HN Reader

Juggling is one of hobbies with the highest ratios of being able to impress random people versus the actual effort you have to put in, and I generally find I never forget 3-ball stuff I learned as a kid. It's also as good as a long walk for getting you out of your head when needed.

Shout out to anyone that remembers the Mushy Pea juggling shop in Manchester many years ago, where I learned all sorts of circus skills.

Perhaps of interest: I came across this retrospective of the author of that site and how he moved it to static hosting a couple of years ago [1].

I would also say that this library covers more or less the “lower half” of solo ball juggling in terms of difficulty. With lower ball counts (say ≤ 4), there are a lot of these patterns that have complex arm movements and can be difficult to explain with words, so having such a listing with animations and step-by-step instructions is very valuable. Starting with 4 balls, there’s less and less time for moving your arms around and it is more about the sequence of heights of the throws, which are well described with just their numeric “siteswap” pattern and you can learn them just from knowing the number sequence. The site has only the most basic of those (e.g. 534) and even very common 4-ball (7531, 633) patterns are missing with hardly anything beyond that.

[1]: https://ianconvy.github.io/projects/other/libraryofjuggling/...

I remember happily going through these each day after school until I could do everything.

There wasn't much on YouTube at the time but I also think YouTube is a worse resource for pretty much all of these simple tricks. All you need is a slow loop to learn any ball juggling trick.

There was also a similar site that let you input siteswaps.

The noob gains once you get comfortable with 3 balls are addictive, compared to later patterns or tricks that can take hours, days or even weeks to pick up.

Those animations - the stick figures moving red balls - were all over Tumblr a few months ago, with people creating all sorts of interesting animations out of them. You can find them by searching for "juggling lab".

The website is great, but I find the lack of hyperlinks maddening.

I find it fascinating that it uses a 2-9 scale to grade difficulty.

The rating is described as a rating "1 - 10"

But every trick is actually graded 2 to 9. ( https://libraryofjuggling.com/TricksByDifficulty.html )

Presumably no-one ever wanted to define a grade 1, just in case an easier one was discovered, and similarly for 10.

What a great website aesthetic, takes me way back to when the Internet felt a lot smaller.

As a Java developer, I recommend Factory trick. Simple, but impresses people the most

https://libraryofjuggling.com/Tricks/3balltricks/Factory.htm...

Usage map indicates that either Alaska is a heretofore undiscovered hotbed of juggling or Cloudflare analytics are countrywide