The truth about Vertax.
...can finally be revealed in this thread (click!):
https://mastodon.social/@docpop/113234213120973371
...which then veers off into loop diabolo and yo-yo talk. (Check out Doc Pop's Loop vid while you're there.) Which also makes me wonder when I first saw loop diabolo. I'm fairly sure someone was doing it in London in the mid-90s. I suspect Sam, who I shall now email. I wonder if there are any clips of it in any old Alan Plotkin videos. I'd probably have to watch them to find out though, and that's going to take a lot of time. :-) (Plus, I think he took down the all his full convention videos 'cos of music rights.)
(Meanwhile, since it was a t-shirt post that started this all off...)
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dot sig says Free P&P from 3-8th October!
https://tlmb.net/tees/
IT WAS YOU?!!
Well done, some people briefly called it Excalibur which was clearly a rubbish name. Glad vertax stuck!
Little Paul - - Parent #
“Excalibur? That’s not even a good name for a sword”
Upon first trying to remember loop diabolo, an image of Sam (Veale, btw) sprang to mind, but also the possibility that Donald Grant or Bruce had showed me something, perhaps in early '94, but that memory was hazier. I've now asked Sam, and he says he indeed played with loop diabolo, but credits it to Donald. And, on looking into his books, I find in 1996's Totally Diabolical, the description of what he called Diaboloop.
Sam also cites Venus as doing the first vertax he saw - (which also jogs my memory: deliberate tilting of the #diabolo, in order to go into...) the gyro grind.
I do recall correcting someone who said "horizontal diabolo" with "it's called Vertax", and then thinking "am I going to get away with this? Yeah, I think I just did...". Thankfully, it needed no intervention from me for the analagous backronym of "horax" that someone came up with to die a quick death. (Seuss meets Rowling?)
I miss DCA. The gang there would've enjoyed this. So it goes...
Yours ipsedixitistically,
Void
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dot sig says Free P&P from 3-8th October!
https://tlmb.net/tees/
Apparently I was doing two in and on a loop in late ‘95, and I think Dave Proctor was, as with everything else, a big influence. I would guess that one diabolo loop stuff would predate that by well more than a couple of years.
.sig is on a train. Just passed through Obdam. Still can’t avoid reading that as ‘Obligatory dam’.
I like how it all developed. Thanks for starting with the term vertax!
IIRC the french used to call a vertax genocide excalibur, because you were cutting the air with the diabolo sticks and string like a sword.
Marko Akkanen did a video about how to move with your diabolo in vertax: https://youtu.be/Pox_ksO53fk
I came late to the scene in 2009. Were Tr'espace and Ryo Yabe inspirational for your t-shirt design?
I liked how your T-Shirts "Vertax is rubbish" influenced Alexis Levillon to post a video called "Vertax is not rubbish": https://youtu.be/l72lbLbcXyM. Later he even did 3 diabolos in vertax: https://youtu.be/jgtvYG8nRVY
Alexis invented then the combination of vertax and horizontal with https://youtu.be/3xBNIgN7ouk. The diabolo.ca community coined the term galaxy to attribute the trick to Alexis.
Nowadays vertax has become very popular in the scene, especially in Asia.
Is there more historical information online about vertax diabolo?
As a reference source, DCA is alive and well (but not thriving) in the archive. So to answer your question, no, this thread is what inspired the t-shirt:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230329184450/https://diabolo.ca/forum/index.php?topic=3153.0
So, there’s probably a lot more info about vertax in there, you care to trawl through it. There’s also a site called something like “the museum of diabolo history”. Or was, at least. I’ll see if I can find the link for you…
I just needed to remember that it was French:
https://www.museediabolo.fr/
Yes I know that site and there is a museum in China as well. I was thinking about the newer developments in the past 30 years. I guess your link to the internet archive for dca is the best information we have. Thanks!
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