Construction and slot choice

Something being subjective isn't inherently bad. Musical and artistic tastes are completely subjective and yet we can have plenty of constructive conversations about them. In my last article I argued that difficulty is subjective to such a degree that there is no fruitful conversation to be had just by focusing on that criteria. This can leave a bitter taste, but my ultimate point is not to say that there is nothing to discuss at all, but that we need to find what is worth discussing.

Sense and nonsense

With a slight rephrasing, the problem about difficulty turns into a well studied topic in philosophy: ethics. Difficulty, or more generally, tournament criteria can be said to be the sets of values that allow us to make sensible judgements about the worth of a combo, in the same sense that ethical values are those corresponding to human actions. From Plato to Thomas Aquinas to Kant to Nietzsche to postmodern philosophers, the origin of moral and ethical values has been argued to come from many different places: eternal ideas, God, logic, our society, our own experience, science...

Without delving too deep in it, let's just say that trying to find the origins of those values in something external and eternal that we can access through some method (practice, logic, experience etc) just doesn't end very well. In addition to that, the debates about where do those values come from (philosophy) and how to apply those values (law) are quite distinct, so for the purposes of this article let's just focus on the latter.

These criteria have two purposes within our community: to lead to fruitful conversations and for tournaments to be as fair as possible. In the topic of difficulty, there clearly is something that we experience, that gives value to some pieces of pen spinning and not to others. However, difficulty is, ultimately, a personal experience. The amount of time that I spend to learn something, the boundary that separates what I can and can't do is of no use to other people, it's not a constructive conversation and is a terrible gauge for judging tournaments. It's this huge affinity bias what leads us to think in terms of our common experience as a community, and why I discourage the use of difficulty as a concept.

It's a matter of vocabulary

All activities have their own set of terms, but I think that what's beautiful about pen spinning is that the constant innovation and the small and invested community is the perfect environment for the creation of new terms. Being able to express our ideas is the first step towards perfecting our understanding. A simplified view of the role of vocabulary in pen spinning is shown here:

If this makes sense to you, then it should be obvious why I want the focus of conversations to move away from difficulty and towards other concepts. We need to find what is that we all experience, name it and talk about it, and move away from terms which are too vague.

Let's not talk about difficulty, but rather about...

1) Construction. Extra 0.5 revolutions in a random trick increase "difficulty" but are less interesting that extra 0.5 revolutions in a different one with the purpose of increasing the impact of the trick, its visibility or to change the position of the pen to a latter one. Our perceptions of how "difficult" each of those 0.5 rev increments are will never agree, but we can all learn from how cleverly a linkage is designed.

 

2) Density. As nine explains very nicely in his recent article, density is a good way of increasing the "difficulty" of a combo. Let me talk more about it in just a moment.

3) Tension and release. It is "difficult" to implement those concepts in a combo, but when talking about tension and release we focus on a visual aspect that we all experience. It is also related to execution, but this term is more precise.

4) Finger positioning. Being mindful of how our fingers appear on camera, under how much tension they are because of the trick choices or the weight of the pen, that takes time and experience and is certainly "difficult". Again, the visual element is something that we all experience equally, so even talking about our (subjective) tastes is constructive.

Density is alright, but...

There is a inherent problem with density, but it's different to that of difficulty. A movement being an hybrid or not is ill-defined, not because of our experiences are different but because it depends on our definition of a "trick". For example:

bak > midbak > ringbak > pinkybak

This is a bakfall, and we would say that it's not an hybrid, but four tricks slapped one after the other, right? Well, what about this:

bakfall ~> pinkybak

This is technically a hybrid. A trick was cut short (bakfall) so I could do another one (pinkybak). This is represented by the ~. But these are just the same! This may seem like a technicality, but it is not. Anyone who has gone through all of the notation sections of my book will understand the trouble of defining what a trick is or isn't. Whether we divide tricks in sequences of pushes, spins and catches (PSC), rotations and translations of the pen center (elementary notation) or movements of the tips of the mod (other possible elementary notation), the definition of a trick changes and thus there is no coherent way to define a hybrid.

This is a clear indicator that we need to refine our vocabulary. Forget about the troubles of trying to define "trick" and "hybrid" and try to find what is our common experience of a "hybrid" that raises whatever "difficulty" may be. My proposals are:

1) Charge removal. Also known as Japanese motion. This concept can also be framed within "hybridization", but it is more precise in the sense that in it's core, it doesn't require defining "trick". The only thing that it says is that if you remove any amount of charges (usually 0.5) from your pen movements, then you're doing a Japanese motion. We can then argue that this adds value ("difficulty") to the combo.

2) Slot choices. Charge removal is clearly not all that there is. A sonic clip can be said to be more "difficult" than a regular sonic and yet it has more charges, not less. This may seem unrelated to the topic of density, but don't forget that a fishing is just a fingerless charge! Removing it makes a combo shorter, but definitely not less "difficult" and not less "dense". The idea here is that the extra charge in some slots (13, 24 or 14 in a sonic clip, over some fingers in a fishing) adds value to the combo, while extra charges in slots like 12, 23 or Tf may not (always talking about "density", not spinning in general).

We can push this idea even more and realize that interesting slot choices is the core concept behind many "hybrids". For example, in nine's MISS, it's the several motions in slots like 13, 24 or 14 what adds value, rather than splitting the trick in two and going through slots like 12 or 23. In this backaround JP motion I'm skipping the slot T1, and putting the pen in 1* (over 1) instead.

3) Construction. Again, the strategic removal of certain parts of a combo can be discussed under the idea of combo construction, as removing different parts adds more or less value to the final result.

Conclusion

What is it about theoretical physicists that they like to meddle into everything? Well, apparently building giant metallic donuts gives us permission to talk about philosophy, linguistics and pandemic modeling. 

 

I already blew my best material on R1 with fel2fram's flying sausage quote so I have to resort to cheaper jokes. Filler, bad finisher, difficulty 3/10. Maybe next time.