Rosalia Rambles

Tag: careers

Redundancy Review: Day 337, “The Day Everything Changed”

(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 hermits and recluses, welcome to Day 337 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

Today is 13th May 2026. One year ago, my life changed in ways I still struggle to fully comprehend.

Whilst the one year anniversary of being made redundant is coming up in about a month’s time, this day marks when I got told that the company I was working for had entered financial distress and that falling into administration looked likely.

The memory exists so clearly in my mind still, to the point that I can recount the entire thing when I would struggle to do so for other significant days.

I started later than usual, around 9:30am, because of needing to do an early morning blood test. Back then I tried to start my days at 8am so I could finish earlier in the day and have more evening to evening with, and I did not particularly want to spend my lunch hour getting my blood stolen, so shifting around my day was the play.

It flowed like any other day. We had our standup, and specifically I was invited to a meeting to start playing around with a new tool the development team had been working on for a little bit, one that was hopefully going to form part of a new proposition.

After using it for a little bit, I had a lot of faith in the tool, and I found myself wanting to position myself as the owner/manager of this tool, wanting to take on more responsibility at the company and figuring this would be a good way to build myself up and learn more about being a producer.

Even as some friends came down to visit me I was talking about excitement for the future with what could be coming next. Of course I still had nervous whispers in the back of my mind about what the future could hold, but I figured we would at least have till the end of the year to get things sorted.

Then the anvil dropped.

The CFO/HR person messaged me.

“Hey Rosa”

“Are you free for a quick call please”

No preamble.

No pleasantries.

A message that reads as a death knell to all in the tech world, with my worst fears being realised when I got onto the call and I saw both the CFO and COO with solemn looks on their faces.

With the gift of hindsight, the gallows humour approach would have been to say “Well I am getting fired or we all are” once I figured out what was going on.

But I was a very different person back then, and I instantly knew what was likely going to happen. All I managed to muster was an “ah” before the news was delivered.

I tried to keep a strong face, minimising how much I spoke both so I could understand what was being said to me and because I knew if I spoke I would start to cry my eyes out which would set the other two off.

Not that it really mattered, but I said I would be taking the day after as an off day, before finishing the call with “I am gonna go hug Joe”, because in that moment all I wanted to do was cry my eyes out and wonder what the fuck was going to happen next.

My running joke is that I survived layoffs so many times that it obviously would take the foundations collapsing in to finally get rid of me, but that mainly served as a deflection for survivor’s guilt – a sadly all too common phenomenon within the tech and games industry, an almost paralysing paranoia that you did not feel good enough to survive the axe when all too many talented people lost their jobs instead of you.

The initial moments afterwards hurt. It was so bad that my anxiety response of vomiting almost triggered and I had to explain my feelings knelt in front of the toilet bowl in case it somehow got too much for me midway through.

It was only a small consolation that I was not alone in this sensation, in that everyone in the company had received the news and had to process their next steps as well. It was a small positive that we kept daily standups going, if just to share potential job opportunities and talk about whatever we were feeling. I specifically remember rambling to a colleague of mine about Eurovision partway through the whole uncertainty process just to take our mind off things.

Even today though, the scars remain. If anything they are more pronounced than ever because of yet another layoff hitting me just as I was starting to find my feet once more and push towards the projects I wanted to work on again this year, now instead I find myself trying to figure out what to do next whilst navigating the utter quagmire that is a mind plagued by depression and negative thoughts about how loyalty ultimately means nothing when my position on the landscape is not up to me.

Getting dangerously close to breaking professionalism there, so I am going to move on to the review topic instead, which… admittedly is not Warhammer Wednesday because there was something that kicked off a year ago today alongside everything that happened to me on that day, which gives me a lot of mixed feelings.

Because yes, I did lose my job, my sense of self and purpose, and all notion of stability in my life…

…but the Helldivers 2 ARG ended with the arrival of the Illuminate Great Host, heralding the invasion of Super Earth, which y’know, is kind of equally important as having a job.

This ARG was extremely fun to watch across the four or five days it was live, seeing the community slowly work towards restoring the station to full functionality through minigames themed to actual terminal tasks in game – not knowing what the ultimate result was going to be

I also have to give a shoutout to CloudPlays on Youtube for this stream title when the ARG first started. The sentiment was there my guy, but considering it took from May 9th to May 13th for things to finish, making such a content-brained declaration was certainly a choice.

It was great to see the community come together to solve these puzzles though, even if during the pipe alignment minigame there were multiple moments where the blob kept moving a pipe out of alignment which undid a bunch of progress, especially when we had already solved the puzzle and just needed it to wait, leading to multiple messages of “HOLD” sent to the Satcom chat in the Discord, which was how players interacted with the ARG as a whole.

This did lead to quite a few interesting moments, from the Discord API timing out because of the sheer volume of requests to the… various creative ingress bytes that the Helldivers community attempted, with the pipe shuffling incident also generating a beautiful message from one of the community managers saying “Satcom has lost all hope in the helldivers”

Side note, no matter how hard I tried to track it down from DMs I shared with people during the ARG or things posted on Reddit, I could not for the life of me find the invalid ingress byte of “femboy feet pics”.

After the ARG was solved, it took a day or so for the ending to play out. This ending started around three minutes before my main meeting of that day, and I am someone who absolutely does not like being late for any meeting, so I was watching the invasion fleet arrive with absolute suspense and horror whilst also going “HURRY UP I NEED TO BE IN MY MEETING SOON!”.

There is a certain dread that came from seeing so many Illuminate ships arrive at once, fully in the vein of the “Slipspace Rupture Detected” scene in Halo: Reach, compounded by the graphic of how it was shown in game.

My intention is to do a couple more Helldivers 2 retrospectives around the invasion of Super Earth. I played a lot of the game around this point due to my unemployment and it forced me to evolve my strategy in game, which eventually became the foundation of how I play the game today.

That should cover everything for today. Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope you are having a good week. The weekend is not too far away if you are having a rough one, so I hope you can relax up until that point.

May 13, 2026
Redundancy Review: Day 329, “Tidying Time”
(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 caretakers and clearers (yes that is a word, I specifically looked it up), welcome to Day 329 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

Spent a bit of today doing some cleaning, both of myself and of my living space, specifically starting to tackle clearing out the fridge and freezer in order to make space for various essentials I want to pick up in the coming weeks whilst I still make my current amount of money alongside tidying up the bathroom so I could stick the shower baskets back on to keep things relatively organised.

Housework is always something I struggle to find the impetus for, possibly because of that old bastard ADHD. It never seems urgent in my mind, so it falls by the wayside in favour of other things, but simultaneously, I am a housework fiend when it comes to procrastinating something more important…

…there is a joke in here about how my flat is going to be the cleanest it has ever been as I put off finding another job, but I do not know how confident I feel to make it.

So instead I think I will spin it more into a general discussion topic, specifically along the lines of: What sort of timeline do I think I will find a new job on?

The short answer is: “eeeeehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh?”, with the explanation to that answer and the long answer being one and the same.

As I have mentioned previously, processing where I want to go next is the first priority, and given I am extremely privileged to have a good amount of runway to support a long amount of processing time, debugging myself and recovering from burnout is the key.

At the same time though, I know this is also partially because I reckon a three-to-six month job search is going to be the optimistic end of the timeline, with upwards of one-and-a-half years being the middle ground between pessimism and realism given how rough the market is currently for job searchers, hence my logic of wanting to throw myself into writing cause if I am going to be on the search for a while, I may as well maintain a massive personal project.

It is the advice that is always given to all walks of life in terms of career development: maintain a personal project. Artists of all flavours, programmers, and even quality assurance professionals such as myself are expected to work on projects or ideas outside of work hours to show your dedication to your craft, and it is the theory behind this that I have a love-hate relationship with.

I get the logic behind it, promise. Working on stuff outside of work can help show employers what you are capable of in ways that cannot be expressed properly in an interview or job application, and it can be fulfilling to see a personal project through to completion – especially if you do so with friends.

But at the same time, and especially with modern work culture, the idea of giving up personal time to go beyond work feels extremely unfair in terms of how it makes you stand out to employers. Heck the reason there are so many gaps of multiple weeks between Redundancy Reviews before I got shitcanned was because I would finish a work day and not even want to fathom doing anything that would class as brain stimulation – and I work remotely.

Remote work means that I do not have to consider the same factors as other people do:
- There is no commute to worry about, freeing up on average two hours
- I live in a very walkable town that has numerous local amenities for lunch and food shopping, meaning I can do those errands on my lunch hour
- During my breaks from work, I can make small dents into the housework list as a way to get away from the screen and decompress my mind
- And because I only had a few meetings a day, I could spend my focus energy on actually getting the job done rather than having my social battery drain bit-by-bit
All of these are an extreme privilege to have against modern work culture, and asking someone who works longer hours and also has to deal with a commute to give up their paltry time in the evening or any amount of time during the two weekend days they get to work on a personal project feels, in equal measures, performative and exploitative.

There is also a prime opportunity for me to drag AI through the mud once more off the back of that, but I think I will save that one for another day and instead talk about VTubers that I like.

Like Nerissa Ravencroft from Hololive English Advent.

I ramble about Shiori Novella enough, but I have only slightly alluded to what I think about Nerissa. When Advent initially debuted she was actually the design I was taken least with, but as time went on and I saw how she interacted with the community on streams, I started to fall in love with how this silly goober functions, combined with her absolutely godlike singing voice.

Her originals are wonderfully crafted pieces that resonate with different emotions in each piece, from alluding to the playful and seductive nature of demons in “Say My Name”, to diving deep in how it feels to reflect alone on mistakes and past trauma in the hauntingly poetic “In My Feelings”… and well, I could talk about Oyome Holic here too, but let us save that for a day where I am not writing this at past ten in the evening.

This varied vocal energy is brought out in the cover songs she creates as well, with the two I am wanting to highlight showing both ends of the Vocaloid producer spectrum with “Birdbrain” nailing the esoteric and weird side of things (alongside nailing the scream right at the end of the bridge), and with “Rabbit Hole” utilising Rachie’s English lyrics being…

…well…

…Rabbit Hole is a hell of a good song, and I will leave it there to save myself any embarrassment.

Outside of this though, the thing I admire most about Nerissa is her work ethic. She does so much behind the scenes to enable music and streams for the Jailbirds, and this definitely deserves to be recognised more because the effort put in even when the odds are against her is one hell of an admirable quality.

Plus her obsession with Culver’s acts as great advertising for the American chain, to the point that if I somehow end up in the US in the future, I would love to try it out.

Anyway, that’s my VTuber rambling at an end for today, not so much a review, more just an unstructured gush about the talents I look up to.

Thank you for reading this edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope this week brings you peace and comfort where possible, or if you are facing hardship, that it passes by quickly without much weight on your soul.

Keep on keeping on.
May 5, 2026
Redundancy Review: Day 321, “Career Uncertainty, Part 2

(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 admirals and commodores, welcome to Day 321 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

Off the back of getting rejected for a job role I was pretty excited for, I continue to persist in my goal to write a daily series. Heads up that this edition might read a bit more like a rant in some areas, as I am going to be talking about career stuff as I briefly alluded to yesterday.

About eight years of my life has been spent either aspiring and studying to enter the tech industry, or working in the tech industry itself. As a twenty eight year old, this means approximately one quarter of my life has been spent in the tech space.

This started with me going to university to study Computer Games Technology, with the hope of becoming a games programmer of some description, either working on my own independent projects or joining some large studio to be a cog in the machine. Admittedly it started well, with both my first and second year having good results in what I was attempting to do with my coursework.

Not without struggle though. My second year in particular was plagued with a lot of struggle and tense moments as things heated up, particularly in the first semester more than anything else.

Third year… was the hardest. The first semester had me navigating a lot of personal issues that impacted my work in a negative way that whilst I was still fulfilling deadlines and getting on with things, I was not pushing myself on working on things that were not coursework, which is definitely one of the things that you need to succeed as a programmer by improving your skills.

With the gift of hindsight, whilst I knew how to navigate programming, I am not built to be a full-time programmer. The idea of spending a full work day sitting in front of an IDE (or more realistic to the modern day, an agent prompt window) did not appeal to me in the slightest.

This issue was compounded when my second semester was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing things online, disrupting the deadlines I had and disrupting the flow of the group I was working with at the time, causing things to fall behind.

I still graduated, with a First class degree no less, specifically because the module I scored highest on, as part of a course dedicated to building me up as a programmer more than anything else, was Consultancy and IT Management, which was around building a case study to upgrade a company’s IT infrastructure… which I feel reflects the current me pretty nicely, but is still funny to look back on.

As is evident from my many previous stories, I did not in-fact go into programming full time. Whilst someone in my life at the time tried to push me to work on personal projects so I could put together a more proper portfolio, the drive was not there, and I should have admitted that way sooner, both to myself and that person.

So I spent six months unemployed, trying to work on writing when I can but mainly resolving a bunch of personal issues more than anything else. COVID jobs market sucked, and I did have some interviews, but not much success.

That was until I interviewed for the position of QA Engineer at Codemasters, which I have talked about at length in my Day 118 Redundancy Review. This set the trajectory for where my career has taken me today, with a year spent in the games industry until I pivoted into working for an XR company that specialised in both bespoke VR content and an educational platform.

This is where I have spent the majority of my career, building myself up as a QA initially before my mentor Gabi took me under her wing and started to build me up as a producer as well… I should reach out to her again, especially now with shit hitting the fan again. She is one of the reasons I have as much resilience as I do today, and I still try to internalise one of the last things she told me when the company went to shit:

“You are a person worth knowing.”

I gave a lot of myself to that XR company, pushing myself beyond my limits and learning as much as I could with each project. I definitely pushed a little too hard in some instances, as I had to have at least two periods of leave that were due to the stress catching up to me… well, the latter one was purely stress, the former was due to me catching COVID and severely underestimating how long it took to recover – I kept coming back to work only to have myself punched back down by how sluggish my body felt, something I still struggle with today as I most definitely have some variety of Long COVID after catching it twice.

My aim was to make myself indispensable, if a little neurotic in how I approached things. Stubbornness is a genetic trait I fight against every day, and it definitely affected how I communicated with my colleagues at times, both in positive and negative ways. Regardless, I made my mark, and navigated responsibilities I would have never considered in the year prior.

But now we get to the hard details, and that is what it is like to work within startup/scaleup culture. I will try to frame this with the positive aspect first followed by why it can cause psychological strain in certain scenarios.

First off, team size. After coming from Codemasters where a single platform QA team would be around fifteen to twenty people at peak times with the greater QA team easily being one-hundred people and above, going to a company which never went above fifty people at the peak was certainly a cultural difference.

The primary perk of this was knowing who you worked with well, especially after my part of the company got reorganised into a proper studio team where we would have a general standup and retro alongside project specific meetings. This meant I got to know people on a personal level, learning about their hobbies, how they prefer to work, and who I could ask certain questions of. A lot of my old colleagues were incredibly chill people, and very supportive of me as a trans person – one distinct memory I have is absolutely bawling on the shoulder of one of them after I had to dip from a company dinner because of a murder mystery actor making a rather crass transphobic joke, which I spent a fair bit of time not wanting to ruin his very nice jacket with my snot or tears.

The main downside of working this way is that responsibilities had to be shared almost all of the time, often leading to moments where my plate would be filled with all different tasks that needed to be balanced or differing deadlines, requiring precision prioritisation in order to get things done, which I managed to do most days, but the stress definitely felt intense on some days, especially while I was working towards being a producer, often having to balance QA responsibilities along with my production responsibilities.

To bring things back to the positive, this does mean I can prepare, practice, and perform a presentation in a relatively short timescale, something I utilised in a recent interview to do the above in around half an hour. AI might be able to do a similar thing, but I can do it much cheaper with fewer resources, like caffeine and painkillers as opposed to context and tokens.

Second main perk is being treated like an adult in regards to working patterns. Codemasters offered me flexitime but this was a measured arrangement, where if I signed out early on any given day, I would need to make up that time later on in the week, or vice versa where staying late one night meant I could sign out earlier. Work is hard and intense within startup culture, but so long as the work is being completed by the deadline, I was free to work however I wanted, which is an absolute relief to an ADHDer like myself, as forcing myself to work on a pattern that is not mine does my head in.

Downside of this all? Overtime was very rarely compensated, partially due to the fact my compensation was already pretty generous, but this meant any time I needed to stay late or start early often resulted in nothing but a congratulations, which was actually less than what I got in the games industry, as I got time-and-a-half for any weekend work and double time for any bank holiday. Flexing my life for the needs of the business was also a requirement, which became particularly annoying on the day after my partner moved in with me, where I was supposed to cook our first proper meal together but ended up needing to stay multiple hours past my usual finishing time to help get something out the door, which ended with no result anyway.

(small aside: I do not believe in the discussion of wages being taboo. Possibly a Gen Z thing, possibly a leftist thing.)

And finally, the thing that I cannot highlight any positive for, or even try to talk about in a positive way: layoffs, and funding.

There is no way for me to discuss this part of working in a startup or scaleup without going overly negative, because this shit absolutely destroys lives, morale, and direction of a company. In my five year career, I have survived three rounds of layoffs, and being laid off twice. Two rounds of those layoffs have been in the XR industry, where I had to watch friends and senior colleagues disappear whilst I was still around, leading to some serious survivor guilt developing which got worse during the second round.

No one can dodge mortar shells forever, though it seems appropriate that for someone who survived layoffs three times, it would obviously take the nuke of administration/insolvency for me to finally get hit, leading to where we are today with the Redundancy Review and the “season 2” we are currently within due to the second layoff.

So, what is the moral of me running through this all?

Because whilst I can continue on in the tech industry, and there is definitely a real possibility I stick around if a good opportunity arises, everything I have run through has worn me down bit by fucking bit, and I am done. The games industry is undergoing constant shifts with layoffs, closures, and cancellations, the tech industry is going all in on AI which leads to fewer opportunities being created, and pretty much all of my friends have told me to move away from startup culture for the sake of my own health.

That leaves me contemplating going down the path of the starving artist, which has its own set of pitfalls and would lead to even more career uncertainty than I am facing right now….

…but when has that ever stopped me?

The world needs more LGBTQ+ artists making works public, especially trans artists to try show those falling victim to culture war topics that not only are we real people, we are also nothing like what the media portrays – I literally do not like going to the toilet in public at the best of times I am certainly not going to be doing heinous shit in a women’s toilet.

I did not intend for this to become such a long piece, but the words kept flowing as I kept typing, but now we need to do a review topic. Something shorter than usual, and I have something just for that.

This is a can of Poppi, a brand of soda that was launched in the US in 2018 as a “gut healthy” soda with it recently launching in the UK in Pret A Manger and Tesco locations. I saw it multiple times in my local Tesco express, but considering it is £2 for an individual can or £4.50 Clubcard Price for a four-pack, I never really had the impetus to try it until today, where I went to grab a meal deal lunch for my partner and decided to include it as the drink as repayment to myself for running this errand.

And I am very glad it came as the meal deal drink because holy shit I do not consider this worth £2 for a can and I would be at a stretch to pay £1.12~ per can in the four-pack.

Comparing Poppi to a standard fizzy orange drink in the UK, Tango and/or Fanta, it barely has any orange flavour to it, or even much fizz to it, kind of tasting like a squash made with an extremely flat sparkling water. I am someone who does not even like Fanta, but if I had to take the pick between Fanta or Poppi I would take Fanta every time.

But it is a healthy soda, so obviously it would not taste as good as a processed and high-sugar drink.

I will concede that point, but counter with the comparison I made. A glass of orange squash has more orange flavour, but would also have more health benefits in term of hydration and be substantially cheaper than paying £1.12-£2 for a can of supposedly “healthy” soda.

Note to self, Robinson’s Squash for a future Redundancy Review topic.

Just about 2300 words for today, the longest I have written in a damn while.

Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope you are able to relax and that the Monday blues are not hitting you too hard.

April 27, 2026
Redundancy Review: Day 136-137, “Good Enough”

(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 adequates and passables, welcome to Day 136 & 137 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

Totally did not skip a day because I spent almost five hours playing Clair Obscur last night.

Nope.

Would not have happened.

Did not immediately finish work to have a delicious kebab takeaway before getting fully immersed in the game…

…yeah, no, after the work week I had and the actual work day I had on Friday, my brain was just fully in the mode of turning itself off and focusing on trying to disconnect myself from my current situation.

Not that it helped this morning, as I woke up at my regular time of seven in the goddamn morning only to immediately start worrying about work on a day where I am supposed to be trying to disconnect from it all.

Trying to separate my emotions from my work is hard sometimes, and again, it is one of those qualities that a lot of people find admirable that I find makes it harder for me to live my life without worry. Having my emotions in my work makes me care more about the end result, which leads to me putting in hard work in order to make the clients happy and my colleagues’ lives easier.

But when things go wrong, I feel the pain, the hurt, and the disappointment it brings all too much. Even in such a small company where there is a blameless culture and the focus is put on improving the process rather than finding someone to scapegoat, I find it hard to separate myself from the fact that something I did as a piece of work did not yield the optimal result.

Which is where today’s title comes into play: worrying about whether or not I am “good enough” for the role I currently play.

The short answer is “yes, yes you are”, the slightly longer answer is “Rosa this is just impostor syndrome and redundancy trauma kicking in”, and the long answer unpacks both of these statements.

I did not actually interview for my current role, at least not formally. Given that it was a collection of former colleagues retained by the investors to continue the company’s work, all that really happened was two short conversations with the CTO and CFO to explain what needs doing as part of the role, with me accepting a couple of days after.

Ten days, by the way, that is all it took for me to go from those initial conversations to starting work again. No formal interview, just people asking me back because they felt I was the right person for the job.

My feelings around this process are… weird. I know for a fact this does happen in the industry at large through the referral process, but it makes me feel as if I did not “earn” my position in a way – but I did earn my position. It was earned through all the hard work I put in at the previous company by making myself adaptable, dependable, and pleasant to be around even in high stress situations.

This then plays into my greater impostor syndrome, as I sit around after a rough day wondering if I am good enough for any position outside of my current one, that I want to step into another career path not just because I feel there is a greater purpose for me outside of the tech industry, but because I am ultimately not suitable for this career path anymore.

In my worst moments, these thoughts eat at me greatly, but then I think back to playing Clair Obscur last night: running into the walls, either trying to find hidden paths or disguised switches, jumping around seeing if I am able to bypass any zones through sheer determination & Skyrim-horsing, and discovering broken builds on my own steam.

Quality assurance is not just a career for me, honestly it stopped being that long ago. It is hard-wired into my brain, bringing all the transferable skills along with it.

An eye for detail.

A problem-solving mindset.

Being able to throw myself at a wall as many times as necessary until it breaks.

Even if I end up speccing out my career into automation testing, once more embracing the programming life I thought I would leave behind forever, I will always be a manual QA at heart – because nothing brings my soul joy more than pushing software to its absolute limit.

I am good enough. My bad days do not define me. The mistakes and mishaps of my career do not mean I am not good enough. I am the sum of every success and scar across this long journey.

One thing that did help ease my impostor syndrome a little was an interview for a store manager retail role. It is not a role I feel I want to take, especially because it would mean leaving my current contract and team, but being able to have an interview again for the first time in almost four years genuinely helped me remember that I am someone with a good breadth of skills and a large amount of my favourite thing in the world: stories.

Stories about times I helped others, when others needed to help me, and every difficult experience that in the moment felt like it was the end of the world, but now look back at it knowing I got through it, almost with a weird fondness given how everything ended up.

My love for stories persists, even through the hard times – just wish I had more time and energy to write out the ones still inside my head.

But for now, we always have food reviews.

Oh yeah, I have missed getting to write this out. It is time for another exciting edition of…

Rosa Eats Her Way Around Shrewsbury!

It has been… far too long since I have got to write that. I have done food reviews in recent weeks but I have not actually talked about any of the food offerings in my adopted home for almost a month, and I have got a good one today.

On Tuesday, my partner & I went to the market to buy some supplies for upcoming dinners in the week… except that I went ahead to the cheese counter, while my partner’s eye was caught by a sandwich bar.

Upon returning to him, I fully understood why. They were offering “doorstop sandwiches” with any variety and amount of fillings you like for an extremely modest £5 – more expensive than what you get in terms of variety with a supermarket meal deal, but given the quality of the bread and the sheer amount of food, it definitely becomes worth it.

And I know that because I returned on Friday to Pete’s Sandwich Bar to get my own creation.

The above is their doorstop sandwich offering filled with chicken strips, coleslaw, pickled jalapenos, and sriracha mayo. The photo does not do the bread justice, this loaf was pillowy soft but still robust enough to hold up to all the moisture contained within my sandwich.

Speaking of moisture, this is exactly why I chose coleslaw as my main vegetable filling of choice, and gives me an opportunity to talk about my firm belief that coleslaw is the best accompaniment for any sandwich, wrap, or burger.

When it comes to adding moisture and crunch to any of the food items I listed, there is no better option than a beautiful coleslaw as it provides equal amounts of both, especially when the dressing is homemade and the person making it has the opportunity to add so many different ingredients such as English mustard, lemon juice, and grated garlic…

…yes this is just me talking about my own recipe for homemade coleslaw now, being able to consistently make good coleslaw has ruined supermarket offerings for me now it just does not hit the same without my additions.

Anyway, back on track. This was a fantastic sandwich, and getting to support a small, local business over a supermarket or a well-known sandwich chain that I have not actually eaten at for two years is well worth the extremely small premium I pay on top of a meal deal.

I will end off this food review though with a bit of introspection. I am extremely lucky to be in a position in my life currently where I am able to indulge in lunches that are made by small businesses, and to also be able to go out to cafes & restaurants as well.

I know this time may not last forever, especially with my current job uncertainty, but I at least want to take some time to acknowledge that I am lucky that I get to write about good food, even as part of my hobby.

That will cover everything for today, thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are I hope you are able to relax and take the weekend easy, I know what I will be doing: playing more Clair Obscur.

October 25, 2025
Redundancy Review: Day 134, “Self-Expression”

(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 impressionists and pointillists, welcome to Day 134 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

One of the first things to fall for me when I enter into a depressive spike is my outward self-expression. My appearance starts to falter as I neglect doing a proper hair wash and shave to use what little energy I have on not smelling like the dumpster I feel I am, and my choice of clothing goes from the goth-lite style I typically enjoy to simple hoodie and joggers.

It definitely helps me to cope with the depression, I do not need to put much mental effort into deciding what I want to wear and can instead direct that energy into making sure I can do what is absolutely essential for the day.

In a way though, it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. I find myself falling into a state of depression, which makes my self-expression slip, which worsens my depression because I struggle to feel like myself, which makes it harder to find the time to dress up all cute and fancy without it feeling like an obligation.

Writing definitely helps ease that feeling, or at the very least make me feel as if I am able to keep up with a form of self-expression, even if that mostly boils down to letting the words flow out of my head onto the page to make things more quiet up top – very much needed because of how noisy my brain feels right now.

On the plus side, I know my employment will at least last for the rest of the year, with some amount of uncertainty about what might come next depending on the work output of myself and the people I work with. It provides comfort and anxiety simultaneously, the former from the fact I know I can at least see out the rest of this year working towards a goal, and the latter from once more facing down the barrel of uncertainty in a highly competitive jobs market.

God this is turning into a proper ramble, I am struggling to keep my head focused on the task at hand and I keep veering off topic to talk about everything going on.

I think I am just going to do some affirmations before I head to the review segment, both for myself, and anyone reading who may need it.

It is tough to carry on right now, but I want to keep moving forward.

There is still so much room for me to grow, I can keep growing stronger.

My career has not peaked, I still have so much more to give to my field.

Everything I have been through has helped me become who I am today, I am the net result of every victory and every defeat.

Things feel overwhelming right now, but I will keep going.

There is still so much beauty in this world I am yet to bear witness to, and I want to be able to put my own stories into the world.

I teared up a little bit writing that all down if I am honest.

Anyway, time to go into the review segment for today, which… is less a review, and more just a discussion about my fursona.

Meet Rosa, the Arctic Fox & Phoenix hybrid. She is essentially my “truesona”, being a reflection of myself more than an actual character I would embody, down to her having similar proportions to what my actual body looks like IRL. This reference sheet was drawn by my friend Ely, who I think did a fantastic job with the entire thing.

So, why did I make the design choices that I did with her?

Part of it comes from my background in playing Monster Hunter. In both Rise and World I had armour & weapon setups that focused on the idea of fire (or blast, in this case) and ice, which slowly evolved into becoming my signature loadouts with me even developing lore based around the two Elder Dragons that the weapons were derived from.

This elemental aesthetic inspires not only the animal choices for the fursona itself, but for the colour detailing on her as well, with the orange & blue markings representing her two elemental affinities, the colours being matched in the eyes two.

Fun fact: I have given enough of my characters that are supposed to represent me heterochromia that I have had to write a note down that reminds me which eye is supposed be the chromatic one, as it is always a blue right eye with an unnatural colour for the right eye – orange for the fursona, and pink for any of my Monster Hunter characters.

But I want to dive deeper on why the phoenix was chosen as one half of this hybrid. The arctic fox part is easy enough to explain: it is a creature associated with cold environments and I absolutely love foxes.

The phoenix has a lot of personal connection to me though, and it started long before I became a furry.

Initially, my connection to the mythical creature came through my first D&D character, Marieya Ebontide, someone who I have written a lot of fiction about and still need to give her a proper ending. After coming up with a part of her backstory on the fly for a nothic to dig into, that small fact soon evolved into developing her as a sorcerer suppressing her powers, gifted to her by having the soul of a phoenix.

Over time, I found myself connecting with the concept of the phoenix more. I related it to my own challenges, how each time I got brought down to my lowest point I would always find a way to rekindle myself to come back stronger than I did before.

Fire dims, colour fades, and feathers shed – but nothing lasts forever, and whatever is bringing me down low fades, letting my flames reignite once more to let my true nature shine through.

I will finish up this review by going into the painful and excruciating details as to why my truesona has wings…

…wings are fucking awesome.

Simple as.

While they do a good job at helping hammer home the phoenix aspect of the character, they are mainly there for being damn awesome, even in the small amounts of lore I have written for her I specify that they are not flight-capable wings, primarily there to add lift to jumps or stabilise herself during acrobatic manoeuvres.

That pretty much covers it all for today, thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are I hope you have been able to get past the hump day feelings and are able to look forward to the weekend coming soon.

October 22, 2025
Redundancy Review: Day 126-128, “Even in the face of adversity”

(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 villains and adversaries, welcome to Day 126 to 128 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

The core of the Redundancy Review has been vulnerability, about showing the core of myself to the world, to talking about things that worry me and making a written record of my feelings.

With how deep my recent depression has been, and continues to be, I think it is the right time for me to vomit words onto a page in the hopes of unfucking my brain just a little bit.

So here goes nothing…

At my core, I am a deeply insecure person. I am plagued by impostor syndrome on the daily, which infects my work, my hobbies, and my general being. There is a constant nagging voice in the back of my mind telling me that I am not good enough for my current field, hence my desire to switch out of the tech sector into something else.

Like with a good deal of people in the modern age, I worry about what AI means for my job, about whether or not the field I have worked in for the last half a decade is about to be automated away entirely, even as discussions of the issues of the sustainability of the technology rage on. I know AI can be a helpful tool for doing away with menial and repetitive tasks that reduce friction, especially in creative ventures, but right now I feel the technology is being abused too much for the optimistic view to take hold.

Most of all, I feel worried that I am going to lose what I currently have: my partner, my friends, the lifestyle I lead. Even when presented with evidence to the contrary, I find myself losing to the throes of a panic attack as I scream and cry for the pain overtaking my body to stop.

I hold an immense amount of pride for the point I have managed to get my life to. I moved out shortly after turning 24, moving into my remarkably successful tech industry job around the same time… which did end in the redundancy that started this series but let us ignore that bit right now. Mixed in with all those big changes was me starting hormone replacement therapy as part of my transition into being the person I wanted to be, a decision I have never regretted or feel I ever will regret.

For someone who had to rebuild the core of their life post-university due to having grown disdainful of the subject of their degree, I have done extremely well for myself. Ironically I have found myself reapplying some of my degree knowledge as part of my current contracting role, specifically in the usage of the Unity engine – some habits die hard I guess.

But now I find myself almost at a crossroads, unsure of which path I want to walk down. Do I fully commit to the quality assurance route, upskilling myself in automation testing and utilising the fact that I do still have a programmer’s brain for good by hardening my skillset to find even better roles?

Or do I walk away from the path I have travelled so far down to see where the road might fork, seeing where I could put my skills to the test in new sectors, such as charity or civil service?

At the same time I need to ask myself the question of what this all means for my writing. I still want to tell my stories, even when I find myself with limited time on my hands due to the stresses of this world along with my own mind fighting against me, meaning I wish to pursue the mythical “work-life balance” that so many in the tech industry want to talk down on.

All of those questions need answers, but they are most certainly not simple answers. So what do I do in the meantime?

Same thing as I did when I started working in the games industry, not knowing where I could end up.

Same thing as I did when I transitioned over to the technology industry, and was unsure of my place in such a competitive industry.

Same thing as when the news of my redundancy hit, and I did not know where my next paycheck would be coming from.

I keep going.

Even in the face of adversity.

Even when my own insecurities are eating me alive.

Even when I do not know what path the future will hold.

I try my best to keep walking, with all the depression, uncertainty, and pain that comes along with navigating the current state of the world.

And in honour of that, I think I want to talk about one of my favourite pieces of music as a review topic.

For those unaware, I was just ever so slightly an emo kid growing up… yeah, I know, shocking, a trans girl grew up listening to emo music, in other news a fork was found in a kitchen today.

But I was definitely someone who, in addition to a healthy diet of Dragonforce and video game OSTs, enjoyed the music of My Chemical Romance, Linkin Park (RIP Chester Bennington), and the subject of today’s review: Three Days Grace.

What started my interest in the band was, of course, the absolute edgy banger of Animal I Have Become, the background track to everyone’s favourite AMV back in the day. But much like my love of Dragonforce, I went beyond the songs that everyone on the internet knew and looked further into their discography, leading me to discover Life Starts Now.

It… is actually hard for me to do an in-depth lyrical analysis on this, because I think the entire song is a beautiful tale about never giving up and carrying on even when everything is against you, that it is never too late to change the way you have been living to make a new start.

I always like to look at the framing of the song being a conversation between two long-time friends, where one has gone through so much and is desperately tired, whereas the singer is trying to convince them that they have already been through so much that they survived through, that making another fresh start is not exactly going to hurt, and whatever comes next they will likely survive too.

However, I do want to highlight the bridge, and do a little bit of my own analysis from my viewpoint on it:

“All this pain

Take this life and make it yours

All this hate

Take your heart and let it love again

You will survive this somehow”

There are so many ways I like to interpret this. The fantasy nerd in me loves to see this from the perspective of a warrior sacrificing themselves for their companion, giving them another chance at life while also telling them to not let hate consume them, to choose love instead to overcome the grief.

But the more reasonable interpretation is the singer telling their friend that for all the pain they feel, for all the hatred they might feel at the world, and for any hatred they may feel at themselves, none of it is worth holding on to. As someone who has had to overcome many traumas in the course of their life, I know that holding on to pain and anger can very often be a choice, at least in my situation.

Life got a lot better for me once I stopped being angry at the things that were tying me to the past, though this is not to say the emotions are not there within me – they most definitely still are. It is just that I try to live my day-to-day life without holding onto them, and in a way, I have to try apply that same logic to the feelings that the redundancy gave to me.

It will take time, but I will survive this somehow, because through each moment of pain & heartbreak, there is a chance for life to start anew. I just need to be ready to meet that chance.

Took a few days off work and off writing, and I feel I have come back still as strong as ever. Though I need a thumbnail picture…

…yeah, that will do. Friend of mine sent me this image earlier in the week to remind me that I am still able to be successful, even if I do end up changing tracks.

Thank you for reading the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope you are able to feel relaxed. If you are fighting your own battles, please know you are not alone in any of them. Help is out there if you need it, and the world is brighter for you being in it.

October 16, 2025
Redundancy Review: Day 120, “Four Month Reflection”

(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 clerics and healers, welcome to Day 120 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

120 days since I was first made redundant. Four months worth of thinking, reflection, and trying to figure out where to do next. In terms of actual posts, this is the 92nd Redundancy Review since this all kicked off, so only off by a factor of about thirty days due to holidays, breaks, or just not feeling the flow.

In those four months I have fought the government for what is rightfully mine, waded through job boards in the hope of finding something new, expanded my horizons beyond QA to see what I might be good at, and have now found myself back in the life of a SaaS QA tester within the greater technology industry… for better or worse.

Part of what drove me to start writing a career retrospective at the start of this week is the fact I am growing incredibly weary with the tech industry as a whole. The start up culture, the grindset mindset, the need to build & scale fast with less… all of it has started to wear me down.

If we include my time at Codemasters, I am coming up on having worked for half a decade in the technology industry as a QA, with some production on the side. This comes back to something I said I need to keep in mind off the back of my redundancy, that it was a traumatic event, and it is okay to let it change me.

And one of those things that might need to change is my career as a whole.

I have already started to explore other options in addition to balancing my contract work… on top of balancing maintaining a good posting schedule… on top of trying to maintain an amount of social life and relaxation time…

Being real, things feel hard for me right now. Over the last couple of days I have found myself crying at my desk more often, with even the most routine of work tasks overwhelming me. In between uploads, downloads, or waiting for processes to finish, I take moments to let out little sobs, which shows to me that it is not the challenges of the work getting to me, it is just the nature of the work itself.

And the mental separation I try to impose on myself that this is a holdover contract role, that it will not be forever is slowly starting to break down as I realise I have fallen out of love with the greater industry as a whole, and to ensure longevity in my future; I need to make a change to one of the biggest parts of my life.

Saying goodbye to an industry that has honed me, hardened me, and shaped me into the person I am today.

This is not to say I am going to move away from technology as a whole, because I am perfectly willing to do a job that mostly revolves around a computer, and there is no denying I have made a good career in QA with how long I have survived in such a competitive industry, especially in the recent years of a turbulent job market.

It is just a matter of deciding where to go, with my current avenues for exploration being in insurance, civil service, and I have also signed up for a charity jobs board – both for QA and writing roles.

There is a part of me that thinks I am “limiting my potential” by choosing to walk away from tech, that if I committed the energy I am using to look elsewhere to doubling my effort into the tech industry, I could stand to make a lot of money by pursuing even more elite roles within the startup space.

But the redundancy has changed me. I am distrustful of investor groups, the primary way such companies would be funded. The need to keep scaling up and making things even bigger rather than focusing on steady outcomes is incompatible with my current life philosophy.

I need to move away from what has been a significant part of my life and enabled my growth into who I am today, to heal from the pain that growth has been accompanied by, and start a new chapter of my life.

Ultimately, I am still quite young, having not even hit my thirties yet. In a way my professional life has only just begun, with the role I was made redundant from being only my second job ever.

There is so much I can do, I just need to find myself to find out what I want to do.

In the meantime, my contract can hold me over, and whilst I do not want to maintain the grindset mindset, I am also not someone who can half-arse a job. My safety net is actually stronger than it was before my redundancy too, so I am in an extremely lucky position to not be pressed against the wall.

Ideally I do not want to eat into the safety net and I can transition from my contract into a new role, but I am prepared for any eventuality.

No matter what, I will continue to write. This story still has several chapters to write, and the stories inside my head still need to be told.

Time to get into the review, and I think it is time to introduce a somewhat new topic to the Redundancy Review: hot sauce.

For those who have been around for the somewhat regular food reviews, you will know I am a little bit of a spicehead, and this definitely extends into my home life as I have a very decent collection of hot sauces within my fridge. Today’s hot sauce is made from one of the spiciest peppers in the world: Bhut Jolokia, more commonly known as the Ghost Pepper.

This specific sauce is from a small UK brand called Mahi, and this was one of the three hot sauces in their “Discovery Pack”, a bundle offer for those wanting to explore more options in hot sauce outside of the main brands in the UK.

With it being such a spice forward sauce, there is actually a pleasing acidic bite that announces itself first before the heat ramps up, though it is actually variable how much heat will be delivered with each taste.

Sometimes it will be a pleasant warmth that accompanies the acidity.

And sometimes it will be a deliverance of heat worthy of the nickname my partner gave to this sauce after one accidentally trying it: “Death Sauce”.

£7.50 plus shipping was the price for the pack of three sauces, and it came in a very attractive box which included a catalogue of Mahi’s other products, most of which I will definitely want to try in future because of how nice everything included in the box was.

This does however include a Trinidad Scorpion sauce, which is supposedly even hotter than the Ghost Pepper…

…oh well, as I often yell before doing anything stupid, DEATH OR GLORY!

That should do it for today. Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are I hope you are able to relax and that your path ahead in life is clear, if not, then there is nothing to fear. You are in good company with that, and as we all know, not all who wander are lost.

For more information on Mahi’s products, visit their website here: https://saucymahi.co/

October 8, 2025
Redundancy Review: Day 118, “Career Uncertainty, Part 1”

(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 diviners and cartographers, welcome to Day 118 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

Things seem to be returning to normal for me now, I still live the busy life of a SaaS QA professional, but I do not feel the same amount of pressure as I was experiencing last week.

It is in this moment though, over four months gone since my initial redundancy and as the five-year milestone of my quality assurance career comes ever closer, that I find myself reflecting on where I am along with where I might want to go.

I have been trying to write a “living CV” page on this website, though I keep putting it off in favour of other things, so now I feel it is a good time to start off writing a career retrospective along with talking about the moments of uncertainty that have come along the way.

My career as a Quality Assurance professional started in March 2021, where I joined Codemasters Software Company as a QA Technician. I joined in the Xbox Functional QA team for F1 2021.

Look, there I am in the credits!

Honestly, even though it is over four years gone now, and the game is not even available to purchase on Steam anymore which really sucks cause I would love to revisit it for a review, I still hold an immense amount of pride for my first credited video game release – especially when I consider the amount of effort I put into that release.

Codemasters was my first job ever, so I tried to push myself above and beyond to show what I was capable of. This inevitably led to me getting noticed by the higher ups, not only for my sheer amount of bugs being logged, but for the sheer tenacity I had when it came to throwing myself into test sheets.

This led to me getting the opportunity to go into the Southam office for a week to try my hand at some audio testing in the, quite frankly beautiful, surround sound room at the recently refurbished QA building. Getting hands on with more specialised testing really left a lasting impact on me, especially as I got the chance to do this only one month into my job.

Fun fact: this is actually the only time I have worked in an office/in-person setting, the rest of my career has been entirely remote, as I changed roles right as offices were beginning to open up again.

After that, I continued grinding on. Helping out where needed with requests from my lovely & sweary platform lead (I call him that affectionately, we bonded over colourful language from time to time), continuing to plug away at my test sheets, and maintained the push towards the ever-approaching release date.

As that time came closer, overtime became available to help push things over the line. Unlike other game development companies which might make crunch time mandatory; Codemasters was on an entirely voluntary basis, with you nominating yourself for certain days to work and it being up to the lead QA’s discretion on who would make it in.

Now, as I have mentioned I was eager to prove myself and get stuck in.

Perhaps too eager.

So I put my name down for every available overtime day between the start of the final push all the way up to the day of the final Build Verification Test (BVT) being sent off to Xbox in order to get the discs manufactured.

Nineteen days.

Nineteen days in a row.

Admittedly, the pay was good. We got time-and-a-half for any Saturday or Sunday work, and considering late May bank holiday fell during this time too that paid double-time – this led to me having enough to buy myself a proper gaming PC once the stressful period was over.

That said… never again. Never again do I want to work to that same degree because I was thoroughly destroyed by the end of it all.

When the eighteenth day came around I vividly remember barely being lucid at my desk. I remember going into work, sitting at my desk, and around eight hours later I logged off before heading straight into bed before day nineteen started with a final rush to do a BVT.

It was a hard push, and it definitely taught me one of my many lessons about listening to my body.

Release came and went, but even as the needs of the team shifted with post-launch content on the horizon along with people being migrated across to other projects, my role mostly stayed the same, plugging away happily at my tasks.

During this time period, a Senior QA Technician role came up within the company, and despite being relatively green I was encouraged to apply by the QA lead and my platform lead. I did land an interview as well where I was complimented for how I handled myself, but ultimately they wanted someone with more experience who could more reasonably step into a platform lead kind of role.

However, once again, my tenacity and drive did not go unnoticed. Soon after this I was brought into a call with two other stellar QAs from the Playstation and PC team to be told we were going to be made “second-in-commands” for our respective teams, essentially being groomed for management type roles in the near future.

This meant I was taking on more responsibility, though, given the fact our team sizes had shrunk massively due to projects elsewhere in the company, the team I managed to start off with was ultimately very small. Nevertheless, I was given my first exposure to what it took to organise a QA effort within a large-scale project.

Though, it was not long though until new hires started rolling in to begin work on F1 22 (EA had decided to drop the “20” part of the name to bring it in line with their other sports franchises) that I got a chance to start guiding and mentoring fresh QAs… which did lead to a funny story.

It was the week before the Christmas shutdown started, both the QA lead and my platform lead had used some annual leave to add some extra time to a well-deserved break – this left me the de facto “leader” of the Xbox team in their absence.

One day, one of the newer QAs came to me with a question relating to specific Xbox console guidelines. I was unsure of what he was asking, so I said to give me a minute whilst I went to my platform lead…

…oh wait, platform lead is not in. That is fine I will just go to the QA lead…

…no he is not in either…

…shit…

…I am the one in charge, I need to get him an answer.

I hastily searched through the very helpful glossary of Xbox terminology I had been provided at the start of my job to get him an answer, letting them log the bug report correctly and carry on with their day unimpeded.

F1 22 started on schedule, and whilst I was still required to get F1 2021 over the line in terms of the final bits of post-release content – primarily battle pass stuff – I was still hard at work making my mark on the new project too, hoping to maintain my crown as Rosalia, Queen of the Bug Leaderboard.

But… I was also wanting for more. First of all I wanted more money, as for all the above and beyond what I was doing it was still minimum wage for the time, but also I wanted a new challenge. Initially I did try branching out into writing roles once more but also kept applying to QA roles as well.

I interviewed for Immerse, and shortly after I moved into my new flat early in 2022, I got the job offer from them which started my now nearly four year long stint in the SaaS XR industry.

Although, I needed to tell the people at Codemasters that I would not be continuing my employment with them. Due to the nature of my role, a full-time contract which was periodically renewed, all I really needed to do was give notice that I did not intend to pursue a renewed contract with the company.

What I did do though was call both the QA lead (who was my manager) and my platform lead. During the call with the former he knew it was coming due to being put down as a reference for one of my applications, but he understood that someone of my skills wanted to try out different environments.

My platform lead had a very different initial reaction:

“Who’s upset you? Tell me and I’ll thump them for you!”

He was a very bombastic character, and even through those jokey moments he understood why I was leaving, wishing me the best.

I left Codemasters end of March 2022, a week later I would start working at Immerse which began a chapter that has defined, and continues to define, my current adult life. But that story is for another time.

Still got my name in the credits for F1 22 though.

So, what does this all have to do with uncertainty?

Because at every key story moment, from starting out to overtime, the senior QA interview to being the second-in-command, to even deciding to take the plunge to leave: I was uncertain.

The title is a dual-meaning. I currently experience uncertainty about where I want my career to go in the wake of drastic changes within the last four months, but simultaneously, I have made my career in spite of uncertainty.

Even when presented with opportunities where I was never fully sure how they would go, I always said yes.

When I was unsure on what I should be doing, my head was still down and I still moved forward.

I am a career uncertain, and whilst I do not know what direction I may take next, I do know that my tenacious & enthusiastic spirit will come along with it.

Maybe next time I will tell the story about how that spirit persists even when the flesh is spongy, bruised, and extremely tired.

So many stories to tell, guess that is as good a reason as any to keep writing them down. To be honest the above does not even begin to cover everything I experienced at Codemasters that stuck with me, so even more reason to keep writing.

But even though I have written damn near 1800 words, I still think I should get a review subject in here somehow.

Yeah, let us go for the random object I had to hand – not like it is an uncommon theme on the Redundancy Review.

Well, not entirely random, as when it comes to buying drinks there is one specific reason that comes to my mind whenever I need to buy apple juice.

Last week was extremely stressful for me, balancing work, periods, and trying to stay generally healthy. Unfortunately for me, one thing always happens when I am placed under large amounts of stress: my stomach starts getting fucked up.

One thing I have always found helpful in mitigating that is apple juice, especially a more “wholesome” brand like this Cawston Press carton where it is more likely to pure juice rather than from concentrate, it helps put my stomach at rest in a way that ginger or turmeric based products often struggle to.

This carton specifically cost me £3.95 from a local and small greengrocer that I love going to for its wide variety of more off-brand products than you would find in a supermarket, plus shopping local is always the best route to take where possible. Admittedly it is definitely a steeper price that what you would pay elsewhere, but supporting local can be like that sometimes.

Anyway, that will do it for today, it has still been surprisingly stressful even though I have managed to find the time to write today. Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review, wherever you are I hope the Monday blues are not hitting you too hard, and that the week ahead looks clear for you.

October 6, 2025
Redundancy Review: Day 83, “Bitterness, Honesty, & Ambition”
(for context on what this series is, please see my Day 1 post here: Redundancy Review: Day 1, “A New Beginning” – Rosalia’s Rambles)

Good morning seamstresses and crafters, welcome to Day 83 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

It is now six days before my convention and I am most definitely starting to panic and feel the stress holy shit. Was doing some try-ons of the improvised cosplay I am intending to wear and there is definitely still some stuff needing to be adjusted/ironed out for it to be worthwhile, and this is not including all of the other logistical details also needing to be sorted out before we leave on Thursday afternoon.

Of course all this stress would be moderately reduced if my actual costume plans had come together… and of course I would also be less stressed if I had not had to spend a lot of my time fighting government agencies for money in the wake of my redundancy instead of costume planning but life goes on.

All of this comes with the thoughts of what it might be like next year to try do this same convention again, and try to reattempt what was meant to happen this year, which leads on to the thought: where the hell am I going to be this time next year?

My partner and I were talking about how the improvised plan is still not going to be perfect, with him specifically worrying about “it not going right”, to which my very blunt response was:

“A lot of things have not gone right this year.”

If you asked the Rosa of March this year about how she felt her year was going to go, she would respond with cautious optimism. She would recognise that the company she worked at was going through some hard times but she had faith in upper management of navigating these issues, and that whilst things might seem hairy, she at least had job security for the remainder of the year.

And now?

Well, I am certainly a different person, although I find the words to describe who I am now oddly difficult.

Part of me wants to call myself a more “bitter” person now, that my redundancy hardened my heart and fully disillusioned me from any corporate structure giving me true fulfillment, even if holding that belief was a fool’s errand to begin with.

Another part wants to call myself a more “honest” person, that I have a better read of situations within the industry I exist in and I, however begrudgingly it may be, understand that my position within this industry has now changed, demanding that my approach change with it.

There could also be an argument made for a part of myself that considers myself a more “ambitious” person now. Before my redundancy was made official I had struggled to write consistently for over a year, instead choosing to push one of my purest passions to the side in favour of navigating through my new life circumstances – something I do not feel I can be faulted for.

But now I find myself trying to write every day, with a varied success rate, and exploring new ideas for making my way in this world, desiring to learn something new every day or trying new things and attempting to persevere through my mind telling me I am not good enough.

Even if my creative ventures continue to be nothing more than thoughts inside my head, I want to be proud of the fact I have committed to practicing writing every day in one form or another. The Redundancy Review is my living journal through which I build my skills up every day, no matter the weird topics I tackle or the intense emotions I put on show for all to see.

If anything I write appeals to you, please get in touch. I continue to be available for freelance writing work on top of freelance QA work and I would love to learn more while making your project the best it can be.

In the meantime though, I need to review something, otherwise the title suddenly makes very little sense, and I think it is time that a little bit of my tech industry background starts to show itself.

So, am I talking about a piece of work software? Perhaps talking about one of the virtual reality headsets I use on a daily basis? Maybe it is even my work peripherals I want to talk about?

Surprise!

It is none of them.

Instead, we are talking about the all-in-one meal replacement in a bottle: Huel.

Huel, a portmanteau of the words “human” and “fuel” which shows how techbro this stuff really is, is a brand of meal replacement powders, dehydrated meals, and the subject of today’s review, the ready-to-drink meal. Specifically the Black Edition because that is the one my local Tesco had in stock.

Initially, I tried Huel on a whim near the start of March having found it next to the milk in my local Tesco. I had some familiarity of what it was but had never considered trying it before that point.

It is… weird to describe. Due to the fact Huel is entirely plant based with the Black Edition specifically having a base of water and coconut milk powder, it has the consistency of very thin porridge but with a chocolate flavour. Thankfully the coconut flavour is not all that pronounced which is good because I cannot stand the taste of coconut.

On the surface, Huel is described as “nutritionally complete food”, with the headlines on the bottle reading:
- 35g protein
- 26 essential vitamins & minerals
- 7g dietary fibre
- Slow-release carbs
- And Omega-3 and Omega-6
Back in April I actually pursued using Huel as a weight loss aid, replacing my lunch with it specifically. The logic behind this was trying to make my calorie intake over lunch more consistent as I frequently had indulgent lunches that would hit between 800-1000 calories, this is not to mention that a single bottle of Huel (on average) still has less calories than a supermarket meal deal sandwich.

It was a tough time, especially as my body had to grow used to so few calories before dinner, but for a time I did feel healthier… until the redundancy hit and I stopped as a cost saving measure.

Now I view Huel as mainly an emergency/convenience item more than anything else. The two bottles I have pictured are coming with me to my convention as having something to carry around in the back to have as a “meal” if the schedule is as busy as I anticipate it being, leaving me little time to actually sit down and eat.

In terms of convenience though, Huel is a great option for the days when my brain is just too overwhelmed to make decisions, which is what I see as the best personal excuse to do a meal replacement drink. Some days I am worrying too much about work, personal stress, or otherwise to even want to process picking something out for lunch, so downing a drink that gives me enough nutrition to keep going whilst I let my brain slow down is the perfect option.

Plus, with the fact these Huel Black Editions were on Clubcard Price for £3.20 each combined with the recent increase in Tesco Meal Deal pricing, this works out as both less calories and cheaper overall, which I think is pretty good.

But that does it all for today, I am going to head back now to do my actual current job. Thank you for reading this edition of the Redundancy Review, I hope the Monday blues are not dragging you down too much and the rest of your week looks clear.

For more information on Huel, visit their website here: Huel UK
September 1, 2025