Rosalia Rambles

Tag: love

  • Redundancy Review: Day 367-371, “Staying Positive”

    (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 pioneers and explorers, welcome to Day 367 to 371 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    No, I am not ashamed for empahsising that number, thank you for asking.

    And if you did not notice, now you do.

    Small moments of brevity like this are what helps to keep my morale up when a lot of my life is shifting in drastic ways around me. From hanging out with friends to share silly jokes, to sitting down and playing video games with people I care about deeply, taking that time where possible really helps to stop my mood completely plummeting into negativity.

    That is not to say I am completely immune to negative moments, and admittedly the reason I am writing about this topic today is because my mind has been fixated on so many negative things that I want to try talk about what I do to stay positive in the face of massive life changes.

    One of the simplest things I have found positivity in ever since losing my job has been the ability to drink coffee without it feeling like a crutch or something that is “essential” for me to function through the day. Granted, I am someone who still needs an amount of stimulants in my system in order to be at my peak, but there have been moments where I think to myself, “I want a coffee”, rather than “Oh dear god I need coffee right now”, and because my day is dictated at my own pace currently I do not need to gulp it down as fast as possible to get the blood pumping.

    I think in general the fact I am taking life at a slower pace currently is both helping and hindering my mindset. Helping in that I do not feel constantly rushed by everything going on and the pseudo-urgency of corporate deadlines so I can work on projects at a comfortable speed rather than feeling ashamed that I am not doing everything all at once to make sure things get done.

    Though, it hinders me because some days all I feel I am doing is filling the time with activities to do nothing but distract me because I will get to the end of the day feeling accomplished with what I have done before the realisation sets in that I have to do it all again tomorrow and the things I did do have not sufficiently made me tired enough to sleep, leading to a restless night as negative thoughts creep back in.

    To borrow a quote from Umamusume Pretty Derby Season 2: “Has one day… always been this long?”. Fucking heartbreaking line in context, but it is one I have found myself relating to a lot these past days.

    Writing helps as well, but, some days it definitely feels harder to have the bandwidth to sit down and recount what I have been feeling, or even feel settled long enough to write something coherent about my day… which is weird to say on my writing blog.

    I do not want to call it “writer’s block”, because I do not particularly feel blocked on what I want to say, but whenever I try to write recently my head feels unbearably full with me needing to force myself to focus…

    …the fun part about being consistently inconsistent is that I wrote this paragraph, took a break, and then ended up sleeping for two hours before needing to do evening errands.

    I think I am going to skip ahead to the review, as it talks about a VTuber song I have wanted to discuss for ages and I do not want to lose another VTuesday along the way because I cannot write a preamble piece.

    So let the madness commence!

    The Hololive English Justice pair of Cecilia Immergeen and Gigi Murin is lovingly referred to as “Autofister”, due to Ceciilia being an ancient automaton and Gigi being… the fister.

    Cause of her massive power fists.

    These two are an absolutely chaotic pair with an amazing onscreen dynamic, Gigi’s chaos perfectly contrasting with Cece’s reluctance to play along whilst trying to maintain somewhat of a reserved facade, with both of them eventually aligning on things and letting all hell break loose.

    This is perfectly reflected in their annoyingly catchy song, with several fun visual gags throughout including:

    • “I’m fifty shades of fucked up”
    • Recreating The Creation of Adam but with their designs
    • The “argument” before the final chorus starting by showing the editing timeline of the video
    • And honestly the entire argument sequence is filled with great on-screen gags inbetween the two of them bickering in the background

    The part I want to highlight in particular is the bridge that comes right after the argument, as I feel those lyrics really resonate with what Autofister means:

    “All our fun must come to an end
    But at least you’ve found a friend
    So let us play and stay forever

    Now together!”

    These two came together as colleagues in Justice, but have formed a genuine and sincere friendship together that generates extremely memorable moments on stream, but does so in an extremely heartwarming way to see the two of them interact. If it were not for Hololive, there is a good chance these two would not have found each other, and even through the company’s many persistent issues, there is still beauty to be found in what the girls can create together.

    Feels like I have not written a lot, but there is only so much I feel I can do analysis wise on a song that is ultimately just a very silly project between two friends who work together. Give it a listen, I went through it three times as part of writing this and I am not even starting to get sick of listening to it.

    As the title suggests, it helps me stay positive.

    Thumbnail picture inbound…

    Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope you are doing well.

    Let us keep doing our best every day.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 366, “Continuing as I mean to go on”

    (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 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.

    I hope you can too.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 365, “One Year On”

    (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 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.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 361-364, “Independent and Resilient”

    Redundancy Review: Day 361-364, “Independent and Resilient”

    (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 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.”

    Ueigrhauairhgetiow4jrgutorhgier09ghonvjer09withugbnoq4rphjgb4508gh9ndsght0j

    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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    A taste of power perhaps?

    Or succumbing to the dark side entirely?

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

    But why the Farsight Enclaves specifically?

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

    “Through fire, revelation
    Through revelation, rebellion”

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

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

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

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

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

  • Redundancy Review: Day 338-357, “Decisions, Decisions”

    Redundancy Review: Day 338-357, “Decisions, Decisions”

    (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 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.

    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.

    Keep going. I will if you will.

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

    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.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 330, “Late Night Struggles”

    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.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 329, “Tidying Time”

    Redundancy Review: Day 329, “Tidying Time”

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

    Good morning caretakers and clearers (yes that is a word, I specifically looked it up), welcome to Day 329 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Remote work means that I do not have to consider the same factors as other people do:

    • There is no commute to worry about, freeing up on average two hours
    • I live in a very walkable town that has numerous local amenities for lunch and food shopping, meaning I can do those errands on my lunch hour
    • During my breaks from work, I can make small dents into the housework list as a way to get away from the screen and decompress my mind
    • And because I only had a few meetings a day, I could spend my focus energy on actually getting the job done rather than having my social battery drain bit-by-bit

    All of these are an extreme privilege to have against modern work culture, and asking someone who works longer hours and also has to deal with a commute to give up their paltry time in the evening or any amount of time during the two weekend days they get to work on a personal project feels, in equal measures, performative and exploitative.

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

    Like Nerissa Ravencroft from Hololive English Advent.

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

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

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

    …well…

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

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

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

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

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

    Keep on keeping on.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 322, “Comfort”

    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.