[HN Gopher] Chindogu: The Japanese Art of Useless Inventions
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Chindogu: The Japanese Art of Useless Inventions
Author : type0
Score : 110 points
Date : 2022-01-01 14:10 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.equilibriumfans.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.equilibriumfans.com)
| tdeck wrote:
| > The Japanese, however, believe otherwise. There are just some
| things that need to be invented even when people don't really
| need it.
|
| > Finding it difficult to spread butter on your morning toast?
| There's an invention for that. Have a terrible cold and
| constantly need tissue to blow your nose? The Japanese have
| exactly what you need.
|
| Is this particularly "Japanese"? We used to have a magazine in
| the US called Skymall that was full of these kinds of inventions.
| Hammacker Schlemmer is one company in particular that sells a lot
| of them.
| tasha0663 wrote:
| I would always take the SkyMall catalog when I was a kid. It
| was a comedic gold mine.
|
| Personal favorite: Safe-T-Man
|
| https://www.gusworld.com.au/rotd/9610/safe.htm
| hinkley wrote:
| The shoes for stealing pachinko balls are amazing. I thought I
| could see it coming but I thought he had magnets in those chunky
| soles.
| suction wrote:
| I simply love every Japanese term starting with "Chin".
| SapporoChris wrote:
| I recommend glancing at a Japanese dictionary sometime.
| stavros wrote:
| This speaks to my soul.
| lanewinfield wrote:
| I now know there's a name for the category of my Zoom pull cord.
|
| https://twitter.com/lanewinfield/status/1339257875034566656
|
| I've never sold it and I don't plan to sell it. And it's
| definitely because of Chindogu rule 5 and definitely not because
| hardware scaling is very hard.
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| This isn't a rebuke at all or a request to post your content
| elsewhere, but it seems that a lot of regular Twitter users may
| not realise that you can't access links like yours without
| being logged in to Twitter.
|
| Not saying you should care, just pointing it out.
| canttestthis wrote:
| Works for me, I'm not logged in.
| Lamad123 wrote:
| chopsticks on clothespin seem very useful (at least from the
| point of view of the two thirds of humanity).
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Is this how SkyMall started?
| ezconnect wrote:
| They have lots of gadgets, I saw a karaoke microphone with a cone
| you sing into so not to disturb the neighbors when you are
| singing, just like the bowl on ears on the article but applied to
| a microphone.
| tdeck wrote:
| Sounds something like a steno mask
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenomask
| ctdonath wrote:
| "Strange how much human progress and achievement comes from
| contemplation of the irrelevant." - Scott Kim
| croes wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selfie_stick was once such an
| invention
| capableweb wrote:
| Seems like a bunch of people (tried to at least) patent the
| selfie stick at one or another point. You wouldn't try to
| patent something you have no interest in earning money from,
| and is therefore not Chindogu
| croes wrote:
| Not back then when it wa first mentioned for cameras
|
| https://www.amusingplanet.com/2018/10/chindogu-japanese-
| art-...
| nosianu wrote:
| That site has some cool stories. I didn't know about "The
| London Beer Flood of 1814" until just now.
|
| https://www.amusingplanet.com/2021/12/the-london-beer-
| flood-...
|
| > _The Horse Shoe Brewery was the site of an unusual
| tragedy. In 1814, several large vats of beer broke
| releasing a tsunami of fermented porter in the streets,
| that killed eight people._
|
| > _A wave of porter beer 15 feet high swept into New
| Street, destroying houses and inundating basements._
| bitcurious wrote:
| In "The Book of Thinkage" (which I heard of on HN), one of the
| characters practices "cozy" - making his space fit his exact
| needs, by adding a shelf here, a lever there. There's something
| universal, and quite satisfying, about the instinct to shape the
| world around us to match our individualisms. It's like all of our
| random automation scripts, but physical.
| sersi wrote:
| Those eyedrop funnels glasses look really useful. As someone who
| has a very hard time using eyedrops they might actually help me.
| ansible wrote:
| Given that they need to be sterile and dust-free when you use
| them... I don't think so. Otherwise you are just causing more
| problems for your eyes.
| laumars wrote:
| There used to be a U.K. TV show (CBBC) based on this
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27ll_Never_Work%3F
| johnjungles wrote:
| I follow unnecessaryinventions guy to get my Chindogu fix
| noyesno wrote:
| Reminds me of Bonk Business:
|
| " Bonk Business is a fictional corporation created by Finnish
| artist and sculptor Alvar Gullichsen. The "products of Bonk
| Business" are absurd machines, such as the paranormal cannon,
| that have no apparent use, and which are built by Gullichsen. The
| story is that Bonk machines are powered by anchovy oil. The works
| parody corporate and marketing cliches in a retrofuturistic
| style."
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonk_Business
| mcshicks wrote:
| We really enjoyed the book "101 unuseless japanese inventions"
| with our kids when they were growing up, which was the first time
| I heard about chindogu. It might still make a nice gift for some
| people, especially adolescents. It seems like the book is
| available on archive.org
| https://archive.org/details/101unuselessjapa00kawa
| csydas wrote:
| I think designing "useless" things is actually a really great
| exercise that forces you to challenge a lot of your
| biases/assumptions and really flex your muscles.
|
| I help teach some people intro-level coding and we practice on
| "useless" code all the time, like text mangling to do meme-
| posting, writing some data-moshing tools, etc. It's practical in
| that it teaches some fundamentals, but the output is ultimately
| silly but observable. (e.g., there's not much value to the
| program but a successful output is clear)
|
| Useless inventions are pretty fun for a lot of things;
| theatre/home movies are filled with such things as CG is
| typically too much work for an individual, so practical effects
| need to be used. For a movie I made for a friend, we had to
| figure out how to make a puppet "blow" into a party noise maker,
| and came up with the strangest contraption involving straws and a
| lot of tape; a overall "useless" invention, but turns out there's
| a lot more going into making noise with a party noise maker than
| you'd imagine.
|
| Useless inventions are a great exercise of creativity and logic,
| blending the practical side of our minds with the
| emotional/fantastical parts that just want to make such fun and
| fantastical things work.
| fujidust wrote:
| Oh, looks like we have our very own in the US via Reddit:
| https://reddit.com/u/rightcoastguy
| capableweb wrote:
| I'm not sure they qualify to be called "Chindogu", two of the
| rules are "It must be a tool that solves everyday life
| problems" and "It is not for sale" while some inventions of
| theirs don't solve anything at all, and some of them seems to
| be for sale in their shop.
|
| It's just normal "Unnecessary Inventions".
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(page generated 2022-01-01 23:01 UTC)