Wow, what a year. I’d love to say it had its pros and cons, but the stark reality of it is that the one bad thing – getting laid off, not just years before I wanted to retire, but one day after we successfully showed our new project was working, thus throwing me years off course in my research – overshadows all the good stuff. As I was describing it to my wife, it’s like falling down into a well and finding some shiny rocks down there. They might be nice rocks – heck, they might even be gold, and worth a fortune – but you’ve still got to cope with falling into the well, and figure out how to climb back out again, before taking advantage of the good stuff.
And, I have to admit, there was a lot of good stuff. We submitted a great paper on social robot navigation and held a great workshop on embodied AI, which was renewed for next year. Thinking Ink Press published a new book, was chosen for the Innovative Voices program and launched a successful Kickstarter. We proposed the Neurodiversiverse anthology, announced it at Dragon Con, and have almost a hundred submissions as of the close of the year. That inspired me to write two new stories, “Blessing of the Prism” and “Shadows of Titanium Rain”, which I think are some of my best work. I even started a robotics consulting business and got a few clients, which is helping to reduce the uncertainty.
But 2023 was the worst year for me for a while. There have been bad ones recently – in 2016 we elected a wannabe dictator and many of my friends and family seemed to lose their minds; in 2019 my mother died; and in 2020 I had the double whammy of the pandemic with the most stressful period of my work life. But, like 2023, each of those years had ups with the downs: in 2016, my current research thread started; in 2019, we proved that our research ideas were working (for all the good it did us); and in 2020, we moved back to my hometown into what we hope is our forever home.
And yet, with the exception of the loss of my mother, none of those seemed quite as life changing as getting laid off. Even for Mom, I was somewhat prepared: my father had unexpectedly lost one of his siblings early, and our extended family had developed a kind of shared knowledge of how to cope with loss. I had already lost my father and grandmother, and knew that Mom, while healthy, was in her mid-80s, and could pass at any time; so I was spending as much time as practical with her. I spoke to her the day she died. And so, after she was gone, I started down a road that I had been preparing for mentally for a long, long time.
But I wasn’t in the mindset that Google would kill off half its robotics program just in AI’s hour of triumph. We were even working on a projects directly related to Google’s new large language model focus. It made no sense, and left this strange kind of void, creating a severance I didn’t expect for another decade.
Despite all of what happened this year, I keep coming back to one thing:
Was it worth it if I wrote those two new stories?
Yes.
So, farewell, you crazy year you: thanks for all you gave me. My wife even said “Supposedly what you do on New Year’s Eve is what you’ll do for the rest of the year,” and today we worked on our businesses, worked on writing and art, met friends old and new, and even moved furniture (which, metaphorically, is her new business venture). So’s here’s to more writing, more art, more friends, and more business in 2024!
-the Centaur
P.S. I see that I kept up “Blogging Every Day” in 2023 for 91 days, almost a quarter of the year; my earlier attempt at “Drawing Every Day” in 2021 lasted 103 days, a little over a quarter of the year. Let’s see if we can break both those records in 2024, now that I have far more free time (and flexible time) on my hands!
