It's lots of fun, with folding allowing you to go offline for a while. The community is very friendly, both online and with IRL meetings such as yearly conventions in many countries.
Still a kind of niche within origami, so there's lots of room for novelty and explorations. And there are strong ties to mathematical and computational origami if you're into this kind of thing.
This looks like an interesting option I did not think of. Can anyone upload there? If so, I'll upload them myself. I was mostly aware of the Internet Archive and did not think of archive.org when it comes to books.
Unfortunately, paper versions are currently very hard to obtain. The last reprint was in 2007 (Twist Origami 1-3, and Introduction to Creative Playing with Origami), and the volumes were too little to match growing interest. When starting this project a year ago, I already had most of the books, but getting those I didn't own was very difficult. The copy of Solid Origami I grabbed was - I believe - literally the last copy I could find on the English-speaking internet. I grabbed it from Kim's Crane (https://kimscrane.com/) and I think they had a copy or two of Fujimoto's other books at the time.
If there is an origami society in your country, they may have some of these books in their library (rules for lending may vary, of course).
These books being so difficult to find was one of the reasons I wanted to ask Fujimoto's heirs to release the books to the Public Domain.
Not yet, unfortunately, since I don't speak Japanese myself. Google lens helps with some segments but produces garbage for others. These books are not the most approachable and many sections do require some background in geometric folding. Hopefully, with the books being PD now, we'll be able to get help and make them more accessible to everyone. Meanwhile, you can find links to instructions for a few Fujimoto's works scattered around the web (on youtube, on my web page at https://origami.kosmulski.org/ and other places).
The shake of the forming wire does help align the fibers in cross-direction, but the effectiveness of this is smaller than all the other effects combined, which align the fibers parallel to machine direction. So, overall, the process reduces the alignment to machine direction somewhat, but does not change it enough to make cross-direction dominant. So, everything makes sense: toilet paper is a long band, grain is aligned with machine direction (the long side of the band, perpendicular to perforation), and that's why it tends to tear "the wrong way". It was exactly the same with the paper towel whose picture is shown in the post.
A crease pattern [almost] defines an origami design so this is the closest to a formal description you can get. It's actually good enough for quite an advanced mathematical apparatus to have been developed which allows you to prove lots of things about origami in a strict, mathematical way. However, the crease pattern is still a 2D drawing, so while much simpler to describe than the final 3D shape, it's also too complex to be neatly described in words. You can, of course, spell out all the folds, their angles and lengths, but usually it will be too long to be called a name. For simplified cases with additional bounds, it is, however possible - in the post I list one such approach (by Goran Konjevod) which works for a certain type of tessellations.
Thanks for the feedback regarding the clutter. Some parts have indeed grown beyond what I originally planned. I was able to remove the breadcrumbs and it didn't feel like a loss. I also shortened the social media links at top of the page since you were right to notice on some pages they took lots of space for no good reason.
It's lots of fun, with folding allowing you to go offline for a while. The community is very friendly, both online and with IRL meetings such as yearly conventions in many countries.
Still a kind of niche within origami, so there's lots of room for novelty and explorations. And there are strong ties to mathematical and computational origami if you're into this kind of thing.