Ah memories. I used to steal school supplies to make origami fortune tellers and sell them to kids in grade school.
Then I realized becoming an unfeeling capitalist only concerned with profiting off of my fortune tellers was making me into a monster, and I haven't looked back since. Now if I do origami, it is either for personal use or as gifts. The darkness tested me, I saw what that path would make of me, and I chose the light.
I may not be an origami mogul, but my humanity wasn't worth discarding to become one.
Whenever people ask why anyone makes open source software for free, I'm going to use this as a metaphor.
I see you fellow anti capitalist.
I remember this asshole of a kid in middle school selling these neat looking pens for a dollar each.
I found a box of them at a flea market that weekend and had my mom buy them for me, they came out to like 10 cents each. I sold them to every kid in class for a quarter and shut his shitty grift right down.
The version of this I always think of is the one in which you're playing a video game and get stuck. And unlike today, where you might spend an hour before you give up and lookup a walkthrough, in the 90's when you got stuck, you just... stayed stuck. Like, "well, I guess I'm going to spend the next week or two on the Water Temple running into every wall and bombing everything until hopefully something opens." Oh and it turns out the solution is something you tried within the first 15 minutes but didn't get quite right.
Oh yeah for sure. Zelda 1, the 7th dungeon, took me 10 years. It was a block pushing room, but all the other block pushing rooms were obvious. This was a unique pattern. Old man your advice sucks.
My cousin had a subscription to Nintendo Power so I gave up after a while and just looked. Otherwise I'd still be in that dungeon.
I'm a bit younger than you, we had to read ASCII maps and terrible, terrible directions on IGN. These guide writers would be calling enemies by their real names that you don't know without the guide book and it's basically "go right, walk a little bit, go left, go right twice, jump on the crate (followed by several more minutes worth of instructions but you already took the "wrong" left)
You sold yours? Damn, I should have tried that. I made hundreds of them out of graph paper while bored in math class.
Haha yeah, and i used to charge an extra 25 cents for a "premium" version made out of construction paper.
Dang, a whole dollar? I would sell origami tanks for 25¢ each, didn't realize people would pay more than that.
Don't forget trying to go through a knot tying book with only images and descriptions to guide you.
Yo what? Does no one here remember the origami tv show? It might have been PBS and only 10\15 minutes long but it was real. It started out with them always fanning it a stack of origami paper by rubbing their fist on it and then squaring it out again. I don't think they spoke. Early 90s, let me go find a link.
I remember checking out an origami book in 3rd grade and liking it so much that I just continually renewed it all year and memorized a bunch of designs. Skip ahead to 7th grade and I was in a math class with a terrible teacher and I wasn't doing well and constantly getting Cs and Ds. So to make myself feel better, whenever I would get homework or tests back from that class with low grades, I would turn it into something beautiful 🥲. The following year, I had to retake that class. The only time I've ever had to do so. Except, this time I was doing phinominally to the point that my teacher questioned why I was even in her class in the first place. Almost like it was the previous teacher that was the problem... Anyway, I still remember that first book I checked out all those years ago and still remember some of the designs. It gave me a pretty good outlet for my sadness when I needed it.
You might like Vi Hart's YouTube video series titled "doodling in math class".
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF7CBA45AEBAD18B8&si=3_t695CNEflJcwz_
I'm a 2000's kid so I had the internet and found a lot of pictograms with Japanese explanations and if I were lucky, there were English ones with isn't my native language either
I definitely much prefer the esoteric lines and diagrams I can't stand watching a video to fold, it sucks rewinding and pausing to try and keep up. Hey is there anybody else out there fucking around with pirated PDFs, Tanteidan conventions, and Double Tissue?
And you got damn good at it eventually!
I wow people with tiny flowers and cranes, I could do it in my sleep lol
If God wanted origami, he would have created an evolutionary process that would reault in creatures with opposable thumbs, who would also have the intelligence to invent language, then create ways of writing down that language, then create paper in order to more efficiently write and store that language and then create the art of folding that paper into cool shapes. Oh wait...
If God wanted paper to be shaped like an antelope, he would have made antelopes shaped like flat squares.
Worst books were the ones that missed a step or forgot to draw a line. Something simple like flipping the paper over.
I think I got one or two books like that as a kid and have never touched origami since.
I was particularly blessed when I first started, because my first origami book was from the 1950s and had each of the models in it glued to the first page of the instructions. 4-year-old me never would have figured out the bird base if it weren't for that book.
Lol the origami section was the very first place I would check when I visited the library as a kid. I would always get so bummed if they were all checked out
