I know people on #Mastodon love to wonder how people are doing on other social media sites. So I can say in my time at #Bluesky I have gained one (1) follower, and generated forty-six (46) posts, and the number of vaguely supportive feedback (bluelikes, blueretweets, bluecomments I think is the correct terminology) I've gotten is extremely small, virtually nil.
Mastodon is totally different, in the sense that everything I post gets virtually no vaguely supportive feedback, but we're operating on some open-source model so everything we do or don't do is inherently good for its own sake.
I am not a HUGE fan of classical music in the sense that I could identify anything really obscure, but I do like it well enough to know a few things beyond the most famous.
It is funny that some of the most famous classical music consists of the most boring parts of otherwise really interesting, fun, exciting, dramatic pieces.
Like when "Pictures at an Exhibition" transitions from the famous "Promenade" to "Gnomus," that's a punk rock sort of move. Or the non-slow parts of Moonlight Sonata. Or everything about "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini" except the famous part, which even the composer joked was the moneymaker part.
Classical music is WAY more fun than most people know, because the most famous parts are the slow, deliberate ones that are easiest to play for a middle school student first learning an instrument.
Yes, the reason I moved to Brooklyn is so that I could walk to the local pizza place (Domino's) and get a $7 pizza with pineapple and sausage and eat it alone at home. I don't even care who judges me, all my window shades are down anyway.
to truly understand how ridiculous the '90s were you simply have to watch the movie "American Beauty," which is absolute garbage, and then just think about why everyone thought that movie was really, really great. like it was seriously being considered a cinematic masterpiece no joke.
@Nonog The most broken thing about the American economy is that people can get insanely rich from manipulating stock prices of companies that don't even function (much less "make" a "profit").
It's the riddle of Gen X. Once we discover what it is to Wang Chung, we will shed the Jan Brady Syndrome of being stuck between the more popular Boomers and Millennials and be FREE, I tell you!
It’s my birthday today and the grief is hitting me hard. Mom always sent me flowers on my birthday and the absence of that today is like a hole in my heart.
I suppose these milestones get less ouchie over time but…oof. Yeah.
@dancinyogi I really like Robert Plant's solo work, much more than anything he did with Led Zeppelin. Manic Nirvana was one of my favorite albums ever. But I'd forgotten this song.
I had a Twitter account for 10 years before I ever actually started using it. Not sure I'll use Bluesky either, but it does feel important to capture the username Ramankhutu before someone else takes it.
@foser And here I thought I was functionally incompetent due to overwhelming self-hatred. Imagine being the New York Times and waking up every morning begging people to blow you up.
A research sabbatical is the most amazing benefit of academia, especially at #CUNY where it's still pretty generous (80% salary for the year when most places have cut it to 50%).
But sometimes it makes you feel alive when you've felt dead, and inspires major life changes. Last time I left Boulder forever. This time I'm moving to Brooklyn. I don't know what I'll do after my next one, maybe move to Mars.