Rosalia Rambles

Tag: Gaming

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 331-333, “For Those Who Come After”
(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 the ones that came before and those who come after, welcome to Day 331-333 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

First off, cause I have friends who have not got that far in Expedition 33:

This article is going to talk about the themes of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 in a fair amount of detail and this is your only spoiler warning before I start as all significant details are going to be unspoilered for the purposes of discussion. If you have not yet played Clair Obscur, please do, the TL;DR of this is that it is a modern masterpiece of a video game.

Right, now that I have probably shooed off a significant number of people – except Aaron, say hi to Aaron everyone – let us begin.

Dim dam talé lam vacarme
Redundancy Review begun
And Rosa shall ramble on
Dilim dili lili lam
So much to say this is just a “part one”

Dim-dim-dam-dada, dim-dim-da-dada, dim-da-lilam

Dim-dim-dam-dada, dim-dim-da-dada, dim-da-lilam

I love the opening of this game. The opening view of the twisted spire of Lumière with the eponymous song playing in the background helps set the tone of a dark yet optimistic story, with each individual frame of the game being as beautiful as a painting, but with credit going to the phenomenal motion capture work of Maxence Cazorla for helping to make Gustave such a relatable character from the get go.

That said, Charlie Cox also deserves his flowers. His background in traditional acting means he delivers the majority of Gustave’s lines in a way an on-screen actor would in a natural conversational style, bringing a down–to-earth charm to the somewhat introverted inventor. He is only in a short segment of the game, but it is no surprise he was nominated alongside the monolithic talents of Ben Starr and Jennifer English for awards.

Side tangent, as much as Jennifer English deserves the world and so much more, I really wish Andy Serkis at least got a nod for his performance as both Painted Renoir and Real Renoir, the ability to portray the same character from two drastically different perspectives has not been celebrated enough, playing two different antagonist characters would be hard work for any seasoned actor, and he made it seem effortless.

Jen herself performs fantastically as Maelle, delivering a performance that balances the perfect mix of youth exuberance but with a weight of maturity behind it, reflecting a world in which children are forced to grow up way too fast thanks to the Gommage, Maelle carrying the weight of being orphaned multiple times before she even reached sixteen, but still wanting to join the Expedition to try save her home.

Oh yeah, should probably explain the Gommage, which is the main inciting incident of the game.

In the distance, visible from Lumière, there is a monolith where a lone figure sits motionless for the majority of the time. A number is painted upon it, with the number “34” being visible at the start of the game. The figure is referred to as “The Paintress”, and every year she will paint a new number onto the monolith, decreasing by one each time. When she does, everyone above that number in age will vanish into a cloud of petals, being “Gommaged”, leaving behind friends, family, and loved ones of all description.

How the various denizens of Lumière react to the Gommage is rather realistic, with everyone taking a different approach on how to spend their final minutes. Some accept their fate with dignity and decorum, staying strong for those around them. Some choose to “enjoy life”, spending their last moments in the comforting embrace of their partners. Finally, some do not react well at all, taking to drinking and slamming the efforts of the Expeditions as pointless busywork when the Gommage keeps happening.

This is the first main exposure to what is the main theme of the game as a whole: the cycle of grief.

When I first started playing, my partner refused to tell me anything about the game except that it was “a game about grief”. Right from the beginning, you see how Lumière is a city that has been utterly traumatised by a regular cycle of grief – death is a constant, reoccurring factor for them, to the point that traditions around the Gommage have been established with almost everyone going to the harbour to mark their final moments.

But there is also a beautiful moment hiding in plain sight that is beautiful foreshadowing to this overarching theme, which I wish I got a bloody screenshot of but the transcript will have to do:

Sophie: “Sometimes I feel sorry for her.”
Gustave: “Who, the Paintress?”
Sophie: “Look at her. She looks sad. Maybe she’s a prisoner too. Stuck in the same cycle as us.”

On the first playthrough, you may have no idea what Sophie is talking about. As far as the player knows, the Paintress is responsible for the Gommage, and her constant cycle of death is all that both the player and the characters know.

But then you finish Act II, and become witness to the fantastic, if a bit divisive, twist that everything you have played through is in a painted world, with a family stuck in their own twisted cycle of grief being the main antagonist forces behind what is happening within what is now known as “The Canvas”.

The Paintress does not want to go through with the Gommage. With each passing year, her available supply of Chroma – the source of a painter’s power, diminishes thanks to the actions of the real Renoir, who is trying to force the Paintress out of the Canvas because she is his wife, choosing to stay in a fantasy world with a painted copy of her dead son at serious detriment to her own physical health.

Grief is ultimately what drives all characters forward in this game. Each of them have their own complex motivations as to why they move forward, but each initial Expedition member has their own flavour of grief pushing them forward:
- Gustave lost Sophie, his lost love who he only managed to reconcile with before she died
- Maelle lost both her original parents and her foster parents, leaving her only with Gustave as her adoptive brother
- Lune lost her parents on a previous expedition, and hopes to find out what happened to them as part of Expedition 33
- Sciel lost her husband Pieree, and subsequently lost her unborn child during her suicide attempt driven by the previous grief
In spite of their grief though, they move forward, regardless of the consequences.

I have already used one set of arc words as the title of this article, but there is another set there are equally important to the story of Clair Obscur:

They are just “Tomorrow Comes” but I have this Sciel screenshot saved so I am going to use it because this is another instance of something becoming way more tragic on a second playthrough – specifically that Sciel tried to kill herself via drowning in the ocean, giving her a fear of water moving forward.

Even when grief feels overwhelming, even when it feels like the world is collapsing in on yourself, even when you lose your job for the second time within a year meaning you start experiencing regular crashouts that disrupt your writing schedule and general routine: Tomorrow Comes. There will always be another dawn after the dark, and even when things feel overwhelming, there is a comfort in knowing that a tomorrow will always come. Struggles may remain for a long period of time, but it is a blessing to be guaranteed a tomorrow in the face of adversity.

But, I made the title of this article “For Those Who Come After”, and as such, I should probably talk about what those arc words mean within the game, and what they mean to me.

It is actually a shortened version of a longer line, which forms part of the oath Expeditioners take before embarking, something which Sandfall Interactive has not posted in full when I really wish they would. The full line is:

“Learn from the ones who came before, and lay the trail for those who come after.”

Within the game, this takes the form of all the expeditions that embarked before Expedition 33. You will be able to find their journals scattered around the game world which tell how they met their end whilst also informing you of how to navigate whatever danger they succumbed to… or in some cases, you find the journal after navigating the danger making you exclaim “well that would have been helpful five minutes ago”, but each Expedition before yours has laid the trail in some way, either through the grapple points or climbing handles, or dealing with an obnoxiously large threat long before you appeared.

The Expedition is also a sign of hope for Lumiere, even as cynicism grows within the populace over the effectiveness of the effort as a whole, it shows that there are still those who are willing to navigate into a hostile world in an effort to try secure a better future for those who remain in Lumiere. Gustave specifically thinks of his apprentices, uttering these very words each time he finishes a journal entry:

What do these words mean to me though? How do I take these arc words and apply them to my day-to-day experiences?

Well, I have talked about it at some length in the past, but my goal as an artist is to act as inspiration for younger LGBTQ+ folk who have their own worries, concerns, or serious amounts of anxiety about living in a world that is very often hostile to them.

I try my best to learn the history of LGBT rights as a whole, who laid the trail for people like me today and started to build a world where we can all be accepted, and I use that to inspire myself to try to do the same for others in whatever way I can.

This is especially true for living in the UK, a country where trans rights are completely ignored by the ruling party at best, and at worst there are those who actively want to remove us from the public perception whilst simultaneously destroying our access to the life-saving healthcare we need.

Even as economic conditions become worse and political forces start to work against me, I refuse to back down.

I will not abandon my home.

I will not leave behind those like me.

I will do what I can to change things for the better for people like me, even if I do not live to see what this world will look like.

My art may not ever make enough money for me to live off, and it may not even reach the vast majority of people.

But if I can inspire even one person to take the plunge and see how good their life could be when they choose to be themselves, then I can be proud that I did something good.

For Those Who Come After.

Plus I just had to write about Expedition 33 on Day 333 of the Redundancy Review. Even if this is not my full final write up on the game, and believe me I have a lot more to say I just do not have the screenshots or time to back it up right now, this serves as a good prologue to discussing the game at length – something that is still a goal of mine for this.

That will cover everything for today. Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope the weekend will treat you well and you can take some time to relax. Partake in things that make you happy, or work to improve the space around you.

Whatever you do, I know you will smash it.
May 9, 2026
Redundancy Review: Day 330, “Late Night Struggles”

(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 gravekeepers and morticians, welcome to Day 330 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

If things are on my mind, I usually cannot sleep well. This is a bad trait to have when combined with ADHD where I seem almost incapable of not having things on my mind, but usually enough time passes where I am able to silence my inner monologue for long enough to actually get to sleep.

The problem comes from impending unemployment putting a lot of things on my mind, and the knock-on struggles that come about from that.

Being honest, it is not really the spectre of unemployment itself that is weighing on my mind, it is the thing that killed me the most during the period before my official redundancy when everything kicked off last year:

Waiting.

I like to consider myself a relatively patient person, despite various neurological factors working against me, but I definitely feel like I am dealing with one extreme case of “waiting room syndrome” right now – a phenomenon seen among neurodivergent individuals where when they know an event or appointment is coming up they feel a sense of paralysis that will not subside until the event is done with.

In a way, I guess the more correct term would be “limbo”, and I will have to pick my words very carefully here because I do not want to come off as unprofessional unintentionally. Up until the end of May, I am still in the employ of my current company, but not included in meetings anymore due to the plan moving forward not involving me, which I get, but it definitely has an impact on the feeling of isolation that can come along with remote work.

During the redundancy period last year, I still showed up to previously scheduled meetings even when there was no work to be done. This acted as group therapy for me and my colleagues to discuss how we were feeling, any interesting opportunities we had found, or just stay in touch so we were not stuck in our own heads as the world shifted around us.

The Redundancy Review helps in a way, because if I were not committed to writing practice where the focus is placed on how I am feeling day-to-day, I think a lot of my emotions would just bottle up to dangerous levels and my isolation would get a lot worse.

In the past, my instinct when faced with great stress or turmoil was to isolate myself from people. This would involve making myself appear offline on as many socials as possible, not responding to any messages directed at me (even if they were messages of concern), and basically staying in my own bubble of unhealthy coping mechanisms.

Straight up, this was not a good thing to do. Whilst I can look back and understand why past me would have exhibited this behaviour, I can also see the amount of times this resulted in a lot of unnecessary worry from people that could have been easily dispelled if I took five minutes to communicate why I was feeling the way I did. Think I have done it once or twice within the last year or so, but unlike previously where these episodes would last a couple of days or up to a week, they last about a day before people shake me out of my rut and get me speaking again.

Socialisation is strength, but it is important to make time for your own hobby projects…

…which is what I would be saying, if my workspace did not look like this currently:

A mess, plain and simple. From a handful of Vinted orders coming through alongside making the use of sales and coupons on some other regular websites I haunted, I now have a decent ~~pile of shame~~ project backlog to make plenty of stuff for Warhammer Wednesday.

The main focus of my hobby work has actually been on repair as opposed building new kits, specifically due to going loft diving at my parent’s place to recover a lot of my old models and kits – some of which includes exclusive models from past Games Day events which have been interesting to repair… if a little annoying because they are all metal and I forgot how ass using superglue is for things like this.

I need to stop procrastinating on getting some models painted though, lest I accumulate a pile of grey plastic tat. Painting was never my strong suit back in the day, so I feel I little hesitant on giving it another go.

Only way to learn is by doing, right?

Not really a focused Redundancy Review today, but a ramble on the innermost functioning of my mind all the same.

Thank you for reading today’s edition. Wherever you are, I hope your week is going well, and if it is not, then the weekend is soon upon us, and that should give you plenty of time to relax.

May 6, 2026
Redundancy Review: Day 327-328, “Good for your soul”

(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 serfs and peasants, welcome to Day 327 and 328 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

Yeah, I missed a day again. Yesterday ended up being a bit slow and a bit sad, partially driven by a touch of FOMO from seeing so many pictures of people attending the Hololive English All for One screening in London.

There was a brief moment where I was considering going to that, but it ultimately ended up not being that financially viable once I considered travel, accommodation, and various miscellaneous purchases along the way – which in hindsight considering I am getting shitcanned at the end of the month, was a smart decision.

It still stings a little though, being on the outside looking in, seeing so many groups of cool people come together for a shared event made my heart feel simultaneously full and empty at the same time. I have Vexpo this year, but considering my funds are likely to have an asterisk hanging over them for the near future, it seems like that will be my only VTuber related excursion this year.

Which, to be blunt and selfish for a moment, really fucking sucks.

VExpo was a damn near life-changing event for me last year, getting to meet several people with a shared interest of mine alongside having the opportunity to meet several VTubers I looked up to and meet ones that I only recently discovered. My survival comes first unfortunately, so it means a good four months or so of rooting for awesome people on the outside.

In the meantime though, there is definitely going to be a lot I do within the comfort of my local area to help my soul to recover from the tech industry, which does include keeping up with VTuesday segments to show my love of the VTuber space in whatever way I can.

Additionally, it means putting my energy into things that might not influence profit margins or return-on-investment numbers, but will influence the world in a positive way, whether in the wider world or within my local spaces. I should hopefully have more social energy once things fully process from my mind, which means I can work on projects with friends or just be able to host social gatherings with a bit more spring in my step – I have wanted to host a cheese-based gathering for friends, and sitting around eating cured meat and cheese to celebrate the next phase of my life sounds like one hell of a good evening.

I guess it all boils down to processing, and everyone processes differently. In a way I have not had much processing time at all due to how hectic my life was balancing my career and keeping up with the schedule I wanted to. Thankful for being able to write the Redundancy Review as a way of debugging my mind bit by bit even when everything feels full and overwhelming.

Not sure how today’s review topic will go, but there is a certain joy in me talking about weirdly specific topics, and despite having played-

(it says “Install” cause I primarily play on Steam Deck, and this was taken on my laptop)

-this much Umamusume over the last five months, I have only talked about it once on the Redundancy Review, and I do not even think I did a good job on that one knowing what I know now.

Anyway, today’s review topic is the Pretty Derby Season 2 opening credits, set to the song “Yume wo Kakeru!”, or “Run for our Dream!” as it is labelled in the concert theatre in the game.

Side note, the concert theatre might be one of my favourite features within the game that I cannot help but get irrationally annoyed over because of how limited the pool of vocalists for some songs are – especially in the wake of some later seasons and series of the anime having characters sing those songs whilst they do not have the same track in-game.

I just want to have my oshi Oguri Cap sing all of the songs, is that so hard to fulfill?

Anyway, back on track.

Having now watched basically every single piece of Umamusume media since I first talked about the Miracle Run in Season 2, I can say that whilst it still holds an important place in my heart, I can concede that the later stories are way stronger in terms of writing and pacing.

That said, I will not concede that Yume no Kakeru is the best opening track in the series. There is just so much joy and energy in the singing that really embodies the feeling of this being a song to sing alongside your rivalry, wanting to try your best and push yourself beyond your limits.

In terms of visual elements… it is tough to consider. Personally, I think the Season 3 opening nails the slice-of-life aspects the best, as the daily lives of all of the students at Tracen are half the fun of the series, and the short visual gags in that opening bring a much bigger smile to my face now that I have the context of having played the game.

There are a lot of fun visual elements to the Season 2 opening as well, a few of my favourites including:

Mayano Top Gun in her prime position of sleeping through the entire season because the real-world horse was not active at the same time as Tokai Teio.

Team Rigil warming up and T.M. Opera O just… doing T.M. Opera O things instead of warming up.

And Twin Turbo proving her nature as the ultimate front runner by being so clear of the pack no one can try catch up to her. That little dot on the far right of the screen is her.

But my absolute favourite visual element of this opening comes right at the end, where young Kitasan Black and Satono Diamond are seen cheering for Teio and McQueen, and these two were the entire reason I decided to talk about this opening because I wanted to use them as the thumbnail picture.

These two appearing as the “Come on!” cheers play out in the song never fails to put a smile on my face from how absolutely adorable they look.

If you are at all curious about Umamusume, I definitely recommend it. I am not someone who typically enjoys sports anime but I found myself enamoured from the beginning which only escalated into an obsession after watching Season 2, and well, after I finished Cinderella Gray I ended up going against my better instincts and getting into a fucking gacha game.

I can definitely recommend getting into the anime over the game – I cannot in good conscience recommend people to get into the gacha game, as much as I will jokingly tease my friends to join my club.

The anime can be found on Crunchyroll and Tubi with the Road to the Top OVA being available on Youtube. I… do not really recommend getting it through Crunchyroll as I do not agree with their business practices, so explore other options to find the platform that works best for you.

That should cover everything for today. Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are I hope you have had an easy day, if you are in the UK I hope you have enjoyed the bank holiday as well.

May 4, 2026
Redundancy Review: Day 323-325, “Sleep, and lots of it”

(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 nocturnals and diurnals, welcome to Day 323 to 325 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

Yeah, no, the streak broke, but the streak resumption is still way shorter than what it was before. In short: periods suck. Emotional volatility and feeling drained by most things led to writing falling by the wayside in favour of recovery, but some positive things did happen in the interim.

(end screen courtesy of my Gunlance friend, cause I was coming down so hard from the fight that I forgot to take a screenie)

Me and my group of Monster Hunter friends finally came together to get me to beat Savage Omega. It took one initial attempt to dial things in after having not played so long, but the attempt after that went as smooth as anything, with no faints and being done in a smooth sub twenty minute time.

It was one of the last things I needed to do to start considering my base game experience in Wilds to be “complete”, and I still love how Omega was implemented into the game from both the story and the gameplay perspective.

I should talk about Wilds more in future reviews, for all of its launch faults in terms of performance on PC, the experience I have had with it has been nothing short of phenomenal. In general I feel I should do more gaming-based reviews, or write more about games in general – try to inject some positivity into a space that can often be overwhelmed with negativity.

In general, I follow the logic that I am not a critic, nor am I qualified to be one. I exercise my critical thinking skills and can approach stuff from a critical perspective, but my intention is to hopefully have the vast majority of the Redundancy Review be more about personal experience than critique.

Outside of that I have been working hard on yet another Satisfactory engineering project, this time on a world my partner and I are playing together. I said early on that I wanted to handle the power generation for the world, and after some amount of trial and error I have been able to construct the first two floors of what I am referring to as “The Tower of Power”, something that will ideally be our central hub for power generation along with some smaller stations along the periphery of our world. It needs further refinement, but I am very happy with what I have been able to achieve in terms of engineering.

But overall, what have I been doing the most?

Resting.

Sleeping in late.

Enjoying my time with things.

Indulging in the things I enjoy.

Today I slept in till almost noon, and catching up on that amount of sleep feels fantastic. Given the nature of my work and life, I tended to run on a sleep deficit that often caught up with me very quickly in certain circumstances, leading to me constantly projecting the outwards appearance of being half asleep, alongside medicating myself heavily with various strengths of caffeine to have some measure of function throughout the day.

It is still scary to consider the prospect that I am about to be unemployed once more, especially given that I want to use this as an opportunity to grow into something beyond what I currently am – even if I do not fully know where I am going next.

For that though, I refer to an image that I have pinned in the DMs between myself and my partner on Discord. It is something that I am using as one of many guiding philosophies in how I am going forward in this strange new existence.

I am going to pursue myself, both to recover from the pain and heartache that giving my all into a career has inflicted upon me, but also to grow into the person I want to become: a healthier, more put together version of myself.

That will cover things for now, hopefully tomorrow brings about a more substantial Redundancy Review, especially as I am currently out and about with some tickets to go see a wildlife photographer give a talk, courtesy of my lovely parents.

Thank you for reading this short catchup for this edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are I hope you are able to take it easy this weekend. Indulge in your favourite food or drink if you can, you definitely deserve it after what came your way this week.

No matter what you end up doing, I am proud of you. Never forget that.

May 1, 2026
Redundancy Review: Day 322, “Comfort”

(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 duvets and blankets, welcome to Day 322 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

Today does not feel like a good day. A mixture of the events of last week combined with period brain descending upon me has led to my emotions feeling volatile and horrible, flip-flopping from anger to regret over being angry to overwhelmed and somehow finding every emotion in between that.

To this end, even after I dragged myself out of bed to play some Umamusume and watch the Helldivers 2 patch notes video with my partner, I find myself back in the same location sipping a delicious mocha and finding some weird inspiration to write about how I feel right now.

Period brain can do many things to me, but one of the worst things it does is turn the various negative parts of my mind up to eleven. Catastrophising gets amped up to the point that even the most minor inconveniences somehow turn into world-ending events, depression and despair make my outlook on things I enjoy turn into doom and gloom predictions of wondering what could go wrong, and as for my aggression levels, well, I will refer to contemporary poet Fred Durst to explain how it feels:

“It’s just one of those days where you don’t wanna wake up
Everything is fucked, everybody sucks
You don’t really know why
But you wanna justify rippin’ someone’s head off”

It is a rare occasion where I get to quote Limp Bizkit for something – I do not even consider myself a fan, but “Break Stuff” is an infinitely quotable song for moments like this.

So, what do I do when everything is fucked and everybody sucks?

I seek out things that comfort me.

Quick synonym tangent, I initially used the word “insular” to describe how I prefer to interact with things that comfort me, but I did not think that really describes how I view the situation, a point that was compounded further when I looked up the synonyms of the word and I did not really agree with any of them. Thesauruses are great, I know most people would use an LLM to do the task today, but that removes the joy of discovering just how many synonyms can exist for a word as the chatbot response will only cover the most popular.

Back on track – comforting myself is an activity I usually do in seclusion more than anything else. Whilst other people (my partner included) find comfort in getting out there and spending time with like-minded individuals, my comfort typically comes from being in a private space where I can engage in my hobbies.

Most of the time, this is me getting all cozy in bed with a hot mocha and an ice water, with me zoning out to streams or playing stuff on my Steam Deck. Long stretches of time where I can have no interruptions from the outside world where I can focus solely on immersing myself in another world.

Escapism would be the most appropriate term to describe this I guess, something I have talked about before last year with a Redundancy Review. It was the reason why, up until I got canned again, that I was looking at properly investing into cosplay more this year cause I view the idea of getting all dressed up in the outfit of one of my favourite characters as one of the ultimate forms of escapism.

Feels weird to say in a way, that one of my ideas of peak comfort is dressing up in an elaborate getup only to sit at home and do the things I would be doing anyway, but I think it serves as an important disconnection point to the harsh reality that envelops so many of us today. A persona, if you will, one you can put on or off at will to help feel like you are someone greater than you are… though I feel I lean more towards “magical girl” vibes than “superhero” vibes when the latter would be more appropriate to some.

This is also where my love of worldbuilding and elaborate details probably comes from. The notion of having a fantasy world where even the most minute details are thought through brings joy to my soul, where systems are thought through to try to give them as much grounding within the real world whilst retaining the whimsical aspects of fantasy.

And considering this is the first VTuesday I have been able to mark in a while, this also marks a good opportunity to talk about why VTubers appeal to me in the context of escapism.

Despite having never grown up as your typical “theatre kid”, being more the shy and reserved type, there is a certain appeal in the notion of regular people being behind virtual avatars. Whilst kayfabe is slowly becoming less of an “essential” part of VTuber culture, for better or worse, the characters that the performers embody can still carry a lot of emotional weight in their words and actions.

This might be why Hololive English Advent is my favourite unit of VTubers, as they blend together what I consider to be a perfect mix of the real person underneath combined with their lore and characters. Their personalities coming through on streams and them being the sweetest people ever contrasts wonderfully with how their original songs and stories go.

An original song is the topic of today’s review, the final part of Advent’s five-part story: Unchained

I reviewed Genesis what seems like a lifetime ago, and between then and now the remaining songs have come out of the series. Is it a little weird I am reviewing the final song without having covered the second, third, and fourth songs? Yes. Do I do anything in order on the Redundancy Review? You bet your sweet arse I do not.

Unchained I feel is an appropriate song to review both for a day like this and considering the events I have been going through recently. It is a song about escaping from any trials you have gone through before and living a new life full of freedom, hope, and expectation for tomorrow.

The first chorus in particular speaks to me:

“Now I feel so free, I can be who I am,

I know I’m not alone, I got a new life,

In the rain, the wind, and the sunlight.

You believed in me, and that’s where it all began

Now hope is everlasting, I can live my life with you,

Unchained”

With this next stint of unemployment, outside of some emotional volatility, there is much less fear than there was before. In a way, I do feel like I have a new lease of freedom compared to what I had before, and that no matter what days ahead I face, rain, wind, or sunlight, I have a life that I can truly call mine, one fully unchained from the past.

However… it would not be a Rosalia Rambles piece if I did not find some way to extract a trans allegory from this song, and by god the chorus definitely hits that criteria.

Being trans mean to live a true life unchained from the expectations of others, and in living that truth you live a happier life no matter what outside forces are coming at you – and believe me there are a lot of outside forces that want to bring you down if you are trans.

Transition is not a solitary thing though, or at the very least, transition gets a whole lot easier when you have supportive people in your life. Having confidants that believe in you and want to encourage you to be your best self can give you some amazing amounts of motivation to live your life to the fullest.

I also want to do a bit of analysis on the bridge, as I feel that is a wonderful sequence that speaks to the lore, and actual social dynamic, of Advent being a found family of misfits:

“Don’t cry, you can breathe free; I’m here if you need me

Let go of all your heartache,

We made it through, it’s the dawning of a new day

Feel the world’s embrace,

Oh what a joyful place

This is where I wanna be, so come with me;

Keep dreaming…”

First off, I have to gush about the first two lines sung by my absolute favourite sweetheart Shiori Novella. Her voice is so smooth and soft making these lines so comforting to listen to.

But all of these lines combine to give the vibe of Advent regrouping after they finally made it out of The Cell together, taking a moment to breathe and take in the world around them, seeing the beauty of nature once more before carrying on in the world, being free to dream once more as the group of lovable renegades they are.

God… for all of Hololive’s documented issues, I still find it so easy to support the girls when they put on massive projects and performances like this – especially knowing how bureaucratic it can get behind the scenes sometimes.

Thumbnail picture, swiped from the official Hololive English Twitter account

That covers everything for today, a somewhat rambly Redundancy Review for a very up-and-down day. Thank you for reading this edition. Wherever you are I hope you are able to relax and enjoy the things that bring you joy and make life worth living.

April 28, 2026
Redundancy Review: Day 319, “Eepy”

(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 baristas and bartenders, welcome to Day 319 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

Being upfront, I am knackered right now.

Saturday is normally a sleep-in day for me anyway, but things moved slowly up until I got the impetus to go shopping for the supplies needed for tomorrow night’s dinner and snacks for a film night with good company – said film night then taking up most of the time I could work on writing afterwards and now I am just lying here in bed typing out whatever my brain will allow me to.

Which is not a lot, honestly.

So uhh…

Here is one of the megastructures I have built in Satisfactory. I refer to it as the “Basin Shell”, because it is built over the basin of a large waterfall and whenever I build a structure in Satisfactory over water I tend to append “Shell” onto it after the Big Shell in Metal Gear Solid 2.

This was built as I severely needed to upgrade my power infrastructure going forward in order to accommodate the amount of structures I would need to construct and wanted to avoid brownouts or the fuse blowing wherever possible… there is a slight possibility I went overboard in this construction project as I was able to support a large factory in my home base and then build a massive shell project over another body of water, fully rig that up with power, and then nowhere near run out of power until I upgraded the grid yet again.

Building megastructures is the thing I enjoy the most in Satisfactory. I know the overall goal is “the factory must grow”, and Part A needs to make Part B and Part C, but there’s a certain satisfaction (get it) in building a massive structure that only fills one purpose rather than having new components introduced to an already spaghetti-like machine.

Maybe when I finally finish it, I will talk a bit about the other shell project and how it came together.

In the meantime, that will do it for today. Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope you can rest as well as I am going to tonight.

April 25, 2026
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.

March 25, 2026
Redundancy Review: Day 218-258, “Inspiration, or lack thereof”

(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 cadavers and corpses, welcome to quite frankly an absurd amount of days between my last Redundancy Review and today of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

And now, a silly bit.

Charging to twenty days.

Clear!

Still not enough motivation, charging to forty days.

Clear!

Right, that should have injected enough life into things to write for a bit.

So… why the long unintended hiatus? Whilst I am no stranger to them, this is definitely up there for the longest one taken of this so called daily series.

In short: depression.

In slightly longer: depression plus inspiration.

In full long form: well, keep reading and I will get there.

Seasonal depression kicked my ass hard, as is noticeable from some Redundancy Reviews before my long break, which led to a lot of days blurring together as I tried to navigate through the wet haze of greyness that is the UK in winter.

And when I was in that mental state, I did not particularly want to write. Not because of lacking ideas to talk about, but more because I did not want to only talk about my sadness or mental condition, because I want to try focus on the positives rather than the negatives.

Which, yes, I know is a pretty shitty attitude to take towards myself. All of my feelings are valid, but, there was a certain guilt that I felt whenever I would open a document and start trying to write what my view on the world was at that given time when everything in my mind was just doom and gloom.

But, as much as I want to keep things positive and write Redundancy Reviews based on what good has occurred in my life recently, that does not mean I should suppress any inkling of negative emotion just to make “good content”.

Things have been tough lately, with my day job especially putting some strain on me for the bigger push to use AI tools in our workflows to try make things more efficient/productive – a total misrepresentation of the facts considering I feel what the tool is doing is neither of those things and just adds layers of complication that waste time in the fixes that need applying where we could have just made base level improvements to the current processes instead of introducing a hallucination layer instead.

There is a certain pressure from within my own psyche to be “grateful” for the fact I have a job currently, especially in the job market of today – and do not get me wrong, I do fully appreciate how lucky I am to have a job in the wake of a layoff when so many of my contemporaries in the industry do not, but “grateful” is not a term I would really use.

It gets me by, and I do at least learn new things even if I do not put much value on the skills I learn in navigating AI slop, but currently that is all I feel to my job: a means to an end.

The end in question is just getting to live my life as I want to, although with everything going on lately it has been hard to do that, with just surviving each day and getting to the weekend feeling like an accomplishment.

That is not to say that things are all bad. There is plenty I am actually finding enjoyment in outside of work, work is just this malaise over my brain that depletes what little energy I can muster.

I have got back into building Warhammer 40k models, admittedly an expensive hobby to undertake, but as I was looking at the various offerings of plastic crack that is available to purchase my conclusion was that I was fucked no matter what route I took and at least I had some familiarity with 40k from my past experiences. Built a full box of models over the last couple weeks with another one to start work on soon, not to mention painting which was one of my goals for this year.

My gaming life continues to be plentiful, having recently 100%ed the first Hades game before moving on to Mewgenics, with Umamusme sprinkled in and Monster Hunter Wilds returning for another round of buffet selections with how many new quests are being added in as part of the final update before the expansion drops at an indeterminate time in the future.

Finally had my first consultation for voice training, which should give me a boost in confidence and let me explore my identity a bit more.

Writing just… kind of falls by the wayside when things get intense and I want to focus on living. I suppose it is the dichotomy of being a writer in my current situation: my main body of work revolves around making “content” that takes inspiration from my daily life, but when my energy levels are low, I want to focus that energy on living rather than writing about life.

And if I do not have energy to write about life, that usually means I do not have the energy to write whimsical fiction of any description.

If anything, I just need to find a new source of whimsy for myself to latch onto, to hold tight in the darker moments.

Have a picture of some ducks that I took when I was out shopping with my partner over the weekend, they were pretty cute.

Think that will cover everything for the meantime, hopefully I can get back into some kind of groove after finally sitting down to write a piece and not let my true emotions get filtered out.

Regardless, thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope you are safe, happy, and comfortable. Times like these are hard on everyone, and finding whatever small bits of hope we can hold onto can help make life feel that much more worth it.

(and thanks to my friend Rhys for checking in on me after noticing I had not written one of these in a while. Thanks man, it actually did kind of spur me to write again.)

February 23, 2026
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.
January 5, 2026