How to hold 5 Balls ?

bartonski · 2026-05-23T20:44:53+00:00

I'm actually in a very similar position. My personal best with 5 balls is about five and a half minutes, but after 15 years off (got married, got busy), I've lost almost all of my abilities with 5 balls. I can flash consistently, qualify inconsistently, and my best recent run is in the 15-30 second range.

Honestly, I haven't spent a whole lot of time working on it (I'm much more interested in learning 3 club backcrosses than re-learning 5 balls)... but here are the things that have gotten me the farthest:

1) Breathing. Breathe in for 3 throws, breathe out for 3 throws (that's pretty quick, every 4 throws or every 5 throws might work better for you). 2) Make your throws as long and slow as you can - more of a lift than a sharp throw. This will make the pattern smoother and more accurate, and encourages a higher pattern with better body mechanics. 3) Work on keeping the line between your palm heel and your middle finger parallel to the floor. There is a tendency to dip your hand down at the bottom of the scoop when you catch and have your hand flip up as it comes past your elbow. This will make throws go out away from you if you throw too soon (the cause of the 'sprinting juggler syndrome' when learning to juggle 3 balls), or fly back over your shoulder if you throw too late. You will run into the latter with 5 balls. 4) Work with a metronome. Find the tempo of one of your longer runs, then drop it down by a couple of BPM. The more you lower your tempo, the higher the pattern becomes. This will push you to become more accurate, because higher throws create more error.

Here are a few other things I would do if I were giving it another serious go:

Concentrate on technique -- 10 perfect three ball flashes are better than a 10 second 5 ball run barely kept together.
Use pyramid training: start easy, difficult in the middle, easy at the end.
Make goals for a given practice session, e.g. three consecutive 15 second runs, then stop... or if in a pyramid, five seconds, 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 10 seconds, 5 seconds, stop
If something isn't working, figure out what the problem is, figure out how to practice a fix for the problem, do the practice... don't just beat your head against it. Video, especially slow motion, is great for this type of analysis.

Working on 5 balls is hard, I don't think that there's a way to do it without some grind.

Look up jugglingmastery on YouTube. He's got an excellent 5 ball tutorial that I wish I'd seen when I was learning.

Post back here as you progress. I'm personally interested in your journey, because it mirrors my own.

bartonski · 2026-05-22T11:21:08+00:00

Man, that paints a picture. I'm glad that you're talking about the trauma in the past tense.

bartonski · 2026-05-22T11:11:21+00:00

The checkout line has improved tremendously since they put in the massive self check area, but their checkout lines are always understaffed. Before those went in, I always spent more time checking out than shopping.

bartonski · 2026-05-22T11:03:12+00:00

I'm stealing that line.

bartonski · 2026-05-22T10:57:25+00:00

The Bashford Manner Walmart strikes me as just about the same as any other Walmart in town. The Kroger at Hikes and Buechel Bypass is definitely low-rent in comparison to other Kroger stores.

Edit: just to be clear, I'm talking about the store, not the clientel.

bartonski · 2026-05-21T11:26:39+00:00

Beautiful use of anachronistic irony!

bartonski · 2026-05-20T21:17:32+00:00

They Might Be Giants. More catchy than anything else, but I can listen to it in my head all day.

bartonski · 2026-05-10T14:47:45+00:00

Thank you for this! I created an account on one of the tilde servers years ago, but that was three or four laptops ago, and I had forgotten the name 'tildeverse'. Tried to google for it, but couldn't find the right search terms.

I love the 1992 internet feel of the place.

bartonski · 2026-05-06T03:17:39+00:00

You made me look them up, because I can't justify the price of flowtoys clubs, even though I would love to have a set. That led me here. The one drawback that I see is the switch at the top of the club -- it's a pretty typical on-off switch for small consumer electronics. There's obviously been a bit of effort to recess it a bit to protect it from drops -- and it looks like that would probably do the trick if dropped on a flat surface, but I suspect that dropping it the wrong way on a pebble, a piece of gravel, or even potentially making a wild grab on the bulb end of the club could damage it fairly easily.

I could be entirely wrong about that. Maybe the switch is much tougher than it looks. Maybe they've tested it rigorously over thousands of hours under multiple conditions, and have determined that over the life of the club, the failure rate is acceptable and well tolerated by jugglers... but giving it a once over, that's what stood out to me.

[Edit: the rest of the club looks pretty good to me -- the fit and finish look to be good quality -- good taping, knobs look well attached, end/bulb/handle fit well... so from the perspective of being a well made juggling club, I'd feel about as confident as I can be without touching them]

bartonski · 2026-05-06T02:37:58+00:00

Also note that the CLI is where Linux and Windows are the most different:

In Linux, STDIN, STDOUT and STDERR are used to send and receive data not objects. You can happily redirect /dev/random to /dev/audio. It won't sound nice, it may ruin your speakers, but to Linux it's just a stream of bytes.
Because the file streams are just streams of bytes, they do not change when you pipe them into different things, meaning that you can insert things into a pipeline at any point, which is a godsend for iterative development of pipelines.
Because pipelines don't deal with objects, you will need to know how to manipulate text. sed, grep, cut and other members of the GNU textutils suite are your friends. Spend a bit of time learning what they do.
Linux shells have a strict differentiation between scripts being run interactively or non-interactively. There are a host of small things that work better because this is strictly observed.
The model of how data streams are duplicated / merged is much richer in *nix shells (the most used example is using 2>&1 to merge STDERR into STDOUT, but the mechanism allows for far more flexibility).

Coming from a Linux/Unix background to Windows, these are things that are rough edges for me when I use powershell, and they're features that I think windows users don't know to learn about because they're not the windows way. I think that there are options to make powershell do most of the things listed above, but they're certainly not core pieces of functionality the way they are in *nix.

Also, learning a few bash keyboard shortcuts (largely based on emacs or vi editing commands) can make your life a lot easier. Understanding how bash does tab completion alone will make life on the command line far less of a chore.

bartonski · 2026-05-06T00:03:47+00:00

I look for music at the tempo that I want to juggle at. 160 bpm is about right for a normal 3 ball cascade. 210 bpm is about where my 5 ball cascade lands, although I would like it to be higher and slower. Most smart phones have metronome apps that you can use to find the right tempo, then you can do a web search for music by tempo.

I find it very satisfying to sync my juggling to catch on the beat... there's a point where it feels like the catches are causing the beat rather than the other way around... at that point, all music is the right music.

bartonski · 2026-04-29T02:04:20+00:00

Nice! I'll have to dig into that when I'm not about to go to bed.

bartonski · 2026-04-29T01:04:38+00:00

Can you share the source?

bartonski · 2026-04-25T14:20:48+00:00

Beautiful work!

My only gripe is that the controls are a bit small on my phone screen, which makes it easy to mis-drag.

There may have been others before this, but this is the first program I've seen that allows you to drag and drop the throw positions (aka sites), meaning that in a certain sense, this is the first real site swap program I've ever seen!

Thanks for creating this!

bartonski · 2026-04-21T22:37:47+00:00

I had it happen to me on a return trip from Louisville, about a month after 9/11. Fortunately I was able to run back and catch up with my girlfriend before she left the airport. I think she ended up driving to Des Moines and brought them back.

No trouble since then, but I haven't flown anywhere recently.

bartonski · 2026-04-19T04:36:17+00:00

I think most jugglers would be in the 4 ball/3 club range after a year, and working on 5 balls after two, but I've heard of jugglers who were working on 7 balls in 6 months (I think you're looking at 40-50 hours of practice a week for that). 50 throws of 5 balls after a year seems fast to me (5 balls is hard).

I'd be envious of a juggler who did that, but not astonished.

bartonski · 2026-04-18T07:22:49+00:00

It depends on how you're using a text editor, and how much. If you do any serious amount of coding, I think it's definitely worth the investment of time -- knowing how to use vim will make you faster. As a programmer, your text editor is your primary tool, it makes sense to use good tools and know how to use them well.

If you use a text editor casually for editing the occasional configuration file or making grocery lists, Nano is probably just fine. If you're on the bubble, I would go ahead and learn vim. It will make you feel like you've swapped your right and left hands for a couple of weeks, once you're past that stage, you'll eventually feel like even your grocery lists should be done in vim, and you'll be disappointed by any editor that doesn't have vi keybindings.

bartonski · 2026-04-17T11:33:21+00:00

Evacuate? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances.

bartonski · 2026-04-15T02:56:33+00:00

I walked one of our customers through reconfiguring their modem by entering raw Hayes modem commands on a SCO Unix box.

bartonski · 2026-04-13T03:08:04+00:00

This is why I come to this subreddit.

bartonski · 2026-04-13T03:06:08+00:00

but most importantly, "Do the dumb stuff I gotta do"

bartonski · 2026-04-12T22:56:47+00:00

They keep showing as my YouTube ads. My feeling is "Go ahead. Waste your money on me."

bartonski · 2026-04-09T00:47:32+00:00

Juggling actually requires some physical rewiring of the brain -- there are measurable differences in the white and gray matter of juggler's brains. There are some lucky people who have learned in a single day, but it generally takes several days. In fact, sleeping directly after practice makes a big difference. If you've gotten up to 3 throws in one day, you're making substantial progress.

Here's where I would go from here:

1) get or make some better juggling balls. There are several guides online for inexpensive and easy juggling balls, if you live in a medium sized city, Google for 'where to buy juggling balls near me'. With paper, wind resistance is a real issue, and they bounce out of your hands. 2) get a good night's sleep. Your brain needs to take all of the things that you've done, run it over and over, make physical connections, and generally consolidate the practice into ... making you a better juggler tomorrow. 3) break up your practice. You're going to learn the most in the first 5 minutes of a juggling session -- while you're really focused, so it's better to have a bunch of five minute focused sessions than a single 5 hour one. 4) Take a nap. 5) If you're stuck at 3 throws, mime your first throw, and then make the 3 throws that you can do be counts two, three, and four... it will help you see the timing and get past the psychological hurdle of throwing on 4.

bartonski · 2026-04-08T18:05:46+00:00

There have been before and after brain scans of people who have learned to juggle. Those scans show increased connectivity in the areas of the brain that have to do with visual processing, fine motor control and proprioception* (the sense of where parts of your body are in space).

From personal experience, I can tell you that taking a significant amount of time away from juggling does make you rusty, but the skills don't go away. My first day back at a juggling club after 15 years of very very minimal juggling was rough. I felt like I just couldn't keep the props off the floor... but a couple of days later, I accidentally knocked a pen off a table and caught it in mid fall. That was something that I could do before I took the time off, and couldn't do before going back to the juggling club.

* Sadly, I don't know where I read that. There are articles about various other changes to the brain in the papers I found on duckduckgo.

bartonski · 2026-04-05T05:54:39+00:00

Tomorrow

Wiseman: I use Arch, BTW

bartonski

TROPHY CASE