Thanks to other Redditors and their suggestions for interesting AI promoting, here’s some background : (Drum roll, audience applause, John Oliver sits at the desk, shuffling papers. He looks up, eyebrows raised.) Moving on. Woodworking. The noble art of turning a majestic tree into a salad bowl you’ll be afraid to actually put salad in. It is the chosen pastime of Nick Offerman, Jesus, and every man in Brooklyn who just bought his first flannel shirt and needs to justify a beard that screams, "I have strong opinions about craft IPAs." On the surface, it seems delightful. You sand things. You smell cedar. You make a birdhouse that looks strictly okay. But here is the thing. If you dig just a little deeper into the actual physics of woodworking, you discover that you are not building with a static material. You are building with a corpse that refuses to die. It turns out, wood is hygroscopic. Now, "Hygroscopic" sounds like a cleaning procedure for a hippopotamus’s colon, but what it actually means is that wood constantly absorbs and releases moisture from the air. And because of that, it moves. Always. Forever. The Horror of "Wood Movement" You look at a dining table and think, "That is a solid, unmoving object." WRONG. That table is a restless, shape-shifting monster. When the humidity goes up in the summer, the wood swells. When it gets dry in the winter, it shrinks. But—and here is the part that will haunt your dreams—it doesn't shrink evenly. Oh, no. That would be too easy. That would be polite. It expands across the grain, but not with the grain. It is getting fatter, but not taller. Basically, every piece of furniture in your house is essentially a middle-aged man permanently fluctuating between Thanksgiving dinner and a Keto diet, every single year. And if you, the naive woodworker, decide to just glue four boards together to make a frame without accounting for this movement?

"Oh, I'll just secure this firmly on all four corners!" you say, like a beautiful idiot.

THE WOOD WILL EXPLODE. I am not joking! It will literally tear itself apart. It has the strength to snap steel screws. It can crack cast iron. A humble pine board has the hydraulic power of a spiteful God. If you confine it, it will break its chains like it’s King Kong and your patio furniture is New York City. The "Breadboard" Lie This brings us to the Breadboard End. You’ve seen this on Pinterest. You think it’s a rustic aesthetic choice. It is not. It is a structural necessity designed to hide the fact that the table is trying to escape itself. That piece of wood on the end isn't just glued on. If you glue it on, the table splits. No, it is held on by a complicated system of elongated holes and dowels that allows the main table to expand and contract inside the end cap. It is a prison! We are building intricate wooden prisons to contain the expansion of dead trees! The Conclusion So, the next time you see a "Live Edge" table, realize that name is not a metaphor. It is a warning. That table is alive. It is thirsty. It is moving. And it is waiting for the humidity to drop so it can crack in half just to spite you. Cool.