Reflections on Life Archives | A.S. Akkalon

Small thoughts about leaving my job

Yesterday was my last day in a job I’ve had for over a decade. I had some thoughts, but mostly just felt empty.

Yesterday was my final day in a job I’ve had for nearly twelve years. We had a nice farewell morning tea, and I talked more to some people I worked with than I have in years.

I packed up the last of the detritus from my office, set an email auto-reply, and closed my work email for the last time. Then I was officially job-free.

Several random people waved friendly greetings or complimented my plant as I walked to my car. It might have been because I was wearing a hat with ears.

It might have just been a weird day.

A nerd’s guide to choosing a forever coffee shop

Each week my colleagues and I go for coffee. The decision of which café to visit is momentous and is made only every five years. Here’s how.

I work with nerds. That’s not an insult–I’m a nerd myself. Once a week my nerd friends and I go out to a coffee shop, where we talk about work problems, nerdy stuff, or why everyone must see the Barbie movie right now.

Deciding which coffee shop to visit each time would be time-consuming and might result in a pitched battle in the office, so we go to the same coffee shop every week.

Not just any coffee shop, but the best coffee shop.

How do we know it’s the best?

How not to bake healthy bread with a breadmaker

Breadmakers are wonderful, and if you can follow a few simple instructions you can easily use them to bake healthy bread. Sadly, I can’t.

At some point when early woman got home from chasing a wildebeest across the Serengeti and still had to knead her bread dough, she stopped and thought, gee there are a lot of steps to making bread. It would be much easier if I had a machine to do all this for me.

Thus was the breadmaker created.*

* It’s possible this isn’t precisely what happened. Not likely, but possible.

I have such a breadmaker, a gift from a relative whose faith in my ability to make bread without a breadmaker is… fairly accurate.

Unfortunately, it turned out my ability to make bread with a breadmaker is not much better.

Why ChatGPT won’t replace fiction writers any time soon

ChatGPT might be impressive, but I’m not convinced it will replace fiction writers any time soon. Here it pretends to know me, then makes a hash of imitating me.

If you read the news, or talk to people who read the news, I’m sure you’ve heard of ChatGPT and all its little AI friends.

There’s been a lot of excitement about the possibilities, and a lot of angst about the possible destruction of human civilisation. Recently some writers sued the company behind one of these models for using their work to train the model without compensating them.

But I’m not going to talk about any of that.

What I want to know is whether ChatGPT can replace me.

The ultimate plan for avoiding writing burnout

I have the ultimate plan for avoiding writing burnout. It may even help.

Did I oversell that? I think I might have oversold it. Okay, this may not be the ultimate plan for anyone to avoid burnout as a writer, but it’s my plan for me for right now. Who knows, it may even help.

In case you just arrived here from Pluto (no longer a planet, but still a lovely holiday spot), I should point out the world for the past few years has been rough.

That’s made writing hard. Some days it’s made everything hard.

Early in the pandemic, I tried to do too much with my writing life and I burned out. I didn’t write for two years. I thought maybe it was just me, but when I poked my nose online I saw people everywhere talking about burnout.

I have friends! They may not know I exist, but they’re my friends regardless. Maybe you’re one of them.

If you are, stay a while. Have a cookie.