Month: January 2024

It had to be, the only topic for today – what are my new years resolutions? We did the reflection yesterday, now for the look ahead.

Sadly we start with the serious one, and the first one is no surprise at all. I’ve got to lose some weight. Looking back at the pictures of me over the last year, it’s clear that I’m eating too much. I particularly noticed it when we were doing the Christmas Day stream. I’m not THAT much overweight, but I could certainly lose 1/3 of my bodyweight and I would be still at a healthy weight.

On the plus side, I’ve been doing plenty of exercise with the running and that has worked out well, but I really just need to eat more healthily. More than that I think that I need to eat less, it’s not necessarily that what we have is bad. Of course it’s the worst time to start, we’ve still got tonnes of Christmas chocolate to work through.

So the resolution is ‘to look thin in the Christmas Day 2024 stream’.

The second one is much more about growth and it’s to make this blog! So I’ve already achieved it! It’s going well because I already wrote 27 or so articles so I’ve been able to just put them in here. But this is the first day I’m actually writing in the blog itself. It’s pretty bare bones at the moment.

And the purpose of all this. Well, my twitch stream is the heart of the content creation that I do, but there’s things I want to be better at, and one of those is to improve my storytelling. So to write like this each day helps with that, a bit. It also provides me with a library of material that I can more easily recall when I’m doing live stuff. I also want to be more funny, there’s very few jokes in this, by the end of the year you won’t be able to read this far because you’ll have fallen on the floor in histerics.

But this is also my journal. Its really nice to have a kind of diary of what I’ve done, and this is that. So there we go, I’m not sure this folds nicely into a one liner. I’m not sure I can commit to writing something every day, but I can at least try. I also got 3 months free of webspace for this blog, so we’ll see how we are going at the start of April, I guess. So short version ‘do a blog’.

Those are the two big things, and I think it’s best to keep things short, but there a bunch of minor bits. I’d like to get my 10k under 50 minutes again, but that kind of links to the weight thing, maybe I can do a half marathon, maybe I can get my 5k time towards 20 minutes again, I dunno – a load of running achievement. I’d like to grow the stream – but I’m not really in control of that, all I can do is to try and make better content. And I’d like to meet more people, hopefully there will be a Twitchcon EU and hopefully we can meet up there together.

Happy New Year

So that was 2023. I’m not sure it was necessarily the most exciting year of my life, but definitely a year when I travelled far and wide, compared to the COVID years when I didn’t go very far at all.
We started 2023 at home, watching the new yaers fireworks on TV, like the cool people. Then on the first of January we went on a little tour of the city centre, searching the town for Christmas Penguins.
We had had our house redone at the end of 2022, the bathrooms replaced and kitchen refurbished, so a proportion of January was spent sorting out the rest of the house. We repainted the walls and had new carpets. Most excitingly I created my own office for streaming, which I did by rotating my setup by 90 degrees. In celebration I also upgraded the processor of my streaming computer, which meant I could play the piano and stream at the same time.
Little did I know that later in the year the Sky Troupe would be set up, so I tried to do a little thing for the Sky Streamers and we held the emote context, where each of the streamers sent each other a new animated emote. Seemed to go quite well – I don’t think I’m the greatest organiser thought
We also had a little snow of the 18th January, so of course, we went out for Ice Cream. There’s a little shop that does ice cream in the shape of lollies, dipped in chocolate and nuts. Delicious.
February came and we wanted to continue with decking out the new house. We went to Ikea for new beds for the boys, but ended up just creating videos in the fake rooms that they have – my kids pretending to have important meetings, work in a coffee shop, sit at a desk – everything motivational for their future lives.
We did a reasonable amount of travelling this month – we went to the top of the Malvern Hills to see the awesome scenery of the south of England – such a clear day we could see for miles. We also went to the motorhome exhibition, which was random, but it was really so the kids could have a go at paddleboards and canoeing on the artificial tank they had built. The other trip we made was to my Mom’s new home on the Welsh / English border. It’s a little difficult to get there by train, but it’s the opposite end of the world from where I live in the big city, such a quiet country town in the hills.
March was a quieter month – but we did go down to London with the Children to see the maritime and timekeeping exhibitions in Greenwich. Who should we also meet in London but the wonderful Sannesaurus, with whom we shared a coffee underneath Big Ben.
March also saw the second snow of the year. A tiny amount and I took a photo of a tiny snowman I had built, but it had gone by the time Mrs Rad woke up.
I had been trying out the electric scooters and the electric bikes on stream for a while and they seemed to be a good idea. So in April Mrs Rad decided to buy one, initially with the thought that we would get one between us to share. We took a trip to Stratford Upon Avon to see if we could try and hire electric bikes as a family but it didn’t really work out. We did have a nice walk around the beautiful town though.
I made hot cross buns for easter and we also took a trip to Stafford to see some kind of re-enaction of the bible in the town, it was kind of interesting to see how it was done across the whole town. We also went to the deaf centre open day and spent most of it playing with goats an llamas.
At the end of the month, Mrs Rad’s new electric bike arrived – and I road it up the hill to the highest spot in the midlands, this convinced me that I would get my own for my birthday.
Finally in April, work took me to a conference in Leeds. Sadly quite forgettable.
Apparently the Kings Coronation was in May. The town was decked out nicely for it. We watched most of it on the television.
I ran the Birmingham 10k, it was disappointingly slow – 52 minutes, but I did feel quite good. Hopefully I’ll have another shot to go below 50 minutes this year.
Finally all the family could ride bicycles and we all had a working one at the same time. No mean achievement. We went to Ashbourne to try out the Tissington trail and ended up cycling 28 miles of so together.
June was my birthday month. We spent my birthday on an electric boat on the canal. Something I had seen a lot but never tried. It was a beautiful sunny day, and it was cute that I got to drive my own boat around on the canals near to my home.
Most excitingly, my new electric bike also arrived towards the end of June. So now I have my own way to get around, and I quickly rode a few hundred miles on it. Still very excited by this now.
Event of the year possibly was Twitchcon Paris, which was at the start of July. I’ve streamed for 4 years now, but never really see other streamers IRL. So I got the Eurostar to Paris, and rode around the streets on a hire bike and spent 3 awesome days at Twitchcon. Meeting people, streaming, learning new things, I found it very motivational. Also caht looked after me when my train was heavily delayed on the way home.
When I got back to Birmingham, it was the ‘one year after the 2022 Commonwealth Games’ event. Although early July had been hot, it was really wet for this event, and it was kind of sad that it was washed out.
In August we took the family holiday to Belgium. Again we took the Eurostar, a bit more reliable this time. We hired bikes for the week and we lived like locals, cycling everywhere, it was so cute. We went to Antwerp to look around the big city, we went to the town that is split between Belgium and the Netherlands and we went to visit an automated bread machine. But really we spent most of this holiday swimming and going down the waterslides.
September came and it was time for me to put some effort into getting fitter. I started my 30 days of 5k, which turned into 100 days of 5k. This was a great challenge, which I completed, running 5km per day, keeping my heart rate below 135. It really increased my fitness, and I was chuffed to achieve it (somedays it was hard to fit in).
In October half term we went to Shrewsbury to meet my mom. An interesting town. We just chilled out, took a walk by the river, through some pretty gardens and chatted. Sometimes it’s not about what you see, but about who you are with.
November was probably a worse month. Our water started going off, and they said they could fix it pretty quickly. But pretty quickly ended up being nearly a month. This meant that we weren’t as prepared for the Christmas break as usual, but we did manage to have a cute Christmas day as a family.
I also started writing my nearly daily essays, of which this is one. I think it’s important to reflect on things. I’d like to learn to write better and this is my opportunity. I think that journaling is a good idea anyway.
Then after Christmas day, we took the final two trips of the year. One to Hereford to meet my mom and the other to London, to do the things we planned to do before Christmas, but after Christmas.
At this point I’m supposed to sum up the year. Not bad. 8/10. Looking back I think we are still recovering a bit from the pandemic times and finding our feet in the new world. Looking forward to what 2024 will bring.