Tag: Ace Combat

(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.