Our Award Winning Skill Toy Collection

by Crazy Ivan


Long time readers of this blog will recall a post that I made a while back about the Skill Toy Collection at the House of Skills.  I cataloged all the different skill toys we had (though I somehow managed to leave out the footbags) one at a time and then took a big picture of all of them together.

I was looking over some old posts the other day and came across that one and it occurred to me that I should update it since we'd added so many new toys to our collection in the year or so since I posted it.  It was something I kept meaning to do and it kept getting pushed to the back burner.

And then last week our friends at USAstrojax prompted me to go ahead and make it happen.  I was alerted to a contest they were running on their Facebook page where they were offering a $10 gift certificate to the person who could post the picture of the largest skill toy collection.  At first I simply went back to the blog and found the old picture I'd taken for that year old post and simply offered that up.  I figured that had to be the biggest collection of skill toys anyone would post.

In a sense it was.  If they were measuring by the number of different skill toys in the collection, our pic was clearly way ahead.  But there was another guy who posted a pic of his skill toy collection and while it wasn't as varied as ours, he had so many juggling rings, scarves, balls and clubs that he pulled ahead of us by a bit.  In total, he had 317 toys to our meager 154.

But this was a contest that the House of Skills was not willing to lose, so we decided to take a new picture and just to be on the safe side, after adding all the toys we'd picked up in the interim, I added 180 Myachis from my collection to make sure nobody could outdo us.

To be honest, nobody really cared too much about winning the gift certificate.  We already have three sets of Astrojax so I'll probably just donate it to one of my nephews or something, but there's a certain amount of pride that goes in to stuff like this and when you call your home the "House of Skills", there are certain challenges that you have to face head on... and certain competitions that you have to win.

For the record, this photo contains:

3 Astrojax
26 Balls (bounce, glow, contact, bean, exer, etc.)
8 Battle Paddles
1 Boomerang
3 Cigar Boxes
14 Clubs
4 Devil Sticks
3 Diabolos
1 Finger Chux
1 Fire Devil Sticks
1 Fire Poi
8 Flair Bottles
41 Footbags
2 Gyro Rings
1 Hat
3 Kendiamas
1 Kikbo
1 Lasso
3 Machetes
1 Meteor
180 Myachis
3 Nunchaku
1 Poi
7 Rings
9 Shaker Cups
1 Slackline (The box behind the Diabolos)
1 Staff
1 Stilt Set
9 Spooner Boards
1 Takraw Ball
3 Torches
1 Unicycle
1 Vew-Do Board
3 Yo-Yos

Losing a Myachi the Right Way

by Crazy Ivan


Those of you that have been following this blog for a while will know that in the back yard of the House of Skills, we have a slack line wrapped around a tree and a fence post.  It's basically a tightrope, but it's about as wide as a seat belt.  It's got some bounce to it so it has some elements of a trampoline and some elements of a balance beam.

Anyway, it's one of the many ways that we challenge our skills from day to day and over the year and a month that we've had it, we've actually gotten pretty confident with it.  Mav, Monk and I have even practiced freestyling with a Myachi as we traverse it.  But interestingly enough, it wasn't until yesterday that we thought of another Myachi-related use for it.  Turns out that the thing functions pretty well as a Myachi catapult as well.

We got the idea yesterday afternoon.  It was gorgeous and Monk, Mav and I were all off so, of course, we were outside playing Myachi.  An errant kick left the Myachi sitting over by the slack line so when I went to fetch it, I decided to do something cooler than simply toss it back.

I placed Monk's Suffolk Downs on the line and then grabbed it with both hands.  I pulled it back a little, uttered "this probably won't work..." and let go.  Much to my surprise (and bemusement), the sucker shot at Monk like it was coming out of a canon.  Anyone but a Myachi Master probably would have jumped out of the way, but Monk stuck it with an MVP catch.

And we all smiled.

See, one thing we all share at the House of Skills is the desire to always go bigger.  If somebody comes up with a new trick, we naturally fall into competitions over who can do the more complex version of the trick.  If somebody gets a new toy, we're all looking to master it quicker than anyone else.  And when you inadvertently discover that you can rocket a Myachi off the slack line, everybody starts seeing all the crazy applications of that at once.

After a bit of fun with that, we realize that if you set the Myachi on the line and then bounce just right as you cross it, you can launch the Myachi fifty feet in the air.  So we did that.

It was tough to get a proper launch, so we were taking four or five attempts between every successful launch, and each time we'd get one in the air, we'd stumble about trying to figure out where it was going to land as it pachinkoed its way through the tree branches above.  In one extraordinarily unlikely bounce we all missed the catch and it landed right back on the slack line (which is about three inches across).

Anyway, as we're having fun with this, we're also doing the math.  Every time the Myachi launches, it skyrockets upward and at an angle into the branches.  But we can all see that if it were to somehow navigate the maze of boughs and twigs without hitting any of them, its trajectory would take it out of our yard and way up on top of the neighbor's roof.  It's so striking that Mav even brought it up.  He mentioned it to Monk because we were using a particularly yummy Suffolk Downs that Monk had gone to great lengths to break in.

"You know, if we keep doing this, you're gonna lose this thing up in the tree or in those gutters eventually," Mav warned.

Monk stopped for a moment and contemplated.  There were plenty of Myachis in the house, but nobody else had one on them at the moment.  He'd have had to run inside and by the time he came back, the mood might have changed and we might decide to play another game.  "Forget it," Monk decided, "this is fun".

And I'm sure you can already guess exactly how this story ends.  Within ten minutes of the warning, the Myachi finds a launch window that would have left a NASA scientist scratching their head and somehow manages to fly all the way up to the top of the neighbor's roof... the top of her three floor house.  As in, there is no possible way we're getting this Myachi back.

And Monk's response?  He shrugged.  "I lose Myachis all the time," he admitted, "At least this one has a great story."

The Heart of the House of Skills

by Crazy Ivan


Kid and I stayed up late last night chatting about the brief history of the House of Skills.  For many Myachi Masters, that represents the beginning of their involvement with Myachi, but for Kid and I, it only represents the most recent chapter.  Monk had been with us for over a year when we moved to Forest Hills and Mav had already been on board for quite some time as well.  Animal had been a part of things on and off for a while, but he started full-time Myachi employment only a few months before we signed the lease on the House of Skills.

So Kid and I were contrasting it, as we often do, with life in the Myachi Mobile before it.  Obviously life it a bit more comfortable now.  The House of Skills is about 12 times the size of the Myachi Mobile and it had fully functioning plumbing so there's that.  There's also the fact that the House of Skills is big enough to hold all our stuff and still have room to play.  There's also the foosball table, the ping pong table, the slack line out back and the presence of a real kitchen.

The Myachi Mobiles (there were two of them, after all), saw a few variations in residency as time went on.  The very first tour in the very first Myachi Mobile consisted of Myachi Man and his buddy Goldie and that was it.  Eventually Goldie left and Kid Myach and I joined in (along with some temporary stints by Big Dog, Butter and Animal).  Throughout those years we never stayed in one place for more than a couple of months at a time.  The Myachi Mobile was our home, but motel rooms, friend's couches and cabins occasionally augmented it.

At that time, to be a Myachi Master was to be in motion.  It was a nomadic lifestyle that demanded the ability to live with very few possessions and with few constant friends.  Of course, it's easy to make friends when you have Myachi to lubricate all your social encounters, so the lifestyle was as rewarding as it was demanding.

And then things started to change and NYC became an inferno of a hot-spot for us.  Before long we had all but retired the Myachi Mobile and all gotten apartments in and around the five boroughs.  Now, I think it's safe to say that even if you've never been to New York City, you probably know that it's one of the most expensive places to live in the world.  It had the highest living cost of any city in the US by a pretty wide margin (San Fransisco is a distant second).  So the House of Skills was born of necessity when it became too expensive for all of us to find places to live.

But the House was also a dream we'd talked about for years.  Even when things were small, we foresaw a day when we could expand and hire a bunch of Myachi Masters.  There was talk about eventually renting a "House of Skills" even before I joined the company.  The concept of giving a bunch of Myachi Masters so much time in close proximity promised to revolutionize the game by creating an engine of unending challenges.

To that extent, the House of Skills has more than lived up to it's intended purpose.  Whenever one of us comes up with a new trick, variations on it show up in a matter of minutes.  New prop-adds and games show up on a regular basis and every record in the game is under constant challenge as the Myachi team relentlessly pushes the envelope of possibility.  Two, three and four man tricks and games can be tested out as soon as they're conceived and there's never a lack of test-subjects when we examine new products and new series.

But the true heart of the House of Skills is in the variety of people who occupy it.  A few people have come and gone, but even the past residence of the House left an echo of their skills.  The unique blend of talents that each resident brings forever alters the overall make-up of the house.

Kid Myach was an athlete all through high-school and college and that has really defined him as a person.  It also colors the way that he looks at the world and, more importantly, the world of Myachi.  Competition is key and accuracy is his strong point (he's a basketball player and a golfer, after all).  He brings a competitive nature to the House of Skills and often sees things in terms of team possibilities that the rest of us miss.

I bring something else to the table entirely.  I never really played team sports and was always more focused on individual accomplishments.  As a juggler, I spent countless hours perfecting odd nuances of skill with a myriad of props.  My focus always was (and still remains) finding new variations in existing tricks.  In the past that meant applying diabolo tricks to cigar boxes or contact juggling moves to poi, but now that I focus that lens on Myachi, it helps to keep the repertoire of known Myachi tricks ever-expanding.

Monk was a renaissance athlete in school as well.  He had a sport for every season growing up and played volleyball at the collegiate level.  He's also the most competitive person I've ever met in my life.  But unlike Kid Myach, he also focused for a long time on an individual skill; flair bar-tending.  Like juggling, this requires hours and hours of solitary refinement so Monk adds a strange synthesis of minute skill and athletic dedication.  Where my focus is forever on expanding my tricks, his is ever on perfecting.

Maverick comes to us from a background in footbag.  Like Kid and Monk, he was an athlete and focused on lacrosse, though he dabbled in a number of athletic endeavors.  The one that eventually caught his eye was, of course, footbag.  He proceeded to take this talent to a level that very few ever do.  Combined with an astounding level of confidence, his skills quite-literally know no bounds.  The tricks that scare off the rest of us are ready challenges to Mav and he almost always gets the best of them in the end.

Lucky comes from a background of performance.  Theater, song and dance and are his primary loves and this adds a new flair to the game.  While he's still catching up when it comes to Myachi-specific skills, two unschooled observers would never know that.  What he lacks in technical know-how, he makes up for in the theatricality he adds to his every move.

While still only a part-time resident, Bones adds a strange blend of skills to the mix as well.  Unlike the rest of us, Myachi is truly his first skill-based obsession.  His introduction to juggling, advanced footbag, balance props and skill-toys in general is all seen through the lens of a Myachi Maniac foremost.  This provides a strange "bottom-up" approach to new skills that none of the rest of us can match.

Even though they've moved on, Animal and Kore still left an indelible mark on the heart of the house as well.  Animal's focus on yo-yo and string based skills (as well as his encyclopedic knowledge of pop-culture) can be seen in Myachi tricks and Myachi trick names, but his greatest influence was to the art of STWAKOJ, which he all but revolutionized with his larger-than-life persona.  Kore's extreme-sport history and devil-may-care attitude helped to establish the very spirit of the House of Skills and it lives on every time a new longboard finds its way to our foyer.

The heart of the House of Skills is the people within it and as new people add their skills, personalities and aspirations to the game that heart grows ever larger.  I suppose it makes for a pretty good microcosm of the Myachi Movement itself.

Life Without Animal

by Crazy Ivan


As many of you know, the Myachi family bid farewell to one of it's favorite sons a few months back.  Animal, who has been involved with this company is some way or another for longer than I have, recently moved on to another job in another state.

Of course, things like this happen.  People grow and their needs change.  Animal fell in love and his need to be with the woman he loved was greater than his need to stay with the job he loved and when she moved we all knew it was only a matter of time.

And while Animal has left the company, he certainly hasn't left the movement.  He's still one of the world's foremost Myachi freestylers.  After all, it's not like you turn in your skills with your two weeks notice.  Nobody can ever truly "leave" the Myachi movement, but it's even less possible when you have the Myachi glyph prominently tattooed on your forearm.

So we said goodbye to Animal the right way, with a big party and a lot of friends... okay, it was actually a big roast with a lot of friends, but it served the same purpose.  He donated a bunch of his collection to future contests, gathered up his belongings (mostly graphic novels and limited edition action figures) and moved on to new things.

Over the intervening months, we've all had to adjust to a House of Skills that is, while a bit cleaner and a bit quieter, a bit less skilled and a bit less fun.  Now don't get me wrong, Bones moved in to Animal's old room and he's mad fun (not as messy or loud though), but there are certain times when it becomes painfully obvious that Animal isn't here any more.  For example, last night we were trying to remember the name of Jabba the Hutt's little pet rat and we had to Google it.  If Animal were here, we could have saved those keystrokes.

Now, I joke, of course, but Animal is one of my best friends in the world.  I've known him for 8 years and for a lot of that time we've worked and lived together... sometimes in a cramped RV.  He's like a brother to me and there's something to be said for having one of your best friends as a roommate.  There are at least a couple times every day when I wish he was still around.  I'm happy that he's doing what he feels is best for him, as we all are, but one can't help but feel that tinge of selfishness when one realizes that a friend that was once always there no longer is.

Life without Animal is tough, but we're coping.  It is kind of nice that we all got moved up in the "best Matrix reloaded in the company" rankings, but it is a small solace.

The Gauntlet Has Been Thrown Down

by Crazy Ivan

Last week I wrote about an awesome website that I'd stumbled across that allows visitors to post videos of world records.  I made a call to action from the Myachi community to flood the site with Myachi records (and a few people responded).  I then went home and showed the site to the House of Skills and everybody agreed that it was exactly the kind of site made for us.

It's a relatively young site so there are plenty of huge categories of tricks that haven't been added yet.  Mav and Animal immediately started thinking about longboarding records they could try to set.  Monk came up with some cool ideas for flair based records.  I just stared at the huge collection of skill toys on the side of the room.

My first thought was to use as many of them as possible in a minute.  Animal and I discussed my plan of attack and we tried using them in a few different orders and combinations.  We filmed it three times altogether, but by the end of it, we came up with this video:



Well, no surprise, it didn't take long for somebody to give my new record a day in court.  My new friend Brian (who inadvertently alerted me to the site's existence in the first place) wanted to show off his skill toy collection too, so he put up a video where he used 23 different skill toys in 60 seconds.

There was some question as to whether all of them counted, but to be fair, their is a similar question as to whether I spun the basketball long enough to consider it "in control" as well.  It doesn't help that the ball itself is all but off camera throughout the finger spin.

Given the questionable nature of a few of our toy usages, it could be said that both of us are actually tied at 19 toys a piece.  But in reality, he has the record and I don't.  Even if it were officially marked as a tie I wouldn't be comfortable with that.  I need to up the ante.  The gauntlet, as they say, has been thrown down.

I've got a lot of items in my in-box, not the least of which is this blog and getting the Trick of the Day videos under control, but I can't let his 23 toys record stand.  I'm careful about how I phrase this because the guy who broke my record and I have way too many common interests to be anything but friends, but there's nothing wrong with a friendly rivalry here and there.

So be on the lookout for my next record breaking video in the near future.  And, while you're at it, be on the lookout for Brian Pankey's record breaking-breaking video shortly after that.

Life at the House of Skills

by Crazy Ivan

The other day I was on the phone with Myachi Man.  While we were talking I stepped outside and started juggling the soccer ball that Monk always leaves on the patio.  I'm terrible at soccer-juggling, but as I am the type that always wants to learn something new, I figured I might as well get some practice while I wasn't using my feet for anything else.

Myachi Man got an important call so he asks if he can call me back in a few minutes.  "Sure", I reply and then hang up.  With a few minutes to kill, I decide to hop up on the slack line and practice my two footed mounts (strangely, these are much tougher than one footed mounts).  I kept this up for about ten minutes and then MM called back and we continued our conversation.

While I was on the phone with him, I went back inside where Animal was hard at work mastering a ring-spinning trick.  I gave him some advice on that as I finished up my phone conversation and then headed upstairs to talk to Monk about a few things.\

When I got there, he and Maverick were challenging each other to do tricks with a little tin of mints.  They were trying to do a Wolverine to a Stiff Arm to a Mantis to a Faceplant with it.  Keeping in mind that it's round, less than half the size of a Myachi and weighs almost nothing, you can see where the challenge comes in.

Obviously, I hopped in on this.  I note with pride that I actually got it on the first try, though I tried a few more times and couldn't hit it again right away.  Monk and I talked business for a few minutes, but as we did Maverick abandoned the little tin and fetched a footbag from his room.  Before I knew it, he, Monk and I were in a circle, hacking as we discussed scheduling changes and upcoming school events.

Once we'd cleared everything up on that end, I went down to the basement.  I was itching to play guitar and since I was technically done working at that point, I spent the next half hour practicing jazz riffs.

At some point, it occurred to me that this is not how most people live.  Most of the people I know have one or two hobbies that occupy their time.  At the House of Skills, our hobbies tend to be hobby-collecting.  In any given day, any one of us will probably be practicing at least half a dozen new skills.  In any given day, at least one of us will learn a new trick or accomplish something we've never done before.  On any given day, at least one of us will set a personal record and occasionally even a world record.

There are some disadvantages to having 6 roommates, especially when you live in the basement apartment and your roomies stay up late doing foot tricks and dropping juggling props.  I think that living at the House of Skills would drive most people crazy after a few weeks.  They'd tire of having to scoot around somebody on a balance board on their way to the fridge.  They'd tire of dodging Nerf darts when they cut through the living room.  They'd tire of hearing several voices erupt in excitement every time somebody bests a new challenge.

But for people like me (and here's hoping that's a very small fraction of the world's populace) there could be no better place to live.

What a Long Day...

by Crazy Ivan

On most nights, the House of Skills quiets down pretty early.  Animal is usually in bed by eleven and by then Kid's already asleep as often as not.  Mav's usually holed up for the night by midnight.  Monk stays up all night, but he's usually in his room, maticulously studying fantasy baseball stats or whatever he does.

This is good for Pinky and I since we usually stay up late and live in the basement.  It's an old house so every time somebody crosses the dining room or the living room, the creeking floor echoes through our room.  In fact, you might have heard how creeky that floor is on some of the Trick of the Day videos I've done there.

Anyway, normally the floor quiets down by 11 or so.  But for the odd midnight snack from Mav or Monk, my room is usually comfortably quiet.  But not last night.  Animal's girlfriend was out of town for the weekend and got home late, so she came to see Animal at about 11.  Mav had a buddy over.  Bones and Bamboo were crashing there so that they could leave early with us, but instead of getting some sleep, they stayed up until 2 in the morning playing Magick with Monk.

Needless to say, my room was far from quiet.  I was tossing and turning and wishing for industrial strength earplugs until after 2.  Of course, 1 or 2 in the morning is when I usually get to sleep, but I usually try to get up earlier when I have to wake up at 4 in the morning.

So I get up this morning on less than two hours of sleep.  And then I drove for 13 and a half hours.  And now I'm at the cabin and I'm about to edit the Trick of the Day video...

Basically, this is all a really long explanation of why I can't write a very long blog post today.  I can barely keep my eyes open at this point and I still need to shove some food into my head before I pass out.  So I promise something with a little more detail tomorrow (including a quick video tour of our new cabin), but for tonight this is all I can manage...

First Large Scale Test

by Crazy Ivan

Got our first chance to really try the 3 on 3 version of the Fu game last night and I have to say that the game passed the test with flying colors.  If you don't know the game I'm talking about, you can read all about it at this link.  I'd advise it since a lot of what follows won't make much sense if you don't know the game.

To be clear, we'd played before, but this was the first time where we had enough Myachi Masters around to (a) field multiple teams and (b) still have people left over to referee.  The game is remarkably exhausting so we were playing first team to 3 points and then we were swapping out teammates here and there and giving a few people a rest.

Myachi Man, Kid, Monk, Animal, Bones, Bamboo, Rush, Unknown, Strike*, Metal* and myself all got in on the game and we had some epic battles.  Kid got a bit of video on his phone so hopefully we'll have some evidence of the awesomeness of the game before long, but for now you'll just have to trust my testimonial (or ask Myachi Man, Kid, Monk, Animal, Bones, Bamboo, Rush, Unknown, Strike* or Metal*).

(* Myachi Masters in Training)

We didn't have enough room to really play the way we'd want to.  We were playing in the driveway at the House of Skills so it was relatively easy to corner the defender and 6 people in such a small arena made it really hard to pass.  By and large one player defended each team's Myachi throughout each round.  There were a couple of passes, but generally speaking you'd have one guy defending the Myachi, another guy defending him and a third guy attacking the other team's Myachi.

That changed from time to time, of course.  Sometimes one team would double team on attack and leave one guy to defend the Myachi by himself.  That tended to work alright as long as the other team didn't decide to double team at the same time.  Then it often turned into a race against the clock.

The game went, in a lot of ways, exactly how I hoped it would.  The gameplay was fast, intense and filled with highlights.  One thing that surprised me was exactly how many elements of different sports we brought into the game.  Strike and Monk are pretty good basketball players and they were using a lot of their basketball skills when they defended.  Unknown plays offensive line so when he was protecting the primary defender (the dude with the Myachi) he created a wall.  There were also heavy elements of lacrosse, soccer, ultimate, footbag, hockey and, of course, martial arts.

There were also a few huge highlights, though I don't think I could do them justice just by describing them.  One of my teams scored short handed while I was in the penalty box (accidentally hit Bones in the head) and that was pretty cool to watch.  At one point when Bones had his team's Myachi he went on the offensive and suddenly there were three guys attacking Monk.  He weaved his way out of it like nobody's business.  At one point Bamboo got in trouble, outran the Myachi and had to kick it to Rush to keep the game going.  At one point I had Metal all over me like Velcro and had to make about 4 saves in a row to give my team time to score.

Next time we play, we'll have multiple cameras.  I can't wait to see this thing presented like a genuine sport.  Unfortunately, this probably won't happen until Bones, Bamboo, Pinky and I get back from Tennessee (in August), but the good news is that we'll have a lot of time to practice up and get our strategies in order.

In fact, I'm even willing to lay down the gauntlet against Monk, Mav and Animal.  Each team gets a few months to practice up and draw up crazy plays and then we duke it out for world domination at the end of the summer... I'm liking the sound of that...

Top 10 Uses for the Backyard at the House of Skills

by Crazy Ivan

A lot of people have requested more info about home life at the House of Skills, so I decided to start a new series of articles on the various usages for the various parts of our humble abode.  I'll eventually try to write a top 10 for every room in the house with the exception of the bathroom... I don't think anyone wants to read that one.

But I'm going to start where I am right now.  I would think that more than any other segment of the House of Skills, the backyard really defines what this place is all about.  So, bearing in mind that I'm just randomly estimating what we actually spend more time doing, here is my educated estimation of the top 10 uses we get out of the backyard:

 #10 General Backyard Stuff  

I kind of had to have a category for stuff like laying out in the sun and reading a book or warming up for a jog.  While we do find some better uses for out backyard, a certain amount of the time we spend out here is for mundane stuff like mowing the grass, raking leaves or writing blogposts.

 #9 Setting Stuff on Fire  

I should start this off with the standard "DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME" warning, but several of us at the House of Skills are trained professionals in the arts of fire manipulation and we can't exactly practice fire poi, fire devil sticks, torch juggling or fire Myachi in the living room.  When we find the need to test the limits of our intelligence and start tempting fire to burn us, we always do it in the backyard.

 #8 Slack Lining  

The Slack-Line hasn't been up for a few days which means we really need to put it back up tomorrow.  We've had the badminton net up for too long now and I'd really like to move slack-lining up the list a bit.  Because it's still a pretty new skill toy for us, it hasn't managed to log enough time to be higher than 8th in my current estimation.

 #7 Practicing New Myachi Tricks  

For those of you wondering when Myachi was going to show up on this list, I should remind you that I'm going least to most.  Myachi will show up a few more times as we get closer to the top uses, but I feel like I have to include it here as well.  We practice new tricks in every part of the house, including both yards, so you'll see this one showing up on virtually every list in this forthcoming series.

The backyard is a particularly good spot for practicing new tricks since when one person starts practicing a new trick, everyone starts wanting to practice new tricks and most of the other spots we could practice would run out of room pretty quick.

 #6 Playing Net Games  

There are several net games we play here so this earns a spot pretty high on the list.  We play a lot of Myachi-Net (with and without paddles) but we also play a lot of badminton, takraw and footbag net.  We are also known to make up random games using whatever we have handy so sometimes we find novel uses for the net.

 #5 Playing Hacky Sack  

There's a limit to how many people can play hacky-sack in the living room (six, for the record) so whenever we have a few friends or other masters over, we often find the game getting too big to hold indoors.  Virtually everyone involved in Myachi has a pre-existing love for footbag when they got into the game so it's only natural that we would stay true to our roots.

 #4 Practicing With Skill Toys too Big for the Living Room  

Most of our stuff can be done with very little room.  There's no need to go outside to practice with juggling balls or Astrojax, but things like meteor, lasso and poi require a bit more free space than the living room offers.  For some tricks, devil sticks and diabolo insist on wide open spaces, as do the more complex tricks with juggling clubs.  To be fair, most of the time stuff that requires high throws gets practiced in the front yard, since a low hanging tree inhibits it in the back.

 #3 Playing Myachi Fu  

Of all the games in Myachi, the one that is fastest growing in popularity is Myachi Fu.  In the past year, this has gone from an obscure off shoot of the game to one of the games most popular and might even unseat MYACH as our most played variation.  To keep up with the kids that are getting scary good at it, the Myachi Masters often find themselves in the backyard training.

 #2 Improvised Sports  

I would not have been at all surprised if when I'd walked outside to write this I saw Monk and Maverick playing a game that involved a Nerf gun, a lacrosse stick, a juggling ring and the balance board.  One of our favorite pastimes here is inventing new games and random challenges so this might actually be the top use we find for the backyard.  There's really only one thing that could conceivably compete with it.

 #1 Playing MYACH

Fu might have the potential to bypass MYACH as the most popular game in the movement, but it hasn't gotten there yet.  Right now, MYACH is the number one way of pitting Myachi skill against Myachi skill and thus it is the most important one for the Masters to train in.  It is also something of a badge of honor for the younger Masters to defeat the veterans in games of MYACH

After the Party...

by Crazy Ivan


Not a whole lot to report from the House of Skills tonight.  Mav and Animal are back and life seems to be getting back to normal.  Pinky really decked the place out for a little welcome home bash last night, but by today the ribbons were down and the helium was running down on the balloons.

Some might see this as a metaphor for the festive attitude diminishing, but those people probably don't know the residents of the House of Skills.  Even after the balloons sank from the skies, we still managed to find a use for them:

Too Quiet and Too Clean

by Crazy Ivan

Mad busy day at HQ today so I don't have time to write much.  But I did want to take a second to acknowledge just how boring the House of Skills has been since Mav and Animal left.  With Kore gone, Noodles a couple of weeks from moving in and Kid Myach spending most nights at his girlfriend's place, that leaves only Pinky, Monk and I to occupy this big, four story house.  Not only are more than half the residents missing, but it was the noisy half at that.

At first it was a quaint little novelty.  When we cleaned up the living room, it just stayed clean.  When it was time to go to bed we weren't interrupted by the sounds of random juggling props slamming against the floor above us.  When I went to the computer, there was nobody on it.  When I got thirsty, the jug of water in the fridge would actually have water in it.

For a while that was pretty cool.  Monk spends most of his time upstairs in his room and if I had to guess, I'd say that he spends about 65% of his off-work time adjusting his fantasy baseball roster (I'm going by how often that's what he's doing when I pop in on him).  Pinky spends at least that much time engulfed in a story on her E-Reader (it's like a Kindle but more expensive and less functional) so I've practically had the house to myself for a month.

But the new smell wears off on that pretty quickly and now I just miss having my friends around.  There's hardly ever anyone to slack-line with, there's nobody there I can beat at ping pong and Nerf wars are way too predictable when it's just me against Monk.  And to be perfectly honest, all that peace and quiet is really starting to get to me.

Not many people are lucky enough to live with several of their best friends and those that are usually overlook how awesome that arrangement is.  It's easy to do because when you live with somebody you see them in good times and bad.  You're constantly confronted by things like their unwashed dishes, their messes, their annoying musical tastes, their bad taste in movies... whatever.  In fact, it's actually pretty easy to get so caught up in these petty annoyances that you completely forget that the person is also awesome.

Nothing like a few weeks of absence to make you forget all about the bad stuff.  I personally can't wait for those guys to get back.  I can't exactly speak for Monk, but he's been long-boarding by himself since they left and now that the weather is so nice I'm sure he's dying for somebody to cruise with.  I'd go myself, but Animal and Mav took their boards with them and I can't bring myself to spend more than $100 on anything you can't buy from the Dube Store.

The wait is almost over and I'm sure that within a couple of weeks I'll be listening to the sounds of Animal's newest video game obsession echoing down the stairs and silently asking Australia to take them back.  But in truth I know what really matters and surrounding yourself with friends is one of those things that matters at every stage of your life.

So if the pilot of their flight happens to read this by some odd chance, hustle bro.  I have new tricks to show them!

Pets at the House of Skills

by Crazy Ivan


Back in the days of the Myachi Mobile, pets were obviously out of the question.  A dog might have managed that much travel, but having to look after one while spending ten hours a day at an event wasn't very plausible.

But now we've got the House of Skills.  Kid is allergic so much to Monk's dismay we don't have a dog (though he never stops trying).  Pinky and I, however, do have a couple of cats.  They're usually secluded in our downstairs apartment, but they are doubtless still members of the House of Skills.

That being said, they have to have some skills.  We can't just go letting them off easy just because they're animals.  Luckily, Pinky has a way with Animals that's pretty darned impressive.  Sorry for the poor lighting, but I think you can make out all the details just fine:

An Open Letter to Television Networks:

by Crazy Ivan

Dear Television,

I was flipping through your myriad offerings last night and it occurred to me (as it has many times before) that pretty much everything on sucks.  I went from a cake-baking show to some burly guys with beards doing something occupationally hazardous to some nincompoop ghostbuster-wannabes to another cake-baking show to a carbon-copy sit-com to a lopsided political show to another cake-baking show.

And then I turned the TV off and silently thanked the producers for inspiring me to get up and practice slack-lining for a while.

But as I was crossing back and forth and stumbling backwards on this thing, I reflected on how bad TV has gotten over the years.  As ever more networks seek to fill ever more time, they inevitably started running out of stuff to show.  At some point, they started just pointing cameras at random stuff and sticking commercial breaks in it and the cake-baking show was born.

Now I'm not trying to trash cake-baking shows.  My wife loves them and she can't be the only one or there wouldn't be 26 of them on television right now (I'm counting cupcake shows in that total as well), but some of the shows just smack of desperation.  I flipped passed a show the other day that was just following the antics of a hair salon.  A hair salon!  Audiences are essentially invited to sit there and watch other people work.  And part of that work is washing and drying hair.  Just think of the suspense!

It would be easy to fault the producers or call the writers lazy, but there are hundreds of networks and every one of them is trying to put together 24 hours worth of programming every day.  It's only a matter of time before there's a television show for every major occupation in the country.  I'm already imagining the promo ads for the next season of "Patent Application Research Assistants: Las Vegas".

But far be it from me to just sit here and complain.  I'm not about finding problems, I'm all about finding solutions.  So to all of the television producers out there, I'd like to make you aware of the following:

• There is a house in picturesque Forest Hills, NY that houses a pro-juggler (me), a pro flair bartender (Monk), a pro-footbagger (Mav), a former college athlete (Kid), an adorable chick with mad skills (Pinky), and a dude named Animal (Animal).
• If that isn't enough to entice you, we also have a very talented beat-boxer and break dancer moving in shortly.
• When we're not at our job playing with toys in two of the coolest stores on earth, we can be found walking on slack-lines, riding unicycles, longboarding at high speeds through Manhattan, swinging fire and/or sword fighting.
• When we're not doing any of the above it's because we're travelling somewhere photogenic (like Australia, for example).
• We are also living the American dream and work every day toward building an empire out of nothing but a crazy idea and a refusal to give up.
• As if that's not enough entertainment waiting to happen, Pinky also occassionally bakes cakes and we know how you TV producers love cake-baking.

Hopefully a television producer or two will happen upon this article and give us a call (office number is 516-801-4949 guys and gals) or shoot us an e-mail (at crazyivan@myachi.com) and maybe next year, instead of another season of the insurance-office themed reality show "Underwriter", you'll see my smiling visage (or better yet, one of the better looking guys).

Sincerely

Crazy "Aaron Davies" Ivan

PS If the producers are reading yet, I'd also love it if you could bring back "Battle Bots"

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Just to be on the safe side, I suggest you pass this article on through every social network you frequent.  Link it on FB, tweet it, e-mail it, print it out and hand it out in flier form... whatever you have to do.  It's not too late to save television.

A Night at the House of Skills

by Crazy Ivan

When you live in a house with 6 roommates that all play with toys for a living, you have to expect some weird stuff from time to time.  When I go upstairs for a soda I'm not surprised if I see Monk furiously defending himself from an onslaught of Nerf darts with a juggling club.  When I go outside to take out the trash, I'm not shocked if I see Animal and Maverick sword fighting on the slack line.  When I get home in the evening it doesn't strike me odd to find a full blown ping-pong ball war going on complete with opposing cushion forts on either side of the living room.

When raucous applause fills the halls of the House of Skills I know that somebody just hit an awesome trick with something or perhaps managed to get the Slinky to walk all the way down the stairs.  When I hear a loud bang waft down from the second floor I know that Monk probably just came really close to hitting a Shove-It on the balance board or maybe Animal discovered the limit of how many juggling clubs he can balance at one time.

That's why I wasn't surprised at all when I walked upstairs on meeting night and saw this:



Now, even without the audio I think you can get the idea that everyone is having fun, but if you have any chance at all to do so, watch it with the audio.  The 20 seconds of Monk cracking up at the beginning make the whole endeavor worthwhile.

Spring Time at the House of Skills

by Crazy Ivan

Ah, the warm weather slowly returns.  It actually hasn't, it's just that the cold weather has left and we're stuck in that limbo between cold and warm, but the sun is out and birds are returning so we readily accept the rumor that it is now Spring once more.

Obviously that means a lot to anyone who lives far enough North to see snow every year.  Beaches will soon be filling up, amusement parks will open, flowers will bloom and you'll be able to make it from your apartment to the subway station without putting on 5 layers of clothing.

But at the House of Skills Spring is a particularly beloved occasion.  Between the 7 residents at the house we have something like 116 hobbies and I'd say about half of those are the kinds of things you have to outside to do.  One thing that links all Myachi Masters is a lifelong love of going outside to play.

Now don't get me wrong, we spend a lot of time outdoors in the winter.  Barring snow and ice you can still longboard and unicycle in the winter.  You can also build snow dinosaurs and have epic snowball fights and there's a lot to be said for that.

What you can't do, however, is spend all day outside without having to thaw out later.  I find myself off today and stealing away just enough time indoors to update this blog and film a trick of the day, but as soon as I'm done here I'll be hopping back on my stilts for another trip around the block.  That's assuming Maverick doesn't talk me into getting on the slack line first (and no, I'm not going to get on the slack line while on my stilts... yet).

The other wonderful thing about being outdoors is that it inspires awesome stuff like this video:



Thanks to Bones, Bamboo, Rush and Unknown for this one and as it gets warmer and warmer, expect to see a lot more of them.

Yet Another New Skill Toy

by Crazy Ivan

So I suppose that it should come as no surprise that yet another skill toy has been added to our toy collection and if you've been following the blog closely you might even be able to guess what it is.

Kid Myach showed back up from Australia on Sunday and he came bearing gifts.  Among them were groovy new Australian key chains for everyone, a few bags of a local Australian cookie called "Tim Tams", a few of those ridiculously cool Theatricks Myachis and, of course, the skill toy that Australia is famous for, the boomerang:

It's blogspot's fault that this is sideways, not mine...

Boomerangs are amongst the oldest skill toys in the world so it seems odd that we're only finally getting around to adding a couple to our collection.  Of course, it's kind of hard to master the boomerang when you live in NYC since they require wide open spaces.  Not sure how soon we'll get going with them, but I'm sure that we'll find a way.

As we speak Monk is probably standing on top of the House of Skills chucking one of these suckers out into the wind.  We've tried them as Frisbees and that hasn't worked out very well but despite the painful cost of catching them we tossed them back and forth for at least an hour yesterday.

I'm sure we'll wind up getting some crazy looks at the park when we head down there for an afternoon of boomeranging, but they won't be any crazier than the looks I got when I was learning to unicycle, lasso or walk on stilts.

I'll keep everyone posted on our progress with these suckers.  Rest assured, Animal and I will not be satisfied until we can freeze bad guys and gather up Rupees with them.

The Value of Practice

by Crazy Ivan


4 weeks ago to the day Maverick and I put up a little video of us messing around on the Slack Line.  It was only my 2nd day on it and Mav's 3rd so we were understandably terrible at it.  We were still having fun, of course, which is all that really matters when it comes to toys.

But since then we've been hard at work practicing.  Of course, Slack Line isn't like Myachi.  You can't practice slack-lining every day because you have to wait for good enough weather (kind of hard to do in the snow and/or rain) and it takes a lot of physical effort.  You can practice Myachi even if you're bed ridden, but if you're so much as a bit under the weather, slack lining is out.

So over the past 4 weeks me and Mav have taken every chance we can to get some practice in.  We'll come home sore after a day's work and spend an hour or more walking back and forth on that thing, missing new tricks and occasionally hitting them.  With Kid out of the country and all the craziness we've had going on at the schools we haven't gotten anywhere near the practice that we were hoping for.

But all that being said, practice pays off.  We're walking at a slightly longer distance now and we have way more control of what we can do.  We're probably building all kinds of weird stabilizer muscles along the way as well.

I wanted to post this video because I know a lot of you saw the first video we did and I want to point out what a little bit of practice can do for you.  Between the two of us we've put in maybe 12 or 13 hours actually on the slack line over the last month (that works out to an average of about thirteen and a half minutes a day each) and that's been enough to make a marked improvement.



Obviously we both still have a long way to go before we've mastered this thing but every day we get closer to it.  I'll be posting another video around the 22nd of April (weather permitting) and hopefully we'll have gotten better by then.  I don't know about you, but I'm dying to see Maverick pull a Crypto on that thing.

The House of Skills Toy Collection

by Crazy Ivan

Last night I decided to catalogue all the skill toys at the House of Skills and I figured I would share the exercise in pictures.  Now, I should warn you ahead of time, you're in for a lot of pictures.  The skill toy collection we've got is the combination of 5 collections, any of which might be impressive on its own.

That being said, the bulk of what you're going to see is mine.  I've been an avid skill toy aficionado for over 20 years now and in that time, things start to pile up.

The obvious place to begin is with juggling balls.  It's the first skill toy I ever fell in love with so it's the first one I put on the table last night.  Again, we've been collecting these things for a while, so they add up:

(sorry, Blogspot's servers are screwy today so I have no control over photo size!)



And once you learn to use those, it's only a matter of time before you add the rings:



And after you learn to use them, you're ready for the challenge of the clubs (sorry about the blur):



But those are just your basic juggling props. Skill toys come from all over the world so we have to add our Asian skill toys to the mix. Here are a few diabolos:



And a couple of sets of Devil Sticks:



Of course, Monk lives here too. He's got a stash of "Flair Bottles" and shakers to add to the mix:



Not sure if you'd notice, but I added a few yo-yos and astrojax to the table on this one:



Again, not sure if you'd notice because it's so subtle, but I added a unicycle in this next picture:



And these weird looking suckers here are "kangaroo stilts":



Now, technically nunchukas and a bo-staff would be considered weapons (they are certainly not toys), but since we only use them for skills and never for defending ourselves against ninjas, I thought I'd add them as well.



And a hat isn't strictly speaking a skill toy either. This one, however, was purchased in a juggling store and is specially designed for manipulation so I'd be slacking if I didn't add it.



Here we have a set of glow-poi and a meteor. If you've never seen them in action, a quick You-Tube search is in order (but for the meteor make sure you search "meteor juggling" or you'll just get video of meteors):



And when you do skill toys long enough you eventually end up setting some of them on fire. Here you'll see I've added a set of juggling torches, fire devil sticks and a set of fire poi:



These are my Cigar Boxes and no, they don't have cigars in them. They're juggling props and have nothing to do with cigars except for the name:



This crazy looking sucker is a balance board:



And this is the most recent addition to the collection, the slack line:



I'm sure that by now you've noticed that one skill toy is suspiciously absent in this collection but I wanted to wait until the end to add the Myachis:



So when you put it all together and then stack a chair on a cabinet so you can get high enough up to get a solid picture of it, all the toys look something like this:



And yes, I did this all for you. It took about forty minutes to set everything up and get all the pictures, but the clean up time was surprisingly fast:

Being the First

by Crazy Ivan

So Maverick added a new skill toy to the House of Skills' collection the other day.  If you're not familiar with "slack-lining", picture tight rope walking on a seat belt and you pretty much have the idea.  It's a tight line about 3 inches wide that you ratchet up to a couple of trees and then walk across... or try to walk across anyway.

Just for the record, none of us had anything to do with that video.  That's a vid that the producers put out so I guess the guys you see there are essentially the "Myachi Masters" of slack-lining.  They're doing all kinds of cool stuff there.  Our highlight video at this point would essentially consist of us stumbling four steps out and then falling off.

But yesterday was our first day on it and like every other skill toy that's come into this house, it's only a matter of time before we master it.  I already managed a pretty solid hand stand on it and Mav pulled off a leaping 360 at one point last night.

And, of course, we Myachied on it as well.  We had it set up in the back yard between the fence post and a big tree leaving us about 12 feet of walkable line.  I managed to Fu and Fusion my way across without dropping the Myachi or myself into the muck below.  While I can't confirm this, I believe that makes me the first person ever who played Myachi across a slack line.

Which brings me to the larger point of this entry.  Because Myachi is such a young and expansive sport, it stands to reason that any creative person could probably accomplish something that nobody has ever done before.  There are so many tricks yet to be discovered, so many marriages between Myachi and other skills that have yet to be attempted, so many crazy challenges that have not even occurred to us yet.

That's the beauty of getting into a game on the ground floor.  There are so many barriers yet to be broken down.  Think about it, if you'd gotten into skateboarding in the late 70s almost everything you did would be ground-breaking.  Almost every trick you came up with would be new.  Almost every move you landed would be revolutionary.

We've always been big fans of using Myachi in conjunction with other skill toys.  We've done Myachi while riding unicycle, while riding a skateboard, on a balance board, while yo-yoing, while juggling, on stilts... and of course, now on a slack line.

So what is your claim to fame?  I ask because there's a good chance that you've pioneered a move or type of trick with Myachi without even realizing it.  I saw a video online a while back where a Myachi Maniac tossed his Myachi over his entire house and had a buddy catch it in the back yard.  That was almost certainly a first.

The easiest way to invent new tricks and challenges is to combine Myachi with some of the other stuff you do.  If you think you've got a "Myachi first", leave it in the comments section below.  Strange as it is, some us are keeping track of these firsts.

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Edit: We were hesitant to set up the line again today because of the snow, but eventually we couldn't take it anymore.  Here is a quick vid of Mav and I playing.  Keep in mind that we're just starting to learn what we're doing here...  Don't expect any backflips just yet.

Meeting Night at the House of Skills

Every other Tuesday we have a meeting at the House of Skills.  We bring all the guys out, order half a dozen pizzas or so and talk over what's new in the world of Myachi.  We use the time for all kinds of stuff; we hash out our sales strategies, we do training exercises with the new guys, we deal with in-store issues, we fill the store guys in on what's happening on the office end and we will in the office guys on what's happening on the store end.

Many people get the impression that when you work for a toy company it's all fun and games.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  As you can see from the video below, we generally stay productive the entire time.

Okay, okay, so maybe we're not productive the whole time, but we still get some business done.  That's just one video.  I'm sure if I dig around on YouTube a bit more I can find a video of us actually hard at work...

Now, that video might not look like we're working, but trust me, that is some very serious research and development going on there.  Just look at how Myachi Man is taking notes with his mind...

Alright, so I admit it, we don't actually do a whole lot of work at these meetings.  Sometimes we actually do have business issues to go over, but we usually try to hammer that kind of stuff out in the first half hour of the meeting so we can spend the rest of the time goofing off and hanging out.  In two weeks time between all of us we've usually come up with at least a half dozen new tricks and combos and the meeting has become the de facto place to show off the latest and greatest challenges.

Last night was no exception.  We're putting together a cool little video so we spent more than half the night getting video of all the guys shredding.  I captured some really solid video of individual shreds as well as a couple of two and three person tricks and some circle jams as well.  We had a full house last night so it took until almost midnight to get everybody on camera but eventually I got jams from everyone present:

• Bones
• Bamboo
• Noodles
• Maverick
• Pinky
• Myachi Man
• Rush
• Kid Myach
• Unknown
• Prime
• Skratch
• Animal
• Me

Now, you'll probably notice that Monk and Kore aren't on the list but fear not.  They are actually both still on vacation this week so I'll be getting shreds from them in the next day or two (they may be on vacation, but they still live in the same house as me) and we'll put it all together over the next few days.

I'll put up some of the raw footage by Friday and link it here on the blog, but the finished product won't be done until Tuesday.  We're shooting for "coolest Myachi You Tube video of all time" with this one and we go into it fully aware of how difficult a task that is...