I agree with the other comment – looks like maybe insect damage or (fungal?) infection, but I’m really not sure. You might try looking through Sue Bottom’s Orchid Disease Guide (PDF), if you haven’t already.

Atomic Frontier on YouTube trained a machine learning model on his prior emails, assignments, etc., and had it determine his personal worst keyboard layout. He posted the code on GitHub for others to do the same.

My thought would be to get flat PVC end caps. These could be attached to the wood with screws, and the pipe attached to the caps with PVC cement.

I second looking at System Crafters’ resources. One thing that helped me was their emacs from scratch video series.

And as a heavy Markdown user, I initially built my config around Markdown. But several years later I’ve found I now use org-mode almost exclusively instead. They both fill the same niche in my workflow, but org-mode can do a lot more.