I'm Getting Back Into Yoyos
Hold on you are doing what?
Ok so look, I was born in the 80s and there was a huge yoyo fad in the 90s. While I was somehow the only person I knew in high school learning yoyo tricks, I knew it was a Whole Thing in the US. So I've wanted to be "good at" yoyos most of my life. And I felt I was ok. I didn't wander into adulthood believing I could just win competitions or blow people out of the water, but I knew how to do some difficult tricks.
NB: no I didn't.
Someone in a discord brought yoyos up; I think they shared some video or other. I mentioned I'd learned some stuff. So I walked by one of my old yoyos and put it on and messed with it some.
And then I went on reddit.
You'll be unsurprised to learn there's a community there for yoyo enthusiasts. And apart from an annoying tendency to respond to any questions about responsive yoyos with a comment about how the OP should just switch to unresponsive (I'll explain later I promise), it's a pretty decent community. There are tons of beginners posting and they mostly don't get shit on. So I ordered a recommended yoyo and watched some videos. And here I am, fulfilling a weird niche lifelong desire. I have also bought several other yoyos because I have a problem.
What did you buy?
So while it's not the most often recommended beginner yoyo, I already had some basic skill so I went with a Shooting Star. It's an H shape, which is a variation on the classic butterfly. I always used, I dunno what to call them, the puck shape, your "classic" yoyo.1 But the butterfly allows you to more easily slot the string into the yoyo for tricks. It's also adjustable: it comes with two axles and two bearings, one for responsive play and one for unresponsive. So I could try both.
Having done so, I went on to buy a Speedaholic XX, a devoted unresponsive yoyo, which I like quite well even though finger spins are more difficult on it. I have a Sunrise for looping tricks, and I am very much still a beginner on those. And I just recently got an Iceberg, which is basically the Shooting Star but with metal rims, to increase its rotational speed.
You said you'd tell me what the hell that "responsive" stuff means
So "responsive" is what you imagine a yoyo to be if you haven't tried both. You throw it, sleep it, and tug to get the yoyo to return. When you do that, the line goes slack briefly, when your hand lowers back towards the yoyo, and the spinning eats the slack and makes the yoyo return.
An "unresponsive" yoyo cannot do this. You can tug all you'd like; it will dangle until it dies. But it will take much longer to die on you, because the friction has been reduced with the unresponsive bearing.
The thing is, you do eventually want the yoyo to return. So you have to learn special tricks just to "bind" it. They're not necessarily hard. Well, not all of them. But they add an extra layer of complexity, since you must now go from doing a trick to doing at least two in sequence. And different tricks will require different binds, because of positioning and spin differences. So you can't really just learn one and practice until you're comfortable. You have to learn at least two. The day I switched for the first time and tried unresponsive, I hyperfixated for hours. I forgot to eat lunch. I didn't read or play video games. I was so sore. But I eventually got to the point where I could do some of the tricks again and return the yoyo.
So is there a point to this post or what?
I overthink everything, so I've been overthinking this too. After talking to my partner and some friends I've mostly put this idea into words I think.
We need hobbies. Humans, we need stuff that's not work. But, I have a ton of hobbies. So what's different about this one? I think, for me, there's no possibility of it ever mattering. This cannot, cannot be important. I could not make a career of this. I could not hustle money on the internet doing commissions with it. I cannot get it into my head that my self-worth is tied into my skill with this.
These things are not universally true in either direction. So, for me, music and art, writing and drawing and singing and playing instruments, they have a lot of self-worth tied into them. And I don't think that's uncommon; it's just not universal. Some of my friends say their music and drawing feels this way to them, that they can just enjoy doing it and feeling good about their improvements. One friend even barely shows anything they draw to anyone else. It's just for them. My partner writes some, still, but never shows anybody, they say. With these pursuits, I personally am too audience-centered; hell, I learned literal audience theory in my pedagogy classes and did my research project on it, for me, in my head, I theorize writing strictly as something pointed at a reader. I am aware some people write without an audience in mind, but I cannot wrap my head around it emotionally, whatever you want to call that real grasping of it.
This is the most important thing, and I'm breaking a structural rule by not ending on it I guess. For me, playing with a yoyo is a hobby that I don't feel guilty about when I mess up. I don't feel bad about myself as a person when I mess up a trick. I got very angry when I was messing up the Bucket and Barrel Roll tricks, but I didn't think I had to give up in despair or that I was useless. I just didn't like how my string was getting tied in knots or how I could not understand where my error was actually happening. Meanwhile, when I get a trick right, I feel great, both with the obvious sense of having succeeded at something I was trying to do and also the feeling of getting better at something I like. There's also, sometimes, a very visceral feeling of pleasure, in a way I remember from the scant handful of times I ever really nicely hit a baseball or made a shot in basketball -- the physical feeling of having coordinated my body correctly in tune with my mind's desires.
A side note about sports: they can probably also be this hobby for many, but for me, the idea of winning and losing comes into it too much. Yoyoing, like competitive baking or whatever, is kind of about putting on the best performance you can and then finding out which one the judges liked best at the end. It's still a competition (and like baking you can of course simply never enter a competition -- I probably never will). But you aren't actively trying to interfere with your fellow competitors.
The other direction is that people certainly do make money playing with yoyos. There are tournaments; players can get sponsors, end up running companies of their own, getting youtube famous, and so on. So they may very well feel differently about it than I do.
What if I want to try this nonsense out?
Both YoYoExpert and YoTricks have excellent playlists for beginners to go from knowing absolutely nothing to very complex tricks. I like both because they have different perspectives on showing you things. The former has what I would describe as an excellent "syllabus", the playlists go in a very coherent order that makes sense to follow; the latter spends time in many videos predicting common problems and how to fix them.
Both of those places are also businesses, and you can follow their profile links to their sites to buy stuff. If you don't want to go for a Shooting Star as your first yoyo, I have read a lot of good things about the YoTricks Sage, which is also convertible from one type to another.
Buy extra strings; I get Sochi Normal, again from a reddit recommendation. Get a 10 pack at least.
Get a bearing tool, by all that's holy. I could not get mine off with pliers.
Get some lube as well; a lot of people will say you only need responsive lube, that you should play unresponsive yoyos "dry." I'm by no means an expert on yoyos, but my time on this planet has led me to believe that grinding metal on metal at high speed, long term, is a bad idea. It will also scream in a way that will upset your cat. The lube quiets it down.
I think YoTricks has a starter pack with all this stuff. It might not have the tool actually.
It's an "imperial" except Duncan has a trademark on that and I've never heard another particularly good term for them. My looping yoyo I mention later is this shape.↩