Rad's Blog

From the excitement of the new year, looking forward to the great things that will happen, today brought us the colour grey. It has rained all day. Non Stop. The clouds only making the day slightly lighter than the night. I went out twice today and go wet feet both times. My shoes and socks have spent longer on the drying rack than on my feet.

And yet, today has been quite a good day. I got to get back to streaming after the Christmas break and spend some time with my friends. It’s nice to have the chance to speak to different people in different countries and generally just chill out and have fun.

I’ve been trying to think up fresh ideas fore the new year, such as my brilliant plan for a streamer exchange programme. The plan is the on April 1st, all the Sky Streamers will swap with a game of the opposite genre (e.g. Fortnite), kind of for fun, but maybe so we all learn something.

I’ve also set my follower goal for 2024 – I think 2024 followers may be possible up from the 1641 I have today, which is apparently down from the 1644 I had this morning. hmmmmmmm.

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.

As every tourist knows, there are only two places in England, London and Stratford upon Avon. Also, Shakespeare is boring, so we decided to go to London. Truth be told, we were supposed to go a couple of weeks ago, but we were deleayed due to issues with water supply turning our house into the Sahara Desert.
We went in style though, we took the fast train down to London, only 1 hour and 17 minutes to get there and we raced across to Hyde Park for the Winter Wonderland festival, exhibition, thing. It’s kind of a load of wooden boards stuck down in Hyde park and then a number of fairground rides built on top of it, together witan ice rink and a traditional German Market. So traditional in fact, that the ice skating rink was sponsored by Lidl. They were in fact selling ‘pigs in blankets (sausage in bacon)’, so we munched some of that. Weirder still they made Mrs Rad sign up for an app, and then that gave us access to the lidl VIP area, which was a small space on the top of the pigs in blanket stall where we got an exclusive view of the ice skating. Really, we should have gone home at this point as nothing was going to top that.
These Christmas ‘things’ have sprung up all over the UK – yes, there’s one in Stratford too. They can be a bit hit and miss – a number of them have closed down, due to ‘meet santa in lapland’ being ‘grandpa in his shed’, this sort of thing. The one in London seemed really coo. Far too expensive obviously, but there were loads of really cool rides, and interesting foods to eat and it was massive loads to look around. I even went on my annual helter skelter.
We stayed for a couple of hours and then we walked through Hyde Park and took in some views of the Albert Memorial and the Royal Albert Hall. I have memories of going here as a child to see concerts with my parents. They’ve improved the area around it a lot and it looks even nicer now.
Then we went to the science museum, free to get in if you can avoid all the marketing, and we spent the money we saved by going to the top floor to the milkshake bar. Nothing helps me learn science more than and ice cream with sprinkles for £7. I do recommend a visit though, we didn’t have ages, but we looked at the aviation exhibits (Radling 2 wanted to know how big a 747 was) and then downstairs to look at the exhibits on computing – Mrs Rad delighted in taking pictures of her first mobile phones, which are now exhibits on a museum wall!
We then travelled on the tube back to London to get home, and our authentic UK experience was completed by our train being cancelled and the next one being late. We arrived exactly 29 minutes late, 1 minutes less than the time allowed to claim a refund on our train fare.

Well today was supposed to be a trip to my mom’s house which is on the border between Wales and England. The contrast between where we live, in the centre of a big city, and her house, basically in the countryside in the middle of nowhere, could not be more stark. However, as I came to check up the train times last night, I discovered that they had all been cancelled due to flooding. So we spent a frantci hour last night trying to come up with a new plan. We eventually settled on going to Hereford, a place that is still quite low lying,but on a train route that goes in a different direction.
Hereford is 55 miles from here on the train, which takes about 90 minutes – it’s not the quickest of trains, but it was quite comfortable. We also got a nice view of the Malvern Hills from the train, despite the inclement weather.
When we met up with my mom, we decided to go to a cafe for a quick drink. This was already the second of my 3 hot chocolates today. The cafe was also ‘dog friendly’ as was the rest of the town, I’ve enver seen so many dogs in shops!
We then went to visit the cathedral, it was a lot more interesting than it sounds. Firstly because of Edward Elgar on a Bicycle – not him precisely, but a statue of him, it looked great, even in the rain. The cathedral itself is beautiful and well maintained. The architecture inside is stunning as there were also lots of secret rooms there to be discovered. What was interesting is that many video games have been clearly inspired by this sort of architecture.
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That’s not the main reason for visiting the cathedral though. It has the mappa mundi. Now this isn’t a map of a Monday, which is the obvious joke we all made, but it refers to being a map of the world. It was created in the 1300’s – its not geographically accurate, but shows that we already knew about a lot of places at this point, there’s much detail about engl;and and france, as well as the middle easy, russia and africa. We particularly enjoyed a 3d model they had made of it (the real one being behind glass) so we could enjoy the tactile experience. There was also the chained library, which is as it sounds, the ancient books were all attached to chains to the scholars couldn’t take them. This area looked like a scene from Harry Potter.
Lunch wasn’t super exciting, it was pouring with rain, so we just ran to the nearest place. However, we did manage to go down to the river which was flowing super fast and the river level was very high, having covered over some of the paths.
We left early, but not before having the final hot chocolate of the day in Costa Coffee.
As we said our goodbyes, my mom gave us the Yule log she had made for us, which we will enjoy tonight.

In the UK, storms, even small ones, get given names these days. The current one is called Storm Gerritt. Well whoever Gerritt is, he is annoying because he’s meant that we have to change our plans for tomorrow. However, Gerrit has not dared come this far towards us, but we have had a bit of rain. So it was in this context that I went on my 1 hour long run this morning.
It’s the first time I’ve tried a longer run (10km, 6 miles) since I finished the 100 days of 5k. It was partly because I want to get fit for some longer runs, but also because i wont get to run tomorrow, so it was kind of a ‘kill 2 runs with one stone’ type of day.
The roads were still quite quiet at 10am this morning. It’s theoretically a normal working day, but it’s still a bit christmassy here. Also, the rain is keeping the casual visitors away. I had waited for the best gap in the weather, and it kind of paid off, but also kind of didn’t.
To keep me at least a little bit dry, I ran in my raincoat. This is not an ideal situation, it only kind of works and makes me very hot. It’ also covers my watch meaning that the GPS doesn’t really work properly. So I kind of wanted to take off the coat, but I had no way of holding it, so I had to run with the hood down and my sleaves rolled up for the most part, which wasn’t ideal.
And then there the fact that my shoes are getting old and there’s actually a small hole in the bottom of one of them, so the water from the puddles just comes straight in, which makes the running very heavy.
Last but not least, there are the big puddles in the road. I’ve never driven a car, so I don’t really know how it works, but the cars, and particularly the lorries, seem to drift towards me when they seem me, making sure I get a huge rain shower when I run past them.
So, I did it, I completed my run, but I’m back to moaning the whole way around, and this took 1 hour and 15 minutes today, so it was a lot of moaning.
Anyway, we’ve redone our plans for tomorrow, a trip to Hereford to meet my mom is the current plan, let’s see if the floods bring any more changes overnight.

So we went to Mrs Rad’s parents house today, for lunch and to play some games. It’s boxing day in the UK, no we don’t have fights in the streets, well no more than usual, but it does mean that its the second public holiday in a row. Compared to Christmas day though, it’s not aw quiet, some shops are open and many of the ‘January Sales’ start at the big retailers. There are massive queues outside some of the shops that start early in the morning, with people hoping for a bargains. We did not take part in any of that shenanigans. We proudly buy all our products at RRP, making sure to keep those mega firms in profit.
In recent years there is generally quite a good bus service running on boxing day in our city, so we took advantage of that to visit the relatives. It takes 2 buses and about an hour and 15 minutes to get to Mrs Rads parents house, and it’s a bit of a trip through time. The smart double decker arrives at the bus stop just a couple of minutes walk from our house (we nearly missed it). We start the journey in the modern city centre, by the big arena (where Rad stood in the car park for Ariana Grande, another story) and it weaves through the gentrified canals, the bars and restaurants and past the modern tramway system.
We continue through the suburbs on wide dual carriageway roads but at some point, we cross the city boundary and take a right turn into an area know as the black country, because of all the coal mining that used to take place here. It feels distinctly different here. All the mining has pretty much ceased here, so the area appears frozen in time around 40-50 years ago. We first go under the motorway, where there has spring up a huge traffic roundabout (known as an island around here) and a number of big box stores with massive car parks. These areas are grey and a bit soulless, but there is a fair amount of activity. The same cannot be said for the town of Dudley, which was one of the most important towns during the industrial revolution. The life has long since passed from this place, and of course, its here that we change buses, a short wait in a desolate bus station, save for one guy that is smoking and another that is shouting at his phone. A ray of hope does exist for this place, the bus station is to be closed in a couple of weeks and rebuilt to accommodate the new trams which that will come from the city.
The next bus is quieter, except for the PA which announces each and every stop. It runs along the quieter, narrower roads and meanders through miles of housing estates built in the early 1900’s. The area is known for it’s humour thought, and I can’t help but chuckle as we pass by the takeaway on Kent Street – ‘Kents Tuck-in Fried Chicken’.
We get off by the church at the top of the hill. There are lots of churches in this area – these have a sense of humour too – one proudly displaying the slogan ‘Tomorrows Forecast: God reigns and the Sun Shines’.
Mrs Rad’s family live at the top of a steep hill and we walk by a large field with horses. This allows for a great panorama of where we have been on our little bus ride. In the distance we can see the tower blocks of the city, which is only 8 miles away as the crow flies but seems a lifetime away from where we are now.

This is my review of Christmas day in the Rad household. I’m writing it late, because I Was so full of food, and I just fell asleep.
It’s always nice to spend the day with just the four of us, even though the kids don’t particularly appreciate that. We did stockings from Santa at 8am, opening up some high quality items from Poundland – including the first of the truckload of chocolate we received.
Then we went through to the front room for the big presents. Mrs Rad got lots of nice lego and we had a few Switch games including Sonic and Mario Wonder. We tried to play Mario Wonder together, but unfortunately, the quality of gameplay thatI can produce spoiled it for everyone.
Then I went on the make the Christmas Dinner. I hadn’t planned a stream but I saw the go-pro and went live. IT was nice to be able to say hi to everyone on Christmas Day. Something went wrong with the turkey, IDK, it wasn’t cooked when it was supposed to be, so I had to microwave a couple of pieces so we could eat it together – then we had the rest in sandwiches later in the day.
Radling 2 had been given a wooden Concorde, which we built together – that was a cute very ‘dad’ thing to do. Mrs rad did the gluing though, because who can be trusted?
Living in the city centre, our tradition has been to go to the only shop open – Starbucks – for a Christmas drink. It’s nice to walk through the city on a quiet day.
In the evening we did a Whatsapp with my dad, who lives about 70 miles away, that was nice, and it’s important to remember family at this time of year.
My big present from Mrs Rad was a chocolate fountain, which I built and we plied with chocolate. That was great fun, but also filled me up and I think that’s what sent me to sleep.

Merry Christmas everybody. And what a lead up it has been to Christmas it has been this year. The the issues we’ve had with the water supply leading up to Christmas has made it feel like a real old fashioned Christmas, 2 days of frantic present buying, one day of fun then back down the pit.
Hopefully though, now is the time to relax. I say that as I’m bashing out this message at a quarter past midnight on Christmas morning after frantically wrapping, tidying the house and squeezing in the Sky dailies. With luck my kids are too old to get us up excitedly at 4am!
In previous years, I’ve done a short stream on Christmas morning while I cook the Christmas lunch. I’m not planning to do that this year, although it’s possible that I may squeeze in a few minutes if there is some time. However, I decided that it is here that I wanted to say how much I appreciate you all. Streaming has bought me a whole new life, and a whole new circle of friend that I never thought I would have. It’s been so great to meet you all and have the chance to chat, and to share the good, and sometimes the bad, things. I don’t know what I expected when I started streaming, but I knew I needed to do it, and I’m so glad with the way it has turned up.
And remember, Christmas is not an easy time for everyone, but if you have the opportunity, make sure to take some time to connect with your family and friends. It’s the one day a year where there is nothing else to do, so you have some time for that. On the other hand, if you need somewhere to vent, there’s always my discord.
Also, if you do have a small drink, make sure to raise a glass to the mods! We always appreciate you.

I like to tell this story every year, partly because I think it’s fairly personal to me, but it also has some interesting bits of british culture and history that I can talk about too.
So, what is Christmas pudding? – well it’s something quite specific. It’s a steamed pudding, made of dried fruit and nuts AND quite a lot of alcohol. Steamed puddings used to be fairly common in the uk. Basically you put the ingredients together and then you cook it in boiling water for hours and the flavours merge together and the mixture solidifies. The puddings are very stodgy and high in calories, but would have been perfect in the days when we used to work in the fields at manual jobs. Christmas pudding is interesting because it is particularly rich, and so in the old days it would have been something very indulgent for poor families at Christmas. Ok, so I’ve no idea if any of this is true, but I haven’t wikipedia’d any of this, because this is my personal understanding that I love.
Why is it special to me? Well the recipe I use has been passed down a couple of generations. My mother got it from her mother, so it does feel like to make a Christmas pudding each year is keeping up some kind of tradition of the olden days. The recipe gets edited a bit each year – for example it calls for suet, which is some kind of horrific meat fat, so I used butter instead. But by and large the recipe remains the same.
It’s not super difficult to make, it’s just a lot of ingredients. The dry ingredients go in first, and it’s really important for flavour that they are fully mixed, so tradition has it that each member of the family gives the mixture a little stir and makes a wish. And this is not the only thing, just before it’s served, it’s traditional to put small coins in the christmas pudding so that people eating it get a lucky Christmas gift.
To make the pudding particularly flvourful, it is made weeks in advance of christmas to allow the alchol to fully mix with the fruit. In fact the church seems to have a designated ‘Stir Up Sunday’, at the end of November, when you are supposed to make the christmas pudding.
And the final strange thing is the way it is served. A spoonful of hot brandy is cooked of a candle, so that it starts to flame, and then this flame is poured on top of the pudding (and we take a photo on our iphones). This adds extra alcohol to an already alcoholic pudding. It is eaten with cream, or brandy butter or even custard. Nom nom nom.