Rosalia Rambles

Tag: new years

  • Redundancy Review: Day 205-206, “New Year, New Bingo”

    (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 starters and appetisers, welcome to Day 205 and 206 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    So starting my year off with period cramps was fun, and led to me using the first day of a year to just rest, relax, and partake in recreation. Sleeping in, followed by a shit tonne of gaming, capped off with a takeaway pizza and even more gaming – what is not to like?

    But now, things are slowly starting to return to some kind of routine. My partner has received a new work schedule so we have a clearer idea of what kind of days off/holidays we can take in the near future, and I return to work in three days time to see out whatever might be left of my current contract.

    I could spend more time relaxing, but I feel getting myself back into a writing rhythm is the best idea, especially considering one of my new bingo card goals.

    Did one of these last year with my friends, and considering how well it went we have decided to do another round. I feel my card this year is a bit more toned down compared to the goals I set last year, there are some new ones entirely, some based around travel, and a couple of returning goals that I would definitely love to see.

    So, I figured for the first post of the year it would be a fun idea to go through all of the goals, explain the logic behind them a little bit, and explore any challenges/obstacles I think I will encounter with them.

    Starting from the top left, we have:

    Set up spare room properly for friends who want to stay: Pretty self-explanatory, my partner’s gaming room currently contains a very nice bed frame we need to get a mattress for. Once that is sorted we can host friends travelling from abroad who need a place to rest or for anyone to stay over if they need space away from their current situation for a night or two.

    VExpo 2026: Mentioned in my year-end ramble as one of my main highlights of last year, this year I definitely want to attend VExpo again and make it another weekend to remember. Financials and job situation might influence how it takes shape later on in the year, but I know I want to make it

    Write semi-fictional story about being transgender: My mentor Gabi always told me to “write the bloody book already” whenever we talked about writing, and I definitely have the idea in mind for one. My goal is to write a story that can help those transitioning later on in life, creating something that helps those who start their transition past their mid-twenties or even later on than that, something that says “you do not have to have your shit together to make a change for your own happiness”. It is a story idea that has stayed in my mind, and it would be great to bring it to life this year.

    100% Ace Combat 8: Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve comes out this year at some point, and given how much I absolutely love the franchise along with my goal to generally 100% more games this year, it would mean a lot to me to push for 100%ing the latest entry soon after it comes out… provided it does not get delayed for any reason.

    Get VTuber reference sheet drawn up (Phox, Hina, Axolotl): It should come as no surprise that I have aspirations to be a VTuber myself, though I recognise it is a long journey to get to that point, hence why the goal for this year is set at a more reasonable level of just getting the reference sheet together. Additionally, I have not yet settled on what concept I would want to pursue properly, having the options of my phoenix-fox (phox) fursona, a character I lovingly title “Hina Relucta”, or some nebulous concept involving one of my other favourite creatures, the axolotl. Hopefully I can develop any of these out over the course of the year.

    Write 180 Redundancy Review posts: Had to include my rambles as a goal this year, and considering I managed 120 posts last year, figured I would up the milestone a bit to make it 180, just under half the year worth of posts or averaging about one every two days. Of course it seems a bit silly to say “I will write a daily post about every two days”, but I want to be realistic and consider that the schedule will almost certainly slip throughout the course of the year due to any number of external stimuli.

    Get a Switch 2: Simple and to the point, I would not be opposed to upgrading my Switch hardware to enable myself to not only play new releases that catch my eye, but to also enjoy previous entries in the Switch catalogue without dealing with the persistent performance problems that plagued the original hardware… looking squarely at you Pokemon Scarlet and Violet.

    Visit Swansea again: Near to the end of last year my partner and I took a trip to Swansea for a Hololive Card Game tournament where we were the only two participants. This was a fun time not only for engaging in the event but also for exploring the town and spending time with my partner’s family, a fun weekend trip I would definitely like to repeat at some point this year.

    Get back into miniature painting: The title is vague but make no mistake, this is me relapsing into Warhammer. I would like to actually make this relapse productive though rather than just chasing the need to build something with my hands again, hence why I have been building up a modest collection of old rulebooks from my glory days of playing the tabletop and would be looking to paint my armies properly as well. Fourteen year old me may have been onto something back in the day, so may as well see if she really did have the right idea.

    Acquire clothing made out of exotic materials: What exotic materials you may ask? I am afraid that is for me to know and for you to guess fruitlessly… but considering I am already engaging in innuendo you can probably guess it is something that would not be leaving the house. 

    Start to declutter the flat/find homes for things on the walls: An extension to a goal last year to get more picture frames and hang cool stuff around the flat, this is to reduce the amount of general clutter around the flat by placing things in dedicated homes or by getting more wall mounted hooks to display things properly – specifically foam dart blasters, and potentially looking at downsizing the collection if space starts to become limited.

    Host three board game/cheese board/cheese game/board board parties: Having a stroke near to the end aside, I mentioned that I wanted to spend more time with friends this year, and having made myself a modest cheeseboard at the start of the week has inspired me to host friends to play board games, eat cheese, or do both at the same time. For additional clarification: playing MTG Commander with my usual group does not count toward this goal, it has to be non-MTG games played for it to count towards the party goals.

    Free Space: You have a free space in your bingo board that you do not know what to fill with? Why not Wynaut Zoidberg?

    Go to Glasgow twice to see family: In the wake of my redundancy last year I resolved that I would spend a bit of time up north in Scotland with my brother, sister-in-law, and nephew. It was an extremely fun time, and, finances permitting, I would love to spend more time up there with them, especially as my nephew is growing up extremely fast and it would be nice to be around more with him.

    Go back to a full blonde dye job: Another returning goal, and one that is more personal to my look. Ever since dying my hair fully blonde mid-way through 2023 and feeling how much euphoria it gave me, I want to go back to it. This can be done at home or in salon, but given how much hair I have and how much of a nightmare it is to take care of on its own, I would rather leave this one to professionals even though the price increases dramatically for that.

    Do my full write up on Expedition 33: Even when the dust settles after the new update, even when the conflict that the Game Awards inevitably brought is forgotten, and even when discussion of the game has likely petered out entirely, tomorrow comes. Expedition 33 was a major part of my gaming journey towards the end of 2025, and I still want to share my experience with it as part of my blog.

    100% Nier Replicant and Nier Automata: Hideo Kojima is not the only Japanese game director I have a fascination with, as I also hold a considerable amount of fondness for the works of Yoko Taro, the creative mind behind the Drakengard and Nier franchises. 100%ing both Nier titles on PC is definitely an interesting undertaking, especially given the man’s fondness for insisting on collecting all weapons and playing the game multiple times to see everything in the story, but I want to push myself to experience both games – pain of poor game design choices included.

    Acquire more houseplants: Green is good. Houseplants are good. I want to fill more of my living space with green plants and continue to let new life grow within the boundaries of this flat.

    Find a new full time, permanent job: A goal that is at odds with one another, as fulfilling this sometime within the next six months would almost certainly kill the goal of writing 180 Redundancy Review posts this year, but getting myself back into full time and permanent work would do wonders for both my self-esteem and general situational stability that would enable me to continue living the life I want to.

    Get down to a sub 100cm waistline: Yet another returning goal, but one I hold a fair bit of pessimism for. I definitely want to get my figure down to where it has been in the past, where I was able to fit into a large-size off the shelf cosplay back in my early university days. Simultaneously though, I know my love of food and treats will get in the way of that one massively without major life changes in terms of activity, but we will see how things go.

    Visit Bristol: Bristol was a city I absolutely loved getting the opportunity to visit growing up, either going to a gig for one of my favourite bands growing up or passing through on the way home from a family holiday. Being able to return to the city as an adult and exploring the surrounding area with the resources I currently find at my disposal would be a fun weekend away, and one I know my partner would appreciate for other reasons as well.

    Don’t be so hard on myself when things go awry: Nebulous? Yes. Difficult to measure? Yes. Something I want to try improve on nonetheless? Yes. When things go wrong my lack of self-esteem can and will punch me down severely if given the chance, and this year I would like to try hold myself higher when plans go off the rails or I need to adjust my approach based on changing circumstances.

    Custom cosplay (Hololive? Umamsume? Rosalina?): The penultimate returning goal from last year, now with a bit of added flavour text. Previously I attempted to get a custom cosplay of Shiori Novella from Hololive English Advent which did not end well, but it has not disheartened me. I would still love to get a custom cosplay, though my options have expanded. Hololive is still included, but given my current addiction problem hyperfixation of Umamusme: Pretty Derby, there are definitely options I can take from horse girls. And of course, there is always the goal that would make my childhood self happy, cosplaying as Rosalina from Mario Galaxy – an oddly thematic one given the release of the Mario Galaxy movie coming this year.

    Go to a furmeet: The final returning goal, and a simple one. For someone who is part of the furry community, I do not engage in as many IRL events as I would like to, which is something I definitely want to change in the coming year.

    100% Armoured Core 6: And now the true final goal, a gaming related one to 100% Armoured Core 6: Fires of Rubicon. A series I have not engaged in before but has caught my eye solely for it being a mecha game and me having an absolute love of anything mecha, mechanical, or heavy weapons related.

    That covers every goal, and that covers everything for the first Redundancy Review of 2026. Thank you for reading this edition, wherever you are I hope you have had a relaxing start to the year and that you have set yourself goals that are reasonable, achievable, and help to make you the person you want to become.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 202-204, “The Patent Pending Year End Ramble”

    (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 closers and finishers, welcome to Day 202, 203, and 204 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    I’m waiting in my cold flat when the bell begins to chime
    Reflecting on this past year as it doesn’t have much time
    ‘Cause at twelve o’clock, they take me to the New Year’s Dawn
    The sands of time for me are running low…

    Bit of an Iron Maiden reference to end the year off. Was sitting here trying to think how to write an opening to the year end ramble and Hallowed Be Thy Name just got right into my head.

    2025 is almost over, and for a lot of us it has been one right stinker of a year. There have been plenty of high points throughout the year where the light of hope shined brightly to break through the darkness, but true to the sequence of days this year started with, it really was a “WThF” kind of year.

    Not sure what a “ThFS” year looks like, but I am ninety-percent convinced it cannot be worse than what this year was.

    I am going to get all the negatives out of the way first, because there is:

    1. A lot of them
    2. I do not want the positives being buried by the negatives
    3. Holy shit this year went so wrong in so many ways

    Going to start with the elephant in the room: redundancy. The whole reason I am sitting here writing a series with that word in the title. Working in the tech industry often means that you await news of your next funding round or new business arriving in with bated breath, desperately yearning for a job where you work on a ThinkPad instead, but when the reality hits that you really do not have a job anymore, it hits like a truck.

    For me, I was anticipating it, and had begun job searching anyway… though I was not anticipating it so soon in the year, I was at least expecting to see 2025 in my previous role, so getting sideswiped in May was not fun in the slightest.

    In the wake of being laid off, the lingering resentment I hold towards the UK government came right to the forefront as I navigated the Insolvency Service, Universal Credit/Jobseekers Allowance, and then setting up as a sole trader with HMRC, fighting through bureaucracy at every moment in the short month I was unemployed. 

    Which, yeah, I was only actually unemployed for a month after officially being made redundant. I cannot imagine how some of my former colleagues feel struggling to find work several months after the fact, because that month felt simultaneously long and slow to me.

    Even with the future still uncertain, I do feel I have developed a fair bit due to doing this contract role. Has it been challenging in its own way? Of course it has, I still struggle to reconcile who I want to be with who I currently am, which has been the source of several mental challenges over the course of the end of the year, not helped by seasonal depression being an absolute monster this time around due to how grey and wet the end of the year has been.

    I do feel hardened by everything I have gone through, and not necessarily in the cold & cynical way I was initially on the path of earlier in the year. I still put too much of myself into things that will likely not return the same love and care, leading to me overusing my energy during the day leaving very little in the tank for the evenings and making it so my weekends are more focused on recovery than actually enjoying myself. 

    But I feel myself slowly gaining an acceptance of the future holding whatever it has for me, as much as I feel a latent desire to be in control of my fate. There is very little I can do to change things other than stay the path I am on and wait for opportunities to arise, which this year has definitely had a lot of good ones.

    That is enough about job stuff, time to move on to some minor negative things.

    First off: a custom cosplay going awry two weeks before my big convention holiday to VExpo. That really sucked, even though the resolution to it was an overall positive due to me getting a full refund for shoddy work. It has at least taught me to be extremely anally retentive and specific when it comes time to define the specifications for a new custom cosplay in the new year, a goal I definitely want to try again with, though maybe not entirely with Hololive this time around.

    Secondly, and I mentioned this in the last Redundancy Review: having to fight an online fashion community for besmirching my partner’s honour, another event that came with a lot of negatives, but has some positive linings.

    Was it a traumatic ordeal for the both of us to navigate false and inflated accusations from a bunch of elitist randoms online? Yes

    Did it take away three precious days of our life navigating the ever changing goalposts those upjumped Discord mods enforced upon us? Yes

    Was our privacy violated by the amount of guilty until proven innocent assumptions a group of sad, lonely, and bored timewasters inflicted upon us? Yes

    Did I get a fucking thrill from taking their arguments apart piece-by-piece in an extensive Google Dockey and having a grudge to hold on to in order to live a beautiful life for both me and my partner out of sheer spite? You bet your arse I do.

    And again, if anyone from that fashion community is reading this post because you still feel the need to cyberstalk us, read my words carefully. I am more than capable of holding this grudge until the two year waiting period is up, and then holding it beyond that point to fuel the spite even further.

    God that feels good to get out of my system.

    And finally: not spending enough time with friends, something I have been working on fixing in the last months of the year and want to work on more in the early months of 2026. From pulling out of social engagements at the last minute, having clashing plans that prevent me from making the most of my time with people, or just simply having my mental demons catch up with me at the worst times, there has been less time I have spent with the people I care about most in my life.

    Think that covers every major bit of negativity this year, time to move onto the way more positive aspects of the year.

    Starting with another elephant in the room: VExpo, the absolute highlight of my year, and focus of the best & biggest piece of writing I did this year what do you mean this was almost four months ago now what the fuck it was day 90 I wrote that and we’re on day 204 now.

    VExpo gave me a taste of a life I did not actually think I would have again. One of going out to conventions, meeting like-minded individuals who enjoy the same hobbies that I do, spending time engaging in all my silly hobbies and coming back feeling both the lows of post-con depression and the absolute high of experiencing such a wonderful event with so many memories made.

    It is my goal to return for VExpo 2026, and I want to make next year’s trip even better than the one this year, with hopefully the convention itself stepping up their game to put on an even better show.

    Next up, it has actually been a great year for me in terms of gaming and pushing myself to 100% complete various games, the proudest of which I definitely think is either Monster Hunter Wilds for the surprising reward of the size grind in that game due to how investigations work and how my friends and I were able to share investigations with one another, or Death Stranding Director’s Cut, for the fairly straightforward nature of all its achievements and the fact it is a Kojima game, so I was absolutely enthralled the entire time.

    It is something I would like to bring forward into 2026, picking up previous projects to finally finish off like Mass Effect Legendary Collection and finding new ones like Space Marine 2. Achievements are always special to me, and pushing myself to 100% games is something I seriously enjoy.

    One part of this year that has ended up surprisingly well for me is actually my financial situation. Without going into too much detail and oversharing sensitive information, for someone who lost their job in the middle of the year I actually end this year off with a stronger savings position than what I started in, almost doubling what I had at the beginning. Of course I still have to worry about taxes in a couple months time which will take a decent chunk back out of that savings cushion, but the fact I can be in a position to not be overly worried about that time is incredibly reassuring.

    And finally, I want to end this post off with what I think is definitely one of the biggest positives of this year.

    This.

    The Redundancy Review.

    A series born out of an unfortunate event, turning into my biggest writing project of my life, with several ups and downs and a lot of missed days, I still end this year off with:

    • 120 posts covering 204 days
    • Approximately 120,000 words across those posts, averaging about 1000 words per post and 584 words per day
    • 54 total food and drink reviews
    • 16 posts about VTubers and VTuber related content
    • 1044 views since kicking off the Redundancy Review

    All of which are insane milestones to consider when 2024 was one of my worst years for writing, and 2025, through a shit circumstance, ended up being one of my best.

    The year ends with a certain amount of uncertainty over my future still, but even in the face of adversity, I made the most of this year with amazing goals achieved nonetheless. For the thumbnail, I am going to post the bingo card I made at the start of the year alongside a group of friends in lieu of standard “resolutions”, which turned into a much more fun way to track the year gone by.

    And that does it for the Year End Ramble, and for the year. Thank you for reading this edition of the Redundancy Review, wherever you are, be it in the past or in the future, I hope you are doing well, and that life is on a steady path for you.

    2025 is ending, let us hope 2026 is a year of far simpler times.