phrixious

joined 1 year ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] phrixious@lemmy.studio 1 points 1 year ago

Didn't notice this feature, thanks!

 

I almost exclusively browse lemmy through the jerboa app. I love having the "all communities" tab so I can browse outside my instance. However, recently when I go to the All tab ans sort by "hot", I'm getting the same posts every day. They're now over a week old. When I sort by "new", it does grab new posts from everywhere, but since most of these are only a couple minutes old, there's not a lot of interaction on them.

Does anyone know why this is happening?

[–] phrixious@lemmy.studio 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Right on time is the biggest tease of a 3 minute build up to the most disappointing pay off ever.

 

This is a place for dicussion of classical music, sharing your own compositions, feedback, news from the classical world, instrumentalists, and everything in between. Until the community gets bigger, I'm imagining this space to be a "catch all" for everything classical music related.

[–] phrixious@lemmy.studio 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yay! This is great! I'm planning on making a few communities (sublemmies? sublems?) over the next few days, just haven't been at my computer much over the weekend. In an effort to see this continue to grow, please let me know if there's anything I can do to help with the server, modding, etc. I'm not as tech savvy as I used to be, but I'm still able to fumble my way through things.

 

Not really sure if this is allowed, so any mod can delete this, just want to shout at the void for a few minutes.

I don't like where my life is heading. I feel stuck. I'm about halfway to traditional retirement age, and have so little to show for it. I feel tired. I feel on the brink of burning out.

At the same time, I have so much going well in my life. Late last year, I bought a house. My dream place in many ways - if you met me 10 years ago, I would have said I want a pent house in the middle of a big city. That phase faded, and I realized a more recent desire; a small-ish place with a big yard in the middle of nowhere. The only neighbor I can see has 1000 some-odd acres for cows and farmland, but even that is mostly hidden by forest. The only sounds I hear are birds in the trees, my chickens clucking, my dogs playing... It's so serene. It's also a lot of work, but so far, I take solace in the chores of keeping up with everything.

But I also feel like I have no time. I have a job that pays too little, that used to bring me some sort of meaning, but the higher-ups moved me to a new group where the clients aren't as... shall we say, appreciative. My job went from a feeling of making a difference to feeling like a butler. This will also be the sixth summer where there's no opportunity for me to take any sort of vacation.

I just want a week. One week of no work, not so I can sit around and do nothing, no, I have so much I want to do that I don't have time for.

I also have zero desire to work in this sector for the rest of my life. I spent, or what I feel more and more, wasted, five years of my life getting a masters degree in music. At the risk of sounding egotistical, I'm a pretty good musician. It's the one thing in my life I've always felt good at.

And I got really lucky, I graduated with my masters about a year ago. Worked all summer at this dead-end job, and got an offer to teach music theory at one of the top schools in the country. However, it wasn't meant to last - the teacher I was replacing was on sebatical for one term, but the headmaster said if there's space for me, and things go well for me, they'll try to make it work.

Well it did go well, well enough that my students actually wrote to the headmaster requesting for me to stay. Alas, the original teacher came back from his sebatical, and there was no space for me. So I return to my dead-end job.

It feels almost cruel, that I get a small taste of a "real career", something that I can see myself doing forever, something I really enjoyed, just to be thrown back into what was normally summer work, now full-time. And subsequently getting moved to a group that I enjoy even less than the one I had come to know over five years.

Unfortunately, many schools have been forced to cut budgets, so my prospects of getting another teaching job right now are very slim.

So it feels as if my life right now will continue indefinitely.

Which I hate.

I don't want to work where I work. But I have no qualifications to apply for a job I might find more fulfilling, and the kind of work I am qualified for isn't looking for anyone.

At the same time, I know that, in all likelihood, this won't actually be the rest of my life. I'll find a better job, I'll find something I'll be happy with. But right now, that feels so far away, so vague and so unreachable that I almost can't imagine my life being any different than what it is right now.

And it's so tiring.

Part of me wants to call in sick for a week, just so I can do other things that I want to do, but I also can't afford docking my pay a week. So I show up, feign a smile, do everything these people want, go home, do as much as I am able to that makes me happy, and go to bed exhausted with just enough time to sleep to have enough energy to do it all again the next day.

I have several side-projects that I work on in my free time, which I truly belive could one day bring in enough money to live off of, but I don't have enough free time right now to get them off the ground. Part of me wishes I had six months of savings in the bank so I could tell work to get bent and focus on myself and what I want. But, being recently graduated, I don't have that luxury. So I'll just keep plodding along indefinitely, trying to keep my ultimate goals in my mind to get me through my work days.

As I said earlier, I just feel tired, stressed, exhausted, and like om burning out. I don't want to do anything, yet I want to do too many things. The year is half over, and so much has happened, yet so little has happened in terms of achieving my overall goals. So much to do, so little time.

I'm not really looking for advice, or a pep talk, or empathy. It just makes me feel better to type this out and know that my inner monologue exists somewhere out in the real world. If anybody actually read this, thank you.

[–] phrixious@lemmy.studio 1 points 1 year ago

The luxury! It's been a bit of an annoyance for us since we moved out of the town center and into the countryside... If we want to have a night out with drinks involved, either gotta book a taxi or have a nice friend to drive us (or one of us just doesn't drink, but that sort of defeats the purpose of us going out for drinks together...)

The culture here is also just more car-centric. If I bike to work, which honestly is downhill almost all the way, all my coworkers look at me like I'm some Olympic athlete. Like cmon, it takes less than 40 minutes, it's not exactly impressive.

[–] phrixious@lemmy.studio 3 points 1 year ago

I learned while in university that just sitting down every day and writing something is the way to go. I never need "inspiration", my brain just goes into composing mode and ideas start flowing. But it took a few weeks before that happened.

As for the actual process, I ten to write whatever idea I have down, and see how far it takes me. If it starts veering into something I don't like, I save the file as a new version, delete the part that I didn't like, and start on a new path. In the end I'll have something like 10-20 different versions, sometimes I'll go back to an older one with fresh ideas and continue on a new branch, etc. More than a couple times I'll marry two versions and have the final product nearly finished just by doing that. If I get stuck, sometimes I'll just repeat a section with different instrumentation just to get a fresh take on it which will jog some new ideas.

There are also times where I think strictly "logically" or structurally about a piece. Let's say I've got a nice A section and some nice B section but no way to join them. Then I can reach into my proverbial toolbox and write something that I know will work (a short fugue-like bit, harmonize things to transition smoothly, etc). This is something I enjoy doing because it's like I create two puzzle pieces and have go figure out how to fit them together.

[–] phrixious@lemmy.studio 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

While I'm also a card carrying bike but and plant-based eater, I think that in many places the answer is also better public transport. When I lived in a big city, busses, subway stations, trams, etc were always 5-10 minutes away, both walking and waiting for the next one.

I live in a smaller town now of ~40,000. However, only ~13,000 live in the actual "town", roughly 20 minutes of walking. The rest of the people live anywhere from 10-60km away. Grocery stores can be anywhere from 10-30km away. Iove biking into work when the weather is nice, but it also snows six months out of the year. Even for a "small trip", you're looking at 20km round trip in hilly terrain to the nearest anything that isn't a neighbor. Busses exist, but out in the countryside they'll come twice around 6am and then twice around 6pm, and none at all during weekends. So if you're not working in the middle of the week, you're SOL unless you're prepared to spend 12 hours in town.

It's also a chicken and egg problem though, everyone has a cat because public transport isn't great. But public transport isn't great because there's no demand, because everyone has a car.

This issue is definitely not only in my town, 70% of the country is dotted with small towns like this and the same issues. Not everyone is physically capable of biking 20km on a summers day, let alone in -20°C on a half meter of snow, so they have almost no choice but to drive.

[–] phrixious@lemmy.studio 4 points 1 year ago

Thanks for this, I hadn't heard of half of these projects and now I'm also looking into them! Pixelfed in particular look amazing. I have a few friends that have been wanting to rid Instagram so will definitely be sending this their way.

[–] phrixious@lemmy.studio 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What did you sub to on reddit? I've found a music-related instance with just a small handful of people, but I'm already enjoying the feel of it. I hope it turns into something slightly larger, but time will tell. I'd suggest looking for communities that are similar to your tastes and stick around for awhile. The party is early, and I think many are too shy to make a move to break the ice. The more active a community seems, the easier it is for newer people to start sharing as well.

[–] phrixious@lemmy.studio 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Cool to see other new people join! I'm also originally from around the midwest (though, east of STL so, I guess not really the midwest). I think your Dreams of Loss track was really nice. If you're interested, please show us what you're working on and maybe we can give you some feedback!

 

Hello all,

Like many I'm migrating from reddit. I've been active there for over a decade, and with all that's going on I came across this particular instance of lemmy. I hope to see it become more active, and will probably have a few questions along the way (like creating my own community, but I honestly just joined, thanks for the quick acceptance btw!)

I'm a composer, conductor, and multi-instrumentalist based in Sweden. I also produce music for a relatively large YouTube channel which is a bit more on the electronic side. I love music of all kinds, and it would be cool to potentially get some more classical music nerds on this instance as well.

At any rate, thanks for the quick acceptance and looking forward to being a part of the community!