(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 pilots and WSOs, welcome to Day 478 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.
I promise that the plane stuff will come to an end soon, especially as I come near to finishing my first playthrough of Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve. I think I am at what will be my last wall in terms of progression, and whilst it is possibly one of my favourite missions in the franchise without having even finished it, the final phase is getting right on my tits.
It is extremely rare I time out during an Ace Combat mission, but this mission has actually managed to inflict that upon me today. After that I developed a headache so I focused on finishing off my beef stew for dinner before playing Dead Space 3 with a close friend of mine.
Being able to be this invested in a game has come as quite a surprise to me. I knew I was hyped up to be able to play a new Ace Combat game, but I was not expecting myself to get quite so into this installment – to the point my partner had to force me off the sofa, making me go outside for food and refreshment. Whilst I did protest initially, my stomach and body caught up with how I had been feeling shortly into our walk, with some cheese on toast from a local cafe perking me right up… until the headache hit but that is both beside the point and repetition.
The point I am trying to make is that it is very rare for me to spend beyond two hours on any given gaming session, maybe pushing it to two-and-a-half hours at a push but even then I will likely be flagging near to the end and looking for a cooldown activity to finish things up. When a game comes along that I can get invested in, or I am simply enjoying the company of those around me so much, getting up to three or four hour long sessions is entirely possible.
Usually punctuated with me going “I’VE BEEN PLAYING FOR HOW LONG?!” at the end of the session, having my body catch up with my mind or vice versa, and limping slowly to bed to do whatever it takes to rest my mind after using that much pure focus energy.
On one hand, I consider it a positive that with the right impetus I can put my mind and body through intense periods of determination for multiple hours at a time – possibly a side effect of my experience working in the repetitive nature of QA. On the other though, it feels a bit weird that my only consistent source of this energy is intense video game sessions.
Do not get me wrong, when the walls are closing in at work and the deadline seems just out of reach I will pull out all the stops to get the task done, but my focus for that seems more fragile than when it comes to these long sessions. Though if I am honest, “corporate deadlines” definitely do not inspire me in the same way as “hunting a magnificent creature” or “patriotism for a nation that does not exist” does.
Or maybe four months of unemployment are taking their toll harder than I anticipated and the main way I can spark my dopamine receptors into action is through intense video game sessions because with the way the job market is in 2026, there is very little reward from filling out job applications knowing they will likely end in rejection or ghosting.
I… should probably reflect on the fact I am saying something like that.
There is no way I want to end up as a perpetual NEET, though in my current situation I can definitely sympathise with those who are in that position, and I definitely want that satisfaction that comes with a full-time position again, because I enjoy working with cool people on cool projects – especially if those projects are for the benefit of other people. There is the obvious route of “well if you get so much thrill from playing games, why not go into streaming?” which has crossed my mind more than I would like to admit, but:
- I am not sure how well my current setup would take to streaming with the games I want to stream
- I am not sure how well my personality would come through on a stream in the way I want it to
- “Tech layoff getting into oversaturated markets” is already a current problem I face
- If I were to put all that energy into streaming, it would probably be better served being put into my writing work as that is how I actually want to interact with the world around me.
This is to not write-off streaming, as I definitely do want to try VTubing for myself properly at some point, but I would rather be doing that from a position of strength rather than desperation.
So that leaves me with conquering the monolith of the job search in 2026, which come hell, high water, or hellishly high water, I will conquer – even if I have to start referring to it as “job search in 2027”.
Managed to get a surprisingly good groove out of that topic, but it is probably a good time to move onto the review segment, which involves me going deep into the backlog all the way back in June for when I went out with my dad and my partner for Father’s Day.
As a bit of background, I have stopped giving my dad physical gifts on Father’s Day, primarily because in his old age I have started to run out of things to give someone whose main hobbies are “books” and “Lego” without cluttering up their home, so instead I resolved to take him out to dinners or lunches instead with the caveat that I pay… which admittedly is a little harder to do when jobless, but for this one we resolved a split instead.
Which when considering the price and what we got, it was not a bad deal at all.
The venue for this dinner was Ribeye Steakhouse in Shrewsbury, a place where my partner and I went near to the end of last year as part of a Christmas gift from his mother, and a place I knew my dad would love. We had a brief debate on the table about what each of us could order, but we remembered that they offer sharing cuts of beef, so we went to check out the fridge where we saw this insane 900g lump of sirloin sitting right in front of us, priced at £8/100g. Splitting that three ways with two extra sides on top of the two included sides in the sharing price with three drinks worked out cheaper than us buying individual meals.
It took a while to come out, though that was down to both the size of the meat and having to commit a food crime in ordering it well-done… dad’s idea, not mine. The official position of Rosalia Rambles is that the ideal red meat cooking temperature is “able to be revived under the correct circumstances”, or “bloody rare” in brief.
But once it all came out, with the sides of creamed spinach, onion rings, and beef dripping fries put onto the plate, accompanied by a flat mushroom and some bearnaise sauce, it made for one incredibly sexy presentation.
Now, the bill. Even with extra sides, this all came out to a surprisingly reasonable total of £88.70, with a surprising lack of service charge which is a rarity around these parts. Given how delicious the meal was and how lovely the staff were in giving us a countdown to our meal with how long it took, we decided to round up to an even £100, essentially giving a 13% tip on the meal. Split evenly between myself and my dad, that was a cool £50 each – still pretty pricey, but when you can indulge in a steakhouse dinner for £33~ a head, that is good value for a once in a blue moon event.
My partner and I have said that we intend to go back there when either of us have big job news to celebrate, and I anticipate the day I can savour a big cut of beef my own way there.
One should hope I end up writing these earlier in the day now that my fixation is starting to wane, but I am still proud of my regularity. Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope you are doing well. The week is almost over, and hopefully a relaxing weekend is ahead for all of us.
We all deserve it.
