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This is actually my second ever comment on Piefed. I’m gradually trying to spend a bit less time on the big centralised social media hubs - I’d like to be less dependent on places like Discord, Reddit, Twitter. So I’ve joined Mastodon, Piefed, and Matrix. It feels liberating, brings back fond memories of the small web before big social media giants took over.
As for my news this week, I’m entering my second week of a new medication for my anxiety and depression. It’s a bit early to say but I’ve seen some early positive signs that it might be helping, so fingers crossed.
So far so good. Today is my Friday this week so I’m looking forward to a four day weekend. No plans just slack.
Work was rough man. Workplace already had some drama for the past month or two, several people on the team left, and I think the fact that I recently got rejected for a fellowship application (a very prestigious one that I didn’t think I’d get, but still) made something crack in me… So I’m back on the job market yay (not expecting to get anything anytime soon)
In any case, I am sufficiently recovered from the flu that I can do normal stuff and enjoy life again
Oh man, getting those rejections just suck. Where you hoping to leverage that to get away from job?
So the fellowship in question essentially allows people to get paid from the EU to “create their own job” and work on their projects of interest. The program I applied to is highly selective and provides 2-2.5 years of stable, contracted employment at above market-rate salary, which is quite hard to come by in academia (but that’s a much longer story)… As an example, my current role is on a 1-year renewable contract, meaning in a bad-case scenario, my boss can theoretically “fire” me any time they want (this is in a country where most jobs are permanent contract & it is otherwise very difficult to fire someone btw). Does wonders to job security…
About the program itself… So Horizon Europe is the main scientific funding body in the EU/EEA area. They run several programs which are aimed at promoting “mobilization”, meaning researchers who relocate to a different country to work and learn new things. I applied to one of those programs in summer 2025 since I relocated to the EU and was eligible. My boss and I knew we were short on time and didn’t expect a miracle, but we still had some hope… But this year the program was particularly tough: +60-70% application numbers, they didn’t track but strong suspicion a lot of those were from the US, and there are strong unofficial speculations that applicants and reviewers were mass-using ChatGPT and other LLMs for proposal writing. I’m just salty because I bombed the application… but a lot of people were genuinely mad because they wrote winning proposals but didn’t win the “lottery”. Fun fact but this was posted on c/europe four months ago: https://lemmy.world/post/36718694
Oh wow, that sounds incredible!!!
Sorry you didn’t get it.
Very bad, family and community are unbearable and I’m losing focus on study. Feel like I need to look for something else to dedicate my time to and maybe move away from them. Did start exercising again though and it wasn’t any harder than where I left off from.
I went to Paris to go to the Musée d’ Orsay.
I spent all my time in my pokey little hotel room with food poisoning instead .
My week has been good, the team I obsess over in the niche sport I also obsess about won, so that is good.
I got a new office at work. It is smaller than the one I had but it is a lot nicer and in a quieter location. One of my big projects got past a major hurdle so that is good.
The Arctic Vortex is subsiding, so the ice is melting.
I started a replay of Horizon Zero Dawn, so that is fun.
This week work has been kind of slow, so I’ve been doing a bunch of small, menial, non-work-related tasks that I’ve been procrastinating since forever:
- weeding, harvesting pepper plants, grafting oranges and mandarins into Malena (my Sicilian lemon tree - there’s a rangpur graft there already). All of them done!
- clipping, merging and subtitling s2 and s3 of the Nights with a Cat anime series. Then translate the subtitles into Portuguese because my family loves this series. The last item is the only one I didn’t do yet.
- compress / re-encode and find good subtitles for the movies I’ve downloaded for my mum.
- organise my temp/to-sort/quick access directory. I was talking about it just today, then it clicked me how messy it is.
- bulk prepare some stuff for freezing. It’s mostly pork burgers and chicken milanesa. I also need to buy some cabbage and prepare a new batch of sauerkraut, the old one is already gone.
Sick at home. It’s nice, I needed a break from the outside world.
Crazy when being sick is a break
