being lazy.

On some levels I feel that I earned that right.  It was a hard summer; I worked for 58 days with only 5 days off and an average of 12 hours a day (not counting time spent blogging or filming/editing the trick of the day videos) and I did it all in 95 degree weather with high humidity and no wind.  If ever there was a reason to take a lazy weekend, that should be it.

But that doesn't serve as an excuse for neglecting things like the blog and the Trick of the Day.  It's an explanation, sure, but not a justifiable one.  In truth, I'm simply tugging at the sympathy of those who were checking the blog/You-Tube channel over the weekend and hoping that they don't get too upset with me.

I'm back in the office this week and back on my normal schedule so I think it's safe to bet that this hiccup is in the rear view mirror, but I still owe everyone an extra trick of the day, lest we further mar our otherwise perfect record of 5 new tricks a week.  I'll get that done today.  I also owe everyone a new contest and I'll be posting more about that later.

So hopefully this post will be the last mea culpa I need to write this summer.  I'm tired of seeing the trend lines on this blog dipping from our spring numbers so it's no doubt time to turn that around.  Hope you're up for a lot of reading this week...

Contest Winners

by Crazy Ivan

It's kind of sad looking back over the original posts on these contests where I laid out the rules and dates and everything... just to change them repeatedly over the next few weeks and months.  I hope that everyone understands the incredible difficulty I had trying to keep up with the blog and the Trick of the Day while I was at Dollywood for the summer, but I'm back now so there are no more excuses for delay.

We had two contests that needed to be wrapped up, so I'm going to start with the photo contest and move on to the Follower contest.

Originally I promised 3 prizes for the photo contest, but given the incredibly small response we saw (even after the contest was extended for 6 weeks), I'm only going to be giving out two prizes.  Sorry to all the other entrants, but there were so few photos it would seem silly to pick a top 3 and if I truly randomized one of the pics, I would likely be sending multiple prizes to a single entrant.

So without further ado, the top prize (and a 5.0 of his choice) will go to our dearest friend from across the pond, Europe's premiere Myachi Maniac and the pride of Switzerland, Myachi Max!  His pics win out for the overall "Best Picture" Prize:

Mad fun pic and definitely captures the whole "Summer with Myachi" concept of the contest.  So Max, we owe you a 5.0 or 5.1 of your choice.  Just pm me on Facebook and let me know what you want... it will take a minute to get it to you (obviously), but it'll be on its way soon.

The second prize goes out for the most artistic photo and that one certainly goes to Animal's friend (and Myachi's friend) Hetzer for his homage to "Son of Man".  And I'll be able to give him his prize in person so it will make up for the extra postage cost of sending one prize to Max:

Over all, a very cool concept pic, though I'm not sure that it looks like he's having as much fun as Max.  Either way, the prizes are equal so I owe Hetzer a 5.0 or 5.1 of his choice as well.

------

And of course, I've got that other contest to finish up as well.  This contest has been going for about 8 months now so it's long overdue for resolution.

When we first started the blog I announced a contest that would be eligible for the first 50 people who signed up to "follow" the Myachi Blog.  We got our 50th follower while I was in Tennessee so I extended it to being eligible for how ever many followers we had by the time I returned (57 as it turns out).

To select the winner I went to an online random number generator and punched in 1 through 57.  The first number I got wasn't going to work (it turned out that Pinky had won the contest...) so I tried again and got the number 29.  In my weird way of counting the followers, the 29th follower was/is Myth, so...

Congratulations, Myth, you're now the proud owner of a sick Pakisack... I just don't know exactly who you are, so you'll have to help me out there.  Leave a message here and/or send me a pm on Facebook and we'll work out how we're going to get your prize to you.  Because this might take a few days (or weeks depending on how soon you read this blog), I'm not going to say which Pakisack you'll get.  I'm afraid that if the communication bit takes too long I might not have the same one available, but I assure you, it will be an awesome and rare sack that you will love.

Anyway, that pretty much catches me up on contests, but that means we have to get another one going in the very near future.  Look for two contest announcements starting in the next few days.  One will be announced later this evening and the other will pop up over the weekend or on Monday.  And hopefully this time I won't have to delay anything!

Team Dollywood is Back

by Crazy Ivan

We rolled in late on Tuesday morning... so late, in fact, that we arrived early Wednesday morning.

We made good time most of the way (if you subtract the point where Kore's car broke down) and we were set to arrive at a reasonable hour (2 am), but a wreck in the midtown tunnel created a traffic jam at 1:30 in the morning and had us stuck for an extra hour.

But now everyone is home and comfortable.  Pinky and I are back in the House of Skills, Bones and Bamboo are back in Manhattan, Rush is safe at home in the Bronx and Kore is everywhere at once (it's a crazy trick he manages).  We'll all be heading back to our more typical jobs on Friday which means I'll be filming tomorrow's trick of the day from HQ for a change.  Pinky'll be back on the phones and we'll both spend the next two weeks catching up on all the office work that's been stacking up.

One of the first things I'll be doing is catching up all the contests, so expect to learn the winners of the photo contest and the 1st 50 followers contest tomorrow.  Also expect an announcement on the next video contest (which should be mad fun).  Also expect more than one entry on the blog.  And expect to see me making up for lost time on the forum.

If you want to come and see Pinky and I, we'll be in the office pretty much all day so swing out to LI (or book a flight if you're reading from far, far away) and stop in.  I have to say, I'm missing a lot of stuff at the office, but of everything I'm looking forward to, the roast beef sandwich at the local deli is at the top of my list...

The Only Reason I Need

by Crazy Ivan

Some times this job can be a tough one.  The hours can be long (and hot), the venues can be grueling (and hot), the days off can be sparse (and still hot) and the weather can be hot (and humid).  Most of the time it's easy to keep yourself fired up about playing with a toy that you love to pay with, but sometimes you can't help but reflect on how hard a job it can be.

This most often happens 58 days into a 59 day assignment with few days off and a lot of 12 and 13 hour days.  Today, as you might have guessed, was one of those kinds of days.  I've been wearing myself out everyday and the finish line is in sight so it was kind of hard to get fired up today.  I did, but as the sun started to set I really started running out of gas.

And then I talked with one person, it changed the way I looked at my whole day, my whole week, my whole summer and my whole 8 year+ career with Myachi.

Now, first I've got to issue an apology and then lay down a bit of back story.  See, the subject of this story (as I found out tonight) actually reads this blog pretty regularly so I'll feel bad if I embarrass him a bit.  So sorry about that...

Now the back story.  I met this dude about 6 years ago when he was at Dollywood with his nephew.  They got heavily into the game, fell in love with it and bought several.  This, of course, happens to me about a hundred times a day so I filed it somewhere in the banks of happy memories Myachi has provided me and carried on.

I ran into him again the other night and even blogged about it.  He was the collector I talked about in this blog.  He came back today so that we could do a few trades... I dropped the ball and only brought a couple of tradables with me today so we didn't get to do as much trading as I hoped (he did give me a sweet deal on the Straight Jacket I wanted, though).

He showed his collection off to a few of the real maniacs that were hanging out; namely Socks, Triumph and Jumpman (nickname subject to change with or without notice).  We chatted a bit about how he'd built his collection over the years.  Turns out he bought a big chunk of it from a Wolf, a maniac that used to be part of a Myachi Club I hosted early in my Myachi career.

But later that night, right before I left, I also had a chance to speak with his wife.  He's had a series of surgeries on one of his knee and is looking at another in the near future.  He's been largely immobile for much of the time over the past couple of years and I can only imagine how frustrating that must be.  From what his wife told me, Myachi is one of the few things that keeps him excited and having fun.  He can still play, of course, but he also keeps up with us online, collects and trades and enjoys being a part of our small community.

That obviously makes me feel really good about what I do for a living.  But after I left and headed back to the Cabin of Skills, I had a thought that almost overwhelmed me.  It was a complete coincidence that I ran into this guy.  If we hadn't done Dollywood this year or if he'd decided not to come this year, or even come a week or two later, we might never have crossed paths.  I might never have known how meaningful our impact on him really was.

And like I said before, I teach more than a hundred people a day.  I've been doing so for more than eight years.  If the school assemblies and camps where I've taught as many as a thousand people in a day balance out my days off and my significant time at the office I've easily taught over a quarter of a million people in the time I've been with Myachi.

Whose to say how many people I've impacted with this game or how impacted they've been?  Perhaps there are dozens of other heart warming stories about Myachi that I'll never be in the right place to know of.  Perhaps there are other people that were helped through a hard time in their lives by our game.  Perhaps there are other people that have become lifelong fans of the game whose faces I've long forgotten.

I've listed a number of reasons why I love my job on this blog before, but in truth, this is the only reason I really need.

When a Trick isn't a Trick

by Crazy Ivan

I've talked before on this blog about the difficulty in defining what makes a "Trick", as opposed to a combo.  The definition has never really been laid down to my satisfaction, so I thought I'd take a new angle on it.  Rather than obsessing over what a trick is, I've decided to mention a few instances that demonstrate what a trick isn't.

First, a bit of laundry for our newer readers.  When you combine tricks together, sometimes you create a new trick and sometimes you create a combo.  Take as an example an Instep Kick, a Wolverine and a Trampoline.  If you did an Instep Kick, do a Wolverine around the Myachi and then hit it with the Trampoline, you've done a single trick:

Instep Kick > Wolverine > Trampoline

The reason this is considered a single trick is because you only touch the Myachi twice; once when you hit it with your instep (the beginning of the trick) and once at the end when you hit it with your T-Shirt.  The Wolverine is an aerial and doesn't require that you hit the Myachi at all.

Now, if you did an Instep Kick, a Trampoline and then the Wolverine, you'd have done 2 tricks:

Instep Kick > Trampoline + Wolverine

The reason is, of course, that you touch the Myachi for a second time before you did the Wolverine.  You did an Instep Kick (1st touch) to start the trick and a Trampoline (2nd touch) to end the trick.  The fact that you've added a Wolverine to the end doesn't count as part of the next trick because it came after the second touch.  The Trampoline > Wolverine was a trick done after the Instep Kick > Trampoline.

The system becomes particularly confusing when you start figuring in grinds and centrifugals.  All other trick types are pretty easy:



Traps: (Require a Touch) Are always the beginning or end of a trick.
Strikes: (Require a Touch) Are always the beginning or end of a trick.
Aerials: (No Touch Allowed) Are never the beginning or end of a trick.
Stalls: (Require a Touch) Are always the beginning or end of a trick.
Portals: (No Touch Allowed) Are never the beginning or end of a trick.
Flips: (No Touch Allowed) Are never the beginning or end of a trick.

But with Centrifugals the Myachi never moves and with Grinds there is a long, continuous touch.  That makes things pretty confusing.  How does a Snake fit in?  What about a Dark Slide?

Well, though it is imperfect, the standing definition has to do with the motion of the Myachi.  Let's say you do a Roller Coaster and toss right into a Double Illusion.  That would count as a single trick because the motion doesn't actually stop and the Myachi isn't redirected within the trick.  But if you did a Double Illusion then caught the Myachi and went into a Crane, it would be two tricks (unless you're so good you can catch a Double Illusion and move straight into a Crane without interrupting the motion of the Myachi).

Like I said, the definition is pretty imperfect.  It would be easy to imagine two people arguing about whether or not the motion of the Myachi actually stopped or whatever so there should be more precision there.

But for the purposes of this article, I don't want to split hairs about Grinds, but rather point out a few things that are not tricks.  People often think they've invented a new trick but then when you see it, you have to break the news to them that no, sorry, they didn't actually invent a "trick" per se.

These are a few of the really common ones that I see:

It's a Combo.

This ties right into what I was talking about before.  Somebody will say they've invented a new trick and then they'll do something like "Toe Stall to Trampoline to Hulk to 720".  Now, that would certainly be pretty sweet, but it's a combo, not a trick.

That's not to say that you can't give it a name.  Maybe the name sticks and maybe it doesn't; that will depend on how popular the combo becomes.  The combo listed above is such a random string of tricks that I can't imagine it becoming anybody's go to jam, but classic combos like the Wavy Gravy have been known to earn names from time to time.

It Doesn't Involve the Myachi.

We had to draw the line on this one early.  According to the officially sanctioned rules of what constitutes a trick, the trick must somehow involve the Myachi.  In other words, if the "trick" is just throwing the Myachi in the air, doing some random action and then catching the Myachi, that's not a trick.

Examples of this are legion.  If you toss the Myachi up, pick your nose and then catch it, that isn't a trick.  If you toss it up, wipe the sweat off your brow and then catch it, that isn't a trick.  If you toss it up, rub your belly while you pat your head and then catch it, that isn't a trick.  If we allowed stuff like that, there would be a gazillion silly tricks and it would be silly to try to keep up with all of them.

The only exception to this rule is the "In-Spin", where you toss a Myachi up, do a full spin and then catch it.  The reason this is still considered a trick is because it does involve the Myachi... you have to take your eyes off of it, spin away from it, etc.  It's not just something you're doing while the Myachi is in the air, it's something that actually makes the catch harder.

It's Already a Trick.



Sometimes people do a trick where, for example, all they're really doing is a well known trick.  For example, if you do an Illusion but make a Fist with the hand that goes around the Myachi, you're still just doing the Illusion.  Since the "Illusion Hand" doesn't actually touch the Myachi, there's no functional difference between doing it with your hand flat or in a fist.

Another great example of this (and the one I saw that prompted me to write this article) would be the position of your hands in a Flying Fish.  A Flying Fish is still a Flying Fish whether your hands are in fists, sideways, longways, or making little dinosaurs.  The reason is, of course, that it makes no real difference to the move what position your hands are in when you do it.  The Myachi is sitting on your leg and your hands aren't touching it.

Now, to be clear, if you do a Flying Fish and then catch the Myachi on your fist, that would be a trick that would be different from just doing a Flying Fish and then catching it on the back of your hand.  What I'm talking about above is a person who was doing a Flying Fish with his hands in a weird position, but then flattening them back out for the catch.

Other?

I'm sure there are others, but it's almost one in the morning so I'm going to stop here.  We're still working on cementing a meaningful and fully encompassing definition for what makes a trick a trick and when we hammer it out, you'll be the first to know.

A Collector Moment

by Crazy Ivan

I've met a ton of people this summer that are partial veterans of the game.  Many of the adults I run into now were once kids that I taught the game to.  Many of them have since fallen out of practice, but after a quick refresher course, most of the time they're jamming like they never put the Myachi down.

I've also met quite a few people that have old, rare Myachis hanging around somewhere.  Keep in mind that Dollywood was our largest venue back when we were selling series 1.0 so there are plenty of Calvins, Diggitys, Purple Hazes, Leopard Limes, etc. floating around in drawers and closets of the Dollywood-going public.

But tonight I saw something I hadn't seen yet.  A dude comes in and he's carrying a bag.  He says "You'll probably wanna see this," and motions me to the table in the back of our booth.  I nod and play along and wander back with him.  He opens up this bag and proceeds to pull out dozens of awesome sacks.  All of them are series sacks with the single exception of a Simply Sports Blue.  He's got the whole 4.3 series and a bunch of 4.4s, 4.2s, 4.0s... but he's also got some absolute gems.  He's got a slightly broken in Calvin, a Diggity in similar state, an uber-yummy Black Butter and a Slater.

Anyway, we chatted and it was like talking to an old friend.  Turns out he watches all our You-Tube videos, and I don't just mean all the ones on the Myachi Channel.  He also subscribes to my channel, Monk's channel, Mav's channel, Bones' channel, etc.  When I told him this was our last weekend there his first words were, "I bet you're looking forward to seeing your cats."

For those who aren't aware, he knew I had cats because of this video:



Anyway, thought it was pretty cool to run into such an avid fan of the game that I didn't already know.  He says he's going to be back on Saturday and I'll be sure to bring a few tradables.  I'm hoping to hook up with his Gray Beard and one of his Straight Jackets.

A Game Too New For a Name

by Crazy Ivan

It's way too late for me to be up, but since I've been up all night playing a new Myachi game, I figured it would only be right to tell you about it before I turn in.  If I'm lucky, I'll be done before one in the morning, but I don't think I'll be that lucky.

So I should say in advance that this game is Bones' brainchild.  He came up with a basic concept the other day, but it took a few days and the input of a couple other Myachi Masters to refine it to its final form.  Bones, Bamboo, Lucky and I finally hit upon the right formula today.

The thing is, it will sound really confusing if I try to explain it and I didn't think to take pictures as we were playing, so I'm going to give you a quick explanation (that might sound confusing) but I'm going to give you simplistic graphics to help make it clear.

First of all, you'll need a few Myachis.  Each player will need 3 of them and the game is best with 3 or 4 players (though it could be fun with 2 as well).  You'll also need several bowls or targets.  We played with 7, but you could play with 5,6 or 8 and it would still be mad fun.  We had 4 players and used 7 bowls so I'd imagine with 3 players you'd probably want 5 or 6 and with 5 players you'd probably want 8 or 9.

We set them up like this, but there are a number of ways you could set it up and still make it fun:

So the you stand far enough away to make it a challenge and throw all three of your Myachis toward the bowls.  You want to land as many as you can in the bowls.  To make things clearer as we go along, we'll go through a hypothetical first round between Bones, Bamboo, Lucky and I.  And we'll all be using different colored Myachis in this example, though in real life you could just use whatever Myachis you have around.  It'll be easy to keep track of whose are whose.

So let's say Bones shoots first and he lands two Myachis in two different bowls.  After his turn, the bowls look something like this:

Bones gets 2 points for this shot.  But perhaps more importantly, he blocks those two bowls for the remainder of the round.  You can only score by hitting one of the empty bowls.  If you land in one of the two bowls that Bones' Myachis are in, he scores a point instead.

So let's say Bamboo shoots next.  He hits the middle bowl (which is mad important in this particular setup), but he also lands in one of the bowls Bones' Myachi was already in:

In this example, Bamboo would score one point (for the middle bowl), but Bones would also score a point because one of Bamboo's Myachis landed in a bowl he "controlled".

Bamboo would remove the Myachi in Bones' bowl so that when the next player, Lucky, stepped up to shoot, he would be facing a field that looked like this:

You can already see that this game gets tougher as it goes.  Now that it's Lucky's turn, he only has 4 bowls that he can shoot for.  Let's say that because he was nervous about giving Bones or Bamboo a point, he missed his first two shots, but his final shot landed between two bowls, half in one, half in the other:

Now this is kind of a weird situation in the game.  He only gets one point (because it was only one Myachi), but because it lands in both bowls, it blocks two bowls from the next shooter (poor little ol' me) so things become even tougher for the last shooter (in this game, it's definitely to your advantage to go first).

Let's say I hit one of the two empty bowls, but another shot lands short and lands in one of the two bowls that Lucky controls:

Now I've scored one point for myself and one for Lucky, so I'll remove the Myachi that's sitting in the lower right hand bowl.  This means that in this example, the score after one round is:

Bones: 3

Bamboo: 1

Lucky: 2

Ivan: 1

Now, you might be wondering what happens when all the bowls fill up.  But there's a rub.  When the next round starts, Bones picks up his two Myachis and faces this set up:

Now he can score points on any of the three bowls on the left.  Or, if he misses or a Myachi slides from one bowl to another, he might score a point for Bamboo, Lucky or myself.  Any Myachis he scores with will stay on the board, but on Bamboo's turn, he'll pick up the one in the middle and on Lucky's turn he'll pick up the Blue one.

If you're following the idea here (and it's possible that I'm struggling with the description... it's a quarter after one already), you can already see all the crazy stuff that can happen in this game.  You can accidentally score three points for the guy you're tied with.  You face different setups every turn.  You can control one bowl forever if you keep landing your Myachis back in it.  You can even fill up the last bowl so any player with no Myachis in scoring position will lose a turn (that's one you'll have to think about for a minute I guess).

We were playing to 15 points, but for a longer game you could play to 21 and for a quicker bout you could play to 10.  The coolest thing about the game is that you can play with different numbers of Myachis, different setups and numbers of bowls and different final scores so you can play this game a ton of different ways.

Anyway, I'll try to post a more understandable and official explanation of the game later when I'm not so tired (complete with video), but for now I hope enough of you understand this to play a few rounds.  You'll see really quickly why we were having so much fun with it.

Incidentally, if you have a good idea for what we should name this game, leave it in the comments section.  I think it only fair that Bones has final say on what it's called, but I'm sure he's open to good suggestions.

It was so fun we had to play 3 games in a row.  Lucky won the first one (when I scored a point for him).