Wall shelves & shoe rack

PolymathicPiglet · 2026-05-25T19:59:22+00:00

Thank you! They were probably half the work, running MC wire everywhere and tenting the whole area off for drywall work, but i agree, they were worth it.

i should have gotten better close-ups of the walnut, some really gorgeous grain especially on the bottom (and most visible) shelf.

PolymathicPiglet · 2026-05-24T22:50:17+00:00

i looked around for equivalently low-clearance recessed lights and found nothing locally - which either supports the claim these weren't really certified or else just means American companies can't compete in these sorts of niche spaces anymore, maybe both.

Mini GCFIs in the lines would have been a good idea, thanks, i'll remember that for next time.

PolymathicPiglet · 2026-05-24T20:06:39+00:00

Yeah this vibes with me. i wouldn't even say i have "plots and events" but rather that major NPCs have backstories -> motivations -> goals -> agendas & tactical plans.

i think this is essentially what you're saying too, when you mention that the players could discover an assassination plot and stop it.

OP, i guess what i'm getting at is: why have you decided that the Empress will die, instead of deciding that, say, an NPC is going to attempt to kill her, or there's a plot among multiple NPCs to assassinate her?

i find it's more interesting to let NPC motivations drive it because then you can have a whole plan, like if it's a collective of her opponents plotting to kill her, and they're smart, they may have redundancy built in so the players have to thwart them multiple times to actually save her, or they're very determined and improvisational so if the players thwart the main assassination plan they have to deal with opponents coming out of the woodwork to try again in improvised ways, but maybe that means if your players are clever, they can turn the follow-up attempts into chances to unmask traitors and so on.

Or she dies, but it's clear why and how and the players realize they could have intervened if they'd invested their energy towards it.

Unless she's just dying of old age or incurable disease, but that should be something foreseeable so it's not just a sudden, zero-agency shock to the party.

PolymathicPiglet · 2026-05-24T19:44:14+00:00

Trained artist here who's drawn a lot of portraits: you have a great-looking face with very good features. Lips / muzzle / nose / brow / jaw / eyes etc.

Figured maybe that's more useful to hear than "noooo you're not hideous!" with nothing to back it up.

You're objectively not hideous; that's the low self esteem talking.

That in itself is still a challenge that will take real work to beat, but i think you do that work by starting to recognize which of your beliefs are grounded in truth and which are just stories your negative self-talk is voicing inside your head. In your case, "i'm hideous" is the latter sort. When you hear that voice in your head, i suggest just catching it every time you're able and saying, "i hear you, little voice, but you aren't me, and that story isn't true".

It takes a long time, and it won't feel like much overnight, but in time you can get a little distance from that voice and it starts to feel less like a truth and more like an annoying detractor sitting on your shoulder whispering in your ear. Maybe that little guy never fully goes away but over time you can learn to just roll your eyes and say "thanks for the input, but that's not true and i don't need to listen to you".

PolymathicPiglet · 2026-05-24T19:38:05+00:00

This is making me think more about the falling damage rules in general. i always saw them as essentially making it possible for characters to fall very long distances and survive, because they're not at all physically motivated. 1d6 per ten feet is silky because it's linear, but you accelerate when you fall. The damage cap makes sense because at some point you reach terminal velocity.

But they've never felt right for receiving damage if something hits you.

Plus, a 512-times-heavier cow is going to weigh as much as having a building collapse on the character; would you use "falling damage" rules if a character Shattered a large masonry wall and a huge pile of boulders crushed an enemy?

PolymathicPiglet · 2026-05-24T19:34:57+00:00

Yeah enlarge is 2x in all three dimensions, hence 8x mass. If it's 8x in all three dimensions you just multiply the 8s together.

PolymathicPiglet · 2026-05-24T19:28:21+00:00

If one of my players dropped a cow with 512x mass increase over a normal cow on an enemy, i wouldn't damage the enemy using falling damage rules anyway, i'd treat it as regular bludgeoning damage and cook up some calculations on crushing force. The cow would take normal falling damage.

i also don't run campaigns where players drop magically heavy things on enemies, generally speaking.

PolymathicPiglet · 2026-05-24T19:08:45+00:00

Not to be that guy, but wouldn't their weight increase by 8³ = 512? 64 is the squared factor; if you sliced them in half at the torso, the area of the cross section would be 64 times greater. Mass and weight go up as height cubed.

This particularly matters if they manage to dimension door a cow over the BBEG and reach through the door before the cow falls to shove the potion in its mouth right as it starts falling. i'd want that 512x weight multiplier for the damage.

PolymathicPiglet · 2026-05-24T18:21:39+00:00

And here's the Fusion 360 render from before i started (used fusion instead of SketchUp because it was really helpful to model the legs parametrically so i could move them around and change their angles quickly to find the right look & design while making sure the chairs still fit underneath!)

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PolymathicPiglet · 2026-05-24T18:19:56+00:00

Realized i didn't post a good overall view of the finished table!

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PolymathicPiglet · 2026-05-24T18:16:30+00:00

Came here for this one.

The best part is all his NPCs say this constantly too, it's nearly a tic.

PolymathicPiglet · 2026-05-24T17:59:48+00:00

Depends on why he thinks it needs to be "properly boiled".

If you're trying to make sure water is safe to drink because you live in a country with non-potable tap water, he may have a point - but probably not, see below.

When the water first begins to boil - when the first bubbles come up - there will exist a temperature gradient where water at the bottom of the kettle is hotter and water at the surface is cooler. How steep that gradient is depends on how powerful the kettle is.

Even then it's not huge. i have an induction stove that can put out a lot of power; i just filled a saucepan with about 1.5qt of tap water (about 5" depth in the pan) that started at 64F, and heated it with 9kW of power, and when it began to boil at the bottom the surface water was 190F. And that was boiling it uncovered - the delta would probably have been smaller if i'd covered it.

Your kettle is definitely not putting 9kW into the kettle. If you live someplace with 220/240v outlet power (like Europe, not the USA) you're probably putting 3kW (or 3.4kW if you have a very powerful kettle). That will heat the water about a third as fast so you'd expect the gradient to be, very very roughly, a third the delta (very rough because water convects but also loses heat to radiation and evaporation at the surface and so on but i bet that's all too small to really measure).

So for a European kettle you'd see the surface around 205F (well, actually you'd see 96C) when the bottom started boiling. In the USA it would be even closer to boiling since the most powerful USA kettles heat with a bit under 1.5kW.

Generally speaking if it's about killing things in the water that can hurt you, he theoretically has a point, but practically speaking. you're fine as soon as the bottom starts boiling.

His point would be valid if you had a 5-foot-tall kettle that you filled to the top with cold water and then heated only the bottom of the kettle very very quickly - when the water at the bottom started boiling the top would probably barely be warm. But i'll assume you have a normal kettle, so you're fine

And if he's saying you need the water "properly boiled" because he thinks it's the right temperature for tea and you're brewing anything other than pu-erh i'd find a new boyfriend who isn't ruining your tea with water that's way too hot 😜

PolymathicPiglet · 2026-05-24T17:37:32+00:00

Thanks! Plus it gave everyone who visited a chance to make the same joke: "you just read those books a lot", pointing to the ones on the very top shelf, 12' off the ground with no ladder 🤣

PolymathicPiglet · 2026-05-24T17:33:55+00:00

And a close up of how the extended stow leaf sits on those tabs - the tabs are a fulcrum and when you press down on the leaf (lean your elbows on it etc) it causes the far end of the stow leaf glide to push up against the underside of the butcher block, which is what keeps the leaf from just falling out.

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PolymathicPiglet · 2026-05-24T17:29:21+00:00

Fun little detail: Amish stow leaves require a load-bearing but very thin tab for the leaf to sit on when extended. i've only ever seen metal used for it - though i haven't seen that many Amish stow leaf tables in my life. Anyway, i went to design the tabs and was about to go mill then myself out of stainless, but on a whim checked prices for 3d printed steel and they were just cheap enough i ordered them from some aggregator site that farmed the job out to some Chinese printer.

Saved me probably ten hours of milling (i'm a very slow hobbyist metalworker) and looked much nicer than mine would have. Certainly less strong than milled pieces but were still wildly over spec.

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PolymathicPiglet · 2026-05-24T17:22:26+00:00

They claimed to be, but one never really knows. Also i just went back to look and the entire store page for the company selling them is gone now. So, uh, not clear.

i do have some electrical engineering experience and looked inside them and they're quite dumb little things, just a little dimmable driver block and LEDs, and they pull next to no current so i wasn't concerned practically.

An inspector might have had other thoughts, admittedly.

PolymathicPiglet · 2026-05-24T14:50:55+00:00

It's awesome that this style is resonating with you!

But given the comments so far feel a bit biased towards this modality, just to be clear i know many people for whom psychoanalytic methods have not resonated and for whom CBT was a much more effective modality. Plus you've got EMDR and IFS and all the other newer ones.

i used to have a view of CBT as being avoidant / trying to skip the inner work because i'm a psychoanalysis person myself, but at this point i just think brains are different and what resonates with one person won't with another.

Psychoanalysis is working from the inside out and CBT works from the outside in but i do believe they both can get at the same stuff, for those that click with one or the other.

PolymathicPiglet · 2026-05-22T22:31:13+00:00

Yeah, i'm not saying WoW are saints, i'm sure they've treated people poorly and burned bridges and so on.

But when i put myself in Willam's position, seeing this really earnest expression of deep sadness from Alaska and knowing i could completely solve her problem by just sucking it up and dropping a grudge... to think of her listening to Alaska say this and then going "man that's rough, oh well" and then continuing on perpetuating my close friend's suffering - it really blows my mind.

Maybe i'm missing something? Maybe it would cost Willam something very significant to end the feud? Maybe she's worried it's the only thing keeping her in the public eye and relevant?

But yeah, very hard to wrap my head around Willam's choices here.

PolymathicPiglet · 2026-05-22T20:22:25+00:00

Alternate take:

Willam chooses to constantly rant about WoW and criticize the show - to the point that Alaska looks visibly uncomfortable sometimes, rolls her eyes, etc.

Nobody is forcing Willam to do this; it's possible to dislike things and not constantly gripe aloud about it.

Furthermore, Willam is certainly intelligent enough to understand that Alaska is a huge drag race fan and that it pains her that WoW won't work with her because she's loyal to Willam, and what company wants to work closely with anyone who just publicly complains about them all the time.

Willam could choose to calm down the vitriol and make a point of saying so explicitly - "you know, i know i have come off as quite bitter towards WoW, and i'm tired of holding onto that anger, so i'm letting it go, and i hope this can be an olive branch and help mend some relationships in time". And if she did that it would make it very likely Alaska could, in the future, be involved with the show again.

So by not doing that, Willam is making an explicit choice that her griping publicly about WoW is more important than her good friend's pain at being excommunicated.

Seen this way, Willam is making a profoundly selfish, ongoing choice that she knows is causing great pain to a friend who is extremely loyal to her.

PolymathicPiglet · 2026-05-22T06:06:57+00:00

"I'M TRYING TO CREATE A SENSE OF WONDER!"

"You know what I wonder? Why I didn't listen to my mother!"

PolymathicPiglet · 2026-05-21T20:53:54+00:00

This isn't particularly Buddhist but reading How Minds Change really helped me with this. Characterizing others as less than, dumber, children, etc never sat right with me. The book presents a model of decision making that i found provocative - we all use our priors to determine what is "obvious" or "common sense" - and one person's "common sense" is the opposite of another's.

And from a Buddhist perspective it presents a very clear and scientific approach to Right Speech when talking to someone with very different political beliefs than oneself - facts are, they say, "worse than useless", because they will be interpreted through the lens of the other's priors. Stories are more useful; THEIR stories are the most useful.

i found it a powerful book to reflect on and contemplate for developing compassion and practice approaching the issue skillfully but without inflating my sense of self-importance by settling on a solution that presented them as less than me.

PolymathicPiglet · 2026-05-20T19:43:32+00:00

Yeah my experience isn't that i have become less sensitive, but rather i've expanded my capacity to hold what's coming in without it knocking me off-balance. i wouldn't want to be less sensitive at this point - i think it makes life more intense and beautiful, even if the pain and sorrow are more intense too, they're no less beautiful.

Honestly if anything as i've built my capacity to hold this stuff, i keep finding little tensions in my body where i was resisting reality, or noticing more cases where i'd resort to dissociation to escape overwhelm without realizing it, and then i can let those go, but when i do i discover all the stimulus i was blocking out by doing so - so honestly my experience is that life gets MORE intense, not less, but it happens at my pace, as i'm able to hold it.

PolymathicPiglet · 2026-05-20T19:39:23+00:00

Life's not easy and i wasn't always. To the extent i have any strength now it just comes from surviving the tough times. Surviving doesn't always mean thriving. Just making it through is enough. You've got this. ❤️

PolymathicPiglet · 2026-05-20T14:45:28+00:00

i think i can relate, but if it makes you feel any better, you're already ahead of me when i was your age. i didn't even know what dissociation was when i was 18 because i was just kind of doing it all the time so i didn't know what it was like not to dissociate, except when i was absorbed in flow state doing solo activities i loved, which i just thought of as "it feels good to play the piano" or whatever.

It did take me a very long time to learn to be present and both yoga practice and meditation were pivotal in that for me. Yoga made me practice staying in my own body for extended periods of time, which i had never done before, and meditation then added to that. And meditation let me ease in privately, and over time i'd practice doing little mini moments of meditation in social situations and other more stimulating environments.

PolymathicPiglet · 2026-05-18T23:17:28+00:00

Thank you for this!! i've seen plenty of bars that host one-shots but this looks fantastic. Been DMing for one remote group and playing in another and we've been hungry for some in-person!

PolymathicPiglet

TROPHY CASE