I love professional wrestling so much (except for WWE) that I am currently a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Auckland, studying the history of Professional Wrestling in New Zealand. I was a freelance writer and have been published most prominently on Cracked (before the internet media apocalypse that destroyed it). Judd Apatow shared one of my articles, which was cool. I also wrote for WhatCulture, predominantly about wrestling. Those articles mainly were shit, though, as they were usually clickbait. I did one about overrated Simpsons episodes (that I didn’t believe), and then Al Jean, the showrunner, shared it, and I rightly got abused on Twitter. It was one of the most embarrassing moments in my life, but well deserved for being such a hack.
Me and the star of Offspring, our daughter Ava. Apparently, she thought we were posing for an eighties sitcom publicity shot, so has her arms crossed and her back to me.
In the past few years, I have dabbled in podcasting with Free FM in Kirikiriroa and writing and recording music under the pseudonym Cheeky Hobson. My album will be on Spotify soon, but you can listen to some demos there now. They are demos, so they are very ugly. Also, I’m not a good songwriter, singer, or musician…so they are bloody ugly.
My podcast, Offspring, was about undertaking fatherhood while living with a complicated psychological profile. It’s no longer in an RSS feed because Free FM has removed it from their feed to put new podcasts up (boo). But you can find episodes on this website, as well as transcripts and music used throughout the episodes.
I have a wonderful family. My wife, Gemma, is incredibly supportive and astonishingly patient with my ongoing mental illness challenges. We had our first daughter in 2020, and she is named Ava. She is awesome, but I thought kids raised themselves with iPads these days, so it has been a learning curve. We also have a dog named Barney, who is as smart as a bag of hammers, and a cat named Edna, who is slightly brighter than a bag of hammers.
I am not sure what my next midlife crisis project will be. But I’ll post it here once it’s done, and I will inevitably cringe about it later. This bio is way longer and more self-indulgent than I originally planned.