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