Rosalia Rambles

Tag: 40k

  • Redundancy Review: Day 365, “One Year On”

    (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 carousers and merrymakers, welcome to…

    Day 365

    …of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    A whole year has gone by since I started this series. What started out as something to act as daily writing practice has, for all intents and purposes, stayed exactly the same except for the fact it really is not daily anymore, except for when it is.

    Might be the energy drink in my system talking, but, I feel less pessimistic than I did yesterday anticipating this as an anniversary. Even took the time today to catch up with some old colleagues to see what they have been up to, which was nice to hear their voices again.

    Being upfront, I am someone who definitely does not network as much as they should: as a tech professional, as a writer, or as any of the labels I can ascribe to myself. I have a LinkedIn, but I feel anything I could write on my public page in any professional capacity would come off as performative more than anything else. I write the Redundancy Review, but I struggle to engage with other writers for fear of being disingenuous about their work.

    And well, I am a socially awkward fuck outside of all that. Even at meetups and conventions when it is quite clear I am surrounded by like-minded people who would be happy to talk for a little bit or accept compliments on their cool-ass cosplays, I find myself struggling to even approach them for a quick hello without my partner either acting as hype man, or starting the conversation for me for me to segue in.

    One of the many areas I have in the list of “things I need to improve about myself”, which is not to say I am not socially capable, more just… the initiation part is always the hardest – though I should get off this tangent now.

    It feels weird. Looking back on a year of events and activities resulting in a lot of ups and downs to find myself in a similar position to where I was when this series started out. 

    Out of a job, unsure of what I want to do with myself except writing as a hobby, and wondering what comes next.

    It was definitely a bit of a self-esteem boost when talking to my former colleagues and one of them saying that I should definitely be putting myself out there a bit more in terms of roles, and that I am capable for positions I have admittedly not been applying for.

    I think for the time being I will continue to vibe, letting nature take its course and seeing what appears. Anyway, having all this time for hobbies has been rather enjoyable, which brings us to yet another Warhammer Wednesday… the first consecutive Warhammer Wednesday no less. Even one where I will talk about a building project I have been doing.

    How unusual.

    What I have been working on this week has been a unit of T’au Empire Fire Warrior Breacher Team, one of the two ways you can build a box of Fire Warriors, as opposed to a Strike Team. Whilst I am aligning myself with the Farsight Enclaves and most likely running battlesuit spam more than anything else, it is probably a good idea to have a basic infantry unit ready to go for smaller games.

    Plus I found a great deal on an old “Start Collecting!” box on Vinted shortly before I got told I was being laid off, and they were included as part of it.

    For a bit of background, Fire Warriors are the bread-and-butter infantry of the T’au Empire, with the most notable iteration of them being what is called the “Strike Team” – wielding either pulse rifles or pulse carbines to unleash massive volleys of shots upon unsuspecting enemies who get close to the gun line. These were one of the main things I was scared of when facing T’au back in the day, as they could take out my squishy units from a distance with it not becoming much better on the charge, as being in closer range gave pulse rifles extra shots, leading to an overwatch that invariably did more damage than if I kept my distance.

    However, I am not one for a static gunline, and I would much rather my infantry be able to dish out good shooting whilst also being close to the enemy, meaning the “Breacher Team” with their pulse blasters feels like a more fitting choice.

    The sprue I am using comes with thirteen options for legs, though there are only ten bodies with which to build full models. 

    My main choices for legs were ones where they are either on one knee to take a shooting position, or bracing themselves on a “rear” leg to assume a standing but steady shooting position. They might not be a static gunline, but I love the dynamic posing that comes from crouching down or leaning back to absorb some of the recoil from the gun.

    Guy doing a reload has a relaxed posture, presumably further back in the gunline whilst his comrades coover him. The Shas’ui (leader) of the squad has his pulse blaster in his hands but is instead using a pistol, aimed slightly higher up to potentially interdict threats from above that might disrupt the gunline.

    Two models in the squad are using the legs that make it look like they are moving forward, but with both feet still on the ground. The remaining three sets of legs I did not use have more dynamic running poses with one foot being off the ground, which did not really align with how I wanted this squad to look.

    Especially with these two. When comparing them to the rest of the gunline which are crouching or leaning down, it feels as if they are a proper cohesive team. A sternguard holding position ready to engage any threats that appear whilst a vanguard advances forward, blasters at the ready to deal with whatever might appear from dark corners.

    Unrelated, I am not sponsored by Tamiya. I do however think it is the best plastic glue on the market both for securely gluing models together and for inhaling the sweet vapours of as you build.

    This has overall been a pretty fun kit to build, with a surprising amount of posing potential for static pairs of legs compared to the potential arrangements a team of Crisis suits could be put into. Painting procrastination will continue until morale improves.

    One year down, let us see what the next year shall bring together.

    Thank you for reading this edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope Wednesday has been kind to you. If not, the weekend is not too far away, and whatever you need to do to relax, I hope you are able to do it.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 358, “How To Be Unemployed”

    Redundancy Review: Day 358, “How To Be Unemployed”

    (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 layabouts and slouches, welcome to Day 358 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    Has it only taken three days of being officially out of work for me to slightly lose my mind?

    Of course not – I was plenty mad before this. But there is a certain actualisation setting in that I do not really know how to be unemployed. We spend so much of our lives working with minimal downtime outside of scheduled holidays making it so that when the routine is disrupted by loss of a job, you have to start learning a new routine.

    For me, I still feel as if I am in the early stages of grief, perhaps exacerbated by my desire to find a new industry. It causes massive whiplash throughout the day cause I will find myself getting hyped over something…

    LIKE THE RELEASE DATE OF ACE COMBAT 8 BEING ANNOUNCED DURING STATE OF PLAY YESTERDAY AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

    …to just feeling a sudden emptiness and numbness after that hype as I slowly come to the realisation that it is eleven at night and even though I have filled the day with activities, it somehow does not feel like I have done “enough” and I have to try fill the entire day tomorrow with activities – productive or otherwise.

    My approach to the current situation might not be helping, because full-time job searching would actually be a way to fill a day, but as I explained I am still unsure as to when I want to do that.

    It makes writing feel hard too. In a way it feels performative to try write about my experiences when internally I feel numb about any of the things I am doing, that nothing I write about ultimately matters cause I do not feel what I am writing has value. I know that this is likely just the depression, or the estrogen, or the repeated beatdowns in optimism talking, but, it feels hard to write.

    Employment brings purpose. Being unemployed means losing purpose. Purpose can be found when unemployed. My purpose right now is both split between multiple areas and somehow undefined.

    I know I am good at writing. People call on me for writing assistance. The ability to extract what someone is trying to say from an initial paragraph or their own words and being able to put it into text is something I have honed and I am proud of…

    …so why do I struggle so much to do it for myself?

    Some of it would be restraint, because as much as I like to call this an “unfiltered” view of the experiences someone navigating an ever-changing world whilst unemployed, there is definitely some amount of filtering going on, if just because I want this site to exist as a portfolio and going full mask-off would be a little unwise off the cuff. Only when it is fully warranted does that part of me come out, which right now does not feel appropriate when talking about the numbness that accompanies unemployment.

    But right now, my words fail me, and the world feels all the more small because of that.

    I want to continue writing, and I want to be the kind of writer that can use words to tell stories even when those stories are not pleasant. To have the ability to craft words even when the motivation is lacking.

    Perhaps the fact I am writing about this shows I already am that kind of writer, just without the ability to see it for myself.

    At the very least, I still have my other hobbies to keep me going through this period, which can segue me nicely to finally doing a proper Warhammer Wednesday again, though, with more of a general discussion about the faction I am working on building and (eventually) painting: the Farsight Enclaves of the T’au Empire.

    So, a lot of the books I own for actually playing the tabletop game come from seventh edition, which was where I played the most 40k and ended up playing around with a lot of different factions… none of which were T’au.

    Specifically because T’au were ridiculously dominant in shooting phases and how they were able to shred through all other factions. I only really played in a small group at my local library, but I always held a mild fear of the T’au player due to how brutal his attacks were – a fact that was exacerbated by the fact I was a Dark Eldar player, a faction that was behind in terms of fun toys to play with compared to others and one that was insanely squishy even without considering that. It only took the T’au player helping me out with a list for me to find a niche within the faction that I enjoyed.

    If I had stuck with seventh edition for longer, my intention was to create some form of Aeldari hybrid force – messing around with adding in Craftworld and Harlequin forces as allied detachments to see if I could make up for what I lacked in certain areas, though a little game called “Star Realms” disrupted my desire to play 40k massively, and the desire completely went away once Magic: the Gathering got involved.

    So why is it, that when I am deciding to revisit the game and build up a collection of seventh edition viable armies from my old stuff, I went back to my old nemesis of the T’au?

    A taste of power perhaps?

    Or succumbing to the dark side entirely?

    Nah, neither of those things. I have always been a nerd for mechs and mech-adjacent things, and the various battlesuits of the T’au fascinate me greatly outside of their in-game effects. Boxy mechs that still have a decent amount of mobility due to their jetpacks or seriously tanky suits that are armed to the teeth with all sorts of high-yield weapons.

    But why the Farsight Enclaves specifically?

    There is a certain joy in aligning myself with the faction that is seen as rebelling against a strict caste system in favour of freedom and self-determinism. As the words in the beginning of my Farsight Enclaves supplement book says:

    “Through fire, revelation
    Through revelation, rebellion”

    This is not to say Farsight is the perfect leader in the grimdark world of 40k, having his own extremist tendencies and at one point in time succumbing to the temptations of Chaos somehow resulting in him becoming an avatar of Khorne for an extremely short period before his senses returned to him as a leader rather than an army-of-one.

    Plus, after transitioning I found myself to have a liking of the colour red more than I used to, which possibly plays into it as well.

    Part of my goal with building a Farsight Enclaves army is to build “The Eight”, Farsight’s group of allies that form a battlefield formation in seventh edition – this is something that can easily be done with my current pile of shame, so keep reading to see how that turns out and if I can motivate myself to actually base my models.

    Bit of a whiplashy Redundancy Review, but one that is likely to form some form of a pattern as I continue to debug my mind bit-by-bit.

    As always though, thank you for reading today’s edition. Wherever you are, I hope you are able to relax. We are past hump day now, and the weekend should be rapidly approaching. Hold on, you will get some time to yourself soon.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 330, “Late Night Struggles”

    Redundancy Review: Day 330, “Late Night Struggles”

    (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 gravekeepers and morticians, welcome to Day 330 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    If things are on my mind, I usually cannot sleep well. This is a bad trait to have when combined with ADHD where I seem almost incapable of not having things on my mind, but usually enough time passes where I am able to silence my inner monologue for long enough to actually get to sleep.

    The problem comes from impending unemployment putting a lot of things on my mind, and the knock-on struggles that come about from that.

    Being honest, it is not really the spectre of unemployment itself that is weighing on my mind, it is the thing that killed me the most during the period before my official redundancy when everything kicked off last year:

    Waiting.

    I like to consider myself a relatively patient person, despite various neurological factors working against me, but I definitely feel like I am dealing with one extreme case of “waiting room syndrome” right now – a phenomenon seen among neurodivergent individuals where when they know an event or appointment is coming up they feel a sense of paralysis that will not subside until the event is done with.

    In a way, I guess the more correct term would be “limbo”, and I will have to pick my words very carefully here because I do not want to come off as unprofessional unintentionally. Up until the end of May, I am still in the employ of my current company, but not included in meetings anymore due to the plan moving forward not involving me, which I get, but it definitely has an impact on the feeling of isolation that can come along with remote work.

    During the redundancy period last year, I still showed up to previously scheduled meetings even when there was no work to be done. This acted as group therapy for me and my colleagues to discuss how we were feeling, any interesting opportunities we had found, or just stay in touch so we were not stuck in our own heads as the world shifted around us.

    The Redundancy Review helps in a way, because if I were not committed to writing practice where the focus is placed on how I am feeling day-to-day, I think a lot of my emotions would just bottle up to dangerous levels and my isolation would get a lot worse.

    In the past, my instinct when faced with great stress or turmoil was to isolate myself from people. This would involve making myself appear offline on as many socials as possible, not responding to any messages directed at me (even if they were messages of concern), and basically staying in my own bubble of unhealthy coping mechanisms.

    Straight up, this was not a good thing to do. Whilst I can look back and understand why past me would have exhibited this behaviour, I can also see the amount of times this resulted in a lot of unnecessary worry from people that could have been easily dispelled if I took five minutes to communicate why I was feeling the way I did. Think I have done it once or twice within the last year or so, but unlike previously where these episodes would last a couple of days or up to a week, they last about a day before people shake me out of my rut and get me speaking again.

    Socialisation is strength, but it is important to make time for your own hobby projects…

    …which is what I would be saying, if my workspace did not look like this currently:

    A mess, plain and simple. From a handful of Vinted orders coming through alongside making the use of sales and coupons on some other regular websites I haunted, I now have a decent pile of shame project backlog to make plenty of stuff for Warhammer Wednesday.

    The main focus of my hobby work has actually been on repair as opposed building new kits, specifically due to going loft diving at my parent’s place to recover a lot of my old models and kits – some of which includes exclusive models from past Games Day events which have been interesting to repair… if a little annoying because they are all metal and I forgot how ass using superglue is for things like this.

    I need to stop procrastinating on getting some models painted though, lest I accumulate a pile of grey plastic tat. Painting was never my strong suit back in the day, so I feel I little hesitant on giving it another go.

    Only way to learn is by doing, right?

    Not really a focused Redundancy Review today, but a ramble on the innermost functioning of my mind all the same.

    Thank you for reading today’s edition. Wherever you are, I hope your week is going well, and if it is not, then the weekend is soon upon us, and that should give you plenty of time to relax.