A fraction was encountered today.

I gotta say, though, I hope it’ll be a good long time before I run into one of these “differential equations” you speak of. The ones with those hook-things look worryingly ready to stab someone. Like a bug with a really long proboscis. What could they possibly need all of that for?

Please enjoy my artistic rendition of how I expect my first encounter with a differential equation to play out:

There are grievances today. Small ones. Spouse cannot meet for lunch. Earbuds lie abandoned on an office desk like forgotten relics. Silence will accompany the walk. Alas.

But then—birds.

For the first time in weeks, the trees are stitched with sweet sound. Thin, bright chirps pierce the damp air like needles pulling thread through heavy cloth. The world, so long held in frozen suspension, is beginning to murmur again. Something small and feathered dares to declare survival.

Perhaps the engineer is lucky today.

Perhaps signal bars will rise like tentative green shoots to the promised land of art and storytelling. Perhaps. Point A to Point B is achieved—not in triumph, but in steady, confident steps. A small-town strip tucked improbably close to the hum and clang of manufacturing. One block over, steel and precision and prototypes and schedules. Here? Window displays. Painted signs. A small retail stretch that feels like it misplaced itself from a gentler decade. It is cute in the way something hard-working tries to be charming anyway. Brick facades. Hand-lettered chalkboards. The café waits at the edge of this thawing world like a lantern left burning in a window.

Soup time. Fic time.

All hail Soup Lady and her tiny, radiant domain. Soup Lady does not know she runs a sanctuary. She does not know the stories that have been drafted at her tables. The fic updates have been inhaled with rapt eyes.

Today’s sacrament: Chicken Corn Chowder.

The engineer is doing good today. The chowder is velvety, savory, fragrant with spice.

And lo—three bars of service.

Tumblr stirs.

Weirdmachine0. Day 3.

The engineer is excited, had been looking forward to an update to this budding oddessy.

The post loads.

The image appears. The caption unfurls.

The brain processes. Processes...processes...

And then—

Laughter erupts mid-spoonful. Chicken corn chowder is violently pulled into forbidden sinus territory. This is not how chowder is meant to travel. The quiet café witnesses a near-death-by-comedy incident.

The culprit?

An entirely novel interpretation of an integral equation. A mathematical horror rendered as a long-proboscised insect poised to stab.

“FREAKY-ASS BUG,” indeed.

The engineer—veteran of the Calculus Wars—drowns in gleeful whimsy.

Because here is the truth, rarely admitted in polite company:

The engineer actually really—reaaaallllyy—likes math.

Not just tolerates it. Not just uses it as a tool. Loves it.

Loves the clean, merciless order of it. The way the universe can be laid out into symbols. The way a page of notation, once opaque, can unfold into utter clarity. There is something holy in that kind of structure. Something steady. Something that does not care about weather or mood or market fluctuations.

The engineer loves that.

But loving something does not mean it was easy.

There were late nights under the interrogation lamp of a desk light. Early mornings fueled by coffee and spite. YouTube videos paused mid-sentence because the leap from line three to line four felt like being asked to jump a canyon without visible ground on the other side.

There were pages rewritten until the paper thinned. There were concepts forced through—not elegantly absorbed, but wrestled into place by repetition and stubbornness. Solve it again. And again. And again. Until the shape of it began to feel less like an enemy and more like a familiar coastline.

The engineer did not fall in love at first sight.

The engineer committed.

And over time, the hooks became curves. The curves became tools. The tools became fluent. The language became home.

So when someone eyeballs a spooky lookin' differential equation and sees a long-proboscised insect poised to stab— Its beautiful, its hilarious, and gawddd damn, that was NAWT on my bingo card today <3 THIS THIS IS BEAUTIFUL, and I almost DIED. with love - the engineer. THE EYEBALLS, the BROOM sent me.

Relatedly, I lost a battle of wits with the sun this morning. I wanted to capture the moment when the sun came over the horizon, so I stood out there for about 50 minutes watching the sky get brighter, but not seeing the sun itself, wondering if I’d somehow avoided the outside world for long enough to forget how sunrises work. Meanwhile, it was sneakily rising behind a cloud that had rolled in at just the right time.

Where I live, there are only two seasons—“summer” (this one occurs during the winter) and “oh god the air is made of lava and my face is melting off”. So, we have a decent amount of sunlight. I nabbed some for you:

Digressions aside, I’m currently being subjected to 3rd grade math. It’s oddly nostalgic. When I was a kid, I would try to get around things like solving for the missing side of a shape by tearing little strips of paper off of my test or scratch paper, and using it like a ruler to manually measure the graphic used to represent the shape described in the problem. It didn’t work—the graphics were intentionally distorted to prevent this kind of cheating.

Day 5 of relearning all math concepts. If I could get wrong answers the normal way (whatever that would be), instead of somehow hallucinating numbers and symbols that aren’t there, it would feel like an accomplishment.

I don’t really like the fact that there are an infinite number of prime numbers. I’m not denying it, I’m just not very happy about it.

One thing I disliked as a kid was the concept of multiplying by a fraction. I don’t remember whether I actually learned how to do it back then, but either way, I hated it and found it completely nonsensical. My brain just couldn’t process the idea that I could multiply two non-zero numbers and get an answer lower than one (or both) of the numbers being multiplied.

At some point, I put this concept out of my mind completely and forgot that it even existed. Now that I’m reencountering it years later, it makes perfect sense.

Functions have been my sworn enemy for many years. I never thought I’d be able to connect with one on an emotional level…

Day 22 of relearning all math concepts.

I’m now progressing to middle school math.

When I was actually in middle school, I absorbed almost zero math-related information, so I wouldn’t be surprised if a good percentage of the things I encounter going forward feel unfamiliar.

The most interesting math lesson I learned during that period of my life had little to do with what I was actually supposed to be learning. Instead, it was an “infinite monkey theorem”-esque lesson about statistics, played out in real life.

It goes like this: if you take a bunch of sixth graders, put them in an algebra class, completely fail at teaching them algebra, and then give them all an end of course exam, eventually one of them will pass despite guessing on about 80% of the questions. That sixth grader? Me.

Out of those 30-or-so kids, there wasn’t a single one who actually learned how to do algebra in that class, but I—with my superior RNG—prevailed, despite the fact that I probably knew the least about math out of all of them.

Oh my god dude. Everything is division in a funny hat. Is this what normal classes were learning in sixth grade? Just memorizing all the names division wants to be called by when it puts on a costume? Rates are ratios in a funny hat, and ratios are fractions in a funny hat, and fractions are division in a funny hat. Percentages are fractions in a funny hat, and fractions are, say it with me…

A fraction was encountered today.

I gotta say, though, I hope it’ll be a good long time before I run into one of these “differential equations” you speak of. The ones with those hook-things look worryingly ready to stab someone. Like a bug with a really long proboscis. What could they possibly need all of that for?

Please enjoy my artistic rendition of how I expect my first encounter with a differential equation to play out:

There are grievances today. Small ones. Spouse cannot meet for lunch. Earbuds lie abandoned on an office desk like forgotten relics. Silence will accompany the walk. Alas.

But then—birds.

For the first time in weeks, the trees are stitched with sweet sound. Thin, bright chirps pierce the damp air like needles pulling thread through heavy cloth. The world, so long held in frozen suspension, is beginning to murmur again. Something small and feathered dares to declare survival.

Perhaps the engineer is lucky today.

Perhaps signal bars will rise like tentative green shoots to the promised land of art and storytelling. Perhaps. Point A to Point B is achieved—not in triumph, but in steady, confident steps. A small-town strip tucked improbably close to the hum and clang of manufacturing. One block over, steel and precision and prototypes and schedules. Here? Window displays. Painted signs. A small retail stretch that feels like it misplaced itself from a gentler decade. It is cute in the way something hard-working tries to be charming anyway. Brick facades. Hand-lettered chalkboards. The café waits at the edge of this thawing world like a lantern left burning in a window.

Soup time. Fic time.

All hail Soup Lady and her tiny, radiant domain. Soup Lady does not know she runs a sanctuary. She does not know the stories that have been drafted at her tables. The fic updates have been inhaled with rapt eyes.

Today’s sacrament: Chicken Corn Chowder.

The engineer is doing good today. The chowder is velvety, savory, fragrant with spice.

And lo—three bars of service.

Tumblr stirs.

Weirdmachine0. Day 3.

The engineer is excited, had been looking forward to an update to this budding oddessy.

The post loads.

The image appears. The caption unfurls.

The brain processes. Processes...processes...

And then—

Laughter erupts mid-spoonful. Chicken corn chowder is violently pulled into forbidden sinus territory. This is not how chowder is meant to travel. The quiet café witnesses a near-death-by-comedy incident.

The culprit?

An entirely novel interpretation of an integral equation. A mathematical horror rendered as a long-proboscised insect poised to stab.

“FREAKY-ASS BUG,” indeed.

The engineer—veteran of the Calculus Wars—drowns in gleeful whimsy.

Because here is the truth, rarely admitted in polite company:

The engineer actually really—reaaaallllyy—likes math.

Not just tolerates it. Not just uses it as a tool. Loves it.

Loves the clean, merciless order of it. The way the universe can be laid out into symbols. The way a page of notation, once opaque, can unfold into utter clarity. There is something holy in that kind of structure. Something steady. Something that does not care about weather or mood or market fluctuations.

The engineer loves that.

But loving something does not mean it was easy.

There were late nights under the interrogation lamp of a desk light. Early mornings fueled by coffee and spite. YouTube videos paused mid-sentence because the leap from line three to line four felt like being asked to jump a canyon without visible ground on the other side.

There were pages rewritten until the paper thinned. There were concepts forced through—not elegantly absorbed, but wrestled into place by repetition and stubbornness. Solve it again. And again. And again. Until the shape of it began to feel less like an enemy and more like a familiar coastline.

The engineer did not fall in love at first sight.

The engineer committed.

And over time, the hooks became curves. The curves became tools. The tools became fluent. The language became home.

So when someone eyeballs a spooky lookin' differential equation and sees a long-proboscised insect poised to stab— Its beautiful, its hilarious, and gawddd damn, that was NAWT on my bingo card today <3 THIS THIS IS BEAUTIFUL, and I almost DIED. with love - the engineer. THE EYEBALLS, the BROOM sent me.

Relatedly, I lost a battle of wits with the sun this morning. I wanted to capture the moment when the sun came over the horizon, so I stood out there for about 50 minutes watching the sky get brighter, but not seeing the sun itself, wondering if I’d somehow avoided the outside world for long enough to forget how sunrises work. Meanwhile, it was sneakily rising behind a cloud that had rolled in at just the right time.

Where I live, there are only two seasons—“summer” (this one occurs during the winter) and “oh god the air is made of lava and my face is melting off”. So, we have a decent amount of sunlight. I nabbed some for you:

Digressions aside, I’m currently being subjected to 3rd grade math. It’s oddly nostalgic. When I was a kid, I would try to get around things like solving for the missing side of a shape by tearing little strips of paper off of my test or scratch paper, and using it like a ruler to manually measure the graphic used to represent the shape described in the problem. It didn’t work—the graphics were intentionally distorted to prevent this kind of cheating.

Day 5 of relearning all math concepts. If I could get wrong answers the normal way (whatever that would be), instead of somehow hallucinating numbers and symbols that aren’t there, it would feel like an accomplishment.

I don’t really like the fact that there are an infinite number of prime numbers. I’m not denying it, I’m just not very happy about it.

One thing I disliked as a kid was the concept of multiplying by a fraction. I don’t remember whether I actually learned how to do it back then, but either way, I hated it and found it completely nonsensical. My brain just couldn’t process the idea that I could multiply two non-zero numbers and get an answer lower than one (or both) of the numbers being multiplied.

At some point, I put this concept out of my mind completely and forgot that it even existed. Now that I’m reencountering it years later, it makes perfect sense.

Functions have been my sworn enemy for many years. I never thought I’d be able to connect with one on an emotional level…

Day 22 of relearning all math concepts.

I’m now progressing to middle school math.

When I was actually in middle school, I absorbed almost zero math-related information, so I wouldn’t be surprised if a good percentage of the things I encounter going forward feel unfamiliar.

The most interesting math lesson I learned during that period of my life had little to do with what I was actually supposed to be learning. Instead, it was an “infinite monkey theorem”-esque lesson about statistics, played out in real life.

It goes like this: if you take a bunch of sixth graders, put them in an algebra class, completely fail at teaching them algebra, and then give them all an end of course exam, eventually one of them will pass despite guessing on about 80% of the questions. That sixth grader? Me.

Out of those 30-or-so kids, there wasn’t a single one who actually learned how to do algebra in that class, but I—with my superior RNG—prevailed, despite the fact that I probably knew the least about math out of all of them.

I'm still alive I swear 😭 Half a year after the first part, I finally finished the second :,,,, )

A fraction was encountered today.

I gotta say, though, I hope it’ll be a good long time before I run into one of these “differential equations” you speak of. The ones with those hook-things look worryingly ready to stab someone. Like a bug with a really long proboscis. What could they possibly need all of that for?

Please enjoy my artistic rendition of how I expect my first encounter with a differential equation to play out:

There are grievances today. Small ones. Spouse cannot meet for lunch. Earbuds lie abandoned on an office desk like forgotten relics. Silence will accompany the walk. Alas.

But then—birds.

For the first time in weeks, the trees are stitched with sweet sound. Thin, bright chirps pierce the damp air like needles pulling thread through heavy cloth. The world, so long held in frozen suspension, is beginning to murmur again. Something small and feathered dares to declare survival.

Perhaps the engineer is lucky today.

Perhaps signal bars will rise like tentative green shoots to the promised land of art and storytelling. Perhaps. Point A to Point B is achieved—not in triumph, but in steady, confident steps. A small-town strip tucked improbably close to the hum and clang of manufacturing. One block over, steel and precision and prototypes and schedules. Here? Window displays. Painted signs. A small retail stretch that feels like it misplaced itself from a gentler decade. It is cute in the way something hard-working tries to be charming anyway. Brick facades. Hand-lettered chalkboards. The café waits at the edge of this thawing world like a lantern left burning in a window.

Soup time. Fic time.

All hail Soup Lady and her tiny, radiant domain. Soup Lady does not know she runs a sanctuary. She does not know the stories that have been drafted at her tables. The fic updates have been inhaled with rapt eyes.

Today’s sacrament: Chicken Corn Chowder.

The engineer is doing good today. The chowder is velvety, savory, fragrant with spice.

And lo—three bars of service.

Tumblr stirs.

Weirdmachine0. Day 3.

The engineer is excited, had been looking forward to an update to this budding oddessy.

The post loads.

The image appears. The caption unfurls.

The brain processes. Processes...processes...

And then—

Laughter erupts mid-spoonful. Chicken corn chowder is violently pulled into forbidden sinus territory. This is not how chowder is meant to travel. The quiet café witnesses a near-death-by-comedy incident.

The culprit?

An entirely novel interpretation of an integral equation. A mathematical horror rendered as a long-proboscised insect poised to stab.

“FREAKY-ASS BUG,” indeed.

The engineer—veteran of the Calculus Wars—drowns in gleeful whimsy.

Because here is the truth, rarely admitted in polite company:

The engineer actually really—reaaaallllyy—likes math.

Not just tolerates it. Not just uses it as a tool. Loves it.

Loves the clean, merciless order of it. The way the universe can be laid out into symbols. The way a page of notation, once opaque, can unfold into utter clarity. There is something holy in that kind of structure. Something steady. Something that does not care about weather or mood or market fluctuations.

The engineer loves that.

But loving something does not mean it was easy.

There were late nights under the interrogation lamp of a desk light. Early mornings fueled by coffee and spite. YouTube videos paused mid-sentence because the leap from line three to line four felt like being asked to jump a canyon without visible ground on the other side.

There were pages rewritten until the paper thinned. There were concepts forced through—not elegantly absorbed, but wrestled into place by repetition and stubbornness. Solve it again. And again. And again. Until the shape of it began to feel less like an enemy and more like a familiar coastline.

The engineer did not fall in love at first sight.

The engineer committed.

And over time, the hooks became curves. The curves became tools. The tools became fluent. The language became home.

So when someone eyeballs a spooky lookin' differential equation and sees a long-proboscised insect poised to stab— Its beautiful, its hilarious, and gawddd damn, that was NAWT on my bingo card today <3 THIS THIS IS BEAUTIFUL, and I almost DIED. with love - the engineer. THE EYEBALLS, the BROOM sent me.

Relatedly, I lost a battle of wits with the sun this morning. I wanted to capture the moment when the sun came over the horizon, so I stood out there for about 50 minutes watching the sky get brighter, but not seeing the sun itself, wondering if I’d somehow avoided the outside world for long enough to forget how sunrises work. Meanwhile, it was sneakily rising behind a cloud that had rolled in at just the right time.

Where I live, there are only two seasons—“summer” (this one occurs during the winter) and “oh god the air is made of lava and my face is melting off”. So, we have a decent amount of sunlight. I nabbed some for you:

Digressions aside, I’m currently being subjected to 3rd grade math. It’s oddly nostalgic. When I was a kid, I would try to get around things like solving for the missing side of a shape by tearing little strips of paper off of my test or scratch paper, and using it like a ruler to manually measure the graphic used to represent the shape described in the problem. It didn’t work—the graphics were intentionally distorted to prevent this kind of cheating.

Day 5 of relearning all math concepts. If I could get wrong answers the normal way (whatever that would be), instead of somehow hallucinating numbers and symbols that aren’t there, it would feel like an accomplishment.

I don’t really like the fact that there are an infinite number of prime numbers. I’m not denying it, I’m just not very happy about it.

One thing I disliked as a kid was the concept of multiplying by a fraction. I don’t remember whether I actually learned how to do it back then, but either way, I hated it and found it completely nonsensical. My brain just couldn’t process the idea that I could multiply two non-zero numbers and get an answer lower than one (or both) of the numbers being multiplied.

At some point, I put this concept out of my mind completely and forgot that it even existed. Now that I’m reencountering it years later, it makes perfect sense.

A fraction was encountered today.

I gotta say, though, I hope it’ll be a good long time before I run into one of these “differential equations” you speak of. The ones with those hook-things look worryingly ready to stab someone. Like a bug with a really long proboscis. What could they possibly need all of that for?

Please enjoy my artistic rendition of how I expect my first encounter with a differential equation to play out:

There are grievances today. Small ones. Spouse cannot meet for lunch. Earbuds lie abandoned on an office desk like forgotten relics. Silence will accompany the walk. Alas.

But then—birds.

For the first time in weeks, the trees are stitched with sweet sound. Thin, bright chirps pierce the damp air like needles pulling thread through heavy cloth. The world, so long held in frozen suspension, is beginning to murmur again. Something small and feathered dares to declare survival.

Perhaps the engineer is lucky today.

Perhaps signal bars will rise like tentative green shoots to the promised land of art and storytelling. Perhaps. Point A to Point B is achieved—not in triumph, but in steady, confident steps. A small-town strip tucked improbably close to the hum and clang of manufacturing. One block over, steel and precision and prototypes and schedules. Here? Window displays. Painted signs. A small retail stretch that feels like it misplaced itself from a gentler decade. It is cute in the way something hard-working tries to be charming anyway. Brick facades. Hand-lettered chalkboards. The café waits at the edge of this thawing world like a lantern left burning in a window.

Soup time. Fic time.

All hail Soup Lady and her tiny, radiant domain. Soup Lady does not know she runs a sanctuary. She does not know the stories that have been drafted at her tables. The fic updates have been inhaled with rapt eyes.

Today’s sacrament: Chicken Corn Chowder.

The engineer is doing good today. The chowder is velvety, savory, fragrant with spice.

And lo—three bars of service.

Tumblr stirs.

Weirdmachine0. Day 3.

The engineer is excited, had been looking forward to an update to this budding oddessy.

The post loads.

The image appears. The caption unfurls.

The brain processes. Processes...processes...

And then—

Laughter erupts mid-spoonful. Chicken corn chowder is violently pulled into forbidden sinus territory. This is not how chowder is meant to travel. The quiet café witnesses a near-death-by-comedy incident.

The culprit?

An entirely novel interpretation of an integral equation. A mathematical horror rendered as a long-proboscised insect poised to stab.

“FREAKY-ASS BUG,” indeed.

The engineer—veteran of the Calculus Wars—drowns in gleeful whimsy.

Because here is the truth, rarely admitted in polite company:

The engineer actually really—reaaaallllyy—likes math.

Not just tolerates it. Not just uses it as a tool. Loves it.

Loves the clean, merciless order of it. The way the universe can be laid out into symbols. The way a page of notation, once opaque, can unfold into utter clarity. There is something holy in that kind of structure. Something steady. Something that does not care about weather or mood or market fluctuations.

The engineer loves that.

But loving something does not mean it was easy.

There were late nights under the interrogation lamp of a desk light. Early mornings fueled by coffee and spite. YouTube videos paused mid-sentence because the leap from line three to line four felt like being asked to jump a canyon without visible ground on the other side.

There were pages rewritten until the paper thinned. There were concepts forced through—not elegantly absorbed, but wrestled into place by repetition and stubbornness. Solve it again. And again. And again. Until the shape of it began to feel less like an enemy and more like a familiar coastline.

The engineer did not fall in love at first sight.

The engineer committed.

And over time, the hooks became curves. The curves became tools. The tools became fluent. The language became home.

So when someone eyeballs a spooky lookin' differential equation and sees a long-proboscised insect poised to stab— Its beautiful, its hilarious, and gawddd damn, that was NAWT on my bingo card today <3 THIS THIS IS BEAUTIFUL, and I almost DIED. with love - the engineer. THE EYEBALLS, the BROOM sent me.

Relatedly, I lost a battle of wits with the sun this morning. I wanted to capture the moment when the sun came over the horizon, so I stood out there for about 50 minutes watching the sky get brighter, but not seeing the sun itself, wondering if I’d somehow avoided the outside world for long enough to forget how sunrises work. Meanwhile, it was sneakily rising behind a cloud that had rolled in at just the right time.

Where I live, there are only two seasons—“summer” (this one occurs during the winter) and “oh god the air is made of lava and my face is melting off”. So, we have a decent amount of sunlight. I nabbed some for you:

Digressions aside, I’m currently being subjected to 3rd grade math. It’s oddly nostalgic. When I was a kid, I would try to get around things like solving for the missing side of a shape by tearing little strips of paper off of my test or scratch paper, and using it like a ruler to manually measure the graphic used to represent the shape described in the problem. It didn’t work—the graphics were intentionally distorted to prevent this kind of cheating.

Day 5 of relearning all math concepts. If I could get wrong answers the normal way (whatever that would be), instead of somehow hallucinating numbers and symbols that aren’t there, it would feel like an accomplishment.

I don’t really like the fact that there are an infinite number of prime numbers. I’m not denying it, I’m just not very happy about it.

The fact that humans have pretty similar reaction to pain as Cybertronians would definitely help the situation but I believe that a good chunk of Cybertronians would still feel kind of. Significantly detached? Human injury does not look like a real injury to them. I think they feel about it somewhat the same way we feel when we look at pictures like this one

- Spending too long around Cybertronians, as a human, and starting to feel empathy towards broken machinery, sentient or otherwise.

- Spending too long around humans, as a Cybertronian, and starting to feel unsettled by red liquids and the tearing of anything that looks superficially similar to flesh.

- Cybertronians being a little bit horrified by humans’ ability to rip off and replace their plating (clothes) every day.

- Some humans assuming Cybertronians can’t be sentient because they’re robots (e.g. thinking they must be AI mimicking human-like behavior). Humans, who initially seem unassuming, developing a reputation for their cruelty.

- The human body being able to heal shockingly well without intervention. Cybertronians being able to come back from almost anything, as long as they are manually repaired, but their bodies have minimal or no self-healing abilities. A human and a Cybertronian arguing over which is better (both think the grass is greener on the other side).

- Wildly overestimating the severity of an injury on someone of another species and coddling them like they’re teetering on the verge of death, when it’s really just a mild inconvenience to them.

- Wildly underestimating the severity of an injury on someone of another species. They don’t want to look weak, so this misconception goes unchallenged until they suddenly collapse.

A fraction was encountered today.

I gotta say, though, I hope it’ll be a good long time before I run into one of these “differential equations” you speak of. The ones with those hook-things look worryingly ready to stab someone. Like a bug with a really long proboscis. What could they possibly need all of that for?

Please enjoy my artistic rendition of how I expect my first encounter with a differential equation to play out:

There are grievances today. Small ones. Spouse cannot meet for lunch. Earbuds lie abandoned on an office desk like forgotten relics. Silence will accompany the walk. Alas.

But then—birds.

For the first time in weeks, the trees are stitched with sweet sound. Thin, bright chirps pierce the damp air like needles pulling thread through heavy cloth. The world, so long held in frozen suspension, is beginning to murmur again. Something small and feathered dares to declare survival.

Perhaps the engineer is lucky today.

Perhaps signal bars will rise like tentative green shoots to the promised land of art and storytelling. Perhaps. Point A to Point B is achieved—not in triumph, but in steady, confident steps. A small-town strip tucked improbably close to the hum and clang of manufacturing. One block over, steel and precision and prototypes and schedules. Here? Window displays. Painted signs. A small retail stretch that feels like it misplaced itself from a gentler decade. It is cute in the way something hard-working tries to be charming anyway. Brick facades. Hand-lettered chalkboards. The café waits at the edge of this thawing world like a lantern left burning in a window.

Soup time. Fic time.

All hail Soup Lady and her tiny, radiant domain. Soup Lady does not know she runs a sanctuary. She does not know the stories that have been drafted at her tables. The fic updates have been inhaled with rapt eyes.

Today’s sacrament: Chicken Corn Chowder.

The engineer is doing good today. The chowder is velvety, savory, fragrant with spice.

And lo—three bars of service.

Tumblr stirs.

Weirdmachine0. Day 3.

The engineer is excited, had been looking forward to an update to this budding oddessy.

The post loads.

The image appears. The caption unfurls.

The brain processes. Processes...processes...

And then—

Laughter erupts mid-spoonful. Chicken corn chowder is violently pulled into forbidden sinus territory. This is not how chowder is meant to travel. The quiet café witnesses a near-death-by-comedy incident.

The culprit?

An entirely novel interpretation of an integral equation. A mathematical horror rendered as a long-proboscised insect poised to stab.

“FREAKY-ASS BUG,” indeed.

The engineer—veteran of the Calculus Wars—drowns in gleeful whimsy.

Because here is the truth, rarely admitted in polite company:

The engineer actually really—reaaaallllyy—likes math.

Not just tolerates it. Not just uses it as a tool. Loves it.

Loves the clean, merciless order of it. The way the universe can be laid out into symbols. The way a page of notation, once opaque, can unfold into utter clarity. There is something holy in that kind of structure. Something steady. Something that does not care about weather or mood or market fluctuations.

The engineer loves that.

But loving something does not mean it was easy.

There were late nights under the interrogation lamp of a desk light. Early mornings fueled by coffee and spite. YouTube videos paused mid-sentence because the leap from line three to line four felt like being asked to jump a canyon without visible ground on the other side.

There were pages rewritten until the paper thinned. There were concepts forced through—not elegantly absorbed, but wrestled into place by repetition and stubbornness. Solve it again. And again. And again. Until the shape of it began to feel less like an enemy and more like a familiar coastline.

The engineer did not fall in love at first sight.

The engineer committed.

And over time, the hooks became curves. The curves became tools. The tools became fluent. The language became home.

So when someone eyeballs a spooky lookin' differential equation and sees a long-proboscised insect poised to stab— Its beautiful, its hilarious, and gawddd damn, that was NAWT on my bingo card today <3 THIS THIS IS BEAUTIFUL, and I almost DIED. with love - the engineer. THE EYEBALLS, the BROOM sent me.

Relatedly, I lost a battle of wits with the sun this morning. I wanted to capture the moment when the sun came over the horizon, so I stood out there for about 50 minutes watching the sky get brighter, but not seeing the sun itself, wondering if I’d somehow avoided the outside world for long enough to forget how sunrises work. Meanwhile, it was sneakily rising behind a cloud that had rolled in at just the right time.

Where I live, there are only two seasons—“summer” (this one occurs during the winter) and “oh god the air is made of lava and my face is melting off”. So, we have a decent amount of sunlight. I nabbed some for you:

Digressions aside, I’m currently being subjected to 3rd grade math. It’s oddly nostalgic. When I was a kid, I would try to get around things like solving for the missing side of a shape by tearing little strips of paper off of my test or scratch paper, and using it like a ruler to manually measure the graphic used to represent the shape described in the problem. It didn’t work—the graphics were intentionally distorted to prevent this kind of cheating.

Day 5 of relearning all math concepts. If I could get wrong answers the normal way (whatever that would be), instead of somehow hallucinating numbers and symbols that aren’t there, it would feel like an accomplishment.

A fraction was encountered today.

I gotta say, though, I hope it’ll be a good long time before I run into one of these “differential equations” you speak of. The ones with those hook-things look worryingly ready to stab someone. Like a bug with a really long proboscis. What could they possibly need all of that for?

Please enjoy my artistic rendition of how I expect my first encounter with a differential equation to play out:

There are grievances today. Small ones. Spouse cannot meet for lunch. Earbuds lie abandoned on an office desk like forgotten relics. Silence will accompany the walk. Alas.

But then—birds.

For the first time in weeks, the trees are stitched with sweet sound. Thin, bright chirps pierce the damp air like needles pulling thread through heavy cloth. The world, so long held in frozen suspension, is beginning to murmur again. Something small and feathered dares to declare survival.

Perhaps the engineer is lucky today.

Perhaps signal bars will rise like tentative green shoots to the promised land of art and storytelling. Perhaps. Point A to Point B is achieved—not in triumph, but in steady, confident steps. A small-town strip tucked improbably close to the hum and clang of manufacturing. One block over, steel and precision and prototypes and schedules. Here? Window displays. Painted signs. A small retail stretch that feels like it misplaced itself from a gentler decade. It is cute in the way something hard-working tries to be charming anyway. Brick facades. Hand-lettered chalkboards. The café waits at the edge of this thawing world like a lantern left burning in a window.

Soup time. Fic time.

All hail Soup Lady and her tiny, radiant domain. Soup Lady does not know she runs a sanctuary. She does not know the stories that have been drafted at her tables. The fic updates have been inhaled with rapt eyes.

Today’s sacrament: Chicken Corn Chowder.

The engineer is doing good today. The chowder is velvety, savory, fragrant with spice.

And lo—three bars of service.

Tumblr stirs.

Weirdmachine0. Day 3.

The engineer is excited, had been looking forward to an update to this budding oddessy.

The post loads.

The image appears. The caption unfurls.

The brain processes. Processes...processes...

And then—

Laughter erupts mid-spoonful. Chicken corn chowder is violently pulled into forbidden sinus territory. This is not how chowder is meant to travel. The quiet café witnesses a near-death-by-comedy incident.

The culprit?

An entirely novel interpretation of an integral equation. A mathematical horror rendered as a long-proboscised insect poised to stab.

“FREAKY-ASS BUG,” indeed.

The engineer—veteran of the Calculus Wars—drowns in gleeful whimsy.

Because here is the truth, rarely admitted in polite company:

The engineer actually really—reaaaallllyy—likes math.

Not just tolerates it. Not just uses it as a tool. Loves it.

Loves the clean, merciless order of it. The way the universe can be laid out into symbols. The way a page of notation, once opaque, can unfold into utter clarity. There is something holy in that kind of structure. Something steady. Something that does not care about weather or mood or market fluctuations.

The engineer loves that.

But loving something does not mean it was easy.

There were late nights under the interrogation lamp of a desk light. Early mornings fueled by coffee and spite. YouTube videos paused mid-sentence because the leap from line three to line four felt like being asked to jump a canyon without visible ground on the other side.

There were pages rewritten until the paper thinned. There were concepts forced through—not elegantly absorbed, but wrestled into place by repetition and stubbornness. Solve it again. And again. And again. Until the shape of it began to feel less like an enemy and more like a familiar coastline.

The engineer did not fall in love at first sight.

The engineer committed.

And over time, the hooks became curves. The curves became tools. The tools became fluent. The language became home.

So when someone eyeballs a spooky lookin' differential equation and sees a long-proboscised insect poised to stab— Its beautiful, its hilarious, and gawddd damn, that was NAWT on my bingo card today <3 THIS THIS IS BEAUTIFUL, and I almost DIED. with love - the engineer. THE EYEBALLS, the BROOM sent me.

Relatedly, I lost a battle of wits with the sun this morning. I wanted to capture the moment when the sun came over the horizon, so I stood out there for about 50 minutes watching the sky get brighter, but not seeing the sun itself, wondering if I’d somehow avoided the outside world for long enough to forget how sunrises work. Meanwhile, it was sneakily rising behind a cloud that had rolled in at just the right time.

Where I live, there are only two seasons—“summer” (this one occurs during the winter) and “oh god the air is made of lava and my face is melting off”. So, we have a decent amount of sunlight. I nabbed some for you:

Digressions aside, I’m currently being subjected to 3rd grade math. It’s oddly nostalgic. When I was a kid, I would try to get around things like solving for the missing side of a shape by tearing little strips of paper off of my test or scratch paper, and using it like a ruler to manually measure the graphic used to represent the shape described in the problem. It didn’t work—the graphics were intentionally distorted to prevent this kind of cheating.