The biggest learning experience was that, in doing this, I mentally modelled pieces of cheap hardware store wood as ideal Platonic solids. It turns out, unsurprisingly in retrospect, that they are not. When you buy what purports to be a 5cm x 5cm x 2.5m square wooden beam, there is no guarantee that all four of the sides are actually 5cm long. There's probably +/-2mm tolerance, and I don't mean here that you might end up with a piece where all four sides are 4.9mm or 5.2mm, but rather where one side is 5.0 and another two are 5.2mm and the last is 4.9. By extension there is no guarantee that all four faces are parallel to one another. There is no guarantee that the beam is perfectly straight and perfectly untwisted along its entire length. I assume there are places in the world you can buy pieces of wood which do have these guarantees, but I don't wanna contemplate how much they might cost.

And why/how am I posting these giga walls of texts if I am “not online”? Long time readers know this and Geminauts have figured out their own similar solutions: it’s because I can post them from Emacs “without looking”. A write-only internet. I can check y’all stuff once a day or once a week or whatever but then I post myself continuously throughout.