Distillation

A distillery where the input is a vat full of "blood, sweat, tears, bugs, dead-ends, confusion, and time." The distillation process produces just a little liquid: a paper.

And I thought the conversion rate from maple sap to syrup was low…

15 Feb 2025

Polished

A friend checks up on their writer friend, who is busy building a massive structure of convoluted words. The friend looks up at his friend and asks, "What are you doing?" She replies, "Polishing my sentences." He then says, "I think you'll be doing something different soon..."

(After the whole structure falls down in a convoluted mess.)

The writer: “Let me start building anew right from my delightful sentences!”

08 Feb 2025

Done

A project timeline from start to end as a line graph. There are dots on the line which represent someone saying, "We're done!" Halfway through the project is the first dot, closely followed by more. Soon, there are a ton of dots all crowding the line, until finally they lower in number again and the final dot actually occurs with reality.

“We’re done!”

(Checks timeline and shakes head)

“No, we have about ten more to go.”

01 Feb 2025

Paper Collaboration

A graph of "Changes Remaining" versus "Time" for a paper. The curve trends downward until the first draft is completed, and then it periodically spikes back up as collaborators ask for changes. First Collaborator 1, then Collaborator 2, then Collaborator 1 again, and so on. The trend line has the label, "Hope this doesn't asymptotically reach zero".

Rapid progress occurred when one of the collaborators said, “Screw it!” and allowed the revision of the paper to continue without including their pet idea.

25 Jan 2025

Saturated

A graph of "Facts uttered" versus time. There's a dashed horizontal line that marks the "Fact limit". For messages that creep above it, people forget them. It's messages that stay below which stick.

The best is when I have a time limit and suddenly I’m trying to break the world record for most facts stated in a minute as if that would help get my message across…

18 Jan 2025

Fractured

On the left is a series of spaced lines, indicated "Scattered reading". On the left is a filled rectangle, indicating "Uninterrupted reading". There's an inequality saying that scattered < uninterrupted.

I feel like I’m reading in smaller and smaller chunks each year.

11 Jan 2025

Logical Gaps

A graph of "Time spent writing mathematical proofs" versus "Inability to ignore logical gaps in conversation". The curve is increasing.

My pedantry has gone through the roof.

04 Jan 2025

Undead

A person arrives at a large pile with a wheelbarrow. In front of the pile is a sign, marked "Undead Projects". They say, "Another batch to end the year!"

The crucial point is that this pile lives in your mind, at the expense of other thoughts.

28 Dec 2024

Synonyms

A graph of "Enjoyable to read" versus "Synonym use". There are two curves. The increasing one is for literature, while the decreasing one is for technical mathematics.

“What do you mean, I can’t describe the same quantity in my equations using five different similar-but-subtly-different-terms!?”

21 Dec 2024

Profound

A single-axis labelled, "Time spent reflecting on X". For small times, the reaction is often, "X is so shallow!" But after you think about X a lot, the reaction becomes, "X is profound!"

Works for many values of X.

14 Dec 2024

To the past To the present