Rosalia Rambles

Tag: Fiction

  • Redundancy Review: Day 209, “Flipping Freezing”

    Redundancy Review: Day 209, “Flipping Freezing”

    (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 hyperboreans and cryomancers, welcome to Day 209 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    As per the title, it is flipping freezing, one might even say fucking freezing… one is me, I think it is fucking freezing, I just do not like to put swears directly in the titles of articles.

    Swearing within the body? Will do so to my heart’s content, but profane titles are off limits.

    I guess I can use today to talk about my relationship with swearing. If you read enough Redundancy Reviews or know me in-person you know I am no stranger to flowery language, dropping “fuck” in every second sentence and having a love of a good “shit”, but where did my sailor mouth come from?

    In a few short points:

    • Family
    • Work
    • ADHD

    The first one is pretty obvious, whilst they started off pretty well with not swearing in front of myself or my brother, things eventually turned to infrequent swearing in front of us yet at the same time not wanting us to swear, before all pretense was dropped and swearing once more became a common feature in our household. 

    This alone was not enough though to get me to the level of swearing I am today, which is where work comes in, specifically, my old platform lead when I worked at Codemasters who went by the name of “Rye”. Was a lovely guy, really helped me out in the early days of me working there and was generally understanding when I messed things up or needed additional guidance.

    Being from Coventry however, he was someone who dropped swears like they were treat-size chocolate bars on Halloween, and considering after a period of time I was working with him quite closely due to the Live Ops team being a smaller group, it was only a matter of time until I picked up his habit of profane language.

    That said, he was not entirely responsible for me picking up that habit, and if anything, the line of work we both found ourselves in almost necessitated swearing as a coping mechanism for dealing with the deluge of shit we encountered on a near-daily basis. It was a running joke in our Teams chat that if it were not for the security locks holding our devkit consoles to our desks, they would have been thrown out the window long ago.

    Quality Assurance is a field of expertise that requires a steady mind to stay focused on getting a bug replicated or an issue to occur on a long playthrough – cussing out whatever you are testing is a good way of stopping your brain from shutting off during the necessary repetition that this brings, which is where the final point of ADHD comes in.

    It might seem confusing for me to correlate neurodivergence with swearing, but bear with me for a bit. My area of specialisation is within the Extended Reality (XR) industry as a QA tester, this often means I have a moderately heavy lump of circuitry and screens strapped to me head with a non-breathable cushion of foam pressed right against my face, leaving only a small gap where my nose is for moist air to escape.

    Given that sometimes the experiences I am required to test will last me up to forty minutes at a time with very repetitive tasks or a large number of tasks, the only thing that can keep my focus is muttering swears under my breath or, as is often the case, venting my frustrations at the virtual avatars around me to once more stop my brain from turning off.

    These mid-test vents eventually became a source of comedy when it came to watching back my test footage, as my creative application of language would often get caught by the Slack auto-transcriber, leading to questions about the suitability of the content if it featured such harsh language… before they realise that, no, the experience itself did not have swearing, the idiot behind the headset was the source of all that.

    A lot of people consider swearing a dirty habit to have, especially in a professional context, but to me swearing comes part and parcel with the stresses that any job can bring, be it retail or corporate. The important distinction is knowing when it is the appropriate time to use curse words and when they should not be said under any circumstance. To reiterate a piece of advice I was once given and have brought up in a previous review:

    “Professionalism is delivering your points clearly and not saying fuck.”

    The line has often blurred for me given the fact I have been working remotely for so long, which I do worry has negatively impacted my socialisation skills for the day I might have to return to being in an office full time, but for now I enjoy the benefits of being a remote worker whose line of work allows her to curse to her heart’s content – which is a lot.

    I did not plan at all to launch into an unscripted diatribe about the origins of my swearing habit along with defending the character of those who do swear in professional scenarios, but that is the beauty of the Redundancy Review. We have random topics at all times and sometimes they take on a life of their own.

    It probably does not help my current situation that I am quite attentively playing through Nier Replicant “Ver 1.22474487139…”, speech marks added so as not to confuse the ellipsis that is actually part of the title with my habit of adding ellipses when a thought needs dramatic impact.

    Through playing Replicant, I have once more come face to face with one of my favourite characters in gaming, a lovely, wholesome individual that goes by the name of Kainé…

    …who has some of my favourite profane dialogue in all of gaming.

    She is a character you encounter fairly early on in the course of the story, who eventually joins with your party after defeating a boss she wanted revenge on. Her NPC AI matches similar to what the player character is intended to be, a spellsword brawler who can dish out a good amount of physical damage whilst also using magic spells to support longer combos or enable quick executions.

    True to form with any Yoko Taro game though, she has hidden depths that come to light as part of the multiple playthroughs required to fully understand the story, with her even getting an extended story in “Ver 1.22…” after completing the entirety of the original game. 

    Fun fact, this game is the sole reason that “hussy” features so prominently in my lexicon, due to the acidic banter that exists between Kainé and Grimoire Weiss, your floating magical book that is the source of all your spells.

    This does remind me I should take more screenshots of the game after I make it through my first playthrough so I can have some material ready to use when I eventually want to talk about this game after 100%ing it, but at least I can use this review to post another one of my favourite lines from Kainé.

    There is one more line that I consider my absolute favourite, but I will wait until the proper review to share that one.

    I think that covers it for today, thank you for reading this surprise discussion of swearing in real life and swearing in video games style Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope the Monday blues of the first working day back of the year have not brought you down too much, and if they have, try turning the air blue with a bunch of swearing, that always makes me feel better.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 175, “Multiples of Seven”

    (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 squares and factorials, welcome to Day 175 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    Tuesday is an important milestone day when it comes to writing these pieces, which makes it a shame that I have missed so many recently as part of my schedule slippage. We have the tradition of me making every Tuesday topic talking about something in the VTuber space, but the day also helps me keep track of how many weeks I have been doing the Redundancy Review, and by extension, making sure my day counter stays consistent.

    When it comes to writing a Tuesday piece, I will take the day and divide it by seven. Getting a whole number back means I am still consistent in my day tracking, and lets me know what week I am on.

    It is week twenty-five, if you are curious. Twenty-five weeks since I first got made redundant, with so much learnt about myself along the way, and yet… I still feel immature within the world as a whole.

    My birthday is coming up next week, and I will be twenty-eight years old, which coincidentally is also a multiple of seven, and my birthday is on Tuesday, which means it will be on a multiple of seven day for the review… okay I am getting tangential here, need to get back on track.

    Twenty-eight is a young age, all things considered, but I feel an immense amount of pressure from within my own mind to be beyond my own capabilities. For all intents and purposes, I have made an extraordinarily successful life for myself and my partner for people within our Gen Z age group, even through all the uncertainty and instability that my redundancy brought, we still had a very good lifestyle.

    I anticipate needing to do some amount of lifestyle trimming depending on the outcome of this contract and how easily I can come into new work after the contract ends. It will take a while for me to reach a point where I feel “stable” in terms of work again, and there is a real possibility that I will be in what I consider to be “unstable” work for a while yet.

    In the meantime though, I shall keep carrying on as I do, rambling about the nature of life as I see it and, when I actually make a post on a Tuesday, VTubers.

    Given the news this morning though, I feel I have to try highlight the work and career of Amane Kanata, a talent from Hololive Japan Fourth Generation who today announced they would be graduating at the end of December.

    This might be a little difficult, because I admittedly am not massively in tune to what work they have done outside of the few appearances I know off the top of my head, but I will sure try.

    First off, six years. Six years spent as a Hololive idol, working on streaming, original albums, and solo concerts. That is an impressive amount of time to spend in any career, let alone one that puts so much pressure on the talent to perform on a regular basis, so that level of dedication has to be respected.

    She listed her reasons for graduation in a document, the translated version of which I will link here (Twitter link) for full context, but it seems like she was taking on too many responsibilities above her position which led to her falling behind on her actual streamer activities, all of which took a toll on her health – all the more worrying considering she suffers from Meniere’s Disease, a very debilitating condition that causes vertigo, tinnitus, and fluctuating hearing loss.

    From the small bits I have seen of Kanata, she is an incredibly talented singer, being able to hold notes for extreme amounts of time whilst having complete control over her voice. Additionally, there was an absolutely massive outpouring of love on Twitter from other Holomems, finding out about her decision to graduate at the same time as the greater fanbase.

    People sharing good memories, saying how supportive she was of their activities, and saying that when things calm down, they should share good food together. It is the mark of a good colleague that everyone feels rough when you announce your departure.

    Though, it definitely highlights the rough nature of corporate VTubing in a way. Kanata taking on way more responsibility than her position dictated should not have happened, and suggests a lot of potential management issues behind the scenes that we as fans do not know about – something that has been speculated for a long time considering how often “disagreements with management” were cited as reasons for graduation.

    Any corporate entity is likely to have issues with management, but when the brand is built on the personas of these idols, taking time away from them which could be spent on brand building activities to instead fix problems above their station does not bode well, so hopefully after a rough year of multiple graduations for Hololive, the corporate structure going forward favours talents more and enables them to perform at their best without bureaucracy holding them back.

    For now, I wish Amane Kanata the best in whatever she does next. She explicitly stated she does not intend to reincarnate or return as a VTuber, preferring instead to be a private individual once more – which I can relate to.

    That covers everything for today, thank you for reading this edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope your week is going well, and that you have positive things on the horizon.

  • Commission: McGala-gear in MIG money marlarky!

    Another member of “The Seven” has found themselves in hot water after the trial of Cleatus McGala-gear concluded today, resulting in a settlement for the Elven Empire. Hoping to branch out into new ventures after the conclusion of the war he had secured planning permission to build a casino in orbit around Paradise One – difficulty was encountered from day one due to fierce yet warranted resistance from individuals within the Elven Empire.

    Trust was given despite tenuous tension from detractors, including organised protests from veterans of the war who decried the inflated egos of The Seven feeling they ignore the amount of Elven blood that was spilled in order to repel the Wrothians. Work continued up until the inciting incident that indicted the iconic individual.

    Witnesses describe a scene in which McGala-gear, in full view of onlookers, used a charm spell on an Elven surveyor hoping to distract from the disastrous deeds going on behind the scenes. The horror, dear reader, of not only trying to cover up one’s misdeeds but resorting to the mental assault of a proud, diligent, and loyal Elven official.

    Questions arose instantly. If a so-called “hero” was willing to stoop this low against trusted civil servants, what else has gone on behind closed doors? What horrors has this charlatan Cleatus inflicted upon the perfected beauty of Paradise One? Readers of a squeamish nature are advised to avert their eyes to what comes next.

    The sculpted terrain? Destroyed. The beautiful vistas? Tarnished. The health & safety code? Violated.

    Major Image Generators were discovered at the scene of this heinous crime, along with manipulative misdirection aimed at making monkeys out of our brave investigators. The former hid the crimes against nature, and the latter was a failed folly to lead legal efforts astray. Only the most luxury of dwellings were even remotely presentable, hoping to secure further investment for a stalling project.

    Thankfully, our supreme system of Elven justice has made right the extensive list of charges: embezzlement, bribery, the violation of a citizen’s right to peace. The casino project is now back in the rightful reach of the Elven Empire, and our noble leaders have publicly started to distance themselves from The Seven, finally reflecting popular sentiment in sensible policy.

    Cleatus McGala-gear read out a prepared statement after the verdict was handed down, through the gaps of his obnoxiously outdated shutter shades our photographer could see his shot & strained eyes as his voice trembled:

    “To the citizens of the Elven Empire, I beg you for forgiveness. I wish to not let this simple mistake of mine overshadow the good work myself and my compatriots have done for this galaxy. I wished to see this project succeed, and the stress of having to step in as a site manager was the reason behind my actions. I know this does not excuse what I have done, and I ask for privacy, respect, and patience, during this trying time for me and my family.”

    Inspiration

    So… this is my first bit of creative writing being published in… one heck of a long time, and it is also my first commission in a while.

    A friend of mine needed newspaper articles for his space-themed D&D campaign to show the impact of the party’s actions on the world and decided to hire me for them. This is the first of two articles with the second one to come sometime soon once the notes to write it from.

    This first one is based around the trial of one of the legendary heroes within his story who went on trial for making a botched casino project within the confines of the Elven Empire, specifically on one of their fabricated luxury worlds.

    Initially it was quite difficult to consider the tone I wanted to go for. I had all the events laid out for me, I just needed to put them together in a believable way for it to come across as an article that would be in Elven newspapers.

    And then a brainwave hit me.

    Elves in most fantasy worlds tend to be foppish creatures, vain & prideful to their cores, and when it comes to how they would be communicating a victory for their own justice system, it would read almost like propaganda in a way.

    Thankfully, I have played a massive amount of Helldivers 2 over the last couple of months, so writing over-the-top propaganda came surprisingly natural to me – now that I have pointed this out, you might be able to pick up on the influences within some of my sentence structure.

    And of course, writing a newspaper article means having an actually valid reason to use my favourite literary device: alliteration. If it is not already painfully obvious, given the website name and the name of my headline series, I am a slut for alliteration, there is something incredibly pleasing in being able to string sentences seamlessly with varied vocabulary, see?

    When one of my friends in this game gave me feedback as well, it gave me an interesting writing prompt based on these newspaper articles, so watch this space to see what comes of that soon.

    Commission information

    This was a commission, and I would like to take this moment to advertise my commission rates for fiction. For a 500-word news article like this, I charged £40. If what I have written interests you in getting something similar or you want my writing style for your project, consider hiring me! 

    I am also perfectly happy to be contacted with whatever your idea and budget is – I am fully willing to work with you to reach a solution that makes both of us happy.