Redundancy Review: Day 135, “Staying Sharp”

(for context on what this series is, please see my Day 1 post here: Redundancy Review: Day 1, “A New Beginning” – Rosalia Rambles)

Good morning swordsmen and pikemen, welcome to Day 135 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

Starting this one pretty late in the evening compared to how I normally get these done, had basically no chance to breathe during work today followed by a lunch where I was purely focused on recovery, before finishing up for the day and deciding that I wanted to focus primarily on eating for the night alongside playing some Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

Absolutely fantastic game by the way, I am just over four hours into the game currently and I am having the time of my life. I think it might end up being too big to do a proper Redundancy Review on, but I definitely want to talk about it at some stage. The themes of the story, the writing, and especially the music are all top-notch with so much to say about all of it.

But for now, I want to write. 

I have talked at length over the last couple of weeks about what the “purpose” of the Redundancy Review is. Documenting change, giving myself the opportunity to look back on where I was, and to clear my head from a busy day – though there is one painfully obvious purpose I have yet to talk about.

It keeps my brain sharp, and my writing skills in use almost every day, which I can see the results of in my everyday life… for the most part.

When friends or my partner ask for writing assistance, it usually comes quickly to me, be it for a quick naming suggestion, help in jazzing up some paragraphs for a job application, or even for the rare commission. 

However, the fun part comes when I am asked to write any form of professional email at work. Deep down I know what I need to write and how to handle myself in any work correspondence, having done the task for almost two years after my mentor let me get hands on with production work.

But there is something that comes with doing that task that causes me to freeze up and overthink about what I need to write, performing several rewrites and word changes to make sure I am not coming off overly harsh, too friendly, or somehow sounding like I do not know what I am doing.

This has reminded me of two pieces of advice that both my mentor and the producer I worked incredibly closely with have given me. The former comes in regards to me talking to her about my overthinking once:

“Yes, I know you are an overthinker. That is why I do not give you the chance to think and give you so much to do so you focus on that instead.”

Harsh? Yes… but she has a point. If I am given enough to work on, and the work is sufficiently stimulating to my brain, I find myself getting into a rhythm before long which seriously helps quiet my brain.

The second piece of advice came as the producer and I talked about me going overly formal on client calls, making me wonder about the nature of professionalism:

“Professionalism is delivering your points clearly and not saying fuck.”

That one in particular has stuck with me, and it has actually helped inform how I handle professional interactions, letting myself sound more natural in how I explain things. I still go a little robotic from time to time, but my delivery has relaxed immensely.

In a way it is funny, I always worried about my professionalism when it came to delivering my work output, which itself is delivered on calls where a large portion of my plushie collection is on show for my colleagues to look at.

I do use virtual backgrounds when talking to external clients, as much as I feel like it would be a conversation starter.

For now though, I keep myself sharp through writing these reviews… which I should probably try write a review segment for today…

…yeah, let us have a “VThursday” as a complement to VTuesday, even though the name does not roll off the tongue the same way.

This was something I actually ordered back right before I lost my job, a canvas panel from the “holoAnimArt” series, a collection of original art depicting Hololive members as the animals that they adopt features from for their VTuber model. Being a massive Shirakami Fubuki fan, as I have talked about before on the Redundancy Review, it was a no-brainer to pick up.

I am surprisingly blown away by the quality of both the included print and the wooden easel it comes with for display purposes. The canvas itself has a loop in the back if I wanted to mount it on a wall instead but I really like the presentation of the easel, gives it a more rustic feeling that matches with the more realistic depiction of the Hololive member as an animal.

The only gripe I have with it, and this is most definitely a “first world VTuber fan” problem, is that because of the size of the easel and the canvas it does not fit well onto my pre-existing, yet admittedly overflowing, Fubuki shrine, so I either have to display it on its lonesome or commit to doing a full rearrangement of my displays in order to build a better Fubuki shrine.

You know, if that is one of the biggest problems facing me right now, then my life really is not that bad, for all the overthinking my brain likes to inflict upon me.

But that will do it for today, thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review, my every day writing practice. Wherever you are I hope you are able to relax, it is Friday tomorrow, and the weekend is beckoning us ever closer.