(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 closers and finishers, welcome to Day 202, 203, and 204 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.
I’m waiting in my cold flat when the bell begins to chime
Reflecting on this past year as it doesn’t have much time
‘Cause at twelve o’clock, they take me to the New Year’s Dawn
The sands of time for me are running low…
Bit of an Iron Maiden reference to end the year off. Was sitting here trying to think how to write an opening to the year end ramble and Hallowed Be Thy Name just got right into my head.
2025 is almost over, and for a lot of us it has been one right stinker of a year. There have been plenty of high points throughout the year where the light of hope shined brightly to break through the darkness, but true to the sequence of days this year started with, it really was a “WThF” kind of year.
Not sure what a “ThFS” year looks like, but I am ninety-percent convinced it cannot be worse than what this year was.
I am going to get all the negatives out of the way first, because there is:
- A lot of them
- I do not want the positives being buried by the negatives
- Holy shit this year went so wrong in so many ways
Going to start with the elephant in the room: redundancy. The whole reason I am sitting here writing a series with that word in the title. Working in the tech industry often means that you await news of your next funding round or new business arriving in with bated breath, desperately yearning for a job where you work on a ThinkPad instead, but when the reality hits that you really do not have a job anymore, it hits like a truck.
For me, I was anticipating it, and had begun job searching anyway… though I was not anticipating it so soon in the year, I was at least expecting to see 2025 in my previous role, so getting sideswiped in May was not fun in the slightest.
In the wake of being laid off, the lingering resentment I hold towards the UK government came right to the forefront as I navigated the Insolvency Service, Universal Credit/Jobseekers Allowance, and then setting up as a sole trader with HMRC, fighting through bureaucracy at every moment in the short month I was unemployed.
Which, yeah, I was only actually unemployed for a month after officially being made redundant. I cannot imagine how some of my former colleagues feel struggling to find work several months after the fact, because that month felt simultaneously long and slow to me.
Even with the future still uncertain, I do feel I have developed a fair bit due to doing this contract role. Has it been challenging in its own way? Of course it has, I still struggle to reconcile who I want to be with who I currently am, which has been the source of several mental challenges over the course of the end of the year, not helped by seasonal depression being an absolute monster this time around due to how grey and wet the end of the year has been.
I do feel hardened by everything I have gone through, and not necessarily in the cold & cynical way I was initially on the path of earlier in the year. I still put too much of myself into things that will likely not return the same love and care, leading to me overusing my energy during the day leaving very little in the tank for the evenings and making it so my weekends are more focused on recovery than actually enjoying myself.
But I feel myself slowly gaining an acceptance of the future holding whatever it has for me, as much as I feel a latent desire to be in control of my fate. There is very little I can do to change things other than stay the path I am on and wait for opportunities to arise, which this year has definitely had a lot of good ones.
That is enough about job stuff, time to move on to some minor negative things.
First off: a custom cosplay going awry two weeks before my big convention holiday to VExpo. That really sucked, even though the resolution to it was an overall positive due to me getting a full refund for shoddy work. It has at least taught me to be extremely anally retentive and specific when it comes time to define the specifications for a new custom cosplay in the new year, a goal I definitely want to try again with, though maybe not entirely with Hololive this time around.
Secondly, and I mentioned this in the last Redundancy Review: having to fight an online fashion community for besmirching my partner’s honour, another event that came with a lot of negatives, but has some positive linings.
Was it a traumatic ordeal for the both of us to navigate false and inflated accusations from a bunch of elitist randoms online? Yes
Did it take away three precious days of our life navigating the ever changing goalposts those upjumped Discord mods enforced upon us? Yes
Was our privacy violated by the amount of guilty until proven innocent assumptions a group of sad, lonely, and bored timewasters inflicted upon us? Yes
Did I get a fucking thrill from taking their arguments apart piece-by-piece in an extensive Google Dockey and having a grudge to hold on to in order to live a beautiful life for both me and my partner out of sheer spite? You bet your arse I do.
And again, if anyone from that fashion community is reading this post because you still feel the need to cyberstalk us, read my words carefully. I am more than capable of holding this grudge until the two year waiting period is up, and then holding it beyond that point to fuel the spite even further.
God that feels good to get out of my system.
And finally: not spending enough time with friends, something I have been working on fixing in the last months of the year and want to work on more in the early months of 2026. From pulling out of social engagements at the last minute, having clashing plans that prevent me from making the most of my time with people, or just simply having my mental demons catch up with me at the worst times, there has been less time I have spent with the people I care about most in my life.
Think that covers every major bit of negativity this year, time to move onto the way more positive aspects of the year.
Starting with another elephant in the room: VExpo, the absolute highlight of my year, and focus of the best & biggest piece of writing I did this year what do you mean this was almost four months ago now what the fuck it was day 90 I wrote that and we’re on day 204 now.
VExpo gave me a taste of a life I did not actually think I would have again. One of going out to conventions, meeting like-minded individuals who enjoy the same hobbies that I do, spending time engaging in all my silly hobbies and coming back feeling both the lows of post-con depression and the absolute high of experiencing such a wonderful event with so many memories made.
It is my goal to return for VExpo 2026, and I want to make next year’s trip even better than the one this year, with hopefully the convention itself stepping up their game to put on an even better show.
Next up, it has actually been a great year for me in terms of gaming and pushing myself to 100% complete various games, the proudest of which I definitely think is either Monster Hunter Wilds for the surprising reward of the size grind in that game due to how investigations work and how my friends and I were able to share investigations with one another, or Death Stranding Director’s Cut, for the fairly straightforward nature of all its achievements and the fact it is a Kojima game, so I was absolutely enthralled the entire time.
It is something I would like to bring forward into 2026, picking up previous projects to finally finish off like Mass Effect Legendary Collection and finding new ones like Space Marine 2. Achievements are always special to me, and pushing myself to 100% games is something I seriously enjoy.
One part of this year that has ended up surprisingly well for me is actually my financial situation. Without going into too much detail and oversharing sensitive information, for someone who lost their job in the middle of the year I actually end this year off with a stronger savings position than what I started in, almost doubling what I had at the beginning. Of course I still have to worry about taxes in a couple months time which will take a decent chunk back out of that savings cushion, but the fact I can be in a position to not be overly worried about that time is incredibly reassuring.
And finally, I want to end this post off with what I think is definitely one of the biggest positives of this year.
This.
The Redundancy Review.
A series born out of an unfortunate event, turning into my biggest writing project of my life, with several ups and downs and a lot of missed days, I still end this year off with:
- 120 posts covering 204 days
- Approximately 120,000 words across those posts, averaging about 1000 words per post and 584 words per day
- 54 total food and drink reviews
- 16 posts about VTubers and VTuber related content
- 1044 views since kicking off the Redundancy Review
All of which are insane milestones to consider when 2024 was one of my worst years for writing, and 2025, through a shit circumstance, ended up being one of my best.
The year ends with a certain amount of uncertainty over my future still, but even in the face of adversity, I made the most of this year with amazing goals achieved nonetheless. For the thumbnail, I am going to post the bingo card I made at the start of the year alongside a group of friends in lieu of standard “resolutions”, which turned into a much more fun way to track the year gone by.
And that does it for the Year End Ramble, and for the year. Thank you for reading this edition of the Redundancy Review, wherever you are, be it in the past or in the future, I hope you are doing well, and that life is on a steady path for you.
2025 is ending, let us hope 2026 is a year of far simpler times.
Rosalia Rambles 
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