I’ve been thinking about text based yo-yo descriptions lately and thinking back on McBride’s TFY notation from Yonomicon. TFY was a system to describe every state a yo-yo could be in by using three reference points: Throwhand, Freehand, and Yo-yo.
For example; Brain Twister would be described as “Front Top Single Mount-Bs.YF(3), Forward Twist, Exit”.
In that example you would start with your throwhand and work your way through to the yo-yo at the end of the string. Throwhand and Yo-yo are always assumed at the beginning and end, so the notation for the mount is simply YF (or TYFY if you were showing the beginning and end in the notation, but since those are always there the notation is just YF).
Double or Nothing would be described as FTYF. Again the yo-yo string goes from your Throwhand (assumed), to your Freehand, to your Throwhand again, then to the Yo-Yo (mounted on the string), then to your Freehand, and ending back at the Yo-yo (which again is not in the notation because that position is assumed). So Freehand, Throwhand, Yo-Yo, Freehand.
To be honest, I never fully grokked the notation and I think it became harder to use when tricks started changing planes (flops) or using multiple planes (like a wrist mount). I might be wrong, it might be totally still functional for describing tricks, but videos just ended up doing a better job. If anyone is looking for more info, you can read some of the chapters here on the Wayback Machine or probably find a used copy of the book somewhere. I don’t think YYE has any in stock.
To get to my question though, I’m working on an art project that involves transcribing some of my tricks into text and I thought TFY could be perfect. As I said before, I don’t really understand most of it, so I thought I’d check and see if anyone here could help me describe the following tricks in TFY:
- Skin The Gerbil
- Branding
- Gyroscopic Flop