So I've just officially gotten a Big Giant Piece of Paper that qualifies me as a Master of something or other (in my case, arts management) and sat through an overwhelming stadium-arena of a graduation ceremony, jam-packed with thousands of attendees and over 10 pop-up stages each shuffling a school's worth of graduates for a hat tip, a photo op and a tube - all over in two hours. Two years of sidelining my publishing/art career is worth it for all of this, I guess...? (I am saying this as a neutral joke - I do have a professional reason for working to earn this degree)

Anyway all of this set-up is because I want to talk about something casually.

Sometimes on Twitter I come across funny-haha tweets from academics warning against the perils of undertaking a PhD (which I am at no risk of pursuing) and getting churned by the publish-or-perish grind. I find this all validating since this is going to be the last time I ever set foot in the ivory tower as a requirement to get Big Giant Pieces of Paper, and doing my Masters again kind of reaffirmed to me that academia still isn't the life I want to keep maintaining. I love studying, I love the aura of university and my mind is engineered for it, but I certainly don't find the system as is inspiring or motivating or effective for the advocacy/educational work I want to do.

I am also realising that I entered and am exiting the academic grind at the right time. Amongst the funny-haha tweets I see a few from teachers across high schools and universities discussing and lamenting the increasing usage of AI by students and the fatalistic acceptance of AI by admin. So now you have students paying big money for AI to generate assignment responses and essays for their Big Giant Papers, and teachers trying to come up with ways to circumvent such behaviour. I am so glad to never have to be around these people as my classmates and that my work won't be caught up in the blast radius.

Last week I participated in a seminar about the value of using webcomics as a tool for public history. There was a list of questions set by the moderator to structure the conversation -- and as the kind of person who needs to prep for panels and public speaking events with pre-written answers, I gladly yoinked the question list from the screenshot.

So, anyone who missed the seminar and wanted to know what I might have said, here are my thoughts on the topic! (Not all of the questions came up during the actual discussion)

I will be speaking at an online seminar organised by the University of Limerick and the University of Luxembourg alongside Aodhán Morris, Aliénor Gandanger, Rachel Beck, Richard Conyngham and Xian Jee. We'll discuss the ways in which our work interrogates history and historiography, and how comics can be used as a tool to educate the public about history. Pretty rad nerdy stuff! If you are curious about my particular approach to my histfic webcomics and my author footnotes, this is for you!

The seminar is on November 15 (Friday), 11 am to 1 pm Ireland time. Click the link here to access the talk when Friday comes!

(I'm digging out posts that have been languishing in my drafts and finally finishing them up. This was a post written on March 21, 2020, and finished today.)

Some of you are perhaps aware of my recent feelings about the Blue Bird Site: that the environment it encourages is now more like a glasshouse with the flimsiness of cling wrap; the archival of information is non-existent (RIP to all of the useful threads I can never find again); and the changing social norms of Internet 2.0 that place unhealthy emotional value on the production of a "relatable" "self" "brand" "content" for an "audience". All of this nonsense is why I keep a blog now - I've, sadly, outgrown the type of internet that Twitter represents.

After watching Abigail Thorn's video essay on Artists and Fandoms, which btw compliments another video by Lindsay Ellis on Manufacturing Authenticity, I felt like playing with one particular idea that connects these disparate feelings I mentioned above together, especially in the context of myself as a creator. It's an idea that explains why I've moved away from Twitter threads to focus more on blog posts, and why I no longer wish to contribute frequently and reactively to The Discourse. It's also, like too many things, a consequence of late-stage capitalism orbiting around grand notions of hyperproductivity, hyperspecificity and hyperoptimisation.

Thoughts on finishing my masters (whoo!), recovering creative energies, and being obsessed with a hobby that isn't drawing but is like drawing anyway.