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Dorodango: the Japanese art of making shiny mud balls (2019)
- dual_dingo 5y agoI first learned about this from Mythbusters, where they proved you indeed can polish a turd.
- qiqitori 5y agoLooks fun but not sure if this belongs on this site? Also article is from 2019.
- jonplackett 5y agoI doubt the underlying technology has changed much in the last 2 years
- bombcar 5y agoSounds like someone hasn’t been up to date on the risk of buffer overflows and hardening updates. And if you’re not at least mixing in some iron oxide into your mud how can you even be secure? Sea shell dust just doesn’t cut it in the modern world.
- canadianfella 5y agoAre you new here?
- gregschlom 5y agoThis absolutely belongs here. This type of article is what makes Hacker News so awesome and unique from any other place on the web.
- bombcar 5y agoExactly. Do I want to read another flamewar about subject X Y or Zed or do I want to read a link about something I never heard about before?
- antattack 5y agoIt seems to me that Dorodango is what some people should do instead of mudslinging on the interweb.
- Aeronwen 5y agoThey're not mutually exclusive.
- yojo 5y agoHN to me has always been about exploration and craft. This usually ends up manifesting as technology news, but particularly interesting crafts (or explorations) feel like fair game.
- lostlogin 5y agoOn-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- enw 5y agoThis is exactly the type of article that belongs on HN.
- delgaudm 5y agoA lot of the imagery for that article seems to be screencapped from a 2016 Nat Geo vid on Youtube[0], so if you want to see Bruce in action, check that video out. Could be the same photographer involved in both the article and the vid. (Edit for corrected URL) [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG7wHTmKtjQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG7wHTmKtjQ
- jdmichal 5y agoI'm getting "video unavailable". It looks like you missed a couple characters on the link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqAfzcJurMM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqAfzcJurMM EDIT: I like this video better for actually seeing the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDSee1-4bUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDSee1-4bUI
- unishark 5y agoAmazing hobby but I have to say, given the first sentence: > Dorodango author Bruce Gardner shares the story of how he discovered the Japanese art of hikaru dorodango. The story itself was kind of anticlimactic. Apparently he read an essay about, then did it.
- shigawire 5y agoI think the discovery is more alluding to discovering the rewarding nature and the nuances after doing it for 17 years.
- underseacables 5y agoThe Japanese art of doing cool and amazing things. Surely there’s a word that just represents all of the cool and amazing things, and skills that the Japanese have for art.
- yojo 5y agoNot exactly what you’re asking for, but a lot of the cool stuff seems to stem from appreciation of wabi-sabi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi
- asddubs 5y agoI learned about this when I watched that king of the hill episode where bobby grows roses in his closet and i still think about it all the time
- bitwize 5y agoAdopting a similar stance of mind yields cool things regardless of culture. I've been known to call Slackware "the shibui Linux distro". Its roughness, lack of ostentation, and exposure of command-line-centric Unix roots is why the distro is so appealing.
- dvh 5y agoPeople spend their lives finding a way to do things. Japanese spend their lives finding the way to do things.
- lovemenot 5y agoI propose: 和道 wado. The way of harmony. It's not actually used, so far as I know. But it fits your definition.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- andi999 5y agoIn Japan everything is art (except common architecture).
- Aeolun 5y agoThat’s also art, just the one of making the fugliest building possible.
- SteveNuts 5y agoAt work, we call any project for maintaining legacy systems "Dorodango". We even have a jira tag for such items.
- BruceM 5y agoThe Nito Project on Youtube has 3 nice videos about this: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDSee1-4bUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDSee1-4bUI (How to make...) * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfBGGuezus8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfBGGuezus8 (Shiny Graphite Ball made from Clay and Graphite) * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG7wHTmKtjQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG7wHTmKtjQ (Textures in Dorodango)
- throwaway09223 5y agoDorodango is one of my favorite metaphors for operationalizing software. Start with any codebase, no matter how naively or ineptly implemented. Grind administrators against it in production for years and inevitably it will become a smooth, shiny and stable component. Often we talk about the power of inertia in keeping around old codebases with terrible histories. We talk about how illogical it is that we don't throw things out and start anew. There's a hidden value in a known quantity which has had blemishes polished off. With a nod to mythbusters, even a turd can shine [1] given sufficient effort. We have all dealt with many turds in the course of our careers. It is of course ideal to polish something more valuable than a turd. Architecture can still be rotten on the inside and necessitate replacement despite having a well polished exterior process. But new systems will always be unpolished no matter how well design. In the end there is no substitute for the smoothing process of constant handling. [1] https://go.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/polishing-a-turd-minimyth https://go.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/polishi...
- asddubs 5y agoand here i was taught to avoid a ball of mud architecture
- throwaway09223 5y agoYes whenever possible, hah. "I am prepared for the worst, but hope for the best." - Disraeli
- annoyingnoob 5y ago> Grind administrators against it in production for years Screw you, I quit!
- praptak 5y agoThere's a Zen saying: “Like the pebbles in a bag, the monks polish one another.” We could modify this to handle sysadmins too.
- dang 5y agoOne singleton from 9 years ago: Painstakingly made, highly polished balls of pure mud - a how to - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4530465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4530465 - Sept 2012 (1 comment)
- Ericson2314 5y agoI like that that site had pictures broken/failed ones. It makes the process more clear.
- jhanschoo 5y agoWell it's no longer a singleton now I guess.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- DanBC 5y agoWhen you see videos about this they can be quite complicated - they talk about a "core" which includes stuff like straw or hair, and then a shell. If you're making dorodango you can ignore all of that. You'll just need to dry it out slowly to avoid cracks. When you make them you'll want to experiment with burnishing at different stages of dryness or with different tools. If you live in a place with low levels of clay in the soil you can just dump a load of dirt in a bucket, fill the bucket with water and swirl it around. That gets clay from the dirt into the water. You then pour the water off into another bucket and let the water evaporate to leave the clay.
- ffggvv 5y ago>>> Coming from the words doro, meaning “mud” and dango, a type of Japanese flour cake think they’re missing out in the context that dango are specifically a desert that’s shaped as tiny little balls. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dango https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dango
- permo-w 5y agoThis was a pleasure to read. In case anyone was wondering, the word "hikaru" (as in hikaru dorodango, or Hikaru Nakamura) means "shine"
- jxub 5y agoThe article is interesting and well-written, but the author's initial in the sticky navbar difficults the reading. I hope that he notices that, but then again many people pay for an online journal and have a worse reading experience, so it's not that bad.
- adventured 5y agoThese are amazing. Thanks for posting it op.
- ww520 5y agoThese look like spheres rendered out from a 3d scene.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoDefinitely raytracing tests from that Turbo Pascal book I can't remember the name of.
- rakshazi 5y ago1. Opened website 2. Got a banner with some offer on 80% of my screen 3. Closed website I like modern web /s
- jonplackett 5y agoThis kind of ridiculousness was why I made this game -> https://termsandconditions.game https://termsandconditions.game
- rakshazi 5y agoOh, I played it and loosed on multiple check boxes level. Fun game, was smiling and crying during gameplay
- TheRealNGenius 5y agoDidn't know this was a thing. Guess that's what's happening here: https://youtu.be/KoRDlnXPtTk?t=325 https://youtu.be/KoRDlnXPtTk?t=325 Edit: Appears to be the case, TIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorodango#In_popular_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorodango#In_popular_culture
- felipemnoa 5y agoThis also is the first thing that I thought about when reading this article. I have to admit that I found the kid's fascination with making a round shiny mud ball a bit weird. After reading this article this scene make sense.
- twic 5y agoWhat sort of soil do you need to do this? I am struggling to imagine doing this with the sandy silt loam that surrounded me as a child [1]. [1] http://www.landis.org.uk/services/soilsguide/series.cfm?serno=1948 http://www.landis.org.uk/services/soilsguide/series.cfm?sern...
- po 5y agoYou just need to use clay. When I was a kid I made mud pies. But I live in Japan now so my kids make Dorodango. I have one on my shelf here that I dug out of a river bank and made with my kids... we saved it and I shined it up by sprinkling sifted clay dust onto it and rolling it on a hard surface as it dried
- colechristensen 5y agoYou can make your own clay out of nearly any soil with a sort of fractional settling process. Make very loose mud with water in a bucket, let it settle for a minute, pour off whatever is floating on the top, keep whatever hasnt settled to the bottom, let it settle for a few hours, recover the settled portion. Repeat if desired for more refinement. Wrap in cloth and hang for several hours to reduce water content.
- jerrre 5y agoDo I understand correctly if you keep the middle portion? You remove both the water, and what settles immediately? I have a hard time visualizing.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- colechristensen 5y agoAfter a short period of stirring you throw out whatever floats on the top and what sinks immediately. You keep the water with suspended particulate, you let that settle for a long period (but not too long) and throw out the water this time keeping what settled which will be clay. You are keeping particles which settle to the bottom after one minute and before one hour (or whatever, the minimum and maximum times are adjusted to suit needs)
- samatman 5y agoI made a few of these out of playa dust one year. It was fun, they made great gifts. They're extremely fragile, I think one of the three I kept has survived, but won't know for sure until I get back into my storage unit.
- wvlia5 5y agoWould people pay to have Dorodango made with the cremated ashes of their loved ones?
- GolDDranks 5y agoApparently this isn't a very old phenomenon at all: https://web-japan.org/trends01/article/011005sci_r.html https://web-japan.org/trends01/article/011005sci_r.html It seems that polishing mud balls became a trend among kids/educators during the last two decades.