Tricktionary Update (Massive)

by Crazy Ivan

It was a big project, but I was convinced that I could do it inside a week.  By Wednesday I started to think I'd bitten off more than I could chew and by Thursday I was starting to fear that it was a lost cause.  But today I wipe the sweat from my brow and sit back in the calm rapture of accomplishment.

When I first started this blog, I intended to add new tricks to the Tricktionary every week.  I figured that even a couple new moves a week would quickly start to add up and soon we would have a monstrous appendix of moves that would take days to dig all the way through.  Like many grand plans, it started to sputter after a few weeks.

Some weeks I would add 5 or 6 tricks.  Some weeks I would add only 1 or 2 and on still other weeks it would slip my mind altogether.  By the time I got to assessing my progress last weekend I realized that I'd fallen so far behind that it would take a Herculean effort just to get all the Trick of the Day moves added to the compendium.

So that's what I set out to do.

It was a pretty big job.  More than a hundred moves had to be added to the Tricktionary, complete with descriptions and video links.  Just figuring out which moves were and weren't already there took a few hours.  Thanks to a couple of computer glitches, my first few attempts to start updating things got wiped out altogether and I quickly became frustrated with the effort.

But I didn't give up.  I kept pecking away at it and by the time I got here this morning I was only 40 or so moves shy of completing the project.  I'd already added all the names and video links, but the laborious part of the process was actually filling in the descriptions of the various moves.  Each trick demanded between one and four paragraphs of text and some of the moves are kind of tricky to explain when you can't just say "do this" and demonstrate it.

Slowly but surely the project yielded to me and about 20 minutes ago I put the finishing touches on it.  I was caught up with all the new tricks I'd added at the beginning of the week.  Of course, since then I've added a few more Trick of the Days, but I'm not going to sweat that too much.  I know that the Tricktionary isn't the kind of thing you ever "finish" exactly, but rather something that just keeps getting bigger and bigger.  I've added 122 tricks in the last 10 days and I think that's a pretty healthy chunk.

Out of curiosity, after I finished, I copied and pasted the whole thing to a word document just to see how big the page had grown.  It turns out that at a standard font the Tricktionary is now 58 pages long and contains 218 tricks and over 30,000 words.  There are still 28 moves with no video links, but they are nearly all doubles or reverses of moves that do have video links.  Still others are super basic moves (like the Reverse Slash) that would make for pretty hum-drum Trick of the Days.

Anyway, I'm sick and tired of typing at the moment and I'm fast running out of words so I better wrap this post up quick before I have to switch to another language or something.  Hope you enjoy the new and constantly improved Tricktionary.  It would be a darn shame to put so much effort into writing it if people weren't having fun reading it.

Incidentally, if you notice any errors or omissions, feel free to email me with them... just don't expect me to correct them right away.