Respectfully, gentlemen, you have some serious misconceptions.
First: to me, there are two kinds of knife throwing, recreational and self-defense. What I do is the latter. The bulk of my methods are aimed at martial artists, knife fighters and lay people who dont yet know anything about knife throwing. These will certainly constitute the majority of my audience. I also do some freestyle recreational throwing, juggling, and the like, but this is secondary. Nothing I do has much in common with the usual accuracy contests and circus tricks. Those things simply dont interest me. For these reasons, experienced conventional knife throwers, such as the people who use this site are, to me, a peripheral market; and in any event these are the people already the most likely look for new things on knife throwing without any prodding from me. If I were primarily interested in commerce I would be far better served to invest my time in activities other than making internet postings on knife-throwing chat sites or sending out individual e-mails to interested parties.
Second, Ralph Thorn is a pen name. Like the majority of authors in my field, I prefer to remain anonymous. I do not have any current plans to reveal my geographical location, attend any public events, or post an e-mail address, even though these things would obviously make it easier to sell things (if that were my primary intention), because it would defeat the purpose of writing under a pen name.
Third, from my point of view I have only barely been guilty of overt soliciting. Every posting I have made since the original thread starter has been either a specific response to a question or remark, or to clear up something I thought could be misconceived. As is this one. I initiate little but try to be thorough in my responses.
Why, then, have I taken time to maintain this limited public presence via chat sites? The main reason is simple. My writing style is intended as humorous, but sometimes in a polemical way. I dont always bother to hide my annoyance with some statements others have made about knife throwing that I know to be false, such as the idea that it is more difficult or even impossible to throw knives without rotation. I have therefore sometimes been perceived as arrogant in my dismissals of rotating knife throwing as a self-defense tool; Ive even been accused of trying to alienate conventional knife throwers. This was not my intention, but in retrospect I should have made this more clear in some of my early statements. While I tread a very different turf than usual knife throwers, it would be counterproductive for all involved if I were to refuse to at least attempt to reach out to conventional hobbyists. The success of my style does not depend on the regular areas of knife throwing, nor do experienced hobbyists and performers require my style for anything. We might not really need each other, but perhaps we can work together to expand the sport, not diminish it with what outsiders would perceive as in-fighting, if indeed they cared at all. That is my intention and my hope, and my motivation in keeping up with this site. As far as I am concerned this matter is closed. I will, with your indulgence, continue to try to provide any interested parties who have specific questions or requests for information with whatever they ask for, but having made the above statements I see no reason to initiate anything new in this forum. I have tried to offer something new and to make peace with those who prefer the old, and nothing else, from my point of view, is necessary here any longer.
