Rosalia Rambles

Tag: reviews

  • Redundancy Review: Day 457, “The common topic of sleep”

    Redundancy Review: Day 457, “The common topic of sleep”

    (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 insomniacs and narcoleptics, welcome to Day 457 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    I am rapidly running out of words relating to sleep to open things up with, which is not surprising considering I have written around ten reviews where the topic of sleep, either too much or too little, is brought up as the main body of the article that day.

    Today is in the latter category of “too little”, as I was up till around two in the morning stuck in a thinking pattern, alternating between having my brain slow down in the hopes of finally giving me the blessed sleep I crave before suddenly thrusting anxiety into the forefront of my mind once more giving me about ten minutes of feeling on edge with rapid thoughts running through my mind before it calms down again.

    Usually in those moments would be the moment I reach for a CBD gummy to help quiet the mind and allowing myself to sleep, but I have been holding back from taking them recently for a handful of reasons:

    • I am halfway down my last jar and really do not have the funds to restock myself at this current moment in time
    • I had a bad experience with one a couple weeks back and have been hesitant ever since
    • And I want my system able to receive the blessed relaxation as best as possible for Vexpo sleep next week because I will certainly need it

    Thankfully the day is not too stacked for me, though I do have some more job applications at the local council I need to work on before my time away. Local government has been the main focus of my applications since being laid off three months ago, primarily in pursuit of acquiring better benefits – especially a more robust pension benefit because whilst I do not fully believe I will be able to retire for one reason or another, it would be nice to actually care about my future rather than be dismissive.

    I definitely have some amount of savings in my pension, although it is simultaneously nowhere near what the guidance says it should be for my age and also looking damn fine if I start to run low on funds if this job search gets more protracted than I would like it to be.

    Plus there is the fact that writers never usually fully retire from work, as our bodies fail keeping our minds sharp is more important than ever, meaning we will be working on our own things even long past the age of any physically or mentally demanding work, though it would still be nice to fund being an aging writer considering that making a living off writing is still as hard as ever.

    Admittedly it has been nice to start writing again, even though I know for a fact Vexpo is going to completely derail any notion of a schedule as I will be out of action from the 17th to at least the 22nd due to how much I have in my itinerary and that I will be writing the sequel last year’s Vexpo post as quickly as I can once my energy returns to me.

    For now though, it has been nice to get back in the groove, and remind myself of why I enjoy writing so much. It came back naturally to me, and even on today when I feel as if I am struggling to write, it feels good to get my thoughts down and make everything feel less heavy if only for a wonderful, fleeting moment before my reality kicks me back down.

    I love writing. There is nothing that would make me happier than getting to do this every day, and who knows? Maybe I will make it there someday.

    Until that point, I will keep rambling about all the things that make me happy, which today includes showing off one of my proudest gaming achievements to date: my collection of endemic life in Monster Hunter World.

    Due to a friend wanting to go through World on their PS5 and myself having a PS4 Pro with a physical copy of the game, we have arranged a regular game night to play through things together. Even as the franchise marches on towards Ascendance, I think there is great value to be found in the fifth generation entries of World plus Iceborne and Rise plus Sunbreak, especially on sale for stupidly low prices given how much content is packed into each game.

    Returning to World felt satisfying as all hell, and whilst there are several gameplay decisions I find myself questioning both on their own and when comparing it to the quality-of-life packed Wilds, I still consider it a nine-out-of-ten experience that any newer Monster Hunter fans should experience at least once.

    Not least because the endemic life collection system and the way you are able to display said endemic life might be one of my favourite side activities in the entire franchise.

    Once you progress into Master Rank in the Iceborne expansion and unlock the new hub area of Seliana, you also unlock a personal room area that can be decorated with ludicrous amounts of microtransaction DLCs to make it fit your taste, but more importantly it features several areas to place any captured endemic life, including both a fish pond and an aquarium.

    Particular creatures of note in my aquarium include two Petricanths, extremely rare endemic life styled after ancient coelacanths, and the Sealord’s Crestfish, an even rarer endemic life that took me so many soft resets during expeditions to find but was one of my proudest achievements once I did… oh how little did I know how hard some of the others were going to be.

    When you enter the room from the main hub area, you start on this upper balcony area that can contain endemic life both on the bannister itself and on the floor. My floor is filled with Moonlight Geckos, not particularly rare creatures compared to what else you can see in the room, but still pretty hard to find. The guest on my bannister is the far more interesting exhibit though, a gorgeous bird called the Blue Diva, an endemic life I did not even search out for and found purely by chance when on a hunt one day. Whilst I would love to find more to fill out the bannister, I think there are more pressing matters for me rather than grinding it out for multiple rare creatures.

    Especially when you take into account I have six out of seven Molys from the endgame Guiding Lands area – or as I prefer to call it, the Grinding Lands because this area is so shittily designed in terms of how you have to progress each zone for mining, monsters, and the rare endemic life of Molys and there is very little that can change my mind on this being the absolute worst way to build an endgame I have seen in any of the Monster Hunter titles I have played.

    Ahem.

    Still, the majority of the Molys is not bad at all.

    In front of my fireplace is a small family of Arrowhead Gecko, another rare creature but one with a guaranteed chance of dropping in one of the early Master Rank event quests, so I took the opportunity to grab a many as possible.

    One creature that took an absurd amount of grinding on my part is the Tsuchinoko. This illusive snake only spawns in Kulve Taroth raids near to the cannons or on the slide to area two, or in the little corridor before the optional quest of the final boss of Iceborne which is where I found it. A little fat bastard wiggling along my floor is a worthy addition to my collection.

    And finally, we come to the fish pond outside alongside the hot spring. The latter holds the singular Goldspring Macaque I have been able to find, and again whilst I would love to fill an entire spring of these, that sort of grinding is not in my cards. The former holds my pride and joy, but not for what is in the pond… although there is a second Sealord’s Crestfish in the pond as well which was so cool to find after grinding out the first one.

    Flying high above the fish pond is the Wintermoon Nettle, a rare creature that can only spawn at night in the Hoarfrost Reach locale and requires full on scaling the mountain in order to have a chance at capturing it. It may not even appear, and whilst it is possible to catch a glimpse of it from the ground I often found it quicker to run up the mountain to try find it, not wanting it to turn to day and have it despawn after taking the effort to get up there.

    This thing is massive, and floats around in the sky so elegantly. I remember when I first saw it after scaling the mountain for the god-knows-how-many’th time and knowing my quest to find the rarest forms of endemic life were at the end.

    World holds a special place in my heart for many of its mechanics, but currently no game in the franchise does creature collecting better than this one.

    Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope you are sleeping well. Losing sleep is never fun, and I hope to sleep better tonight myself.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 456, “I do not like social media”

    (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 posters and creators, welcome to Day 456 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    Considering I am posting this article online, which I will then share to my friends over Discord and then post a link on my Bluesky account for the world to see, the title may seem a little weird. Admittedly, even though a lot of what I want to discuss has probably been said by people smarter than me, in more eloquent ways, I still want to write down my thoughts.

    Social media seems like a necessary evil in the modern world. You want to stay in touch with friends or follow like-minded people for your hobbies or interests, but wanting to do that comes at the risk of seeing the dregs of the internet appears to speak down on whatever you enjoy whilst being exposed to a non-stop stream of every single horror that exists in the modern world because a handful of old men refuse to give up their power or wealth.

    Personally, I am someone who has an unhealthy relationship with Twitter. I like being able to passively engage in the hobbies I have and seeing the interactions between the people I choose to follow, but in return I end up finding myself doomscrolling long past the point of being engaged and all it does is ruin my mood when I am already in an impaired mental state.

    The answer seems easy: deactivate my account like so many people I looked up to have done so before, but as someone who has had to battle various addictions before I know going cold turkey is not exactly the right option, plus for all its faults I do enjoy seeing both my interests and random fun things when the algorithm decides to bless me rather than curse me.

    I recognise this is hypocritical, though I feel I am not alone in thinking this way. To be a writer in the modern age requires the use of social media, and if you are wanting to make this your profession you have to use it to an extensive degree for the required amount of networking in order to land reliable gigs. I will not even lie and say I do not feel anything when I see my view numbers go up or I get engagement on Bluesky, because that dopamine hits like hell whenever I know people are reading what I have to say.

    This is not to mention that my current line of work – self-reflection blogs – requires a certain amount of conceit and vanity in order to make it work. I literally write about my day-to-day life whilst trying to put a positive spin on it all whilst behind the screen I feel like my life, the world, and everything in between is falling apart. For all the complaining I will do about social media feeling fake, manicured, or astroturfed I am equally as guilty for presenting a positive vertical slice when I spent this morning breaking down into tears for almost an hour because I realise I hate the person I am becoming because of the many blows I have taken in recent months.

    At the very least, I hope what I present comes off as more “genuine” than other influencers who might talk about similar things, and I am most definitely not under any illusion to call myself such a ridiculous title. I do not even feel comfortable enough to call myself a “reviewer” despite the title of my headline series being “Redundancy Review”, because whilst I can think critically and formulate my words into critique, I really do not think anyone should take my opinions too seriously outside of “hmm, that is an interesting take”.

    Part of my dislike does definitely come from lack of knowledge as well. Whenever I am putting together a Bluesky post for anything I have posted here I feel as if I am doing it all wrong. I write out a short, but hopefully entertaining, blurb on what the article is about, say what day I am on, and then add my least favourite part of any post: hashtags.

    At the very least, I appreciate that Bluesky has dedicated feeds for writing that my work can be pushed to when I use the tags “#WritingCommunity” and “#Writing”. After that, I usually add the tags “#WordPress” and “#WP” to try push what platform I am using… for better or worse, considering I have a lot of issues with WordPress as a whole but right now the sunk cost fallacy is what keeps me here for the time being.

    After that though is where the real struggles start, as I will usually put in two additional tags related to what I have written about that day. For example yesterday was “#Hololive” and “#HololiveEnglish” to push myself to any feeds that might be about Hololive related news.

    But then I never know when to add more tags, both for respecting character limits and because I do not want to overwhelm my post with SEO-ese to try to get as many hits as possible from as many feeds as possible.

    When it comes to learning new things, I try to do as much as possible by myself and attempt to feel things out before I resort to written guides, but there is little desire to work towards or style myself as a “social media expert”, especially when I try to keep my presence minimal for my own sanity… which is a shame, cause a lot of professional writing roles are very social media focused, and I feel I could adapt myself to those roles for the right price, but I think my wheelhouse for writing roles is admittedly smaller than I would like.

    This is not even to mention my intense resentment of LinkedIn as a platform. It says something when one of my career goals, outside of writing for a living, outside of having a nice steady role I can develop in, and outside of not fearing layoffs every year at a certain point, is solely getting the ability to abandon or outright deactivate my LinkedIn account because I see very little value in having a presence on that platform and absolutely despise the level of performative I would need to be in anything I post there.

    Of course I could make my personal brand on LinkedIn of not being like everyone else on there, but again that falls into the trap of any amount of social media presence requiring some amount of conceit to dare to be “different”, or to think any perspective I have is truly unique.

    But even if my experience is the same as thousands if not tens of thousands of people, there is still value in me writing my experience out, both to record how I am feeling and in the hopes that if it helps even one person feel better, I have done something right.

    I will probably never fully extricate myself from social media, especially if I want to keep sharing my writing, though I can definitely hope for a healthier relationship in future… I still probably will not upload any of my work to Twitter, existing on that site as a trans person of even the slightest visibility feels like it would destroy my psyche beyond repair.

    One of the main challenges that has been facing me during my long writing hiatus is a struggle to engage in any of my usual hobbies besides mindlessly playing Umamusume because it requires little brain power and gives me the required dopamine to stop my brain shutting off. This does mean I have a lack of topics to talk about for Warhammer Wednesday as I have not been building models, or basing models, or doing anything at all related to building things.

    In general it has been hard to stay on track with what I wanted to do with Warhammer this year because of the blows I have taken. Back in March when I was making progress on the daily and making preparations to start painting, I felt positive about the upcoming 11th edition and was considering getting in on the ground floor with the starter set before finding out what local play groups are in my area to start meeting new people. 

    Working on getting my army into a battle-ready state would still be the goal, as I feel going out to meet new people could help me out of this current rut, but there is a lot of myself I need to work on before I feel I could be ready to do that.

    For now, I will just share a progress picture of where I am at with my main T’au force. Plenty of infantry with both Fire Warriors and Pathfinders, a small amount of heavier infantry with Crisis Suits (with plenty in my pile of shame to be built), and two choices of leader in the form of Commander Farsight or my commander in Coldstar armour, not to mention plenty of drones for tactical flexibility.

    There is also an Ethereal that came from a cheap box I managed to find on Vinted pre-layoff which does not entirely fit in with a Farsight Enclaves theme army. There is a part of me that wants to use a craft knife to cut off the head and replace it with a Fire Warrior helmet to make a “rogue Ethereal” kitbash model, one who abandoned the main empire to join the Enclaves, but is required to wear the helmet to show their loyalty to their new side.

    Things still feel hard for me, but each day I wake up I have a chance to improve things. And even if I need to cry out a lot of my negative feelings, then I will do that in the hopes of letting myself heal from all the things that bring me down right now.

    Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope you are able to stay positive in the face of adversity. The world sucks right now, but we are still here. 

  • Redundancy Review: Day 455, “Is existence enough?”

    Redundancy Review: Day 455, “Is existence enough?”

    (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 go-getters and bread-getters, welcome to Day 455 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    It finally happened.

    The first consecutive post since 11th June which was almost three months ago holy shit.

    A prophecy that was foretold in ancient scrolls has finally come to pass, and I write two days in a row once more… although I have no idea what to ramble about other than to simply throw out what is on my mind.

    I ended up sleeping in hard this morning, waking up to the sound of my alarm before doing the one thing you should try never to do when unemployed and going back to sleep. On paper, I “lost” about an hour of time that could have been used in other ways, though I tend to view these types of calculations in a more nuanced way, if solely because I know I would not be at prime functionality waking up at that initial time anyway, spending what could be viewed as a “productive” hour shaking off grogginess and waiting for coffee to kick in anyway.

    Although the above definitely reads as some amount of cope for the fact without a job, I struggle staying in a healthy routine. Staying up at late hours on weekdays doing not a whole lot of anything except zoning out to Youtube videos to numb how I am feeling which leads into sleeping in hard during the mornings to compensate for staying up that late, before dragging myself out of bed to work on whatever small bits of upkeep I can manage and perform the accursed task of job searching once more.

    Even on days where I manage to get applications done or make a good amount of progress around the house, I cannot help but feel a sense of stagnation, or rather, a feeling of yearning for what my life was like with a job. Being on the hunt for a new role is repetitive as all hell with little variation in how things play out.

    Fill in personal details, fill in supporting statements, fill in references. Double check everything you wrote down. Tweak it here and there to make it more suitable to the role. Have friends check it over. Tweak it further. Send it off. Get ghosted. Feel sad. Start the whole cycle again.

    I am no stranger to repetitive work, my primary field of quality assurance relies on performing repetitive tasks in different permutations to see where things break. Automation can minimise a lot of these tasks, but checking other paths through an experience is often something that needs to be done by hand to find where real humans will find friction or frustration.

    But there is a stark difference between the repetitive nature of job hunting versus having a repetitive job… outside of the obvious pressures that come with being unemployed.

    The main thing I miss is socialising with my colleagues over morning standup. We would often get onto the tasks for the day fairly quickly but those five minutes a day where we would chat about any random shit that had come up in any of our lives is something I was not anticipating to miss, but I find myself yearning for even the smallest conversations before getting on with things for the day.

    For all the talk I do about being a remote-first individual who will advocate for remote work in almost any role that can accommodate it, maybe office socialisation would not be so bad for me in the long run – especially if I am finding myself pining for the most basic and bland social interaction that comes in a professional environment.

    My train of thought went off on a tangent far removed from what I was intending to talk about today, but that is the magic of the Redundancy Review. A peek inside the psyche of someone on the borderline between Gen Z and Millenial, somehow finding myself sympathising with the struggles of each generation in the problem I currently face.

    What I was actually wanting to talk about today are those days where all I will really do is passively exist, where everything I need to get done in a day happens, but it feels as if nothing has ultimately happened except for the fact I have existed on that day. In some respect it could be a sign of declining mental health in the face of adversity, that days roll by into each other with no clear definition as to what happened on each day leading into existence feeling homogenised.

    I like to view it with a different lens though, one specifically of finding the positive within overtly shitty situations. For a start, being able to wake up each day in a body that feels comfortable to me is an absolute blessing that I know not many others have, and is the result of years of estrogen taking its effect. Could my body be better? Absolutely, but the work continues each day.

    Additionally, being able to wake up as a trans person each day and try to survive in a world that oftentimes feels insanely hostile to people like me feels like an accomplishment in and of itself. Holding on to hope that the world can become a better place than it is right now and wanting the world to be better when I eventually leave it are two similar ideals that help keep me persevering through the harder days.

    Sometimes, continuing to exist is all that matters in order to see another day where you can live life to the fullest.

    Outside of it being three months since my last consecutive post, it has also been just under three months since my last VTuesday and well… there is a lot I could cover. While I was gone there was a number of big releases on both my Hololive and indie fronts:

    Hololive English Justice released an original group song called “SUPERNOVA SUPER GIRL”, a high energy bop which I do not listen to often but have a super soft spot for.

    Hololive English Advent released another original song called “Spotlight”, an inspirational little number with the amazingly godlike lyric of “Aurafarming baddies in a getaway car” partway through.

    Hololive English as a whole had their fourth concert titled “Serendipity” alongside the official MV for the title song release, which I get to see a screening of this concert in under a week’s time as part of my Vexpo trip which I definitely will talk about soon.

    Shiori Novella, one of my Hololive English oshi released a four part motion comic series detailing an original story involving the Archiver herself and several other holomems in an emotional tale with some light moments that does not constitute as official canon what the hell?

    And whilst this happened before my long VTuber discussion hiatus, Rin Penrose debuted a new model that is insanely more expressive than his old one and started uploading regular videos on old Flash games which has definitely become part of my regular entertainment regime.

    So… there is a lot I missed, a lot I could discuss, and to be honest a lot of it I will probably stick in a backlog and work on it as time passes, but today I want to talk about something recent released in the Hololive space, specifically a cover song by Mori Calliope and Elizabeth Rose Bloodflame, of a hype anthem that has inspired anime fans to do the impossible, see the invisible, and fight the power.

    Yes I am fully aware paraphrasing the song is cringe as hell, but I absolutely do not care considering Gurren Lagann holds a special place in my heart. It was the first anime series I ever watched fully as a semi-aware teenager, of course I had watched Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and individual episodes of other famous series before that point, but Gurren Lagann was my first experience of watching a story all the way through and I came out the other side a changed person.

    Gurren Lagann has its weird moments, as do all anime, but I struggle to think of any definition to it other than “pure art”, a story about human perseverance in the face of impossible odds, and using those impossible odds to push your own evolution beyond its limit to overcome any obstacle in your path. 

    And I think a song that blends opera singing and rap music into a song that punctuates the most awesome mecha battles you have ever seen is the perfect definition of doing something impossible to come out with the best result.

    The opera lyrics are in Latin, and tell the story of someone praying to a god to grant them peace, rest, and sanctuary in the fact of an oncoming apocalypse, which is perfectly contrasted with the rap lyrics being about taking what you want for yourself and not letting anything, not even a god, get in your way as the song ends with the two singers dueling to be heard until all that remains is the rap singer repeating those immortal words.

    “Row! Row! Fight the power!”

    That is enough about the song itself, so what do I think of Mori and Liz singing it?

    Absolute.

    Perfection.

    There is no other way to describe this. Two singers who have diametrically opposed vocal styles, arguably two of the greatest voices in Hololive English (I love you too Nerissa) coming together to utilise their own strengths into something beautiful. I knew Liz had pipes, but I was not fully prepared for how powerful her voice was going to be in the opera parts.

    As for Mori, I actually tend to flip-flop on where I think her voice shines best. There are some of her originals where I cannot help but bop along, special shoutout to Grim Reaper is a Live-Streamer for the first original of hers where I fully appreciated her talents, but at the same time there are some songs where I listen to them and I can tell she is trying her damnedest and either the lyrics do not sit right with me or I do not think her vocal style matches the song.

    (disclaimer: not a professional music person, might be talking out my arse)

    However, there are no such qualms with her approach to the rap on this song. In fact I think it might be some of her best vocal work yet, especially when the two of them reach the dueling segment as she starts out quiet with the opera overpowering her before she rises up in the mix to overpower any feelings of hopelessness.

    Oh, and the entire thing is topped off by the key art being drawn by an artist known as Hyde/@Tabakko, an artist who I primarily follow for our shared love of a certain white fox friend, but is able to create these beautifully detailed pieces on commission for various Holomem projects, with Mori as Simon and Liz as Kamina with her fucking chest flame having little Kamina glasses on them being a small detail that elevates this from a gorgeous piece of art to a true homage to the source material.

    Given the recent news of all of the Hololive branches merging into one, dropping the identifiers of “English”, “Indonesia”, and “DEV_IS” to unify everything under a single “hololive” name, and the usual anxiety that comes from any big high-level company plays like this, it reminds me of how I have always chosen to view Hololive as a company.

    The main purpose of Hololive is to bring talented people together to create amazing works of art, original or interpretative. Hololive acts as a catalyst to these projects, helping talents access resources they would not be able to otherwise and provide connections to make projects like this come into reality.

    But the source of all these projects are the girls behind the talents, and those are the ones who need the support in whatever they do. Whether it is whilst they are still in Hololive and working the best they can within a corporate structure, or when they graduate to go do their own thing, supporting the talents at any point in their journey is the best thing to do.

    And as the somewhat Skyline Serenade concert has been able to show, you do not always need corporate backing to come together to create something magical. Sometimes all it takes is the perseverance of a few talented individuals, and those around them who can help enable amazing projects.

    Not only did I write consecutively, I wrote way more than I anticipated for how I was feeling today. Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope you are doing good in these challenging times. We can make it through together, and I know we can see a brighter day on the horizon.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 429-454, “Longer than I expected”

    (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 timekeepers and watchmakers, welcome to Day 429 to 454 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    As I have said many times in the past: it has been a while. Constantly getting trapped in my own head, trying to navigate what seems like an impossible job market, and wondering whether or not the things I have to write down are worth it at all.

    Usually when I come back to the Redundancy Review it means I have something I want to get out there and writing is the only way I feel I can comfortably convey it, or at the very least, I want to be able to wield my emotions for good rather than letting them bottle up into an almighty crash out at the expense of myself, others, or myself and others.

    The Redundancy Review has gone on longer than I expected it would. What started as a way to practice writing daily whilst chronicling my job search became a way to monitor my own feelings as I returned to work after my initial redundancy, tracing the highs, the lows, and every single rapid inversion of my own mental state in near real time for a good part of 2025… less so in 2026, which you know, could count as its own reflection of 2026 because whilst this year has held plenty of positives, there has been so many negatives as well – on both a personal level and a “I cannot control this shit but it still makes me depressed” level.

    Additionally, this current period of unemployment has gone on longer than I initially expected, currently cresting above the three month mark, although with the state of the job market it is a superposition of:

    • A long period of time for someone who has been able to get interviews but has not had any success yet
    • Not that long at all considering some people will spend an average of six months searching with some searches going into the year plus mark if they even get lucky after that

    The fact I am able to get interviews, especially for roles that are outside of my current wheelhouse, helps reassure me that I am capable of working still, and the most common bit of feedback I receive being that I come off well with an eagerness to learn, but someone else has more experience in the specific area I was interviewing for and would make a better fit… which usually means an internal candidate but there is only so much bitterness I can hold over that before it would outright consume my soul.

    What has gone on far longer than I could have ever expected though?

    Me.

    There is some solace I take in looking back at how I was in previous years, and whilst I clearly see the loss of potential there was in my past, I feel a certain comfort in seeing my past self talk about how long she anticipates to be in a point in her life, with the result usually being that the road keeps on stretching out longer than I could have ever imagined, and that whatever I worry about in the short-term usually ends up working out in the long-term.

    I am still probably going to worry about where I will be three months from now, as I continue to apply for jobs and wonder if this next interview will finally be the one to free me from the crippling uncertainty that comes with waking up each day.

    But I will always try to move forward. Even when the world feels against me, even when nothing seems to go my way, and even when all hope feels lost.

    I keep going. Best I can do some days.

    Right, time to scroll through my camera roll and see what is in my backlog that is worthy of a review…

    …yeah that will do.

    A tradition my partner and I have kept up even during this unusual time for us is taking a trip on the train every Friday to go to a local town to go shopping for a bit, usually going to Asda to get custom pizzas from the counter there because our local one is usually never open and the quality being far below when it actually is open.

    It seems silly to put on paper, but “Pizza Friday” has been something he and I have tried to do consistently for the four years we have been together, and getting to continue experiencing it together even during rougher moments is a light that keeps me going.

    Although… the review today is not going to be about the pizza, it is about the preamble to getting the pizza, as there is a lovely coffee shop in extremely close proximity to where we end up called Coffee #1, a small chain of shops (albeit owned by the same group that owns Caffè Nero in the UK) which offers one of the best professionally-made mochas I have ever tasted, alongside a good selection of savoury and sweet delights.

    My usual go-to as part of these excursions is a three piece selection: a large mocha, a ham and cheese toastie, and a piece of rocky road. Together this comes to an admittedly steep amount of £13 exactly, which would not be far above other chains in terms of pricing, though definitely something I have slowed down on going all out in recent weeks.

    That said, the quality of each individual item is above and beyond what I would expect from any of the larger chains like Costa or Starbucks. 

    To start, the mocha is unbelievably creamy whilst still retaining a strong hit of coffee in each sip, and I want to give a random shoutout to how solid the mug feels to hold. Usually when it comes to coffee shops I find myself intensely disliking the tiny handles that usually come on mugs, whereas this is a solid handle to grab onto and sip as the caffeine takes hold.

    The ham and cheese toastie is the highlight for me though, as this simple staple often sets me up for the rest of the day, with the key difference being that it is not put into an industrial toaster oven like is the norm among other chains, but it placed into a ridged panini pressed, ensuring the cheesy top of the toastie is both melty and with a slight crisp alongside the inside being gooey and delicious.

    Finally, there are very few ways you can mess up a piece of rocky road… although my controversial opinion is adding cherries or raisins into it, whilst being the traditional route, is actually a surefire way to ruin what should be a decadently sweet treat. Tangents about the optimal road construction aside, this is a perfect piece of rocky road, having a good balance of biscuit, chocolate, and marshmallows. 

    Whilst a full spread like this is probably going to be cut back on for myself in the foreseeable future to help manage funds, it makes me happy that I was still able to indulge like this to help keep my spirits up in the darker times.

    I definitely think I am off track for my initial goal of 180 Redundancy Reviews this year, but I am still here, and I am still thankful for you reading this far. Wherever you are, I hope you are keeping yourself safe the best you can. The world continues to be an unusual and scary place to exist at times, especially when things change rapidly.

    I am still here, and you are still here. We should celebrate that.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 416-428, “Loss of Potential”

    Redundancy Review: Day 416-428, “Loss of Potential”

    (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 downers and bummers, welcome to Day 416 to 428 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    The struggle continues to be real. We are back to being in a heatwave in the UK, in addition to being in a “flash drought” due to how little rain we have been getting recently, which is both depressing and terrifying, the latter for the effects of climate change getting progressive worse over here, and the former because I feel sitting down and listening to the rain would help me a little bit.

    Outside of watching the world burn, it has been a struggle to write down my thoughts because everything feels negative right now. I definitely have some good days, but a lot of days recently have had aspects of my negative mind prevail. A particular highlight includes a night where my partner and I had a heart-to-heart about my current job situation, leading to me needing to vocalise something in order to get it out of my head.

    It came after my most recent unsuccessful interview, and I was talking about how it felt to be sitting across a panel of three people in my interview outfit – an outfit that makes me look as professional and presentable as can be – and one dark thought came into the back of my mind as I was answering questions:

    “Who in their right mind in this day and age wants to hire a transgender person?”

    Admittedly… the phrase my thought manifested was not “transgender person”, it was most definitely the T-slur. I am not proud of saying/thinking it, especially in reference to my own identity, but to try deny otherwise would be to deny the serious self-image problems I have been experiencing as part of this most recent layoff/job loss.

    I am still not really sure what to call it, cause in the end I was a contractor, someone who could have been let go extremely easily at any point so it is not really a “layoff”. With a fair bit of time having passed since the initial hit, I do appreciate the amount of heads up that I was given was extremely generous, especially in the current climate of layoffs.

    Layoff might just be the easier word to say? There is a lot of nuance around my current situation, ever since the initial redundancy that triggered this entire journey, which has left me reflecting on my entire career thus far which led to an… uncomfortable conclusion about each of my previous roles: none of them ever reached their true potential, and looking back on that all makes me feel an immense sadness.

    From my first day at Codemasters, I strived to make an impression and do my best work. I was looking back through previous messages to my partner where I recapped a performance evaluation I had with my platform lead at the time, where he had mentioned that “the higher-ups had definitely taken notice of me”, which eventually led to me assuming the “second-in-command” role for my team at the time, with the idea that I was being set up for advancement in the company.

    And then along came a certain video game publisher, who put a stop to any routes I could have taken, which put me on the virtual reality path after a year of working there… which is a good thing for me, considering almost everyone who stayed with the company got laid off sometime in 2023 due to QA being outsourced to another studio, meaning any potential I could have had would have been snuffed out anyway because of that.

    I still see friends and colleagues I had at the time on LinkedIn looking for something new, up to and including the former head of QA, a man who oversaw an incredible operation out of work for such a long period of time is a terrible sight, but it is terrible that everyone got put into that position to begin with.

    But I carried on my journey, and much like with Codemasters, I tried to do my best at Immerse. Making impressions, helping out where I could, which put me on the radar of the executive producer who took me under her wing and helped to mentor me, both in the ways of production but also helping me to mature into a better person, one who could tackle any sorts of problems. I am still thankful to her for all that she did for me.

    I once again had potential, and even though I did not know it, the executive producer had put me on a path that would have led to becoming a fully fledged producer in my own right, working under a new head producer and finding my own rhythm and standing on my own two feet…

    …well the last 428 days have shown things very differently, as the insolvency process at Immerse put a stop to that potential, and it has never really been explored since because of the move I took for my contracting role as a matter of survival.

    Even that ended with my potential being snuffed out once more, leaving me in this current situation of watching, waiting, and wondering what comes next.

    If I am fully honest, I have put a pause on job searching for the time being. Summer feels like a bad time to find something new because most people are going to be on holiday, but also, part of me wants to go to Vexpo and treat that as a full reset.

    Spend the weekend partying, going to concerts, and just embracing my nerd side, before throwing myself fully into the numbers game that is trying to find a job in 2026. Who knows, maybe I will actually find someone there who could find me something to work on for the future – though the main priority is relaxation.

    It has been a while since I have posted anything on Wednesday, but I have not forgotten that we have Warhammer Wednesday around here. Although, I will not be discussing my model building escapades today… if just because I have not had the headspace to build for a while currently.

    Instead, I am going to be talking about my favourite chapter of the Adeptus Astartes, more commonly known as Space Marines – the Salamanders. Specifically through the lens of my current character on Space Marine 2, an Assault Marine.

    I have been having an absolute blast playing through the Operations and Siege modes on Space Marine 2, Player-vs-Environment missions which see you facing off against the Tyranid hordes or the legion of Chaos known as the Thousand Sons, fighting your way through infantry chaff, battlefield commanders, and the toughest elite units each faction can throw at you. 

    Assault Marines go into battle wearing a massive jump pack upon their back, allowing them to elevate themselves above the battlefield before crashing back down to earth like a meteor, soon turning into a flurry of blows against the enemy, armed with a potent melee weapon and a pistol to ensure maximum tactical flexibility when knee-deep in traitor flesh and xenos miasma.

    My current two weapons of choice are the Neo-Volkite Pistol, a concentrated beam weapon that does small tick damage on any enemy it hits whilst building up heat to culminate in a damaging explosion that can be modified to transfer heat to surrounding enemies if desired, and the standard bread-and-butter Power Sword, a versatile melee weapon that can be switched between “Power” and “Speed” style to change tactics against all sorts of enemies, whilst also serving as a potent dueling tool for heavier enemies.

    It carries a massive amount of danger, to go hurtling down towards massive groups of enemies, knowing that even if you do massive amounts of damage that stronger units will survive and you will have to fight them off, but I usually have my partner providing long range support as a sniper.

    So, why did I pick the Salamanders chapter?

    Ever since starting the game with my Assault on Black Reach starter set, I have been fascinated by the chapter, leading to me picking up the Tome of Fire trilogy and learning more about these noble warriors of the Imperium of Man.

    There are very few objective “good guys” in the world of Warhammer 40k, but the Salamanders definitely qualify under some measures. They take the safety of the general citizenry extremely seriously, often putting themselves in harm’s way so civilians can make it out alive.

    This does not mean they are soft however. They will fight with ferocious fire to defend what is right, and do not take kindly to those who would desert their posts to save their own skin rather than fighting to the end to defend the Imperium from harm.

    Also, I really like salamanders as an animal, so I would have an inclination to like a chapter named after them.

    I think that will cover everything for today, thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope you are doing well in these crazy times, and I hope that in some small way, my writing has helped you out, even if just to provide a small distraction.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 379-415, “Weltschmerz”

    Redundancy Review: Day 379-415, “Weltschmerz”

    (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 weary and wounded, welcome to another big catchup post for Days 379 to 415 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    It has been about a month since I have written anything at all, so I think the best approach is to run through what has been occupying my mind for that period of time:

    Several back-to-back heatwaves in the UK making it very hard to focus on the stuff I would normally enjoy and putting more of a focus on surviving through borderline extreme temperatures within my flat – seriously, some rooms reached between 33 and 35 degrees inside alongside high levels of humidity even with a dehumidifier running.

    I struggle with high temperatures, leading to scenarios where all I could really do was flop on the sofa in front of my, admittedly very nice, fan and play something mindless like Umamusume.

    In general I have been prioritising trying to take things slow and explore my options at my own pace… though admittedly part of that is down to sheer trauma more than anything else. There was a certain amount of pain that came from thinking about my current career situation and to some extent it broke my brain to the degree that one week all I could really do each day was cry and worry about the future.

    At both my previous workplaces, I feel that my potential was never fully able to be explored. Either through corporate bureaucracy taking hold which gimped my progression options when it came to my role with EA Codemasters, or through company financials forcing insolvency or my role simply not being required for the greater survival of the company.

    No matter what, none of these factors were within my control for career growth being limited, but it still leads me to have an ultimately negative perspective, especially when looking at the current job market in 2026.

    I know I still have a lot to give and to learn in my main field of QA, I know if I applied myself I would be able to continue growing myself as a producer or project manager, and I know that I have plenty of transferable skills thanks to my time in the tech industry.

    But I am scared of applying myself because of my past experiences, and even recently when I actually secured an interview for an apprenticeship position in food safety, an entry-level position that would be learning on the job in a way that I could utilise my insane eye for detail for benefitting the local area where I live…

    …only to get a rejection saying they went with an internal candidate who had more experience.

    That was insanely demoralising in a way that I am still feeling the effects of almost a week later, leading to me developing something similar to what I have used as the title of this review.

    Weltschmerz, a German word that translates literally to “world-pain”: a deep sadness of the insufficiency of the world. I log onto LinkedIn, and whilst I can see many people getting their bag in an extremely difficult market which gives me sparks of hope, I see just as many people talking about being caught up in layoffs and restructuring, joining ranks with people who have been on the search for a year or more. I scroll social media, and I see news stories of the world on fire, of people suffering, all the while political corruption is rife.

    When presented with this all, while trying to navigate my own difficult situation, it almost feels natural to shut down to some degree. I know a lot of the world’s problems are ultimately out of my control, and that focusing on them over my own situation is not helpful.

    But it makes it somewhat harder to plan for the future when I have no idea what that future looks like.

    All I can say for sure is that I will try to be here. Trying to write about my perspectives as one person in the middle of all this mess, navigating a world I feel increasingly unsure of, and trying to find a new way to survive.

    In a weird way, history repeats itself. As a teenager I was very unsure of myself in a similar way, and considering I always make the joke that my “trans age” is around the teen years due to COVID aging everyone ten years, the situation I find myself in as an adult has parallels to what I went through back then – the same thing rings true for both of them those times though:

    Only I can get myself out of this situation, and I have to move forward even if I feel scared.

    Does this mean I might have any semblance of a schedule going forward? We shall have to see.

    I think for the review segment I am going to do a short ramble about the most recent trainee I pulled for on Umamusme a couple months back, the pride of Edo: Inari One.

    Inari One was a trainee I was absolutely hyped to pull for. After watching the final episode of Cinderella Grey with my partner near the end of last year and having Inari One teased as the next main threat to Oguri Cap, with some insane demonic visuals accompanying her – not to mention some of the stills I have seen from the manga in regards to how she is portrayed.

    Obviously the manga/anime portrayal is going to be very different from in-game, but I was not prepared for how Inari One’s story was going to make me feel. A lot of individual Umamusume stories revolve around them overcoming some form of challenge, either physical or mental, over the course of their career. This can range from simple things like self-esteem, overcoming physical injury after a grueling race, or even going to helping an Umamusume work through an eating disorder developed through their circumstances growing up.

    Inari One falls somewhere into the former categories, with self-esteem and wanting to make her hometown proud being a focal point of her story, and a big reason as to why she pushes herself so hard.

    This all comes to a head in the career event “The Soul Behind a Festival’s Style”, taking place near to the end where Inari One is about to run the Arima Kinen – a very prestigious race in Japan’s racing calendar. Under some misdirection from the trainer, Inari One is taken back to her hometown, where everyone who has supported her since day one puts on a festival in her honour to remind her of why she is pursuing her goals.

    Initially, she does not take it well, telling everyone to stop the celebrations because she “flat out dropped the ball ‘cause I couldn’t shoulder the weight”, before going on to call herself “a lame-ass disappointment” with tears in her eyes.

    The event is stunned into silence, before everyone starts speaking in turn about how Inari One inspires them culminating in “Chief”, Inari’s trainer from before she came to Tracen Academy reassuring her that no one sees her that way, and that they are all proud of her for what she has accomplished, no matter what she might think of herself.

    Chief asks her to take all that weight off her shoulders, leading to the floodgates breaking and Inari One letting out all those emotions that had been building up over the course of the career, crying in the middle of the festival whilst everyone lets her process these emotions on her own.

    This scene culminated the emotional impact on me, and turned Inari One from someone I was curious about because of the anime into one of my favourite Umamusume, to the point I have used her in some of the competitive “Champions Meet” race modes even when she might not have been fully ideal.

    As someone who struggles with self-esteem and the way others see me because of my personal situation, seeing someone be reassured by their community that the work they are putting in is enough really hit home the first time… and then hit even harder today as I was grabbing the screenies to back up these points because holy shit relatability bomb right on top of my head.

    I very rarely put money into Umamusume, having only bought the selector vouchers during the first-year anniversary, outside of that I mainly scrimp and save carats over the course of months to be able to afford the level of pulls required to get a guaranteed chance of securing a trainee.

    But for Inari One, I managed to pull her three times in the gacha alongside getting to the pity pull, letting me upgrade her to four stars almost instantly. In a way, it might have been fated for me to pull someone so relatable to some of my current situation, just because I was curious about her story.

    The relatability of characters in stories can be surprising sometimes, and I hope one day I can once more find my stride to bring my own characters to life.

    In the meantime, thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope you are keeping safe in the weird world we find ourselves in. If you are like me and also suffering from Weltschmerz, know you are not alone and that even when things feel bleak, we still have each other through all the pain and chaos.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 372-378, “On-Track Tuesdays”

    Redundancy Review: Day 372-378, “On-Track Tuesdays”

    (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 pyromancers and firebenders, welcome to Day 372-378 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    It is too damn hot.

    But I have fled my flat into the safe confines of a place with air conditioning, and considering I have a habit of trying to get the schedule back on track on Tuesdays, may as well take advantage of being in a better space to help my mind write out what I have been feeling lately.

    The lack of reviews and my emotional state are quite entwined right now, because the worst thing I feel is that I have almost entirely lost my drive to be myself. I was always a person who prided themselves on being someone who persevered through it all, never letting boulders get in my way, and kept moving.

    I do not feel anything like that anymore.

    Avoiding falling into doomerism is the hardest challenge I am coming across right now. Every day feels like a constant struggle to not let my negative thoughts and feelings win, to do as I said in my last review and stay positive. 

    The pain still feels raw in my mind, even though I have not been out of the job for even a month yet, but each day feels longer than the last and finding the strength to do anything is getting extremely hard, which then makes it harder to write because even though I want to present the messiness of the modern job search experience as part of the Redundancy Review, a part of me does not want this to become “Rosa rants into the void in the hopes someone will hear her”.

    Within the scope of my current industry, I am one of ten of thousands – if not hundreds of thousands – who is out of work for various reasons. Lack of funding, AI taking business, shifting market conditions, AI taking business, greed of the C-Suite, AI taking business…

    …you know after writing that out it kind of feels like I wrote the same thing six times in a row rather than it being an attempt at a joke about one of the leading causes around software redundancies right now.

    Tangent aside, I am ultimately not special in the current landscape of tech workers in 2026. All of us are struggling with issues regarding self-esteem after layoffs, financial concerns in the short, medium, and long term, and wondering if the industry that some of us still love will ever recover to the point where we could come back.

    And then I fall into another category, a rapidly growing category if my browsing on LinkedIn means anything.

    The ones who are done with it all.

    The ones who do not want to take the strain or stress anymore.

    The ones saying goodbye for good, contributing to a greater industry brain drain that I do not think AI will be able to compensate for in the slightest without a massive downgrade in quality output – especially when you consider QA is often the first to go when these kinds of layoffs come around.

    Combine this with the reluctance to hire junior talent, and the industry as a whole is moving towards a collapse that may not be coming imminently, but will arrive when things break beyond repair and no one is left to fix them.

    I started this talking about tech, but everything I have said also applies to the games industry as well, and I genuinely think we are in the midst of the next big video games crash, spurred on by lack of original ideas coming out of studios and spiking hardware costs thanks to – you guessed it – AI data centres taking up all of the market for components.

    You know what, while I am here making predictions about various industries, I am going to write out my genuine prediction for how AI will take shape in the coming years.

    It is not a difficult task to recognise I am against Generative AI. It has pervaded my hobby spaces in a horrendously parasitic way that has taken away my ability to enjoy things on a first glance without having to look for the telltale signs of generated imagery, it has made components for PCs more expensive in a way that is taking a massive toll on the industry and making me panic whenever I think my components are glitching out, and ultimately, I think the window for it in its current form to be utilised in any productive way has long since passed, especially when the executive mind just sees it as a way to cut costs.

    But we have gone through a period where NFTs were the next big thing, and even though crypto is not in the news as much as AI is nowadays, there is still a dedicated space for crypto related topics and there is a business going on around it.

    Generative AI in its current form will probably fall off massively within the next half decade. After the capex dries up for data centres, after the venture capital dries up for salaries, or maybe as the lakes dry up for both of the above, the bubble will burst leaving a massive toll on the economy.

    After that, machine learning based AI is likely to take the forefront and dominate the next evolution instead. A lot of machine learning applications have already taken to branding themselves as “AI” to hop on the gravy train of getting more investment and eyes on the tool – looking firmly at you Grammarly – but it is also where the more practical uses of AI can be found in medical imaging, protein folding, and assistance tools across multiple industries.

    We are in a cycle of hype right now, where the ones in charge are desperate to get people hooked to keep this cycle going, and once it is all over, there will be plenty of R&D to build a better foundation for something more utilitarian to take the place of Generative AI.

    One I hope actually achieves the talking point of “AI and humans” rather than having all of the big heads spout it as a way to save their arses.

    Feels weird to have called this “On-Track Tuesdays” when I have changed track multiple times as I write this out, and now I have to derail myself from “serious and semi-nuanced takes on the tech landscape” to “god I love virtual puppetry”.

    It is still VTuesday after all, and my unemployment has given me more time to enjoy actual streams from talents rather than engaging in VODs or music as I am normally one to do. Even if I am only able to catch the end of an eight hour stream of Hollow Knight (thank you Biboo) or if I can watch something from start to finish to zone out to, it feels nice to engage in one of my hobbies live rather than living in catch up land.

    Before I was only able really able to catch small amounts of streams when I had bandwidth to put them on in the background as I worked, which is why I was able to watch so many different Holomems play Monster Hunter World during the whole “Return to World” push around the time of Monster Hunter Wilds starting marketing itself.

    One of these talents is one I have mentioned before, the very fluffy fox of Hololive 1st Generation, Shirakami Fubuki. A VTuber in contention for my all-time favourite from JP, often referred to as “kamioshi” in community lingo, my infatuation started the same way it started with a lot of HoloJP members: through their music.

    And then one day, I saw Fubuki streaming Monster Hunter World. I only really tend to engage with the JP side of things when it is something I am able to understand without needing to understand Japanese. Monster Hunter falls perfectly into this category, as I do not need to understand a single word of what is being said or any word on screen because the universal language of “oh shit I am about to be crushed into soup by an Anjanath” is universal.

    Watching Fubuki stream World is one of the best memories I have as a Hololive fan, not only for getting to watch someone I admire greatly play a game I love, but also because it has bore a running joke with me and my partner from seeing a Dodogama – my all time favourite monster – absolutely body an endgame monster in a fight, all the while she was cheering “DODOGAMU!” in the hopes he would win, which now causes me to shout that whenever I see a Dodogama.

    But ultimately, I follow Fubuki for her music, which is the subject of today’s piece… kind of.

    Cause whilst it is a Fubuki song I want to talk about today, it is not the original.

    KONKON Beats is Fubuki’s fourth original song, initially released on October 6th 2022. It is my… second… third… favourite of her original songs, but one I still love dearly nonetheless for its catchy beat, amazing MV courtesy of Haru, and a chorus I cannot help but dance along to given how simple the moves are for it as shown in this short from the fox herself.

    This is a cover from her genmate Ookami Mio, one who has a close relationship with Fubuki and sang this song in the 2024 Hololive Shuffle mix, where talents found themselves swapping outfits and singing each other’s songs as one big showcase as part of the New Year’s show. Unrelated to the topic, I miss this shuffle mix so dearly, it was such a fun way to showcase other talent’s songs in a fun way and I am so sad it never made a return past 2024.

    Mio does not change any of the lyrics as part of the cover, which gives some segments a wholesome touch. Sadly Fubuki does not put official English lyrics on her MVs, which makes it hard to do lyrical analysis due to the variety of unofficial translations available, but I will be working from this video from Pina on Youtube.

    The chorus goes as follows:

    “KON KON KON
    Yes I’m head over heels for this fox
    Knock knock knock
    Open your heart
    Cause I got the feeling that everything’s gonna be alright
    Now, I’ll cast a spell to bewitch you”

    It is specifically the second line of the chorus that gets me in the wholesome feels when taken in the context of Mio’s cover. In the grand scheme of things they are just colleagues, but like last week’s discussion of CCGG Madness showed, Hololive has the wonderful of having colleagues turn into close friends that you can rely on in tough moments whilst also being able to produce wonderful art alongside them, which Mio saying “I’m head over heels for this fox” definitely helps emphasise.

    The ending of this MV also helps to reinforce that, with absolutely gorgeous art of Mio and Fubuki performing together on stage at Our Sparkle, Mio’s first official solo live concert, reinforcing that Mio sees Fubuki as a trusted colleague and close friend, and wants to keep performing with her for however long her career may last.

    There is no way to predict the future when it comes to how long talents can stay, but the important part is to cherish them while they are still around. Fubuki has had an illustrious eight-year career with Hololive up until now, and there are no signs of her stopping any time soon, but regardless of what happens, I will always keep the memories I have with her close to my heart.

    Started this review talking about how I have lost drive, with the person behind the keyboard worrying about how much she would be able to write, and I end up doing almost two-thousand words entirely within the confines of this cafe over the course of about an hour and a half.

    Pretty good work if you ask me, now if only I could do it consistently.

    Regardless, thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope you are able to relax today and stay away from the heat. It is boiling hot in the UK and even the measures I take inside the flat do not work too well. Hopefully the end of the week cools down a bit and I do not have to stress too much about cooling down.

    I say that, and my intention tomorrow is travelling to my parent’s place to make sure my mum’s plants survive – pray for me.

  • 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.