Anonymous Guest asked: what is your icon sir
In my younger days, I was a big fan of White Wolf's Mage: The Ascension TTRPG line. There's something very appealing about fictional systems of metaphysics, and that system's division of magic into 9 "spheres" felt like an unusually broad and efficient approach. In that product line, particular symbols from the alchemical tradition were associated with particular spheres, so I did some poking around at the time to try to figure out why, and quickly concluded that alchemy has no coherent or agreed upon iconography: Any given alchemical glossary can do and indeed does whatever it wants, and the further back into the historical texts you go, the more incoherent it gets. Efforts to organize alchemical symbols into something systematic and coherent (more akin to those used in today's astrology, for example) are really quite modern.
However, a few years after my initial investigation, I came upon Ernst Lehner's Symbols, Signs, & Signets (1950), a sort of symbolic scrapbook for use by graphic designers. And behold, on page 76, was a collection of alchemical symbols that just so happened to include all 9 used by White Wolf in MtA, using almost identical designs. Not only that, but the meanings of these symbols mapped in a sensible way to those used in MtA. So I realized immediately that this interpretation of the symbols was White Wolf's source; very likely Lehner himself (easy to imagine this book sitting on a designer's shelf to be grabbed whenever some iconography was needed), but if not that then wherever Lehner copied the symbols and their interpretations from. Tickled to have discovered this connection, I now have considerable nostalgia for this volume and have hung on to my physical copy.
Given the above, when it came time to start associating my identity with an image in online spaces, I returned to Lehner. It's always been a matter of principle that I not associate my online identity with something like a photo; far better to pick a symbol not in wide use and plant my flag there. So I chose symbol 392, here designated as "the torrefaction of gold." In the European traditions of alchemy, a common conceit is that heat separates and purifies (a straightforward intuition, given what was known about metallurgy) and that gold is the purest of the metals (also intuitive, given its incorruptibility), so many suspected that you could effectively "toast" of "bake" base metals over time to expel their impurities, and in so doing, you could transmute those metals into gold. While this doesn't make chemical sense, I felt that it was a sensible metaphor for my own creative process: If you put in the time, the pressure, and the heat, you can take what seems to be dross and transmute it into something timeless and valuable.
Of course, since alchemy has no center and no basis in reality, it has transpired that this particular symbol is now more widely associated with the process of annealing, at least online. While it's not the meaning I had in mind when I selected the symbol, it's an amusingly apt coincidence because of how much time I spend using numerical approximation methods in my statistical work. I can imagine a very loose sense in which fitting models using Markov chain Monte Carlo could be thought of as an annealing process. 