Month: September 2014

S-Slice: F2L Edge Flip

Adventures in Cubing1 Comment

F2L 38
S-Slice Variant

R’ U S’ U’ (R B’ R’) S R B

For a while now, I’ve had a decent alg for flipping a placed but misoriented F2L edge: r (R U R’ U’) r’ U2 (R U R U’ R2). As I wrote earlier, this is a “purer” alternative — in that it does not affect the orientation of the U corners — to the standard algs of R’ U S’ U’ (R B’ R’) S R B and (R U R’ U’) (U’ R U2 R’) d (R’U’R). It’s regripless and fairly fast, but still a bit a clunky.

While learning an S-slice alternative to another F2L case (coming soon), it occurred to me that S may open up possibilities here, too. I reached out to TellerWest, king of tricked out algs, and we identified this as possibility:

R’ U S’ U’ (R B’ R’) S R B

As shown in this video, it works quite well:

S moves are not that easy nor natural for a lot of folks. Continue reading →

Excuses: 34-Sec Ao5

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It just takes an on-camera 34-second Ao5 (this one as a submission for Paradox Cubing’s 10k Subscriber Contest) to remind me that well, uh, I kinda suck at this cubing thing. I know that 34 seconds is impressive to 99.9% of the general population. But three years into this thing, I should be at speedsolving levels, and 34-seconds isn’t really there.

Nevertheless, since I’ve never been bashful about being mediocre and it not really bothering me, I figure that I might as well post the average. But then to show that, gee, maybe I am a wee bit self-conscious about the time, I’ll follow up with an excuse video.

(cube: Dayan Zhanchi; music: Grateful Dead, “The Eleven” (2.14.68))

Sucky, right? And in multiple different ways:

    Continue reading →