This thing happened a few years ago

When the events described in the comic below happened, I published a thread on then-Twitter, and declined to comment anywhere else. I wanted my initial comments to speak for themselves. And that felt right. (It still does.) So I haven't really revisited those events since.

But recently, I've found myself thinking about what happened again, probably because the self-doubt I feel around making comics is similar to how I felt about making a move from writing about science for the web to being a climate correspondent on TV (on HBO!). So I made a comic about it.

When it comes to comics, I have so much to learn. It's almost like I'm learning how to sound natural on TV again: looking into a camera, delivering a memorized* news script, all while trying to ignore the hustle and bustle of the newsroom around me, and trying not to think too hard about the people who will watch me on their screens. Just one big challenge – that I care a whole lot about.

In other news, I got interviewed by a student at NYU a few weeks ago for Washington Square News, the school's independent newspaper. I had a good chat with the reporter, Lekhya Kantheti, and you can read the resulting story here.

-ADR

*when VICE News Tonight was about to launch, the showrunners decided that all the correspondents would go through a "bootcamp" of sorts. They wanted us to learn to deliver our "to-camera" desk reports without a prompter, so we spent quite a bit of time memorizing these short news stories we'd reported on and written up. Then, we'd try to deliver the whole thing accurately while also trying to sound human. We practiced like this in the months before the show launched, and even continued recording segments this way for a bit after the show started airing. I don't remember how long it took for us to start using prompters, but I remember the relief I felt when we finally got to use them. Suddenly everything was so easy! I'm grateful for that lesson.