(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 posters and creators, welcome to Day 456 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.
Considering I am posting this article online, which I will then share to my friends over Discord and then post a link on my Bluesky account for the world to see, the title may seem a little weird. Admittedly, even though a lot of what I want to discuss has probably been said by people smarter than me, in more eloquent ways, I still want to write down my thoughts.
Social media seems like a necessary evil in the modern world. You want to stay in touch with friends or follow like-minded people for your hobbies or interests, but wanting to do that comes at the risk of seeing the dregs of the internet appears to speak down on whatever you enjoy whilst being exposed to a non-stop stream of every single horror that exists in the modern world because a handful of old men refuse to give up their power or wealth.
Personally, I am someone who has an unhealthy relationship with Twitter. I like being able to passively engage in the hobbies I have and seeing the interactions between the people I choose to follow, but in return I end up finding myself doomscrolling long past the point of being engaged and all it does is ruin my mood when I am already in an impaired mental state.
The answer seems easy: deactivate my account like so many people I looked up to have done so before, but as someone who has had to battle various addictions before I know going cold turkey is not exactly the right option, plus for all its faults I do enjoy seeing both my interests and random fun things when the algorithm decides to bless me rather than curse me.
I recognise this is hypocritical, though I feel I am not alone in thinking this way. To be a writer in the modern age requires the use of social media, and if you are wanting to make this your profession you have to use it to an extensive degree for the required amount of networking in order to land reliable gigs. I will not even lie and say I do not feel anything when I see my view numbers go up or I get engagement on Bluesky, because that dopamine hits like hell whenever I know people are reading what I have to say.
This is not to mention that my current line of work – self-reflection blogs – requires a certain amount of conceit and vanity in order to make it work. I literally write about my day-to-day life whilst trying to put a positive spin on it all whilst behind the screen I feel like my life, the world, and everything in between is falling apart. For all the complaining I will do about social media feeling fake, manicured, or astroturfed I am equally as guilty for presenting a positive vertical slice when I spent this morning breaking down into tears for almost an hour because I realise I hate the person I am becoming because of the many blows I have taken in recent months.
At the very least, I hope what I present comes off as more “genuine” than other influencers who might talk about similar things, and I am most definitely not under any illusion to call myself such a ridiculous title. I do not even feel comfortable enough to call myself a “reviewer” despite the title of my headline series being “Redundancy Review”, because whilst I can think critically and formulate my words into critique, I really do not think anyone should take my opinions too seriously outside of “hmm, that is an interesting take”.
Part of my dislike does definitely come from lack of knowledge as well. Whenever I am putting together a Bluesky post for anything I have posted here I feel as if I am doing it all wrong. I write out a short, but hopefully entertaining, blurb on what the article is about, say what day I am on, and then add my least favourite part of any post: hashtags.
At the very least, I appreciate that Bluesky has dedicated feeds for writing that my work can be pushed to when I use the tags “#WritingCommunity” and “#Writing”. After that, I usually add the tags “#WordPress” and “#WP” to try push what platform I am using… for better or worse, considering I have a lot of issues with WordPress as a whole but right now the sunk cost fallacy is what keeps me here for the time being.
After that though is where the real struggles start, as I will usually put in two additional tags related to what I have written about that day. For example yesterday was “#Hololive” and “#HololiveEnglish” to push myself to any feeds that might be about Hololive related news.
But then I never know when to add more tags, both for respecting character limits and because I do not want to overwhelm my post with SEO-ese to try to get as many hits as possible from as many feeds as possible.
When it comes to learning new things, I try to do as much as possible by myself and attempt to feel things out before I resort to written guides, but there is little desire to work towards or style myself as a “social media expert”, especially when I try to keep my presence minimal for my own sanity… which is a shame, cause a lot of professional writing roles are very social media focused, and I feel I could adapt myself to those roles for the right price, but I think my wheelhouse for writing roles is admittedly smaller than I would like.
This is not even to mention my intense resentment of LinkedIn as a platform. It says something when one of my career goals, outside of writing for a living, outside of having a nice steady role I can develop in, and outside of not fearing layoffs every year at a certain point, is solely getting the ability to abandon or outright deactivate my LinkedIn account because I see very little value in having a presence on that platform and absolutely despise the level of performative I would need to be in anything I post there.
Of course I could make my personal brand on LinkedIn of not being like everyone else on there, but again that falls into the trap of any amount of social media presence requiring some amount of conceit to dare to be “different”, or to think any perspective I have is truly unique.
But even if my experience is the same as thousands if not tens of thousands of people, there is still value in me writing my experience out, both to record how I am feeling and in the hopes that if it helps even one person feel better, I have done something right.
I will probably never fully extricate myself from social media, especially if I want to keep sharing my writing, though I can definitely hope for a healthier relationship in future… I still probably will not upload any of my work to Twitter, existing on that site as a trans person of even the slightest visibility feels like it would destroy my psyche beyond repair.
One of the main challenges that has been facing me during my long writing hiatus is a struggle to engage in any of my usual hobbies besides mindlessly playing Umamusume because it requires little brain power and gives me the required dopamine to stop my brain shutting off. This does mean I have a lack of topics to talk about for Warhammer Wednesday as I have not been building models, or basing models, or doing anything at all related to building things.
In general it has been hard to stay on track with what I wanted to do with Warhammer this year because of the blows I have taken. Back in March when I was making progress on the daily and making preparations to start painting, I felt positive about the upcoming 11th edition and was considering getting in on the ground floor with the starter set before finding out what local play groups are in my area to start meeting new people.
Working on getting my army into a battle-ready state would still be the goal, as I feel going out to meet new people could help me out of this current rut, but there is a lot of myself I need to work on before I feel I could be ready to do that.
For now, I will just share a progress picture of where I am at with my main T’au force. Plenty of infantry with both Fire Warriors and Pathfinders, a small amount of heavier infantry with Crisis Suits (with plenty in my pile of shame to be built), and two choices of leader in the form of Commander Farsight or my commander in Coldstar armour, not to mention plenty of drones for tactical flexibility.
There is also an Ethereal that came from a cheap box I managed to find on Vinted pre-layoff which does not entirely fit in with a Farsight Enclaves theme army. There is a part of me that wants to use a craft knife to cut off the head and replace it with a Fire Warrior helmet to make a “rogue Ethereal” kitbash model, one who abandoned the main empire to join the Enclaves, but is required to wear the helmet to show their loyalty to their new side.
Things still feel hard for me, but each day I wake up I have a chance to improve things. And even if I need to cry out a lot of my negative feelings, then I will do that in the hopes of letting myself heal from all the things that bring me down right now.
Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope you are able to stay positive in the face of adversity. The world sucks right now, but we are still here.
Rosalia Rambles 