Clicking on the map will take you to the sosauce.com trip page where you can zoom in and out stuff. Also, the trip starts and ends in Punta Arenas, number 1 and 8 on the map. This means a loooong journey just to get there.

Yes, I’m returning to Antarctica! It is, by far, the most amazing place I’ve been to while working on cruise ships. Last time I managed to get off the ship and get up close to penguins on the islands and mainland of Antarctica. I even have a stamp in my passport! This time the ship will be doing what’s call “Scenic Cruising” which means it doesn’t stop, and nobody gets off. I will, however, try my best to wangle my way onto the zodiac, which they let off the ship so the photographer can take photos in spectacular places.

Either way, I bough myself a new zoom lens, so I’ll try to do as much wildlife photographs as possible. I hope to photograph:
whales
penguins
orcas
seals
various birds

And, as you can see by the map, I’ll be back in the Falklands again, for the forth time in the past year, so I’ll once again do my traditional walk and see if the bird families have grown up.

Other goals for this cruise:

- Write. Or, more specifically, edit Combat (working title) and Monster Story (working title). Combat won’t take too much, but the ending needs to change. Monster Story needs more work, and I intend to break the story into two parts. From the feedback I found that people were interested in the back story, but I skip over these events in the novel. What I’m going to do is write the “getting to the planet” story as a stand alone novella, and explain the entire story there. Then Monster Story will become the second novella in a sequence. I always had one more story to tell in the same universe, so that could become part three in a trilogy.

- Shoot video. I just released my International Juggler 2009 video. It’s now 2010, and this year’s video will continue in a similar way, but with a twist. It’ll have more structure.

- Read and record SFBRP episodes. I’ve decided to try out audio books, mainly because I wanted to get a copy of The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, and audible could deliver it in minutes. Planning ahead means I could have ordered it from Amazon.com, but I’m not that clever.

- More video. I want to record some shaky footage of me in Montevideo and cut it into the Panic attacks video.

- New podcast. I’m thinking about starting a new podcast, where I release one per trip, telling stories and generally giving my thoughts about things I see and do. It’ll be called something like “Luke Around the World”, which is a crap pun, but sort of catchy. However, I only intend to release the podcast if I think it’s any good. Look out for that in a few weeks.

I think that’s about it. I’ll try to upload photos as I go.

This is the culmination of 12 months of traveling and juggling. The see the page on my website that explains pretty much everything about the video.

There are three main types of three club combat.

1.
The first is group combat, where it’s just a huge melee of jugglers, and it’s every man/woman for himself/herself. You can play this with three people, 30 people (at small juggling events), or 300 people (at the European Juggling Conventions). With a small number of people you can have “first to five wins” sessions, which makes it more interesting than just playing a series of one-off games.

At the larger events, during the “official” tournament, to counter the randomness of action in the large, crowded games, we have four rounds of open group games, then take the winners of the four games and put them into a four person final.

In 2009, I got through to the four person final, but was knocked out by Jochen, another Berlin juggler, who was the overall winner. This was the size of the match in 2009:

Here’s a video of the forth round of the four open games at the EJC in 2008. I went on to win the four person final:

But at conventions it’s not all about the “official” games; the more interesting sessions take place late at night. As soon as one game finishes, the next begins! And as you can play as long as you want, and drop out at any time, most nights the combat sessions last four or five hours. I and many others often play for over three hours at a time.

2.
One on one tournaments (or “Celebrity Fight Nights”) are events that normally last an hour and a half. Eight or twelve jugglers are invited to take part, and it’s knockout tournament, sometimes with group stages for the first rounds. This event is good entertainment for the audience, as the competitors play up their characters, WWE style, but the skill on display is as high as it gets. I’ve yet to win an EJC title, but have taken second place in four out of the last five EJC tournaments. I’ve lost to Jay Gilligan (the best player from America) twice and Jochen Pfeiffer (the best player from Germany) twice. Winning at the EJC is one of my life goals for 2010, although both Jay and Jochen will probably be there. Come to think of it, of the 20 or so Fight Nights I’ve played in, there have only been half a dozen individual winners. Jay Gilligan, Jochen Pfeiffer, Aaron Greg (from Canada), myself, Manu Laude (France), Florian Marienfeld (Berlin)… maybe one other person who has slipped my mind.

Here’s me and Jochen in the final round at the EJC 2009. We meet in final rounds quite often, and I’ve yet to beat him.

3.
The last kind of combat is Team Combat, where jugglers go two on two or three on three. There aren’t that many team events organized, as group and one on one tournaments are much easier to plan, but if you have four or six jugglers, team combat is by far the most interesting and tactical form of combat. Here’s a video of me and Flo vs JJ and DJ. It’s a few years old, but is the best breakdown of what can happen during a team combat match.

Combat is one of my favorite things about juggling, and juggling is my favorite hobby, as well as being my job. It has absolutely no use in a real fight, but it is a very complex and stupidly high skilled martial art.

1 – Work and travel:
1.1 – Keep working on cruise ships, though structuring the my time away better than last year to maximize time in Berlin/with friends/doing my own thing.
1.2 – I already know I’ll be visiting, on various cruises, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, India, and Dubai for the first time, along with a few other places. I may be going to Antarctica again too.
1.3 – On top of work travel, spend some frequent flier points and travel home from various gigs independently. In this way I hope to spend a week in New Zealand, and a week in Japan.
1.4 – Release my International Juggler 2009 video, the one I’ve been working on for the last year, which features me juggling in every country/place I visited.
1.5 – Shoot, edit, and release International Juggler 2010, a similar video as above, of all the places I visit in 2010. I have some ideas about how to make this different/better than the 2009 video, but I don’t need to think about that too much for the next few weeks.
1.6 – Go to Poland. I live really close, but have never been. What’s up with that?
1.7 – Go to the Berlin, British, and European juggling conventions. And a convention in September/October too. Maybe the Turkish again, maybe another.
1.8 – Spend four to six weeks in New York. I’ve visited the city for a few weeks, but I want to get to know the city better. I hear so many people from there talk about it, and I want to experience it all first hand.
1.9 – Maybe, if I can sort the dates right, I might go to DragonCon, to nerd out with the scifi and podcasting geeks.

2 – Juggling:
2.1 – Keep improving my solo shows and performing skills.
2.2 – Work on my Room show project, a juggling theater show. I plan to have all the set building work complete by March, and 20-30 minutes complete by May.
2.3 – Perform a short version of the Room Show at the Berlin Juggling Convention in June.
2.4 – Have an hour show finished by October, and put on a series of shows in my own home for invited audiences.
2.5 – Finish other juggling routines I’m working on at the moment.
2.6 – Run the British Young Juggler of the Year show for the sixth year. Also do a series of online workshops for those taking part, in attempt to raise the quality of the acts. Nobody has won a Gold Award yet!
2.7 – I’m in charge of the Open Stages at the EJC in Finland. That means seven or eight nights of zero stress and easy work as my superior organization skills result in everything running smoothly, and every night’s show rocking. Or so I hope.
2.8 – Generally rock out playing combat.
2.9 – Beat Jochen in the final of a Fight Night 3 Club Combat tournament. I’ve won a tournament we both entered before, but I wasn’t the one to knock him out.
2.10 – Release some more Juggling Podcasts.
2.11 – Release some interesting juggling videos on YouTube (I have a few good ideas).
2.12 – Juggle 9 clubs for 19 passes each with Pola.
2.13 – Also, depending other work commitments, I might enter Britain’s Got Talent. If I do have the time, the final decider will be the question “Will this cause me any stress at all?” At the moment I have very little stress in my life, by design, so I might as well keep it that way.

3 – Writing:
3.1 – Keep writing for this blog.
3.2 – Finish editing and release (and decide on final titles for) on my two works-in-progress novels: Combat Story and Monster Story. Completion dates: January and March.
3.3 – Have another run at Human Danger (working title), the novel I began but didn’t complete in 2009. I have a feeling this will be a longer-term project than just this year though.
3.4 – Research, outline, and write another novel I’m giving the working title “Arc of Life.” It’ll be a fantasy novel set in a world of strange creatures and magic. My fiction writing style at the moment is very much a “just get on with the plot” kind of thing, which means a lot is packed into a very small package. This works well for near-future science fiction thrillers. Writing fantasy set in a strange new world with a completely different history and landscape than our own will hopefully force me to concentrate more on descriptive scene-setting writing, rather than character, dialogue, and action.
3.5 – Start work on the final novel in the Minding Tomorrow world.
3.6 – Do an audio recording of one of my novels. As long as I keep my novels short, this could be a good way to get more readers/listeners. I’d need to buy a new microphone though.

4 – Podcasting:
4.1 – Keep reading science fiction novels and reviewing them for the Science Fiction Book Review Podcast. I also plan to review any fantasy novels I read.
4.2 – Be a guest on other podcasts. I know I’ll be back on the SFFaudio podcast at some point.
4.3 – Doing some more Juggling Podcasts. I really miss the interviews I did with other jugglers.
4.4 – I’m thinking of starting a new podcast about traveling. I enjoy posting photos here on the blog, but I see and do lots of things that I never write about here. For example, I have a lot to say about a place like Punta Arenas, but it’s not the kind of thing that would work as a blog post. I’m thinking of doing a trip-by-trip podcast, or just saving up enough observations and stories and experiences to fill 45 minutes, and releasing it whenever.
4.5 – If I’m going to do this, I’m going to buy a portable mp3 recorder with a mic attachment, so I can record easily while hiking across a city or up a hill.
4.6 – Thinking about that last point, what I should actually do is see if my iPhone would work just as well, as then I need to carry one less gadget.

5 – Photography:
5.1 – I have no plans for my photography. It’s the only hobby I have which has no performance aspect at all (I even podcast about my reading), so there is no pressure to do anything at all. I’ll just keep carrying my camera, and keep improving my skills and artistry.
5.2 – But I will try to keep posting photos to my blog.
5.3 – And I’m going to buy a new zoom lens, because the autofocus on my current (really shitty) zoom lens is broken.
5.4 – And I’ll probably buy another two or three camera bags.

6 – Music:
6.1 – Write an album’s-worth of new songs and record them by the end of the year.
6.2 – Write the music for Room.
6.3 – Buy a five string bass guitar and learn to rock.

7 – Other goals:
7.1 – Get better at speaking German. I plan to hire a personal tutor, as regular classes don’t work with my schedule.
7.2 – Try to spend a few hours a week in the gym whenever I’m on a cruise ship. I spend way more time than that in the bars, and in the jacuzzis, and eating, and other unhealthy things. A few hours in the gym will help me keep my fitness levels up.
7.3 – Spend more time with friends.
7.4 – Make new friends.
7.5 – Have sex.
7.6 – Maybe buy a new laptop. This macbook has served me well for almost two years, but I’m doing more and more music and video and photo editing, and it’s struggling a bit. I think I’ll buy a full spec 13″ MacBook Pro, and upgrade to a solid state hard drive for super quick load times.

8 – Consumption of entertainment:
8.1 – Catch up with Dexter.
8.2 – Watch more than the first episode of Battlestar Galactica. I’ve had the season 1 box set in my cabin(s) for the past eight weeks, and haven’t watched a single episode.
8.3 – Play more Natural Selection and, if it is ever released, Natural Selection 2. I might need more memory for my PC though.

I think that’s about it! The most important things to me out of all these are continued success with my job and the Room show. Unfortunately these two are at odds, as one requires me to travel, and the other requires me to be in Berlin.

Or maybe, looking at it glass full, the two goals create a balance, so when I’m not doing one, I should be working on the other.

Or maybe, if I work hard enough, the Room show can become my job by the end of the year, and then I don’t have to worry. So, if I have nothing to show for the Room project by April, you have permission to slap me hard.

And so, after making a list of all I’ve accomplished in 2009, and seeing how long it is, I’m very proud of my productivity for the year.

In the Win Column.

Work and travel:
- Got a lot better at performing. I got some really good compliments from people who saw me perform my show on a cruise ship back in 2007, and now again in 2009, and they said I’d really improved. This makes me feel good.
- Earned more money than I’ve been able to spend.
- Visited about 45 countries and territories, including many countries I’ve never visited before 2009. For example, I’d never visited Africa before 2009, and now I’ve been to Tanzania, Kenya, Morocco, and Egypt.
- Had really good summer trip to France, Spain, and Portugal.
- Did some good shows at street show festivals in Germany and Austria.
- Made an awesome video of me juggling in all the above countries, a video I’ll be releasing in January. I’ll release this very soon.
- Attended TAMLondon.
- And of course, while it isn’t a “productivity” or “accomplishment” thing, I’ve met loads of people along the way and made many new friends.

Juggling:
- Playing lots of combat.
- Did no performing or hosting at the Berlin convention. This was the plan, and I managed it for the first time in five years.
- Organized the British Young Juggler of the Year competition for the fifth year in the row.
- Hosted a good show at the EJC.
- After wanting to go for the past three years, I finally got to the Sundance Turkish Juggling Festival. I performed my full show, exactly the same as I normally do it for non-jugglers, and it went down really well. This means a lot to me, as I never want to make juggling acts for anyone else but me, and if I enjoy it, I think both juggling and non-juggling audiences should like it too.
- Created four new juggling routines and acts. Most importantly, these acts use juggling equipment I already carry in my case. This means I’m progressively taking less equipment for more minutes of material.
- Released loads of videos on YouTube, including magnet juggling, air bounces, squeeze catches, act videos, and more. Also I released a few 10 minute workshop videos about juggling.

Writing:
- Started yet another blog, and kept posting without many breaks.
- Released my first novel “Minding Tomorrow” online for free, as an eBook. I got loads of great feedback about it.
- Completed two other novels, though I’m still editing both of them. I should release them both over the next few months.
- Started writing a third novel, and while I didn’t complete it, I did learn a lot.
- Wrote a load of articles and workshops for the Kaskade magazine.
- After a year of reading, thinking, and studying, wrote my first Higher Biblical Criticism essay.

Reading and podcasting:
- Read about 40 novels.
- Reviewed all but one or two of those novels for the Science Fiction Book Review Podcast.
- Joined other podcasts as a guest, including the Friday Night Party Line, The Sofanauts, and SFFaudio. This is always a lot of fun, and I’d like to do more in the future.

Photography:
- This has become much more of a hobby for me in the past year, and I’m becoming more and more impressed with the images I’m capturing.
- I kept a photo blog at the EJC and the Turkish Juggling Festival, both of which I really enjoyed.
- I’ve had quite a few images picked for the sosauce.com photo of the day.

Music:
- Wrote six or seven songs.
- Recorded four music tracks.
- Bought a new guitar.
- Performed my very first solo singing and guitar playing set.

In the Fail Column.

- Back injury put me out of action for two months at the start of the year.
- Getting dumped by my girlfriend in August.
- Only having gay men hit on me since I’ve been single.
- Spending too much time away from Berlin, which means I don’t see as much of my friends as I’d like, and the projects I work on at home suffer.
- Not improving much with my German speaking skills, even though I can carry off simple conversations.
- Not progressing very far with my Room Project, a new juggling theater show that has been in the works for two years now.
- Not winning the Fight Night 3 Club Combat Tournaments at either the Berlin or European juggling conventions. I lost to Jochen in the final both times.
- After winning the 3 club combat in the official EJC games in 2008, I only came third in 2009. Come to think of it, I might have won the BJC games combat, but can’t remember.
- New Years Resolution: learning to touch type. I didn’t do this. I find the hand position on my laptop too difficult, as I end up resting them on the mouse pad. And also there’s this really hot spot under the heel of my left hand…

Also, left over from mine and Pola’s “10 Personal Juggling Goals for 2009″ list that we did in the end of 2008 Juggling Podcast, here are some that we failed:
- 9 clubs, 18 passes each.
- Motion tracking routines. I worked on this a bit, but the return on investment probably isn’t very high.
- Host shows together.
- Perform on cruise ships together.
- More Juggling Podcasts.

Meanwhile, in 2009, I’ve been enjoying:
- The computer game Natural Selection.
- The TV show Dexter.
- Watching Tennis and American Football.
- The following podcasts (in alphabetical order): Astronomy Cast, The Bible Geek, The Bugle, Collings and Herrin, Fighting Talk, Filmspotting, gadget, GeekNights, The Good Atheist, In Our Time, Little Atoms, Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo, More or Less, Norman Centuries, Point of Inquiry, Richard Herring’s As It Occurs to me, Science Fiction and Politics, SFFaudio, The Skeptic’s Guide, Skeptoid, The Sofanauts, This Week in Google, This Week in Photography, and Writing Excuses. I listened to other podcasts, but not every episode, and not regularly.

So that’s my showing for 2009! Tomorrow I’ll post my goals and plans for 2010 and the years ahead.

One of the main reasons I didn’t enjoy it, I think, was because I really didn’t understand what was going on. After seeing more games, I understood much more, and could appreciate it on a more tactical level. But it’s still pretty dull.

As a juggler, and an entertainer, I try to do something new, or say something interesting, or make the audience laugh at least once every 10 to 15 seconds. That means, in a 45 minute long show, about 200-250 points of engagement.

With soccer? Something interesting happens only once every two or three minutes, and the vast majority of those end in failure. The rest of the time the guys just kick the ball about, tediously lining each other up, getting into position, faffing about, diving on the floor at the merest touch. Yawn…

So, this is why (among other reasons) I enjoy watching tennis. There’s a constant one-on-one battle, and within a minute someone WILL score a few points. And every contact between the ball and a racket has importance, as if it isn’t perfect (or lucky) they’ll be a point or game or set or match down. In soccer, if someone makes a bad pass, it probably won’t matter, as the other side probably won’t score, and they’ll get possesion back in a minute or so.

Which brings me to American Football, a sport I’ve been watching more and more over the last few years as I’ve worked on cruise ships. ESPN is always available, and you can see games every night of every weekend at this time of year. Now, when I first watched a game, I was put off by how often it stopped, and how many adverts they showed between plays. There was also the whole average time between engagements thing too, where the stop-start nature meant that something interesting happened only once every few minutes. And, as it’s an excruciatingly complex game, I had the not-really-understanding-what-the-hell-is-going-on problem too. And the games a looooong.
That’s a lot of negatives. But I’ve been completely won over.

First, I don’t mind the adverts, because outside of the USA ESPN shows its own adverts, talking about their own programming, not those for other companies, and as they repeat them so much they are completely ignorable. And it’s not as if we’re missing anything during the adverts. I bet you could play as many adverts during a soccer game, over the time that they’re tediously kicking the ball to other players on their own team, without missing anything interesting too!

Second, I understand what’s going on now, and really appreciate the depth of the game. Some of the rules seem a bit “Um… what? Okay then…” and it’s funny that quite a lot of the players don’t know the rules in many situations… “Wait, was that a forward fumble or an interception? And if I touch the ball now does that mean something or not?”

Third, while the average time between engagements is long, every single play is filled with immense skill, strength, tactical depth, athleticism, huge guys pounding each other into the grass, etc. What’s not to like?

Forth, each one of those engagements has a much higher chance of success. Unlike soccer, where success on the part of the attacking team comes maybe two or three times per game, almost every play in American Football gets the team closer to their goal.

Fifth, mistakes matter! If your team makes three or four mess-ups in a game, and your opponents only make one, you’re screeeeeeeeewed.

Sixth, there’s no faking injuries when someone sneezes near another player on the field.

There’s probably more things I could say about what I like about watching American Football over soccer, but I’ll leave it there.

Now basketball… there’s a sport where engagements happen four times a minute, but each one is so repetitive and meaningless that you might as well not bother watching. I have ideas about how to make that sport more interesting, but I’ll save them for another post.

“Naive Juggling”
January 21st, 2006

There are many kinds of art, and each school has its own name and history. Apart from all these usual schools of painting is “Naive Art”, a painting by someone outside of any art tradition, with no art training, with limited experience of other painting… resulting in pictures that may, at first glance, look good, but take a closer look and things are a bit off; wonky perspective, strange colours, blocky composition, etc.

I have noticed the phenomenon that I call “Naive Juggling”. Most people are taught how to juggle by other jugglers, but there are many people who teach themselves tricks out of order, or use strange techniques that most jugglers find more difficult, or are just plain wrong. The most common examples of naive juggling are those people who know how to juggle the two ball shower, want to learn three balls, so do so using the shower pattern (normally considered much harder than the cascade). Some jugglers learn the reverse cascade before the cascade. I even remember my brother and I trying to work out how to pass clubs; we decided that the right way must be to throw every pass with reverse spin, so it lands in the other person’s hand in the same position as a normal self throw. We were 14.

In each of these cases the skills involved are not that advanced. Maybe some people go on to learn the 4 ball shower, or find the 5 ball reverse cascade easier when they get to that level, but normally these “mistakes” are caught by other jugglers and corrected before the naive juggler starts learning more technical skills.

But a few days ago I met Andreas. He learned to juggle in isolation… and all was normal when learning 3, 4, 5 6 balls. Then 3 clubs, in the cascade. Then 4 clubs, in the triple-single, half shower pattern. Not the most common pattern, but I do know others who only use this pattern for 4 clubs, not bothering with the fountain.

Then he started learning the 5 club cascade. His right hand was so used to throwing triples he didn’t want to learn the pattern on doubles. But then his left hand was so used to throwing singles, so he didn’t want to have to learn left handed triples to match his right hand. So he learned the pattern with his right hand throwing triples and his left throwing doubles! Nobody told him this was really wrong; to him it was just the most natural way to juggle. Even so, his pattern is really solid, all the clubs go to exactly the same height, and he keeps it going for a few hundred catches without much trouble. At first you don’t see anything wrong, but look closer, or have it pointed out, and it just looks wrong!

“And I’m told the easiest 6 club pattern is the triple-double half shower,” says Andreas, “so I’ll have an advantage when I get there…”

My goals for the trip, and if I managed to reach them:

- Do some good shows. Tick!

- Hang out with friends on the Prinsendam. Tick!

- Finish the music track for my video project. Tick! I’m really happy with it, but I might re-record the vocals.

- Get the last few shots and do a final edit on the video project. Tick!

- Visit some new places. Tick! Lanzarote was good fun, as was my two days on Aruba.

- Write the second half of my NaNoWriMo novel. Fail! I was working on other stuff. and, to be honest, sort of got hung up on the three quarters problem, and didn’t push through to the end. And this was three quarter of the second half of the novel, and a short novel at that, so I’ve probably only got 6,000 words to write.

- Take some cool photos, and generally get better at photography. Tick!

- Juggle a lot. Fail! Due to hurting my left thumb really badly during a game of combat before I left, I’ve done very little club juggling. Ring juggling is coming on well though. I think when I get back to Berlin I’m going to sign up for a week’s training with Sergei Ignatov to see if I can get some intensive learning with rings.

- Read a few novels and release some podcasts. Tick! Due to a non-shit connection at 2am on the cruise ships, I’ve even uploaded the podcasts while at sea, something that is normally too much of a pain and too expensive. I didn’t bother with Atlas Shrugged, and reviewed the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Makers, the new novel by Cory Doctorow. I also read Shadow Magic by John Lenahan. And The Warrior Prophet by R. Scott Bakker, which I really, really enjoyed. And Exodus.

Highlights from the trip:

- Standing ovations in my shows. Also all the comments from guests and other entertainers about how much they enjoy my show.

- The trip up to the volcano on the island of Lanzarote.

- John Lenahan’s “magic” show. And Diemos’ Draculaphone routine.

- Watching the whole of season 1 of Dexter. Very, very good TV.

- The boat trips and the private island in Aruba. Also taking photos of lizards. Animals that stay still a lot, and look at you a lot, are very easy subjects.

I was planning to drop photos from my trip into this post, but I’ve shared quite a few already, and don’t have time to add them individually before I get on my flight down to Buenos Aires (I’m writing this at my departure gate in Miami International Airport, thanks to Google for the free wifi).

Instead I’ll add all the photos as a slide show, and add a new post in a few days about the second half of this 2 month trip: