Good morning developers and promoters, welcome to Day 366 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.
With the one year anniversary out of the way, things can continue rolling on – even if I am starting this way later in the day than I would usually do due to sleepiness, appointments, and social time with a good friend of mine.
Speaking of continuing things, no matter how much writing advice is “oh do not use rule of three now cause that is an AI indicator”, I am going to keep using rule of three. Those chatbots are trained on data from writers all over the world, we had rule of three first, I am going to keep using it because I like the cadence of it and the clankers can take it from my cold, dead, and clammy hands.
Plus I honour the Oxford comma, which surprisingly is not a feature of some AI writing. I once even had to point that out to the CEO of my previous company when looking at some social posts he had done for promotion and I could clearly tell it was done with AI.
I should not chat too much shit about my previous work, as I did leave on good terms, but the prevalence of how AI was used on a daily basis did get to me a little bit as someone who dislikes GenAI entirely, from chatbots listening in on meetings to generate barely usable notes to another bot who translated tickets for the “agents” to pick up and execute.
Probably a bit bold to say, but if I could find a job where I never have to hear the words “agentic” ever again, I would be extremely happy. Same goes for buzzwords like “ARR”, “grinding”, and whilst not a buzzword, “LinkedIn” is definitely up there as well.
Can “deleting my LinkedIn” be considered a career goal? Getting to the point in my life where I would be able to never have to open professional Facebook ever again seems like a pipe dream, but one I would love to fulfill.
I spent yesterday talking about how I am bad at networking, and then immediately started talking shit about the main networking platform for the tech industry.
For all the fluff that fills the Redundancy Review, I think my love-hate relationship with the tech industry is clear throughout the past year worth of articles. It has most definitely helped enable me to live my life up to now, and given me opportunities I would have never dreamed of… but at the same time I feel a need to recover from working five years in it and want nothing more than to escape to something more stable, if a little boring.
…opening a cafe would not be stable, or boring, but it still speaks to me like a Green Goblin mask every so often…
Well, until the day that I succumb to my intrusive desires to own a cafe, food reviews will have to do.
And I am not doing a grand title of “Rosa Eats Her Way Around Shrewsbury!” because, quite frankly, reviewing food from Wetherspoons does not deserve that title, as much of a guilty pleasure as that place is to me.
On Monday I hung out with a friend of mine to help them write a cover letter for a job application. We were initially thinking of going to a different place to sit, drink, and write, but it was closed for a staff party, so we ended up in Spoons instead.
Which ultimately turned out to not be a massive problem due to the weekday “Club” offers that Wetherspoons put on, with Monday Club being a deal on the small plates they offer, being three for £10 rather than three for £14.99.
I remember when that was the normal price, in the pre-COVID era. It actually used to be my preferred way of eating at the monthly nerd meetups I attended pre-COVID as it was a damn good deal for a university student and filled me up nicely, with an infinite refills coffee serving the rest of my needs nicely if at the cost of my sleep later on in the evening.
Food from Wetherspoons is never going to be gourmet. It is not even really going to be massively flavourful. What it will do is fill you up for a cheap price with some weird comfort that comes from the lower quality.
That said, the pizzas are usually some of the freshest things on the menu, and eight-inch variants are included in the small plates deal, so I had to get my usual of the Spicy Meat Feast. But I wanted something more, so I also included some chicken strips in the mix, which I then placed onto the pizza and rolled up to create the horrifying creation of the Spicy Meat Feast Pizza Chicken Strip wrap.
And finally, came Wetherspoons “loaded chips”, the most basic chips in the world, haphazardly topped with melted cheese and bacon, served with a sour cream dip.
Are these one of the easiest things to replicate at home? Yes.
Is this somehow also a comfort meal for me? Yes.
Probably cause it was the small plate I always ordered the most at my nerd meetups, there is something marvelously comforting about the simplicity of the plate, especially when you get a bite with all elements on it, it brings me back to a simpler time when all I had to worry about was the crushing weight of expectation at university rather than the crushing weight of surviving in the adult world.
On that cheery note, thank you for reading this edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope you are doing well. The week is almost over, and the weekend shall be upon us soon. My plans are very minimal, but I intend to take the time to relax all the same.
Good morning carousers and merrymakers, welcome to…
Day 365
…of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.
A whole year has gone by since I started this series. What started out as something to act as daily writing practice has, for all intents and purposes, stayed exactly the same except for the fact it really is not daily anymore, except for when it is.
Might be the energy drink in my system talking, but, I feel less pessimistic than I did yesterday anticipating this as an anniversary. Even took the time today to catch up with some old colleagues to see what they have been up to, which was nice to hear their voices again.
Being upfront, I am someone who definitely does not network as much as they should: as a tech professional, as a writer, or as any of the labels I can ascribe to myself. I have a LinkedIn, but I feel anything I could write on my public page in any professional capacity would come off as performative more than anything else. I write the Redundancy Review, but I struggle to engage with other writers for fear of being disingenuous about their work.
And well, I am a socially awkward fuck outside of all that. Even at meetups and conventions when it is quite clear I am surrounded by like-minded people who would be happy to talk for a little bit or accept compliments on their cool-ass cosplays, I find myself struggling to even approach them for a quick hello without my partner either acting as hype man, or starting the conversation for me for me to segue in.
One of the many areas I have in the list of “things I need to improve about myself”, which is not to say I am not socially capable, more just… the initiation part is always the hardest – though I should get off this tangent now.
It feels weird. Looking back on a year of events and activities resulting in a lot of ups and downs to find myself in a similar position to where I was when this series started out.
Out of a job, unsure of what I want to do with myself except writing as a hobby, and wondering what comes next.
It was definitely a bit of a self-esteem boost when talking to my former colleagues and one of them saying that I should definitely be putting myself out there a bit more in terms of roles, and that I am capable for positions I have admittedly not been applying for.
I think for the time being I will continue to vibe, letting nature take its course and seeing what appears. Anyway, having all this time for hobbies has been rather enjoyable, which brings us to yet another Warhammer Wednesday… the first consecutive Warhammer Wednesday no less. Even one where I will talk about a building project I have been doing.
How unusual.
What I have been working on this week has been a unit of T’au Empire Fire Warrior Breacher Team, one of the two ways you can build a box of Fire Warriors, as opposed to a Strike Team. Whilst I am aligning myself with the Farsight Enclaves and most likely running battlesuit spam more than anything else, it is probably a good idea to have a basic infantry unit ready to go for smaller games.
Plus I found a great deal on an old “Start Collecting!” box on Vinted shortly before I got told I was being laid off, and they were included as part of it.
For a bit of background, Fire Warriors are the bread-and-butter infantry of the T’au Empire, with the most notable iteration of them being what is called the “Strike Team” – wielding either pulse rifles or pulse carbines to unleash massive volleys of shots upon unsuspecting enemies who get close to the gun line. These were one of the main things I was scared of when facing T’au back in the day, as they could take out my squishy units from a distance with it not becoming much better on the charge, as being in closer range gave pulse rifles extra shots, leading to an overwatch that invariably did more damage than if I kept my distance.
However, I am not one for a static gunline, and I would much rather my infantry be able to dish out good shooting whilst also being close to the enemy, meaning the “Breacher Team” with their pulse blasters feels like a more fitting choice.
The sprue I am using comes with thirteen options for legs, though there are only ten bodies with which to build full models.
My main choices for legs were ones where they are either on one knee to take a shooting position, or bracing themselves on a “rear” leg to assume a standing but steady shooting position. They might not be a static gunline, but I love the dynamic posing that comes from crouching down or leaning back to absorb some of the recoil from the gun.
Guy doing a reload has a relaxed posture, presumably further back in the gunline whilst his comrades coover him. The Shas’ui (leader) of the squad has his pulse blaster in his hands but is instead using a pistol, aimed slightly higher up to potentially interdict threats from above that might disrupt the gunline.
Two models in the squad are using the legs that make it look like they are moving forward, but with both feet still on the ground. The remaining three sets of legs I did not use have more dynamic running poses with one foot being off the ground, which did not really align with how I wanted this squad to look.
Especially with these two. When comparing them to the rest of the gunline which are crouching or leaning down, it feels as if they are a proper cohesive team. A sternguard holding position ready to engage any threats that appear whilst a vanguard advances forward, blasters at the ready to deal with whatever might appear from dark corners.
Unrelated, I am not sponsored by Tamiya. I do however think it is the best plastic glue on the market both for securely gluing models together and for inhaling the sweet vapours of as you build.
This has overall been a pretty fun kit to build, with a surprising amount of posing potential for static pairs of legs compared to the potential arrangements a team of Crisis suits could be put into. Painting procrastination will continue until morale improves.
One year down, let us see what the next year shall bring together.
Thank you for reading this edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope Wednesday has been kind to you. If not, the weekend is not too far away, and whatever you need to do to relax, I hope you are able to do it.
Good morning momos and roaches, welcome to Day 361 to 364 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.
Took time away from writing over the weekend, mainly cause I ended up being so damn sleepy after eating way too much both on the Friday and somehow the Saturday, leading to hermitting a fair bit outside of delivering some bread to a friend who was visiting town.
But, considering tomorrow marks quite possibly the biggest milestone the Redundancy Review will hit – a year since starting – need to be back on track in order to hit that.
It feels weird to consider that the most life-altering event that has happened to me is almost a year past now, having the company I gave three years to go under seemingly out of nowhere, leading me to navigate joblessness for the first time in four years, encompassing applying for redundancy payouts, going through nonsense at the Jobcentre (a place devoid of soul and emotion), and applying to all different sorts of roles across communications, admin, and my main area of expertise, quality assurance.
Outside of the redundancy payments, the rest of the ventures did not have much success. I have talked previously how much I despise the UK benefits system, and this opinion has not changed over time, with me very much not looking forward to when I eventually have to go back into that system to play along with their demands to get a meagre amount of money to go towards bills and small morale boosts along the way.
Though honestly, I am a long way off needing to play the Jobcentre game, both because I currently have too much saved for them to even consider helping me out, and with the way my final paycheck worked out I will not even be eligible to say I am out of paid work until July – which by that point, who knows what could have happened?
What I wrote above comes off as fairly pessimistic, and well, being honest, I do feel rather pessimistic right now. In addition to sleepiness over the weekend, I ended up having a lot of negative feelings in relation to being unemployed, even going so far as to cry heavily into my pillow some nights because the loss of my professional identity ended up hitting way too hard.
I cannot recall how much I have used that phrase in previous reviews since losing my job again, but that is probably the most succinct way of describing how I feel.
The way I was conducting myself professionally was not really healthy for me. I was burning out hard, losing passion for the work I did, and coping through seriously unhealthy ways – but at the same time, to not have that in my life anymore leaves me extremely listless in a way that feels particularly oxymoronic.
It is painful.
It is confusing.
It makes me doubt my every move.
And that is why I need to keep writing.
Even when I do not feel like it.
Even when the world feels painful.
Even when what I have to say is negative and borderline vitriolic in some ways.
Because I do not want to fade away… and if it were not for my writing, all of this would stay stuck inside me.
I will make it through, no matter the pain, no matter the pessimism, no matter the cost.
It feels weird to try segue into a VTuesday segment after talking about such pessimism, but considering the individual I want to discuss today, I think it all fits.
The title of this review is “Independent and Resilient”, which is the alignment of my independent VTuber kamioshi of Matara Kan, a beautiful giant roach woman whose perseverance has inspired me greatly.
Formerly of the agency VShojo, which crashed and burned extremely hard just under a year ago, Matara has now been continuing to carve her own path as a fully independent VTuber. She was even a guest at Vexpo last year, taking part in both the opening concert and a Meet & Greet, both of which I had the absolute honour of attending.
I mentioned it briefly in my Vexpo rundown, but it is worth re-emphasising that I got absolutely stunlocked by Matara as I went into the booth for my Meet & Greet with her. I had my questions in mind, I was ready to talk to her about different topics, I was a confident person who, whilst a little socially awkward, would be able to talk to a VTuber she absolutely loved.
“Ooo, you’re stylish~” “Rosa? That’s a gorgeous name.”
Brain? Gone. Words? Fumbled. Feelings of flattery? Off the fucking charts.
I still managed to ask my questions, but in part due to my brain going haywire and the convention noise spilling in a little bit, I do not think I fully processed what she was saying back to me.
So I just ended up gushing.
Loving her resilience. The ability to carry on in the face of hardship. I did not explicitly mention to her about losing my job, but I think I mentioned having my own hardships and being inspired by her carrying on.
It was not even two minutes I got to spend chatting with her, as when it came time for the attendant to politely signal that I should wrap up whatever I was saying, I said my thank yous and asked for a photo with her.
This is still a cherished memory.
And I recently got around to finally framing the penplotter gift that came with that Meet & Greet, taking its spot in my, slowly forming, VTuber art and merch tessellation on the old fireplace wall in my flat.
Independent and resilient… I will embody those words as best as I can going forward. Even when the days feel dark, I want to try hold myself strong in the face of uncertainty.
I just hope this is not empty fluff I am using to hype myself up.
Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope you are doing okay. Things feel tough right now, and if you are struggling against it all right now, I hope you find the strength to win your battles.
Good morning valedictorians and salutatorians, welcome to Day 360 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.
The initial concept for today’s piece was going to be a quick-fire review of each plate I had at the buffet I went to today, just going through one after another especially considering I have spent the full day outside going on a date with my partner.
But inspiration hit me partway through eating at the buffet for a reflective ramble, and I want to see how far I can run with it.
I was thinking about my previous record number of plates I have ever eaten at a buffet, which stands at a lofty six plus a plate of desserts, which I set when I was around eighteen or nineteen – it was definitely a pre-university event at the very least and I started my undergrad work at nineteen.
Even today I consider myself a big eater, but my teenage appetite was something else, even if that appetite manifested as my eyes being bigger than my stomach more often than not. I would see the biggest plates on menus at pubs and go “that please”, I saw buffets as a way to challenge my previous record rather than ways to experience new dishes, and I indulged in junk food way too often, eventually leading to my weight struggles of today.
The times of being a big eater as a teenager were not without consequence though. There are at least two hands worth of incidents where I would go out with family or on my own, eat far too much, and then immediately upon getting home my body would give me the signal that I had severely fucked up and was about to pay a dire price.
Although I have to admit, having that number of incidents under my belt has taught me when to stop, and knowing when not to keep eating at risk of ruining a delicious meal by piling too much on top.
Which definitely came into play today, as I blasted through plates one, two, and three. Upon starting plate four I quickly realised I was coming close to fucking up again, only really stopping myself properly when my partner told me to.
I am not going to say that I am “getting old”, I would have particular friends jump down my neck for saying that. But it is time like these that I reflect on how tenacious and resilient I was as a teenager with the feats I was able to accomplish.
Past Rosa is not a good person, and I am very glad I am not her anymore, though I have to be thankful for what she achieved. Windmilling seven plates at a buffet only to go home and be able to jam Binding of Isaac till three in the morning to unlock some of the hardest achievements in the base game at the time.
I hope if she knew where she ended up, she would look at me with fondness.
Anyway, back on track to actually talk about the plates I had at the buffet. The place is called “Umami: World Kitchen”, and me and my partner decided to go there today as a treat after having a day of shopping and watching The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act in cinemas (the review of that will come after the episode drops on Youtube – I may be a small creator, but I am not violating the request to withhold spoilers until its out). The price is £21.99 plus £4.75 for a bottomless refills soft drink, for two people plus a 3% service charge came to £53.75 overall, which is on the higher end for a night out, but considering the offerings available, I thought it was great.
Plus part of the fun of buffets is seeing what food crime combinations you can create with each passing plate, with my first one being a bizarre combination of:
Pepperoni pizza
Mac and cheese
Garlic bread
Tandoori chicken
And yes, I did use my pizza crust to mop up the leftover tandoori marinade on my plate, it was strangely delicious as a combo. Though, after putting my plate together I did realise my mistake of loading on the carbs early as opposed to trying out more vegetable and protein based offerings to ensure more room in the stomach…
…so I said “fuck it” and just decided to keep going down the route of carbs just to see how much I could, following up plate one with a second plate filled to the brim with offerings from the nacho station:
Tortilla chips
Cheese sauce
Sour cream
Salsa
Jalapeños
Nachos in general are something I love to have at restaurants. Neon yellow cheese sauce hits different in a restaurant and I do not want to pretend otherwise, plus the sour cream was thick as all hell rather than being runny, which made it perfect to dollop on top of the tortilla chips.
Plate three came next, going with a decidedly American-style offering:
Double beef burger, with ketchup and mayo
Chips
Onion rings
Chicken nuggets
Buffalo chicken wings
It felt a little weird that I could not see any cheese on offer for the burgers, but considering I had already gone a bit hog wild on this plate and previous ones, it was not too much of a miss. Buffalo wings were a bit… meh, not really sauced, or fried, or anything that makes a Buffalo wing a Buffalo wing honestly, though when it comes to buffets, I tend not to have too high a standard as I know I am paying for quantity more than anything else.
Plate four came along, and considering the fact the list looks like this:
Stir-fried rice noodles
Sweet and sour chicken
Salt and pepper squid rings
My appetite was definitely satiated and my overload of carbs finally started to catch up with me. I was barely able to finish this one, partially due to fullness, partially due to the sweet and sour tasting not all that great, when I finally rang the bell on the savoury.
Not on desserts though, I was not about to leave without tasting some variety of sweet treats, with the plate including two pieces of vanilla cheesecake, two pieces of chocolate fudge cake, a piece of Eton Mess cake, and a soft serve ice cream cone that was split between myself and my partner.
Overall, I think I did a respectable effort. Four-ish plates plus a shared dessert plate is an admirable achievement considering all I had eaten in the day before this point was a piece of rocky road, a few slices of chorizo, and a can of energy drink…
…y’know, writing that down might not help the case that I have grown out of being a teenager. Oh well, I still strive for constant growth, meaning I will be constantly making poor decisions until I train myself into making the right ones.
Bit of a weird ramble, some reflection, and a lot of food. Regardless, thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope you can enjoy the weekend. Take some time for yourself, and just let the world pass you by – things are chaotic and hectic enough as is.
Good morning striders and strollers, welcome to Day 359 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.
Today is a day where I feel very stiff and sore, primarily due to all the walking I have been doing for the last couple weeks. As someone who lives in a very walkable town, most of my errands are conducted with me walking all over the place to get what I need.
Though, my affinity for walking comes down to both enjoying the ability to take in the sights, sounds, and smells… alongside the fact I am a cheap bastard where if my options are to take a bus for fifteen minutes or to walk for forty minutes, I will inevitably pick the option that does not involve spending a small amount of money and instead put my legs to work.
This came into full effect whenever I needed to take a trip to London for something related to work, where I would usually enter in from Victoria Coach Station and need to navigate to a more central part of the city such as Euston or Kensington.
Most normal people would walk the short distance to Victoria Tube Station and take a Victoria Line train that would take approximately seven minutes to whisk them away to their destination.
Me, on the other hand, who is both cheap and despises going on the London Underground with all my soul, will invariably decide that the almost hour long walk (or in real terms, anywhere between one-and-half to two miles) is the better idea, however bad it might fuck up my feet, my joints, or in the case of doing this exact thing in the summertime, my overall disposition and appearance when the sweat inevitably kicks in.
However much I complain about the pain my legs and feet are in though, I do not think I want to change how I operate in the slightest.
First off, I recognise the fact I am able to walk these long distances with only avoidable pain to show for it is an absolute blessing. Being able-bodied (if severely lazy) is something I do not take for granted and am thankful for every time I am able to breathe deep and pound the pavement to my destination.
Secondly, and this definitely applies more to when I take this approach to navigating around a city, but there is so much to organically discover when walking around a new location. This especially applies to whenever I would walk around London as part of a work trip, as my usual plan was to commute in via coach/train very early in the morning – both to avoid normal rush hour traffic and because there was no value in me working for an hour in the morning to then spend most of my time travelling anyway – and do my best to navigate to where I needed to be using only tourist maps, seeing what places I could see as I made my way to the meeting venue.
I also incorporate “getting lost” time into my schedule whenever I have to walk somewhere new, with the planning stage me being looking up how long the walk will take on Google Maps, subtracting about five-to-ten minutes to account for my naturally faster walking speed… and then adding on half an hour to take into consideration the fact I will get distracted and will find a place that catches my eye so I have to spend a short while browsing in there.
This especially came to fruition when my partner and I visited Manchester on Good Friday for him to have an initial consultation with a dress maker, they had a lot of clients before us so asked us to leave a phone number and they would call us back when they were ready.
Main benefit for me was that this dressmaker was based in a part of Manchester I had never been to before, so we were able to kill an hour or two by letting my instincts guide me around the city whilst I went “ooo look at that thing” and “hey I wanna go in here”, finding new places to discover and seeing how chain shops in a big city compared to the same I had back home.
Of course by the time we returned to the dress maker my feet were absolutely shredded and all I wanted to do was sit on the floor for a little bit to let myself recover… and even then my legs felt like they were out of action for the entire weekend afterwards, but again, I recognise all my pain is self-inflicted.
It is a worthy payoff though, cause I feel my legs are my best aspect – both in how strong they are when I actually put my mind to using them, and how fucking shapely they are because of how much I walk, naturally toning them as I go and making them look fantastic in leggings.
Now if only I were not a glutton, then I might be able to trim my waistline down just on virtue of how much I roam.
Think I will be grabbing something from the backlogs for today’s review, partially because I had an Umamusume idea to tie into glutton and legs cause they run, but I ended up getting too distracted and not taking the required screenshots or having the brain power to explain one of my favourite characters.
So instead, I will be talking about a simple burger and chips I ordered from a small local cafe, about a thirty minute walk from my place: The Tasty Table
This cost me £9.50, extremely cheap in terms of food, but there are no frills here. No Aberdeen Angus or Wagyu beef, no brioche or sourdough buns, and no triple-cooked duck fat chips. This is a catering style burger patty, with a slice of plastic cheese, served in a floury bap. Add in a bit of mayo for moisture, and you have the perfect brunch as part of a walk to go mattress shopping.
Whilst it does not look impressive, and I have certainly eaten more flavourful burgers, it is important to partake in the simpler things in life, both to remember how good things can be, and to never forget where you came from. Simple burgers from small cafes are a particular pleasure of mine – I even have a pipe dream of opening my own cafe one day – and I will always savour the most basic ass burgers I can find.
More of a story focused review today than an actual review, but I am still proud of it. Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope you are doing well. Friday is upon us soon, and for me it is going to be a busy day, but I hopefully have a good idea to try make a good review out of it all.
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.
Good morning pots and kettles, welcome to Day 338 to 357 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.
May 29th was the last day of my contract with my previous company. I leave on good terms and whilst I do wish things could have turned out differently, the nature of layoffs is to cut costs to give the business the best chance of survival when things get hard.
So, what comes next?
Decisions.
Decisions.
Decisions.
Some amount of waiting as well, as I currently have two open job applications that I need to wait to see if I get an interview or not, but if those do not go my way for whatever reason, a lot of personal decisions for myself.
One of the most pressing is deciding what I want to do as a career going forward. Early on after getting told I was going to be let go, I made a decision that I wanted to move away from the tech industry as a whole. My intention is to keep the door slightly open, partially because a good majority of my connections are within this industry, and partially because I feel I could jump back in if the right opportunity came along which somehow also managed to align with the direction I want my life to go.
But that alignment feels unlikely to happen. Even with only a short amount of time to view myself from outside the tech industry, I can see a more positive future if I slowly start to decouple myself from the professional identity I have built over the last five years.
Admin or communications are the main things that come to mind, if I want to redirect myself into a more corporate-style focus. Working with data, organising others, or being able to use my writing skills for a positive influence in an organisation.
There is a perspective in my mind that putting myself back into a corporate environment is “stifling” my own potential, when all of my major skill advancement and career moves have been within the same startup environment, giving me the flexibility and freedom to build myself up within the same place by adopting new roles as they appear.
However, and this might come off as a bit controversial, but at this stage of my life, I would happily trade freedom and flexibility for a bureaucratic structure if it gave me even a modicum of job security, especially when it would give me a launching pad for the other activities I want to do in life.
My goal in life is to try be evolving constantly. For the last five years, this was a career-focused goal, of pushing myself beyond my limits in work, climbing the ladder, and seeing where I could end up in that regard.
Having the ladder shatter beneath my feet twice within the span of the years has honestly left me kind of disillusioned with that whole notion, and has made me realise little time I have taken to evolve myself over the last two years or so. I have my Rambles, but I have not really taken time to develop it in the way I want to outside of a few standout Redundancy Reviews.
I need to work more on original fiction, which was something I did tonnes of back in 2022, and gives me the ability to be more creative with my storytelling or work on writing prompts that I find interesting, or even just scratch out a random story based on the most simple things.
Which leads in nicely to my other main decision: when do I want to go all in on job hunting again? Well, the most forward answer is: “Right now what the fuck are you talking about do you know how fucked the market is and how long it takes to find the kind of job you are describing?!”
But, that is exactly why I am hesitating on when I want to dedicate myself to the job hunt, which is a full-time activity in and of itself. I want to recover from the stress of my previous role, I want to work on my own projects as an artist, and I want to be in the best position possible before I throw myself into the seemingly never-ending grind that is finding a corporate position in the current market.
The obvious worry of this approach is financials. The cost of living in the UK is high, no thanks to successive governments not doing anything to help that in the slightest, and spending any length of time unemployed is not going to help my monetary outlook, especially as my partner is not exactly rolling in cash from his part-time job – though he is also looking for full-time work himself, which has its own set of difficulties exclusive to him.
On the flipside though, in the face of several irresponsible financial decisions I have made over the course of my life, I think I have more of a safety cushion than my contemporaries in Gen Z, which gives me a surprising amount of runway for both job hunting prospects and working on my own projects.
And that is assuming I do nothing at all, which would include not taking commissions (which I am always open for get in touch if you are curious) or selling any of my collectable items, which I am currently working through the notion of selling a good chunk of my Magic card collection.
Not for overt dislike of the game, but more because I am sitting on a good number of expensive cards that are gathering dust in a binder, and that I am unlikely to buy any new sealed product in future because Hasbro’s management of the game has fully put me off investing any more money into it.
The road ahead looks rocky, but when times look hard, I keep the immortal words of Phoebe-chan in my head.
My love of VTubers will definitely keep my spirits up as I navigate the days ahead, segueing me nicely into a VTuesday segment where I am actually going to talk about something recently released for a change rather than picking something from the backlog of awesome VTuber-related things I want to write about.
Specifically, the second original song from Densetsu.EXE, a VTuber idol group formed of Phoebe-Chan, Mint Fantôme, and Victoria Roman: “Burn On! Hot-Blooded Heroine”
So, I have mentioned Phoebe-chan before, my partner and I met at her Vexpo last year with her opening concert performance leaving a lasting impact on me to the point I bought her album and my partner bought a lightstick. Specifically my partner refused to accept change from her manager Steiner which left them both a little confused before they just went with it.
However, I have not ever mentioned Mint or Victoria, which for the latter comes solely for the fact I have not interacted much with their work outside of what they do with Densetsu.EXE, only really seeing bits of her from clips when they are all streaming together. Considering how much I enjoy her personality in those moments, think it might be an idea to properly sit down and engage with her.
As for Mint, it is now a silly goal of mine to attend a Meet & Greet with her for the sole purpose of talking to a VTuber about Ace Combat, as she has streamed Ace Combat 4 previously and someone who sounds suspiciously like her has streamed Ace Combat 7, but I am sure that is completely unrelated.
Whilst they are all nerds in their own right, they are still idols… even if this song is particularly silly more than anything else, looking to pay tribute to old Japanese sentai style shows… which I am going to be honest, I know next to nothing about so I can not really do a deep analysis on the aesthetics of this other than it is absolutely amazing to see the idols performing as heroes in their signature outfits with PNGs of their avatars imposed onto their heads, with special mention to Mint wearing the exact off-the-hanger cosplay that so many other nerds can buy.
I think the MV is also a testament to how far Steiner goes for the talents under his management. Both acting as director and starring in it as the main villain “Lord Loiter”, which is a fantastically bizarre name for something in this style, it really shows the dedication he puts in to helping the enable the girls to pursue more ambitious projects, shown in the fact that the explosions in this video are real and done with gasoline.
MV Behind the Scenes 📽 For "Burn On! Hot-Blooded Heroine"
The world's most explosive idol mic drop!!! Filmed at the Iwafune Quarry 🔥🎤🔥
The timing was hard with the drop and we only had one try at the explosion but it worked out thank goodness!!!!! 🥹 pic.twitter.com/rZB1nZ82P4
— Phoebe Chan 🐝🌸 Densetsu.EXE (@feebeechanchibi) June 1, 2026
In general, this MV is an absolute achievement for all the hard work involved by all parties, a beautiful display of what independent groups fo VTubers can achieve with the right backing and people behind them, producing high-quality works of art that show the passion that lies behind the screens and the dedication to get it done, though I think Steiner says it best himself.
If on the off chance you somehow see this, please forgive me for including your spelling error GIF response – it was too funny to pass up
Also dropping the thumbnail of the video for the thumbnail of my article, courtesy of the lovely Maid Mint herself.
Much like how this segment started with Phoebe saying “Never give up, bitch!”, I strive to never give up on myself, as my idols show what they can be capable of when you keep on keeping on.
Well, I got no excuse now, I am officially unemployed and made a declaration I want to try keep evolving my writing work, guess I got to try keep to it now.
As always, thank you for reading this edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope you are safe and keeping well. If not, then I hope my silly words about various topics have brought you comfort, if only for a short while.
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.
Good morning C-Suites and executives, welcome to Day 334-336 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.
Going to be another career focused ramble today, though one that hopefully ends off with a more positive message around my own work than anything else.
It feels easy to create career-focused articles right now because of how much is going on in my head surrounding my current career. Whilst there is a prevailing desire to leave behind startup culture with a greater motive of leaving the tech industry entirely, I cannot deny that the prospect of transitioning away from a five year career feels somewhat daunting – especially when that entire time has been spent within the corporate yoke.
The problem in my mind is that I am far too good at existing in a system that I do not want to be a part of. This especially hits home when I reflect upon my own self and how people such as myself often struggle to meld within these spaces whilst maintaining the expectations of others.
Or to drop the formal business speak: how the fuck has my trans and neurodivergent arse survived in this world for so long?
In all honesty, the answer is most definitely privilege, in that my career thus far has been surrounded by people who either understood where I was coming from – my line manager’s last message to me at Codemasters was “I hope you become the person you want to be” – or had a natural curiosity about my situation and wanted to learn more from the source rather than making assumptions based on whatever the media is saying.
Side note, if on the off chance you are somehow reading this: I am definitely the person I want to be Pete, and I hope the crazy world of EA has not swept you up too hard like it has done to so many of my other colleagues.
People understood that my brain was likely going to cannibalise itself every so often, and when I brought up my concerns to the people responsible for managing me the response was usually:
“Wow, that sucks. You’re still doing good work though so try not to stress too much.”
Which does track. I will have moments where everything sucks and my mind is eating itself alive, but I still try to deliver. I guess allowing myself to have schedule slippages on the Redundancy Review now is a sign that I am being a bit kinder in terms of how I treat my work…
…not a massive fan of the wording there, which is strange to say cause I wrote it, but I am not “allowing myself” to have breaks. The Redundancy Review is a reflection of who I am as a person, breaks in the schedule of the so-called “daily series” reflect how I am feeling in the current situation I find myself in, having lost two jobs within the span of a year.
This leads nicely into what the title is about. One of the main things you come across when applying to corporate jobs is when you start doing your research on the company you want to join, which invariably leads you to a “mission statement” or “core values” page.
Borrowed from my old haunt of EA
They usually are one word titles followed by a brief summation of what it means to the company, and it is one of the easiest wins you can find in a job application or interview by being able to quote a company’s values back at them as it shows you took the time to learn about the foundation of the company.
Considering I want to work on this site as a proper artist in the wake of this latest layoff, whilst simultaneously showing that even though I have made a public declaration to leave the industry, I still have the wherewithal to reinsert myself back into the corporate if needed: I am going to write a mission statement for Rosalia Rambles today.
Rosalia Rambles is the personal brainchild of one Rosalia Butler, an introverted and slightly neurotic writer from the UK. Her headline series is the “Redundancy Review”, an (almost) daily series which covers her adventures navigating joblessness whilst also providing an outlet for her to gush about nerdy things. In addition to this, she is a passionate fiction writer with the ability to adapt to any genre and an underlying talent to try to make any piece of fiction trans allegory.
Going forward, she wishes to adopt the following values into her work:
Humanity – The focus of the Redundancy Review is the human behind the screen. This means there will be no Generative Artificial Intelligence content hosted on this website, as to do so would be to sacrifice the integrity of the site as a whole.
Expression – Art is a reflection of the soul. Whilst there will be nuances in how certain topics are presented to maintain professionalism, ultimately this site is meant to be an expression of my true self. This means a decent amount of swearing, an unabashed joy in how I present myself as a trans woman, and very few filtered thoughts unless the situation calls for calm.
Messiness – Humans are messy creatures, and any articles or stories will reflect that messiness by presenting an unfiltered view into the soul of an artist. I will make mistakes, I will not filter feelings, and I certainly will forget to correctly place images in the future. Mistakes are what remind us we are human: we make them, we fix them, we learn from them.
Kindness – To borrow the guiding principle from my mentor: “Everyone shits. And how we deal with that is how we move forward as people.” I shit, the people behind topics I review shit, everyone shits. What matters is how we navigate the fact that everyone shits, with the overriding value of kindness above all else.
Legacy – “Life isn’t just about passing on your genes. We can leave behind much more than just DNA. Through speech, music, literature and movies… what we’ve seen, heard, felt… anger, joy and sorrow… these are the things I will pass on. That’s what I live for. We need to pass the torch, and let our children read our messy and sad history by its light. We have all the magic of the digital age to do that with.”
…yeah that last is ripped verbatim from the ending of Metal Gear Solid 2, but considering I am a card-carrying member of the Cult of Kojima, I have no shame in applying some of his fantastic writing skills to my own work.
In a sillier world I would add “VTubers” as a core value, but that is what we have VTuesday for.
Raora Panthera falls into the same category as Nerissa Ravencroft to me, in that a new generation of Hololive talent debuts and there will be one or two members I am instinctively drawn to, but the remaining members end up standing out to me in their own ways.
Specifically, what drew me in with Raora was twofold:
Her amazing Youtube shorts that either played around with her lore as a member of Justice, or just her explaining how to make various Italian dishes
Her streams of Monster Hunter World, which became frequent background noise during my work hours whenever she streamed it
The latter in particular was very good at making me a fan, as I gelled with her personality very easily and I became familiar with her more nerdy side over time.
Today’s review is about her second original song, “Draw.”, and I think it is a good example of being able to engage with art even if you do not fully understand it.
Case in point, this song is in majority Japanese with no English subtitles available, and only a few English lyrics to go off to try to discern the meaning.
Despite that, I consider this a beautiful piece of art about the nature of creation, and how art that comes from the soul is made with the purest colours.
“All the pieces I picked up Unraveled within my own chest “It’s okay,” I whisper softly Saying it back to myself”
To me, this English verse refers to the nature of an artist drawing inspiration from the world around them and using their heart and instinct to make sense of it all, reassuring yourself that art created from your own external stimuli is valid, especially if you use it to help you process the things you see.
“All the colors I held back Start to gather in the hush “It’s all right,” the first light tells me Sending warmth into my heart”
This verse refers to the artistic side struggling to express itself in the way it wants to. Colours in art can mean multiple different things, and can bring about many different interpretations, and it is good to let those colours out as an expression of yourself, letting whatever artistic muses you may have influence what you put down on your medium of choice.
The main English verse though is what made this song speak to me:
“Draw it slow, draw it true.”
Art is an inherently slow process. It can take months, sometimes years, even decades for a work to reach its true completion, what matters is that the end result is true to the mind behind the work. Speed does not matter when creating works of art that reflect the nature of the soul, the key factor is that the end result rings true to the soul of the artist.
“The effort you put forth to anything transcends yourself, for there is no futility even in death”
Monty Oum
Outside of the lyrics, the music video itself is gorgeous, reflecting what it means to be an artist with delightful visual references to programs, tools, and silly little doodles present throughout as well.
I love the medium of VTubing, especially as VTubers from across the spectrum of corporate to indie all put in immense effort to their creative contributions to the world. I often use the phrase “digital puppetry” to describe VTubers to people who might not be familiar with the topic, but the medium itself goes far beyond such simplistic terms, as every VTuber is an artist in their own right, no matter what area of expertise they specialise in.
A perfect blend of corporate speak and talking about the nature of being an artist, all the while affirming what I consider to be the “mission statement” of the Redundancy Review – this might be one of my best works yet.
Thank you for reading today’s edition. Wherever you are, I hope the week is treating you well so far. The world continues to turn even if our bodies are catching up to that fact, and whatever we do this week, we can smash it.
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.
Rosalia Rambles 