Rosalia Rambles

Tag: Games Workshop

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

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

    (for context on what this series is, please see my Day 1 post here: Redundancy Review: Day 1, “A New Beginning” – Rosalia Rambles)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    A taste of power perhaps?

    Or succumbing to the dark side entirely?

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

    But why the Farsight Enclaves specifically?

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

    “Through fire, revelation
    Through revelation, rebellion”

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

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

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

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

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

  • Redundancy Review: Day 287-288, “Warhammer Wednesday”

    Redundancy Review: Day 287-288, “Warhammer Wednesday”

    (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 commissars and ethereals, welcome to Day 287-288 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    Yes. I know.

    It is a goddamn miracle.

    I am writing an entry to the quote unquote “daily series” that does not have over the span of a week between posts. Praise God, Satan, Lathander – whichever deity you choose to follow in life, because Rosalia has chosen to ramble on non-consecutive days in the same week…

    …so of course I am going to be launching a weekly segment in this post similar to VTuesday because I am incapable of learning my lesson, but this is something I have had in the back of my mind since the start of the year, and I finally want to make it official.

    Wednesdays will now be “Warhammer Wednesday”…

    …Warnsdays?

    A slightly more catchy title may be in development.

    Throwing it back to my bingo card for the year, one of the squares I put down on it was “Get back into miniature painting”, which was essentially code for “Start exploring Warhammer again”, as the hobby was an important part of my formative years growing up and I want to see it with fresh eyes.

    Which leads us into the story for today, because I cannot really understate how important Warhammer was for my childhood when I spent damn near seven years playing it regularly before I fell to the dark side of Magic: the Gathering. It was even the first foray into fiction writing in my life when I wrote a short story for a local gaming event that had a writing contest.

    The contest was pitched as writing something on the day between games, but given I was an overachiever I came prepared with a two page story about a Dark Angels Interrogator Chaplain getting ambushed by some Warp Talons… think I might still have the certificate I won back then somewhere too.

    Pretty much every Saturday in my early-to-mid teens was spent playing Warhammer, initially 40k where an old friend first introduced me to it, which eventually shifted over to a period of playing Warhammer Fantasy for a period of time before it shifted back over to 40k up until I became the sole steward of the club and we started playing other games such as Star Realms, my actual legit favourite card game of all time.

    Oh yeah, that is a pretty important detail – this Saturday club was hosted in my local library and after a period of time I was the volunteer running the group, a task I was wholly unsuited for when I started but eventually it was just sort of being the mature/organised one in a group of friends more than anything else. It is what gave me a fierce defense of libraries as third spaces, as my local was essential to my personal development.

    Back at my parent’s place there are still tons of boxes filled with my old gear, often acquired through people not wanting their own old stuff and me picking it up at a cheaper price, or in one instance, just for a box of Maltesers. I should be reclaiming some of it soon to add to the collection, but my main joy in the hobby came from building more than anything, hence why painting is my goal as I was not the best at that back in the day.

    To that end, what caused my relapse?

    This battleforce box specifically, themed around the Farsight Enclaves of the T’au faction. I have always had a soft spot for the Farsight Enclaves as a faction, both for their bold red colour scheme and what they represent in going against the grain of an established society…

    …that said, I also hold a great deal of fear for T’au for how utterly dominant they were back in my day of playing seventh edition due to how much they owned the shooting phase and could deal with all sorts of threats.

    Or maybe I am just salty because I was a Dark Eldar player and got my shit handed to me on the regular due to the fact I used masochists riding in paper boats as my main fighting force.

    Regardless, I figured this would be a good start for getting myself back into building. Geometric shapes and flat panels would also make for easy painting practice once I finally got around to it.

    I will be covering the model I started with today, which is of the eponymous commander of the Enclaves himself, Farsight. For this model and the model I built after this I was initially using Citadel Plastic Glue, but I quickly switched to Tamiya Extra Thin Cement after remembering how utterly shit the bottles that Citadel glue comes in.

    Even with inferior glue, this was a fun build to attempt. Everything came together relatively easily, which is to be expected for a kit that did not come with many spare bits on the sprue – very few places to experiment with posing or alternative weapon options.

    There was something oddly therapeutic about getting to build a plastic model again, something that I spent so much of my younger years doing but now as a much different person, though still the same nerd at heart.

    Not too much to say beyond that, it was easy to follow the instructions with the numbers embossed onto the sprue and the model came together in a way I am very happy with.

    Later editions of Warhammer Wednesday should cover a bit more detail about how I wanted to put the model together, though progress photos for some later models are a little sparse, so hopefully how I have built them is enough of a story.

    Right, I have made something that came out not long after my last post, do I have the momentum again or is this another false start? Only one way to find out, and that is to keep moving forward. Thank you for reading this edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are I hope you can engage in the hobbies that bring you the most joy, be they new or old, expensive or cheap.