I love paying attention to features on people's faces - but I don't know how to convey this appreciation without sounding like a weirdo. (So I must blog it)

Or perceived as only suitable for children and not the parents or guardians/cool adults who I actually crafted the comic for in the first place. I explain why I am annoyed.

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Yet again, another comics discourse.

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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.

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