Most who want simple ‘bonsai’ trees are ill-served by traditional bonsai methods
dirtwise.substack.com
dirtwise.substack.com
In gaming, including sports, this tension is common, and it's satisfied by competing at an appropriate level.
- Fast gaming computers that are only used to run benchmarks.
- Fancy photography gear that is only used to take pictures of resolution test charts and cats.
- Expensive guns that are never taken to the shooting range.
- High-end musical equipment that is only used for "noodling" (goofing off).
But modifying a 3D printer is cheap and fast (in labor time, printing stuff is slow, but it's not work), while parts for any other use tend to take much more time designing and applying. So that ratio is misleading.
i built my own bike when i was young, but mainly because it was cheaper to get a quality bike that way and easier than saving up the money for a brand new bike. in the end riding is more interesting, so now that i can afford it, i just buy what i need.
I knew a guy like this. He also had 2-3 other bikes that he actually rode, but he spend a lot of time and effort (and money) building his Dream Bike. He was always waiting for some part to be shipped from some tiny manufacturer in Italy or Spain or Japan or Canada, and by the time it arrived he would have read about this other company that had an even smaller/thinner/lighter part, so he would order that as well and wait until he had both parts before meticulously compare them. And once he had managed to finally assemble a complete bike it wouldn't take many rides before either something broke or he decided something wasn't quite perfect so he would take the bike apart again and try to find an even more perfect part.
You could have a goal which is to compete at the highest level that you can and push your abilities to see what you can accomplish, which you might enjoy doing. If you aim for this there's also plenty of scope for losing the deeper goal of just, having fun and enjoying your life.
In this respect I think the gaming and cycling examples can be qualitatively similar.
As with many things in life, you've not found the right people. I know some high level players (perhaps a level or two below the best) in a niche but well-known game community. They're very welcoming and are happy to play against me repeatedly despite the fact they all crushed me without a sweat. That said, I do think that the industry wide move towards skill based match making has made games far less endearing than they were in the past. It used to be that people could find the server that was right for them, be it competitive or casual, and do what they wanted. Now most big games don't give you the option to play against people outside of your skill range and you're constantly facing people about as good as you. To me, that's pretty boring long term.
But there's unfortunately a loud enough unpleasant portion of the gamer community that describing myself as a gamer to people outside of my closest circle of friends and colleagues tends to invoke a picture of gamers screaming insults and rage quitting whenever they lose and insulting and laughing at people when they win.
For gaming, it seems to me this to me this is more part of the public perception than for other hobbies. Or perhaps I'm just too far removed from an outside view of it.
I also notice how toxic some regular airsoft/paintball players can be, especially young men/teens.
On the other hand I wouldn't say it's something I myself "center" my identiy around. If you ask me who I am my first response is usually that I'm a father of two. But if you ask me what I do, well.. I develop games for a living and I play games for fun. That covers a big part of how I spend my time.
Pretty sure non of them got a career in gaming tho
What experience do you have with the subculture i.e. via what portal.
> gamer because it has so many strange connotations
With gamergate, and "gamers are dead" anti-gamer PR from gaming/activist media outlets; members of the gaming culture have been associated a culture war. With so much propaganda on both sides it's hard to determine what is real.
As for my own experiences: I grew up playing games as did all the people I spent time with in my youth. I've played countless games online, starting somewhere in the late nineties, and joined a number of communities built around those games. I've found that most communities and public servers are quite loud, rude, and unpleasant. I usually have to put in some work to find a circle of like-minded people who just want to enjoy the game in a civilized manner.
The absolutely worst I've come across was probably the Worms 2 online play. Nothing but kids thinking themselves cool by swearing and insulting each other. The best ones were the community some of my friends built in Dungeon Siege, role playing communities in Jedi Knight Academy, and some of the casual guilds in Elder Scrolls Online.
This is basically true for every hobby and I always struggle the most to cut through all the unnecessary stuff when embarking on a new journey.
I’m just wonderfully delighted and surprised when I come across a community of experts who “get it” and offer helpful, pragmatic advice.
But the 'real' Japan is a lot less idyllic; from what I've heard, people are overworked, single, depressed, addicted, etc. But that too is probably lacking in nuance, because it's all second / third hand knowledge.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/122291004/bonsai-band...
Peppers, tomatoes, and hemp all work well that way. Tomatoes can make fruits bigger than the plant, if you torture them right.
Cucumbers are lovely as minis but are much harder to keep contained and harder to get to fruit. They grow their fruit too fast and its hard to get enough water into the plant without drowning it.
Tobacco was entertaining to grow in a small pot, i got a 6ft plant that flowered in a 1L pot. it never had great leaves and it scavenged nutrients out of lower leaves to grow higher ones so it was all spindly. Never "miniaturized" the way other plants do. I suspect pumpkins and some other families would behave the same way.
Bonsai inspired teacup trees or something.
I would assume Japanese people would call bonsai any plant in a recipient that has enough art to be enjoyable to watch. For instance I think moss is accepted, as long as it's artful and well groomed.
(eg of a penjing site full of guides and discussion about the type of plant, the soil, the pot etc: https://www.pjcn.org/ )
And just like the article says about Japanese and their attitude towards the "not bonsai" - outside of the enthusiast communities, most people don't care, and will enjoy their small-tree-like-plant and call it bonsai/penjing anyway.
So I don't see why one would object to calling a casual mini tree a bonsai but is comfortable calling it penjing. Either both are okay or neither is.
(boringly, bons.ai redirects to some desperately enterprise-looking Microsoft AI thing)
Note: This isn't a new concept per se, rental plants are a staple of many offices in the Netherlands. They're usually low maintenance, with someone passing by once a month for watering and other maintenance at the most.
I did a bonsai course more than 20 years ago. I practiced in the course on my first tree that died weeks later. Then I bought another plant, created the bonsai using what I remembered from the course and I care to it to this day.
It is not a pretty bonsai, most guests don’t even see it as bonsai I think, but it occupies a central place in my living room and I am proud of it.
In a daily basis, I take care of it like any other plant. I trim it like once a year and I wired it only three times in those 20 years. To little dedication to call it a hobby, but it is a part of my life that I care.
If someone mentions they made a web app, likely I will spend far more time asking them about the programming language, the architecture, the framework, etc than actually about what it does.
https://gardenculturemagazine.com/history-of-hydroponics-par...
Weird thing about bonsai, the goal isn't to maximize... more like, I wanna just fail at killing the thing.
I'm jealous- some mint got from my planter into the lawn. The good news it smells nice whenever I mow.
There is something that is killing it in your backyard. Mint should be difficult to get rid of and easy to grow.
There's an argument that these trees get better care which I don't doubt but I look at the folded over fins of whales in captivity who are also getting the same "better care" and just wonder if humans should let nature do it's thing without getting in the way.
We have to eat. You can argue that it’s better and more efficient to let other animals be, but you can’t really do the same with plants. What’s left then?
I eat meat, and plants (and fungi and algae) but I also grow plants and I try to treat them as well as I can. That means giving them what they need to live, and also pruning them when that's more convenient for me or better for them. I don't think bonsai making is actually torture to plants, but I wouldn't inflict them treatments that I feel are detrimental to them (let's say, leaving them to freeze outside when it's too cold, subjecting them to thirst beyond what is healthy for them, depriving them of light).
I think "having a right to exert our will over other beings" doesn't mean you actually should feel free to do whatever you want to them. They are living beings. And if you live with them long enough and have the patience to observe them, some plants are clearly individuals with their own habits and preferences. It's just less immediately obvious because they are slower and more alien than animals.
Also, in the same way you don't treat horses and fish the same way, you could very well consider tomatoes to be dumb plants only good for food and lemon trees or bonsai oaks as "pets".
Every monstera and fiddle leaf that is kept indoors is a juvenile plant that will not get the chance to reach sexual maturity.
Under your framework, That’s the equivalent of starving an animal so much that it stunts it’s growth.
I can cut leaves off of a kale plant to eat without killing it. Under your framework, surgically amputating an animals leg and eating that meat would be equivalent.
Plants don’t have consciousness in the way animals do (in fact they are much closer in sensory responsiveness to the bacteria you kill every time you move).
I would seriously ask yourself why you are anthropomorphizing plants if you are making your arguments in good faith. Being able to understand what warrants empathy and what doesn’t is an important life skill.
The comparisons you are making make no sense because plants live in a totally different way from animals: cutting plant leaves is obviously nothing like cutting animal limbs, and plants routinely stay juvenile their whole life, and generally stay partly juvenile in any case. You just can't compare growth between animals and plants.
My examples, freezing outside, depriving them of light or being subject to thirst are actual plant mistreatment IMO because they will die from it. Avoidable death is generally considered a bad thing for living beings.
I don't think one can have empathy with plants at all because they don't have feelings comparable to animals, but suggesting like you do that they simply cannot be mistreated does not look like a good faith argument to me.
Note that the only comparison I made between animals and plants is that we don't have to value all animals the same, and we don't have to value all plants the same either. You didn't refute this, so I don't understand why you're going on about anthropomorphizing plants (especially when I didn't talk about humans at all).
1) To the point of bad faith
a) Why is "cutting plant leaves is obviously nothing like cutting animal limbs"? Is it because animals can't regrow limbs and plants can? Doesn't that lead you down the road of 'torture is an animal-based concept and you can't torture plants'?
b)'Plants routinely stay juvenile their whole life' precisely because they are deprived light, frozen outside, or lack access to water. Sometimes humans do that, WAY more often it just happens because of where a plant is rooted. And to be clear, bonsai does NONE of those things, the point of bonsai is to keep the plant alive as long as possible!
c) Do you suggest that bacteria can be mistreated? Why is bonsai torture and hand sanitizer is not? Pivoting to fungus, do you realize what we do to yeast in order to make bread/beer? Is that torture? And before you make an exception for food, we do not need beer to survive.
2) >some plants are clearly individuals with their own habits and preferences. >why you're going on about anthropomorphizing plants (especially when I didn't talk about humans at all).
Maybe you have a very loose definition of 'individual,' but I think you forgot what you wrote.
For the rest, I think you're just ignoring what I said about different species being treated differently and I don't see any reason why caring about some plants means I should also care about all of them and even about bacteria.
I think just spending time with a plant might make it more healthy, even doing the bonsai thing which always kinda bothered me too.
Yea--there are no citations. Just a wacky thought I have had for awhile.
My grandmother had cypress and juniper bonsai that were roughly 80 years old.
People say to filter tap water, or supposedly leaving it out overnight works somehow.