I always really liked the wooden fish on the wall of the apartment in the Steins;Gate anime that they used to hold their mail. The derpy fish face always made me smile whenever I saw it in the background.

I thought about that fish for years. One day this summer I was looking at a piece of scrap 1x4 laying around, and I said even though this is way too small to make an actual copy, I didn’t expect it to turn out great anyway, so over the next few days I whittled that board down into that fish using just my favorite pocketknife and a scrap of sandpaper.

It’s not perfect, it’s not even finished still, I can’t decide to paint it or stain it, but now it sits on my mantle and I get to see it every day, and it makes me smile thinking if a story I really loved and the effort I put into doing something to make myself happy.

It’s nothing compared to the woodworking stuff on Reddit. I can do pretty fancy stuff, I built furniture and such in school, but I live in a condo and can’t have table saws and lathes and all that, but I can still do something. And like you says, I wouldn’t “bother” Reddit with this, but this place is small and it’s late in the thread anyway, so probably a dozen people will see this, but this is the real me sharing something with you guys who come to listen to what I have to show you every day that I felt you may think is maybe interesting. So here’s my not quite finished palm sized mini fish mail holder replica.