If there’s one problem the internet gives writers, it’s the lack of the end of a page. I constantly have a problem with keeping my blog posts short. Thus, as an experiment, it’s time for Keeping It Short Week, where I attempt to make my point without banging on for 1500 words.
Yessir, 250 words or less, that’s my motto for the next seven days. It’s also a clever attempt to clear out my “blog drafts” folder which has stacked up a bit with half-assembled fragments of hot takes over the five years I’ve been doing this website.
I left the hellsite that was once Twitter a year or so ago and have few regrets about it, except for one thing – sometimes it’s fun to write something concise and witty and then move on, and the endless trolling and hate speech kind of obscured that.
Writing short is good training for the brains, too, and something I generally manage in my paying journalism work. The freedom of the internet is great, but sometimes, a little discipline is good too.
So, onwards, for a week of brief surveys of topics that are of interest to me! And if I happen to go past 250 words well then I’ll just
More importantly, my return to blogging in 2018 kicked off a real renewed interest on my part in the writing end of journalism. I’ve been a working journalist for a long time now, but for many years I found myself focusing more on editing, design and (ugh) management.
Finally I remembered how much I love the act of writing, of reporting and digging for odd facts and talking to interesting strangers. Diving back into blogging in 2018 after a hiatus of several years jumpstarted that part of my brain.
I began to write more and make a concerted effort to build a kind of freelance career down here in New Zealand, in addition to other journalism work.
I’m happy to say I’ve submitted more than 170 invoices for paid writing since 2019, written articles for websites, newspapers and magazines all around the country and at least a hundred or so other non-bylined pieces for Radio New Zealand, where I’ve been working since 2021 and a place I deeply respect for providing quality, diverse and important journalism down in this part of the world.
This website also helped me bring back my long, long-dormant comic book Amoeba Adventures, when we were all stuck in those dreary, uncertain early days of the pandemic a few years back. The Covid hiatus seemed like a really good time for me to pull out all my ancient comic strips and scan and throw them on the internet as I’d been meaning to do for ages. I put nearly 50 of my 1990s small press comics up to download (for FREE! hurray!) and looking at all my old goofy Prometheus comics finally inspired me to pick up a pencil again for the first time since 1998 and write and draw six brand new issues of Amoeba Adventures to date.
In other words, blogging here reminded me why words matter, why art matters when everything else is annoying as hell in this increasingly fractured, fractious world.
More than ever, the past year or so has convinced me that blogging feels more like a natural home for my writing than the endless bickering and hot-takes and rage-scrolling of social media. I left Twitter (I refuse to call it “X”) about a year ago, before it all really went to shit, and haven’t regretted it once, watching it spiral down into a miasma of hate, conspiracy and misinformation. I’ll link to my stuff on Facebook and Instagram, but this site is where I want to commit most of my “spare” writing time rather than arguing with strangers on the internet or whatever.
These days the blog is kind of my writing workshop where I babble about things that maybe don’t quite meet the standard of paying work, or are a little too esoteric, plus linking back to my other projects.
Somehow I’ve bashed out 319 posts on here the last five years – I try to get one up a week, and these days focus mostly on quirky pop culture writing rather than sharing every detail of my life, because that all got pretty old pretty quickly on the internet, didn’t it?
Writing here, generally, makes me feel good about myself, even I’m just tossing words about in a random mix to see what sticks. I write for myself, first and foremost, but I am hugely appreciative of those who’ve followed my website, or my comics, the past few years as Writer Nik attempted to come out of his musty old shell.
All you folk who leave a comment or click a link or download a comic are tops in my book! Cheers and here’s to more words to come!
To be fair, I’ve been ‘quietly quitting’ Twitter for about a year now. I realised a while back that I would go on Twitter and immediately find myself sad, irritated or angry about something I saw, and thought that maybe a place where you go to feel bad is not a place you want to spend too much of your time.
The last thing the world needs is another “dramatic flounce off” note on Twitter, I know, but really, I’m just interested in trying to understand and work out how my own feelings about these spaces has changed the past few years.
It’s my own personal experience, and many people have fine times on Twitter or whatever social media platform they’re on. But for me, Twitter has become a loudmouthed and toxic bore of a place. I’m not alone.
I unfollowed hundreds of people over the past year – nothing personal, mates – but basically tired of the endless echo chambers and social media bubbles, of outrage merchants and people pointing out other people’s stupidity or arguing with strangers. I stopped interacting so much or blathering my thoughts, mostly just posting links to my own work elsewhere – which honestly, get less interaction on Twitter than they do in other places online anyway. Pretty much my main reason for sticking on Twitter is habit and its utility in following breaking news, but there are plenty of alternate places one can do that now.
When social media was fresh and new there was the novelty factor in posting memes, dad jokes, hot takes and quick-fire reactions (I look at my Facebook posts circa 2010 and cringe at how open and carefree I was with my life, not knowing how dangerous that could be). For the first time, anyone anywhere could broadcast their thoughts to a global audience instantly.
Things changed. I saw it unfolding clearly in the past few years: social media became weaponised. What were once cutesy status updates and thoughts became fodder for warfare. A casual post erupts into a hate-fest. Lingo like “main character of the day” as a term for online pile-ons – some deserved, many not – became normal. I’m a straight white male on the internet so it’s been relatively mild for me, but know so many women and LGBTQ+ people who are subjected to terrible, dehumanising treatment every single day online. Misinformation has exploded to the point where a good part of my paid work is debunking it.
The change in management on Twitter to yet another loud-mouthed arrogant rich wanna-be messiah figure drunk on his own power and its increasing vibe of a dark, angry place for me makes it easier to finally leave entirely, which I’m doing at the end of the month.
I’m not giving up all social media. This blog will stick around as long as I write, and while I don’t post much personal stuff on Facebook any more, I’m happy to have my own “page” dedicated to my writing and Amoeba Adventures comics work that you’re all more than welcome to follow.
Social media hasn’t been all bad for me and I’ve “met” many lovely people, like the terrific writer and actress Michelle Langstone, who I guess I’d call a “digital acquaintance” and who left social media sometime this year herself. In a recent interview she nicely summed up the house of mirrors effect these spaces have on us very well: “At some point, I realised I’d come to rely on other people’s responses to the material I was posting and that was shaping who I was, and how I felt about myself.”
Social media feels increasingly performative, and I’d rather focus my energies more on being truly creative with things like this goofy website, my freelance and paid writing, and my comic book scribbles.
That’s just my solution, and for everyone else, hey, whatever works.
I’m not leaving “the internet” – I mean, geez, as a writer and creator in 2022, I really can’t, unless I want to be the tortured artist in the attic muttering away to myself alone. But I can certainly choose where I want to spend my time online, and on places that make me feel good.
I’ve written thousands and thousands of words for work and pleasure, and drawn hundred and hundreds of pages of comics. I’ve written music reviews, breaking news, feature profiles, police reports, posted tweets and edited more stories and wrote more headlines than I can bear to count in my 25+ years in the industry across several countries.
But I have to admit, my columnist days are still close to my heart. I was a newspaper columnist in the fading days of when such things mattered, in the glittering early days of the internet and long before social media was a gleam in pre-pubescent Zuckerberg’s eye. I admired the great columnists who were big in the 1990s – Leonard Pitts, Lewis Grizzard, Jon Carroll, Molly Ivins – or the ancients like Herb Caen, Mike Royko or H.L. Mencken.
I wrote a newspaper column under various dire titles in various sometimes dire places for more than 10 years across several states, starting in my university newspaper in Mississippi and carrying on across California and Oregon newspapers too, until one day around 2005, I just kind of stopped. I sometimes wrote about the issues of the day, but more often, I just kind of wrote about me.
Back in 2006 I put together a little book of what I thought was the best of my column years for friends and family. I’m glad it exists, as a kind of hefty memorial to one part of my life. And hey, you can view and download the PDF of said book for free right here: (Note: This offer has now expired, sorry folks, but you can now purchase my all new for 2025 ‘best of’ book of collected journalism on Amazon.)
Some of these pieces are among the best writing I’ve ever done, I think, and some of these pieces are kind of embarrassing to read now – but also, I’m glad they’re there. They are a time capsule of friends and feelings I had, of people I’ve lost touch with and people I’m still very good friends with. Your twenties are like no other time in your life, and boy, they go by fast. They’re artifacts of a time when every moment in my life seemed filled with drama and I sure wouldn’t have imagined what the world of 2021 turned out like.
I wrote with my heart on my sleeve a lot more than I’d ever do these days – the struggles and egos of a twenty-something trying to figure out the world, slowly morphing into a thirty-something married and with a kid on the way. I admit, sadly, I think I was less angry and the world less angry then.
Young idealistic journalist, pasting up actual pages for actual newspapers on an actual composing desk that must’ve been 200 years old.
There aren’t lot of real columnists left now. There’s a lot of what I call “outrage merchants,” who spout off political opinions aimed to get the clicks or terrible pieces complaining about sausage rolls, but the art of crafting a kind of gentle, thoughtful essay printed on an actual newspaper or its website is kind of vanished.
The great writing has migrated online to other places, magazines and websites, and unlike when I started scribbling thoughts about old friends and familiar places almost 30 years ago, there are plenty of outlets for it. There is still a lot of wonderful writing out there, but the column as it once was is pretty much a dying art form. Hey, things change. It’s the never-ending story.
I started blogging regularly in like 2004, stopped that in 2010 or so and then picked it up again a few years back. I never stopped writing, but I started writing about different things, some for money, some for pleasure.
Writing columns also is a finite thing for most. In previous lives, I’d hire columnists myself for various newspapers, and often people would come in with one great idea, maybe two. “And what will you write for the third column?” I’d say. I wrote a few hundred columns myself over a decade and then I knew that the well was kind of dry.
I gave it up when I realised I didn’t have much more to say in that candid columnist’s fashion about my life and times, and I had little new to add to the debates of the day, and went on to write other things in other ways. These days, everyone shares their feelings all the time in a never-ending fashion on the internet and social media in real time, and I have to admit, like many people, I’ve kind of gone from being eager and excited by social media to loathing a great deal of it and its effect on the world.
I’d write a column about that, but honestly, do we really need another outraged column these days, at all?
Still, I’ll be back with more bloggery in 2022. Have yourself an excellent holidays.
It’s not quite the 50th birthday I once planned – from pre-COVID plotting of having an epic holiday in Japan, to maybe going over for a weekend in Sydney. Then as countries locked down it became possibly a jaunt to Wellington or maybe just stay in Auckland for a nice restaurant dinner, to today, under ongoing Delta lockdowns that hopefully will be a thing of the past by my next birthday.
So, for my gala celebration, it’s takeaways with family, Skype with parents and maybe a quick ocean swim to shake off the cobwebs.
That’s good enough, really.
Kurt Vonnegut, 1990, by Yousuf Karsh
There’s a quote by another guy who was born on the same day as me, Kurt Vonnegut, that kind of sums up the vibe of being here, alive and at a half-century in a world not quite like I imagined it would be when I turned 20, or 30, or 40: “I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.”
I’m 50 today, and Kurt would be 99 years old.
It’s a kind of happy accident that I’m here at all, that any of us are, and in the end, you get what you get.
Again, to quote my birthday buddy Kurt:
“That’s one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones.”
I’ve had a few posts half-written but life has kind of been overtaken by events here in New Zealand this week and it’s been a bit crazy as we deal with an unfortunate outbreak of the Delta variant. It’s been the first time in more than 6 months for any lockdown here and this is the strictest one since April 2020, but it’s a persistent beast of a disease out there…
Hopefully things will improve soon and most of us haven’t forgotten for a second how incredibly fortunate/lucky/grateful we’ve been not to have it as bad here as so many other places in the world have, and so many friends and family have suffered in the past 18 months or so.
In the meantime, I’ve been busy doing a lot of work with Radio New Zealand, and in bloggable content I wrote about 10 recent (and a couple not-so-recent) shows to watch during lockdown, which is applicable in an awful lot of places in this troubled world at the moment. Go and have a read!
I’m not a fashion plate. In the pandemic world and comfortable middle age, I consider myself pretty flashy if I manage to wear a button-down shirt and pants that fit.
But for a while in my wayward youth, I tried desperately, like almost everyone else does, to assemble an identity through what I wore. I loosely hung out with the theatre kids, nerds and punks and punk-adjacent in high school, and then with the leftie liberals and enviromentalists in my Mississippi college days.
There’s photos of me wearing horribly elaborate Duran Duran cosplay gear in the late ‘80s, at least one image of me in parachute pants MC Hammer-style (thankfully suppressed by court order) and several unfortunate pictures of my experiments in tie-dye.
Portrait of a horribly pretentious college freshman trying desperately to look interesting, 1991.
Through it all, through my college years and on afterwards, I had one constant companion in my quest to define myself through fashion – See my vest. I bought a black suede vest sometime around the end of high school, and man, I wore that thing constantly for nearly a decade.
It was my “Nik vest,” my attempt to stand out from the crowd in the strange world of the American South, where I was already the “weird California dude.” I’m not sure why I latched on to the vest, but I thought vests were cool – they seemed like something you’d see Christian Slater wear in Heathers, or maybe Stephen Malkmus in a Pavement video.
The vest was flexible – with a t-shirt it was grunge, with a nice shirt it was passably fancy. I wore it everywhere – there’s photos of me in New York City at the World Trade Center towers with it, at comic conventions in the Midwest, at university and parties and weddings.
My friends gently mocked me for wearing it; I wore it so much that when I drew my daily college comic strip “Jip,” I made one of the characters (the cool one of course) constantly wear a vest and immediately got called out for the obvious attempt to homage myself.
I wore that vest to pretend I was the kind of person I wanted to be, some kind of vaguely mysterious cool arty creative type. I succeeded at that mission perhaps 0.2% of the time I wore the vest, but I kept wearing it. Besides, it was comfortable and gave me extra pockets.
I stopped wearing the vest quite so much in the mid-1990s after I graduated university and went on to start working as a journalist. It vanished entirely somewhere around the millennium – I don’t know, I imagine I was feeling vaguely embarrassed by it and it was also probably kind of worn out after nearly 10 years (suede was not easy to keep clean) and in another moment of stark self-invention, I chucked it.
I kind of wish I’d kept it now, not that I’d wear it in public in 2021 … But it was a symbol of who I was and who I was trying to be, and it’s sometimes worth keeping hold of those things to remember yourself by.
Hello, apparently there’s an election going on somewhere or something. I’ve been keeping busy with a few freelance think pieces this week for my friends over at Radio New Zealand:
First up, what’s it like to vote in not one but two national elections just a few weeks apart? And what can the US learn from New Zealand’s election last month? Here’s my take and what I desperately hope is the last piece I ever write involving a certain 45th President of the United States:
But wait! There’s more! The big story everybody was talking about a day or two before the latest several big stories was the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the US Supreme Court. Also for Radio New Zealand, I wrote about what it all means and how it’s a worrying sign of where America’s head is at these days:
Nik Dirga 