Japan's washi paper torn by modern life
japantimes.co.jp
japantimes.co.jp
It's not so much a matter of the art being lost (well, for now), more of things not being economically viable.
There's also a guy somewhere who's stocked up on diskettes and drives, there's still a large amount of devices that rely on them (e.g. in manufacturing, think stuff like weaving patterns and the like)
Once the displays in older machines are replaced with LCDs (as in new machines won't include them) I assume the only application will be that HuD.
I use CRT on my main computer, in my country all flat panels I seen so far are too expensive OR useless for my purposes.
1. CRT can use arbitrary resolutions, I love that, not only for retro gaming, but some modern games can reach "ultra" settings when lowering resolution a little, on a "mid-range" GPU (I own a Radeon 380X, sadly the last GPU to have analog video, I dunno what I will do when purchasing my next one)
2. My CRT contrast never bothered me, differently from the flat panels I owned, for example trying to play "superhot" and then "dark souls" same day required lots and lots of fiddling with flat panels, the settings that let me see anything at all on dark souls, made the screen flat white on superhot, fixing the settings for superhot made the screen flat black on dark souls... CRT I never felt the need to readjust contrast and brigthness after I found the setting I wanted.
3. Input lag... for most games this is not obvious, specially since lots of recent games have input lag anyway (for example I noticed a couple games check the controller status in a certain order that make all input always 1 frame late, sometimes 2 frames late if there is vsync and whatnot in the mix) but for example playing "Necrodancer" on CRT is much, MUCH easier for me.
4. This one is more theoretical, since the CRTs I own are cheap, but for a long time some CRTs could reach crazy high refresh rates.
5. "HDR", well, to be honest I never seen this either in person, but I know that some manufacturers did made some cool CRTs that supported HDR, most notably for SGI workstations that could create images with some ridiculous amounts of bits per pixel.
6. Retro gaming without expensive hardware: many, MANY games relied on CRT pixel "bleed" and fuzzyness of analog systems to create special effects, a notorious one is the waterfalls in sonic, on a system that has the intended hardware instead of seeing alternating columns of pixels, you would see a transparent waterfall, there are lots of emulators with plugins to simulate those, but to make the art work REALLY right on a modern screen you need a 4k screen, expensive powerful GPU and whatnot... as weird it sounds... it is cheaper to buy an actual CRT and even an actual old console to play some games.
But handheld systems with sharp pixels used the same art techniques, and many pieces of official artwork showed game art drawn with sharp pixels (think early NES game cover art). The Sonic waterfalls even use distinct vertical lines to represent falling water, instead of a checkerboard dither pattern, which would be the natural choice if you assumed it would be blurred. Arcade games used the same art techniques too, and they used high quality monitors and RGB connections, so pixels were clearly visible.
Your software isn't doing color management correctly for your display then. It probably thinks the gamma/native contrast are much higher than they really are.
That said, most customer displays have shitty filtering code they never actually document. You should turn everything off except the backlight control and then never touch it again.
These are still mass produced: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/drilling-machine-manu...
[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvZe6ZCbF9xgbbbdkiodPKQ/vid...
Are there any applications for the techniques used in the making of the materials that could be applied to other modern materials that could potentially create new uses for those materials.
For instance - just spitballing - but what if a different fiber and "glue" were substituted; could a very thin "mat" of such material be made, and what could it be used for?
I'm sure I'm not the first to think about this, though...
As well, there might be other things kouzo fiber could be used for besides the uses it’s been put to (panels in shouji screen doors, and origami paper, mostly), that haven’t been tried because they don’t occur to the artisans who grow the kouzo. Maybe, due to its length, kouzo fiber has better wicking properties than regular paper fiber, and so washi paper would make a better substrate for pH test strips, for example. Or maybe the raw fibers would make a good base for a spray insulation product (presumably in combination with fire retardants.) Or maybe they’re durable enough that you could work them into a cloth, as is done with hemp.
In South Korea, China, and Japan (to the extent of my observations), it seems when some culturally significant norm, craft, or product begins to lose said status, partit chalked up to a result of (what tone usually conveys as destructive) "Westernization". But a significant amount of the advances (i.e., emergent products or norms that have supplanted the ones in question) themselves tend to be celebrated and attributed to the progressive trajectory of their culture & state. It's just an odd bit of nationalistic hypocrisy that gives me an itch.
Of course, I do not think for a moment this is the case for everything, or that their peoples even embrace this view (as I believe to have been conveyed by the media). And I'm sure the West has behaved or.continues to behave in a similar manner, either now or (surely) in the past.
Perhaps I'm completely amiss, which, in that case, all the better.
In the 80/90s we seemed to look to Japan for Business/technology and culture, to Europe for food, and culture as well as America. I suppose China has somewhat filled part of the gap, but it seems to be a near US monopoly at the moment.
It seems to me that being exposed to the diversity of the world is a good thing, becoming a copy of one other place not so much. This is of course highly subjective.
So to answer your question, being exposed to, and picking the best bits of western culture seems a net positive, becoming a generic western country not so much.
I have absolutely no idea where the balance is between 'progress' and 'tradition', and I don't even think I'd recognise the balance if I saw it. I'm not even sure if there is a balance. Perhaps we'll forever be bemoaning the loss of washi, whilst celebrating the things that replace it.
Though I seem to recall one other earlier post, but I can't find it at the moment, it was about debris/bark being mixed into the paper IIRC.