Nish Nadaraja - Our Friend of the Week
Nish's What — “Brandon Bird is one of my favorite pop artists and illustrators out there. I met him at an indie comics conventions years ago and fell for No One Wants To Play Sega With Harrison Ford, which kind of summarizes his WTF approach to pop-culture. I own two of his works, telling more than I care to admit about my own taste in lowbrow culture: Jack McCoy evidently brokering for law and order with the Decepticons and Autobots? Yes, please. Who would have thought Rod Stewart was a stormtrooper, but it makes perfect sense. I highly recommend his own art book for a wacky primer!"Nish on Social: I, F | L | Y | T R | A | P 
FRIEND OF THE WEEK: 11 QUESTIONS
- Nickname(s) Nish is my nickname, short for Nishan. Otherwise, Chocolate Thunder.
- Where do you live? Lower Pac Heights, off Fillmore. I’ve been in San Francisco since 1998!
- What are you working on or how do you spend your days? I'm advising and consulting consumer startups about half the week, then spending the rest of the time as a serial networker. I eat lunch out with someone every day -- we’ve gotten too compartmentalized and disconnected from socialization, ironically because of social media.
- What do you do for fun? Probably stemming from my days at Yelp, I still love trying out old and new restaurants, finding out the local in what's what. I also like to play the role of aging hipster, so have been buying up re-issues of the Rolling Stones, Beatles, and Springsteen on vinyl.
- What do you wonder about? I've spent a lot of time thinking about life and death, legacy and what’s left behind (a morbid way to say that I have an 8-year old son and I’m feeling old because we’ve all lost that Ziggy Stardust), and if we as humans have gotten anything right. I'm very excited about Chuck Klosterman's upcoming book about this very topic.
- If you could wake up with any superpower, what would it be? Time travel: so much easier to say, “I told you so.”
- What qualities do your favorite people have in common? A slight disregard for the obvious, a realization that Burning Man is just a festival, and a love of Buffalo wings and mozzarella sticks.
- What’s the most awkward accidental text or email you’ve ever sent or received? To protect the guilty, I’ll just say nothing good ever comes from texting after midnight. I do hear that my first name gets autocorrected a lot to Bush, so that’s just peachy.
- What is too serious to be joked about? Genocide, hate when that happens! I dunno, I guess most things are good for a laugh within context and relative to the audience. I remember reading a few funny memoirs about cancer when I found out a good friend had breast cancer, since I really didn’t know where else to start.
- What is the most inspiring thing you’ve seen, watched, or read recently? Well of course, Master of None since people tell me Aziz Ansari is my younger doppelganger, and I’d recommend his audio book version of Modern Romance to accompany it. I’ve also read a rough edit of The Girls by Emma Cline, which promises to be a literary event when released this June.
- Where do you see yourself in 5 years? Living on a boat off Miami, with a pet alligator named Elvis. In all seriousness, I’ve been working at writing a bit more, so would love to see where that goes.