Huzzah. I have managed to create a blog at a site called "Troll Kingdom."
One thing relatively relevant to this thread, one nerdy thing about an old friend, and one mawkish thing about my future:
So. The Narnia closet. Started building it. It wasn't going well. And my attempt to stain it (along with having bought enough plywood for a second attempt) caused me to abandon the first effort and try again. I wound up using pine for the mouldings (because that's what they had) and this nudged my cheap ass to buy pine 1x2s instead of oak. It is possible to stain pine so that it doesn't look terrible, but for the time and money it costs, you might as well just buy hardwood and have it look amazing. I dug around a bit more and found some basswood moulding that would work. (I tried using a crown moulding the first time around and it made the build unnecessarily complex.) Some glue overruns that I didn't promptly wipe off further made the stain look absolutely terrible. The second effort is looking very nice. I could still fuck it up, but not too badly, I don't think. Anyway, none of this is what I really wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about illusion.
The whole point of the Narnia closet is, I had a little triangle created by my wall that was free closet space. But it really wasn't big enough to be a decent closet. Since a wardrobe would fit better with the feel of the room (and create a way to get the HVAC vent to heat/cool the room despite being in the closet) but an actual wardrobe would be too deep for the space between the wall and a window on the adjacent wall (read on and this should become more clear) so I built a fake wardrobe facade. And as an added plus, this would allow it to be bigger on the inside.
OK. *Now* I'm going to talk about illusion. So. Wardrobe is basically 80" tall, 37" wide, and 11" deep. It's up on 4" feet (76+4=80). It is in a corner of the room, directly in front of a triangle shaped section of drywall with a hole cut in in on the room side (When you come in the back door, there's a sort of entry space and a window. Big closet on the left, stairs to the basement in front (behind a door), wall that the bathroom is behind also in front. Past the window is my new wall, which runs at a 45 (or is it 135 degree?) angle for about 4'. Then you get another 135 that makes it run parallel to the next bathroom wall for 3' before you get to 6' of oak sliding "barn" doors, 3 more feet, and you're to the doorway to the kitchen. (Goddam, I ramble). The point is, you've got this wood cabinet tucked in a corner that is open in the back and hides a second space inside the wall.
So which way do you hinge the door? If you're going for practicality and ease of use, you put the hinges on the side of the outside wall. The door opens towards the window, making it easier to get access to the closet. But if you're creating the illusion of a magic cabinet, you want the hinge on the room side, so the open door hides the person opening the cabinet from most of the rest of the room. That way, when you step into the cabinet, you're hidden from most of the people in the room, making the illusion of a person climbing into a piece of furniture that is clearly too small for an adult human to fit in far more convincing.
The other thing is the wall gap. I was sure I couldn't have a wall gap between the cabinet and the wall (or if I did, it would involve a lot of fiddly creating a black "collar" to hide the gap. but as I was staining the bugger, I pulled it away from the wall an inch or two. And I realized you absolutely could NOT see the hole in the wall behind the cabinet. So the gap actually HELPS the illusion that a person just disappeared into a magical cabinet.
That said, there are limits to the illusion. If the main purpose was to create an illusion, I'd make a false back door to the cabinet. Or at least a black curtain. But the main purpose is to have a closet. the trick is just gravy. And a curtain would interfere with a hanger rod, so anyone who actually opens the door will quickly expose the trick.
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I am starting to think I cannot ever have a wife and kids. I mean, I'm already old as crap. Add to that that I just don't know how to interact romantically with female humans. I learned a lot about love and sacrifice by having my dog, but it may not be enough to apply it to interacting with a girl I want to live the rest of my life with. This kind of comes back to the new bedroom too. Because, say I meet a girl. She's going to have stuff. And she's going to want to put at least some of that stuff in my house (or I'm going to want to put some of my stuff in her house). When I added the 3rd bedroom, 1 Plan was to just leave it empty, so if I met a girl, she could have that room herself--as well as shared space in the rest of the house. But then my friend was visiting with his daughter so this gave me an excuse to furnish the new bedroom. I mean, one of them could sleep on the living room futon, but having 2 bedrooms would've been even cooler. In the end, I didn't get my furniture in time, but it was a nice plan. And it gave me an excuse to furnish the new room. So now I've got a new room I love. So if I managed to get a girl I'd have a hard time saying "yeah, no, I'll just throw all this great new stuff in my leaky musty tin shed so you have a place to put your stuff."
Besides, I really have no idea how to interact with a human female I'm sexually attracted to. So maybe cut to the chase, stick with what I know, and get another dog and cat for 10+ more years of happiness.
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This year my friend, who hired me and visited me on the way down and back from taking his daughter to Space Camp, and whose injured cat I babysat, got a sexy Cadillac crossover. He got a deal on it because it was copper colored and the salesmen couldn't move it. And he loved it. He'd regularly call me to tell me how amazing it was and how great the computer in it was and how much better it made his life. I drive a 12-13 year old car. It has a computer I liked a lot when I got it, but nothing as robust as my friend's. (I did ride around in it when he was on the way back and we did tourist things in Louisville and I'll admit it had some neat features.) And I explicitly got my car because it had a manual transmission and did NOT have traction control or ABS. The fact that new cars cannot be sold without traction control may make this my last car, but that's another story.
Or is it? Every time he'd call me to tell me about his clever Knight Rider car, I kept thinking about the new Vipers, compared to the 40 year old ones in the BSG reboot--how his Caddy was a nuViper while my Mustang was an Old School Viper. Well today, in the month-end accounting close status update meeting, he shared that he was currently a pedestrian.
See, he was stopped at a light. And his nuVip--er, Caddy--computer shuts the engine off if you're at a light. Because the engine was off, the computer decided it was a good time to download the latest software update. ( You can NOT tell the computer "No, do not download an update right now." It happens.) Well the update had a bug. So his engine would run, but it refused to shift out of "Park." It DID let him turn on his hazard blinkers and call the cops. Pretty quickly, he got it towed to the shop, where they tried to apply a patch they...apparently got off the Dark Web or something. Now it runs, but won't go into drive--and it thinks that it is raining and thus turns on the lights and the wipers.
As he was telling htis tale, I again had to sum up the basic plot of the early 2000s BSG miniseries/pilot. "Yep. That sounds about right," chuckled my friend.
girls c my friend's cylon SUV