[HN Gopher] Dorodango: the Japanese art of making shiny mud ball...
___________________________________________________________________
Dorodango: the Japanese art of making shiny mud balls (2019)
Author : mhb
Score : 199 points
Date : 2021-05-23 15:37 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.laurenceking.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.laurenceking.com)
| TheRealNGenius wrote:
| Didn't know this was a thing. Guess that's what's happening here:
| https://youtu.be/KoRDlnXPtTk?t=325
|
| Edit: Appears to be the case, TIL
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorodango
| felipemnoa wrote:
| This 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.
| BruceM wrote:
| The Nito Project on Youtube has 3 nice videos about this:
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDSee1-4bUI (How to make...)
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfBGGuezus8 (Shiny Graphite
| Ball made from Clay and Graphite)
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG7wHTmKtjQ (Textures in
| Dorodango)
| rakshazi wrote:
| 1. Opened website
|
| 2. Got a banner with some offer on 80% of my screen
|
| 3. Closed website
|
| I like modern web /s
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| Dorodango 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/polishi...
| asddubs wrote:
| and here i was taught to avoid a ball of mud architecture
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| Yes whenever possible, hah.
|
| "I am prepared for the worst, but hope for the best." -
| Disraeli
| bunsenhoneydew wrote:
| One that I've used a few times is "you can't polish a turd...
| but you can roll it in glitter"
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| My metaphor for how software is actually created is Katamari
| Damacy (https://katamari.fandom.com/wiki/Katamari_Damacy): a
| giant ball of random objects that keep getting bigger, and more
| and more random crap just sticks to the ball. That's all there
| really is to it.
| hawski wrote:
| Rob Landlay made a similar observation, but I'm the end named
| the project Toybox instead of Dorodango.
| bitwize wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Kind of the culmination of the "Big Ball of Mud" architecture,
| innit.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| > Grind administrators against it in production for years
|
| Screw you, I quit!
| praptak wrote:
| There's a Zen saying: "Like the pebbles in a bag, the monks
| polish one another."
|
| We could modify this to handle sysadmins too.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| The only lesson in suffering under your job duties as a
| sysadmin is "don't do that". There is little glory in
| polishing production poo, even if you can. You should be
| showing a better way, not reinforcing bad decisions because
| you are a superhero.
| delgaudm wrote:
| A 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
| jdmichal wrote:
| I'm getting "video unavailable". It looks like you missed a
| couple characters on the link.
|
| 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
| ffggvv wrote:
| >>> 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
| jxub wrote:
| The 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.
| ww520 wrote:
| These look like spheres rendered out from a 3d scene.
| dual_dingo wrote:
| I first learned about this from Mythbusters, where they proved
| you indeed can polish a turd.
| tyingq wrote:
| Link for those that want to know more:
| https://go.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/polishi...
| grenoire wrote:
| Love it when the region blocker hits with the Explore Your
| World slogan.
| DanBC wrote:
| When 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.
| adventured wrote:
| These are amazing. Thanks for posting it op.
| permo-w wrote:
| This was a pleasure to read.
|
| In case anyone was wondering, the word "hikaru" (as in hikaru
| dorodango, or Hikaru Nakamura) means "shine"
| underseacables wrote:
| The 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.
| dvh wrote:
| People spend their lives finding a way to do things. Japanese
| spend their lives finding the way to do things.
| yojo wrote:
| Not 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
| bitwize wrote:
| Adopting 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.
| asddubs wrote:
| I 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
| [deleted]
| qiqitori wrote:
| Looks fun but not sure if this belongs on this site? Also article
| is from 2019.
| canadianfella wrote:
| Are you new here?
| gregschlom wrote:
| This absolutely belongs here. This type of article is what
| makes Hacker News so awesome and unique from any other place on
| the web.
| bombcar wrote:
| Exactly. 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 wrote:
| It seems to me that Dorodango is what some people should do
| instead of mudslinging on the interweb.
| Aeronwen wrote:
| They're not mutually exclusive.
| lostlogin wrote:
| On-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
| yojo wrote:
| HN 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.
| jonplackett wrote:
| I doubt the underlying technology has changed much in the last
| 2 years
| bombcar wrote:
| Sounds 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.
| dang wrote:
| One singleton from 9 years ago:
|
| _Painstakingly made, highly polished balls of pure mud - a how
| to_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4530465 - Sept 2012 (1
| comment)
| andi999 wrote:
| In Japan everything is art (except common architecture).
| Aeolun wrote:
| That's also art, just the one of making the fugliest building
| possible.
| unishark wrote:
| Amazing 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.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| At work, we call any project for maintaining legacy systems
| "Dorodango". We even have a jira tag for such items.
| twic wrote:
| What 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?sern...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-05-23 23:00 UTC)