MISCELLANEOUS CHARTS AND GRAPHS

FICTIVE CHARTS, 2024

As far as we know, our crew roster was set-up in a pretty strict window of time, from 1999-2006. Our peak "nostalgia window" (what we call that time period where we really got into fiction for the first time) was from 1996-2004. Coincidence, we wondered? So one day, we decided to chart the big stories of our nostalgia time versus the crew members who pulled from them, and chart when we met versus when we wrote their fictional versions.

There were folks who very obviously pulled from nostalgic stories which we read very soon before. (Miranda's faux-English accent we attribute to us being into a gaslight fantasy comic called "Ruse," which we first read a few months prior to Miranda's creation. Ruse had a curly-haired villainess named Miranda and a plucky blond faux-English protagonist. Though Miranda is not either of those characters, she probably got the name and accent from the story's proximity.) Other characters had long gaps--we definitely saw Men In Black years before Bob and Grey set foot on the scene. And then there are the people who have no fictional basis at all, like Sneak, Rogan, and Falcon.

Some crew members were written as fictional characters months before they first appeared; others we met months or years before writing them as fictional characters. Miranda was never written as a fictional character at all.

GRADES AND ABSENCES

This one is a little tricky because Bro is two years younger than us. There are thus at least four different ways to read this data: by grade (our 6th grade vs. his, f'rex), by year (our 8th grade against his 6th), by class (Algebra), and by period (morning versus afternoon). We have included the whole chart of numbers in GradesAbsences.xlsx, but for the shape and feel of the numbers, read on.

Were this a tactile, 3D chart, not restricted to linear text, I would make these tables tactile. There'd be a box for each year, containing trays for each class, with stacks of blocks noting height of grade or number of absences, all adorned with tactile labels noting class and period (Gemotry, period 2). Our boxes would be on the left, Bro's on the right, so you could compare and contrast with one hand on each side, and everything can be moved around. Alas, I cannot do that, so all I can do is give the raw tables of data below. If you want them, click the expansion below. If you prefer the narrative version of the 3D exhibit, read on.

INFINITY SMASHED GRAPH, 2024

Here's a logic puzzle: you have seven drafts of a series of four stories, written from 2000 to 2005 and ranging in length from 12 to 440 pages. You have only the "date created" and "date last modified" info, and at least two of those "dates created" are wrong. How can you tell what paragraphs you wrote when?

Well, if you're us, you make infographics out of it.

First: find out the true and proper "dates created" by collating everything, checking against journals and paper documents, and thanking your lucky stars that your old man happened to have digital back-ups of old zip discs that he gave to you of his own volition the last time y'all ever saw each other. Presto! You at least know for sure when these drafts got made!

Next: try to make a timeline collating all Infinity Smashed stories directly against life events. Terrible. Shitful. Throw it out and curse your life choices.

Then: take the four drafts of Book One and chart the progress through them, marking them by the five main sections/settings. Discover with dismay that you didn't just write from start to end, oh no, each section just got bigger and more bloated with each draft. In other words, you cannot count of a reference on page 60 being written before another on page 160. Motherfuck.

Okay, trash that. How's this for a wild idea: let's graph it! Yes, that's right, graph it: time on the X axis, page count on the Y, and then mark points on every guaranteed reference you can find. For example, if you reference a joke from a computer game on page 235 of the February '02 draft of Book One, and you learn from your childhood journals (helpfully textually transcribed in advance by your past self) that you first played that game on such-and-such a date, presto! You have a data point anchoring that section of page count to a specific time. If Biff is just barely getting first mentioned at the very end of the Book One draft last edited on December 5, 2000, it's pretty safe to assume he was important around that time!

It makes for a very drunk line graph. It'd make Tufte hurl himself into his grave, purely so he can roll in it. But you know what? It nets you a time frame for the naming of the Vago setting and finding out Biff was gay, kicking both dates back over a year, so it was worth it.

MEMORY WORK GRAPHS, September 2026

These graphs track ten years of two variables: how many episodes we had each month and how many were triggered by sex, plus the yearly mean of each. The full tables of data are in MemoryWorkChart.xlsx; feel free to click and expand it out, but for those who want the Cliff's Notes, read on.

Back in the old days, there would've only been one line on that graph, but by the time we start tracking in January 2016, we have already been through a year of memory work, and the lines have started to diverge. Gradually, so painfully gradually, the lines separate, the episode line rising higher and higher, the sexual one sinking lower and lower.

In January 2020, we have our first ever zero month: a month with no sexual episodes. On February 2021, we have another. 2022 has four zero months, 2023 two, 2024 four, 2025... well, okay, 2025 gets no reprieve because it's the first year of Mori and Rawlin's relationship with whole new triggers to deal with, but 2026 isn't even over and it's had 5 zero months--more than half the year so far! The results are clear: slowly but surely, we're getting the sexual shrapnel out of our souls.

The total episode line, however, is gradually climbing, not sinking. Toward the end of 2018, we have our first month with more than ten episodes. In 2020, we have a 20-episode month, our brain clearing the path for Bob and Grey coming back. (It's easier to be forgiving of the grueling pace with that kind of pay-off.)

For a while after that, things generally stay in the 15-and-lower range, until the "D steamroller" in 2024: 30 episodes in April, 31 in May, 34 in June, 26 in July, 24 in August. Rogan will joke that he spends most of those months lying on the floor crying. The Crazy Boys series is the result.

We have mercifully not hit had a 20 episode month since.

INSERT DATA TABLE HERE

Grab the boxes. Move the trays around to suit your hands and dig in. Feel the peaks and troughs with your hands. Feel our brother's absences climb and his grades sink. Feel our grades climb and stay rigidly high, despite the deaths. Notice something.

The family story was, we/I were school-smart and Bo wasn't. He believed it. It hurt him. Me... well, after a while, we/I wasn't all that sure grades meant smart, but we/I still assumed Mom and Dad weren't totally wrong...

...until we/I found all our report cards in my trunk. (We didn't put them there. I assume someone else did in the panic of the big move, probably during the last frantic push of "just put in a box, somewhere, anywhere!")

Bro wasn't stupid. He was never stupid. Our grades were basically the same until high school... and his summer right before was when he was formally given us as a sexual gift.

Becoming the kind of person who was okay with raping his sister required a sort of mindless deference to our parents' opinions and statements. If they said we/I deserved it, we/I did. If they said he was stupid, he was.

I look at this dropping grades, how they especially plunged once we were gone, and I don't see a stupid boy. I see a boy adapting by living down to expectations.
