Surprise! You’ve been Isekai’d into a D&D World… but it’s specifically a 3.5 Edition D&D world and due to a weird Glitch in the system you have been assigned not just a Base Class, but also one of that edition’s weird and wacky Prestige Class as well! Spin this wheel to see what you got!
(I added a short little summary for each Class explaining the basic gist of it. Although obviously you can also look them up to get more detailed info)
You ever see something innocuous, minding its own business on the clearance shelf at Michael’s and before you know it, it takes over your life for a few weeks?
So it was with this desktop greenhouse.
I took it home and after taking an appropriate time to “season” my idea in my mind (read: a month or two) I set to make my vision of a mini botanical garden a reality.
I started by removing the heavy glass panels and building a raised floor above the latch. I wanted to use the base as a foundation on the building.
I wrapped the foundation in plastic stone textured flooring (meant for Christmas villages) and built a pond at one end of the same. I then gave it a more realistic paint job and designed a rough layout for my plants and displays.
I also knew I wanted to make the ironwork significantly more intricate, but I wasn’t sure how just yet…
Up next - PLANTS! I went wild making all kinds of plants. Some were specific species and some were more conceptual.
I made several trees with polymer clay and moss, cacti out of beads and flocking, cattails out of raffia, hot glue and coffee grounds, and giant monstera leaves out of paper and wire.
This part should have taken me a long time, but it really came together fast. I loved finding ways to replicate natural shapes and patterns using bits of this and that.
I did make adjustments to my plans as I went like eliminating benches in favor of a simpler overall design.
Then I needed to fill my pond with water. For this I used resin. Lily pads were added to the top layer, and I wired in simple LED fairy lights. The batteries are kept in the box under the foundation.
In a weekend frenzy I added more plants, metal (paper) steps, new (plexi)glass windows, a roof, wrought-iron vines (paper again), doors that open, and a hose reel disguising the latch. Suddenly, a project I thought would take months was finished…
I love my desktop botanical garden. Right now it sits on a simple lazy Susan in my office. But I’d love to get it a proper display box to protect from dust.
Thank you for coming on this little journey with me. This piece packs a lot of joy into a tiny space. I always love building miniatures, and I’ll be doing more in the future I’m sure.
Everyone’s all “ohhh 2026 bring back physical media” until I start talking illuminated manuscripts and then suddenly we’re not on the same page anymore
people are sooooo judgemental when a thing that was pretending to be human peels off its face revealing itself to be some sort of creature or perhaps machine
“that’s so gross” “that’s horrifying” as if you would look any better with your face skin peeled off. get real
this is going to be a silly reblog but i have kind of a fixation on animal qualia and the idea of an animal’s umwelt, so i ended up wondering whether pudding was actually “enjoying” this.
which meant i went and read about snail brains.
here’s the bad news, at least by human standards:
snails do not have anything like a centralized brain. their nervous system is made up of small clusters of neurons (ganglia) that mostly handle very local tasks. they don’t have a cortex, they don’t build big integrated models of the world, and they almost certainly don’t experience things like appreciation, anticipation, or savoring.
pudding is not looking at the sky and thinking it’s beautiful.
snail eyes are basically light sensors - they can tell bright from dark, but not form images. snail “taste” is done through chemoreceptors on their tentacles and around their mouth. those receptors don’t produce flavor the way ours do; they just detect chemical compounds and sort them into “approach,” “ignore,” or “avoid.”
so there’s no evidence that snails enjoy food, or wind, or views, the way mammals do.
and that does sound kind of sad. but then i thought that maybe we are asking the wrong question.
snails do have valence. they detect aversive things (like salt or dryness) and withdraw from them. they detect non-aversive or beneficial conditions (like moisture) and stay extended. when pudding is stretched out like this, it means his nervous system is basically saying “this is safe; nothing is wrong.”
if we define pleasure not as our human experience of dopamine and reward chemicals but instead as “the absence of aversion” - a state where the organism is open to its environment instead of defending itself - then this does count as something positive, even if it’s extremely nothing like human enjoyment.
pudding isn’t appreciating the wind. but his body is registering humidity, safety, and the ability to keep functioning, and that matters to him in the only way his nervous system can make things matter. he does not think “this is great, this is awesome, i love the weather”, because he doesn’t think in the way we do at all, but the neurological action in his ganglion tell his body that he is safe, that the moisture is an acceptable level, that it’s not too dry or windy, and that there’s nothing imminently threatening.
i think a lot of the sadness comes from assuming that a good life has to look like ours: full of enjoyment, meaning, and aesthetic experience. but a snail isn’t missing those things. its world just isn’t built to include them.
snails don’t have a sense of flavor. they don’t even have tastebuds. this seems like a gimme, right? but again that might be asking the wrong question about what “taste” is. biologically speaking, it’s chemoreception. we taste sweet because it indicates high value, high calorie sugar molecules. we taste salty for salt, umami for proteins. so in what way does pudding’s chemoreceptors differ from ours instrumentally? we can say “by our human perspective, pudding can’t experience "preference” or “savoring” or “anticipation of delicious food”“, but from pudding’s perspective we have radically overengineered ourselves for the task at hand. pudding can tell what’s salty, what’s high value, what has the chemicals he needs. the functional outcome is that he can discriminate food souces based on their composition. is that not taste?
so maybe the point isn’t "this is sad because he can’t enjoy it,” but “this is a reminder that minds come in radically different shapes, and value doesn’t have to be rich to be real.”
You showed Pudding the world and they said “safe here, this is fine,” and there’s value and beauty in that.
After the hell of the past two days, this reminded me of what America could and should be about. It’s a little pocket of hope when our administration is trying to extinguish diversity and community and basic human decency and replace them with fear and hate and division.
