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Category: Personal
The Decalogue of Nick #3: I work in schools IT policy
For Scott Welch. When I walked away from linguistics, I walked upstairs into department IT support for the Languages Department. It was an underpaid but cosy sinecure, where I got to write papers, work on the side as a research assistant, and practice bad Italian, French, and German on my peers. That didn’t last, and […]
How are you so knowledgeable?
Hoo boy. I’m being A2A’d this by Michaelis Maus, and he’s a trenchant one: I can’t give him a glib answer, and I can’t just protest that I’m an impostor. OK. I read a lot as a kid, as others did, and picked up a lot of encyclopaedic knowledge that way. It helps to connect […]
What is the point of life if you just die and most of us are forgotten in time?
Ah, Jeremy. This is not a trivial question. And most of the non-religious people have converged on the same answer; I liked Bobby Strick’s formulation. When I was in my 20s, I yearned to cheat death by joining that 0.1%. Hence the whole “get my scientific papers laminated and sent to Svalbard” thing, which I […]
What is your reason for having a goatee?
As I said in Nick Nicholas’ answer to How are men with goatees perceived, and how do they think they are perceived? : they were very fashionable in the mid 90s. I took it up after some facial hair experimentation, and Australians nowadays seem to have big problems with moustaches (because of overexposure in the […]
The Decalogue of Nick #2: I’ve trained as a linguist, and I have done computational linguistics stuff
For Audrey Ackerman and Brian Collins and Zeibura S. Kathau. Ask a Greek what they can tell you about Byzantium, and they won’t tell you what the millennium of the East Roman Empire achieved. They won’t tell you about the Palaeologan Renaissance, or the ambivalence about the Classical past, or the edifices of Roman Law, […]
The Decalogue of Nick #1: I’m Greek-Australian
For Kaan Kılıçaslan. I was born in Launceston, Tasmania, in 1971, to a father who had migrated from Cyprus and a mother who had migrated from Crete. We moved to Crete when I was 8. We moved back to Melbourne when I was 12. I’ve lived there since, but for 6 months in Greece in […]
The Decalogue of Nick
I’ve been contemplating writing about who I am here for a little while. Partly because it’s some overdue self-therapy, as I’m in an odd place now in life—at something of a turning point. Partly because I’m making new friends here, who don’t actually know that much about who I am. The pretext for this came […]
Who is Nick Nicholas?
A2A by Michael Masiello, Edward Conway, Jean-Baptiste Bertrand I can neither confirm nor deny that the following is a depiction of Michael and Edward encouraging me to answer this question: The brutal history behind some of Parliament’s unusual traditions | Metro News (And I mean, if it did, then which of Edward and Michael would […]
How does everyone accept that they are going to die someday and there’s nothing they can do about it?
If you are a believer in a religion with an afterlife, as others have said, you are doing something about it. If you’re an atheist? You accept it the same way you accept other unpleasant facts about life. Grudgingly and gradually. When I was in my late 20s, I resented the fact that one day […]
What are the funniest nicknames you’ve been given over the years?
In the order that I recall then: The delightful Australianism Nicko: only once from a blokey geography teacher. Acka Nicka in my local high school (where I mercifully only stayed a year), because of my premature acne. Nick Squared in my elective high school, because Nick Nicholas. NSN as an undergraduate, because I used to […]