Wilson Waffling

As I start to write this waffle, I really have no idea where it is going or what I really want to say. I've been thinking about writing this for a while but could not seem to get the focus correct. In a last ditch attempt to get it sorted, I just thought I would start to waffle and see where I end up - so please, don't expect much from the start! You might be intrigued about what this waffle is going to attempt to be about now and I am happy to share with you the broad topic - its.. wait for it... tight jeans!

Education is, by nature, cyclic. When talking to my students as they prepare to leave university to start their first jobs, I like to give them various pieces of advice. Apart from to make friends with the caretaker/cleaners and admin staff - the number of times this has ended up being beneficial to me is immeasurable - I tell them to have a career plan and work towards it. It is very easy, when working within education, to get permanently 'stuck' in the cycle of events and as Christmases, SATs and Sports Days roll pass you suddenly find yourself like me, old and grey and looking at the NQTs thinking how young they all look! When I moved to higher education I had great hopes for my career, one of which was to attain the accolade of my doctorate. However, as the years have gone by, I have realised that I have fallen into the cyclic chasm I frequently warn the departing students about and that my doctorate itself is becoming transparent, intangible and practical non-existent.

Ideas for this blog are like buses, I have none and than I find that two or even three come together! From the title you might have already guessed that this is an RPG waffle rather than one of those in which I reveal my most inner secrets - do you like reading those? or would you prefer me not to wash my dirty clothes in public! - answers in the comments section below! Anyway back to the topic. I really enjoy watching other people's RPG streams on Twitch, it gives me so many ideas of how people play and DM and how I should be altering my own technique. However, one thing which I have noticed is the platform that people use to stream the game content from, and whether they roll the dice on the screen or on the table, away from the cameras - and hence the topic of this waffle - "To dice or not to dice... that is the question."

I always find that whenever I start to research a topic for this website I suddenly feel like I am untangling a ball of wool. I see a tiny little bit sticking out of the ball and think 'that will be long enough for a waffle' and start to pull it away from the actually ball just to find that it gets longer and longer. Then I find that I encounter a knot which has to be unravelled and then have to spend several hours following the piece of wool under, over and round numerous other threads, trying desperately not to deviate from the other strand which was my initial topic to discuss. Staying with the Innovating Pedagogy Report 2017 I wanted to waffle about another topic - but I found that this one took me deep within the ball of wool and, in fact, as I write this, I am still trying to unravel it - what am I talking about? well this week it's all about Student-Led Analytics.

Within education we always have to be careful. Although essentially stoic in its approach to learning, education, at all levels, is frequently bombarded with a range of innovated approaches which practitioners are encouraged to engage with and adopt. While teaching in the primary sector, there were often new ideas which landed in my pigeon hole requiring attention and implementation, all promising significant improvements to both my own practice and the progression and depth of the children’s learning. However, I learnt very quickly that ‘not all that glitters is gold’

This week, at the end of the mathematics session at university, we got talking about the Sun, the celestial body rather than the rather dubious newspaper. According to Google, so I am sure it is correct, our sun will actually turn into red giant and engulf our planet in about 5 billion years. You might be thinking, what a morbid topic to be discussing in a mathematics lesson, but it was at the end and originally we started to think about the amount of time it takes for light to travel. I was informing the students that probability had been removed from the key stage 2 curriculum and so that awkward question will the Sun definitely rise the next day no longer needed to be engaged with. As the students claimed it was certain, I reminded them that it takes eight minutes for the light of the Sun to actually reach us, so the sun could have actually exploded now, and we wouldn't know for another eight minutes. (Google actually says 8 minutes and 20 seconds...although it might just be trying to make us feel better b

Within my Twitch career there are a few occasions which I remember very well. These include, having more than me and the bots talking in chat, receiving confirmation of my Twitch Affiliation and my first ever donation! I do believe that you can actually see my reaction to the latter [on Youtube](https://youtu.be/fKRhGV1DR8E). A viewer once asked me, what do I do with all the donations and subscribers contributions? Well in order to assure you that I am not using it to build an army of androids to fulfill world domination (hideous laugh!) I thought I would write a waffle to describe where the money goes...

Well, I bet you haven't seen a link to this site for a while! I was sat thinking about targets and I flicked back to the targets that I set for this site at the start of 2017\. Even the title sounds depressing! Sometimes people say that you need breaks from activities and even people in order to reassess where you are and where you are going. I never actually thought this was true until I stopped blogging on this site on a weekly basis and suddenly found that I was no longer blogging here at all. I have been blogging on my other site but while browsing through my Youtube channel and this blog I suddenly felt reignited to do things. So, like a phoenix, I feel I might be arising from the ashes of Wilson Waffling to blog again, with the new and improved me!

Now, you might be mistaken into thinking that I am about to introduce you to an old game show - "Welcome to Every Second Counts!" . But no, I've actually been inspired to write this waffle for some time now, but even more so since I have had yet another birthday and time appears to be ticking by. As part of my new year's resolution, I have decided to be more positive about almost everything and this got me thinking about time and how much we have of it to enjoy life. And hence the title of this waffle - "Every second counts...."

Tomorrow I head back to my day job and I am expecting the similar salutation from many people - "Happy New Year and did you have a good Christmas?" After the usual adjectives have been employed, for example - 'nice', 'quiet', family', I wonder how long before the discussion will get onto New Year Resolutions. I think that research shows that these generally last a maximum of about three weeks, if you are lucky, before they disappear into non-existence and we flop back to the way we were. For me, I tend not to set resolutions, but more targets to achieve and so this waffle is going to detail whether I have succeeded with last year's targets before setting new ones for 2018!

One of the most difficult things I find to understand within the Shadowrun universe is the Matrix. I spend many hours reading the Core Rule Book over and over again followed my searching and reading multiple posts on the associated Reddit. I actually think that I am started to get my head around the concepts but in order to truly establish this I thought I would try to explain it to someone else, since this is one of the true criteria of mastery over a topic. But rather than just writing a waffle of facts and figures I wanted to engage my creative juices which appear to flow better when I am not at work and write a piece of creative writing. Please remember, I am the least creative person around so accept this as what it is, I know I am am unlikely to win any competitions or coveted awards! As I usually sit in Costa to write my waffles, it seemed to be a suitable place to set this scenario. So imagine. The time, 2076. The place Costa Soya coffee the reality? Shadowrun.

I am quite liking writing about the games I play, although I might not be waffling to the level of the great DMs I do feel like I am reflecting on the games I play and the rules which govern them and, in doing this, hopefully I am becoming a better DM. This week, I wanted to waffle on about skills. There are many skills in both the games I play, but who is actually responsible for providing opportunities for them to be put into action within the game? Well here I go with my views!

Don’t worry, before you start reaching for your wallets, I just used the title of this blog to capture your attention and to provide an indication of where I got the inspiration for this waffle from. Yesterday, while scrolling through my Twitter feed, I came across a post from the infamous ExplodingDice replying to the question – “Should DMs get paid?”. It was after reading this that I started to think about the job of the DM and what I actually do from week to week in order to hopefully keep my campaigns going. So here, for your entertainment, is a sneaky peek into my week as a DM…

I’m really trying to get back into the habit of blogging, rather than just constantly posting videos of the games I am playing. Although I enjoy the latter, I really do enjoy blogging and need to make time in order to achieve this. As for content/topics, well I do like to blog about the games I play, from a newbie perspective of course, but I also like to post blogs about my life in general. These are probably the ones which I enjoy writing the most, but are the least viewed and interacted with. I can accept that since, quoting that famous ABBA song – “I’m nothing special, in fact I’m a bit of a bore!”

I quite like change. When I am enjoying something I often think that I am never ever going to stop doing it, but there always comes a time when things either become too much to keep going or something else tempts me away and I no longer have the time for something. I've written before about my class envy and this often does happen with games as well. The most important thing about any game for me is the concept and rules, rather than its popularity or great reports. Even when I am streaming, I tend not to hop onto new games or 'popular' games just for the sake of playing them since I know that I am not really going to enjoy them or be any good at them. RPGs (Role Playing Games) are the same. I tend to like concepts and rule systems rather than the current popular or new games. With this in mind, you might have noticed that I am no longer streaming D&D 5th edition on a Saturday evening, in favour of Mythras. So, in order to prevent any rumours spreading about the reason behind this, I thought I would let you k

I remember playing role playing games for some years. Although I have had some attempts at playing I mainly reside on the rule filled side of the DM screen, creating the adventures and spending hours reading and re-reading rule books. I've recognised numerous changes across the years, from games being played round a table on a bank holiday or Friday night, through the use of letters (as in snail mail) to the present day use of Roll20 and/or Skype to bring the players together. Although the game has changed I've also noticed a change in players. When I refer to players I'm not meaning they have grown older, although they probably have, but more of the characters they choose to play and, when considering this in more detail, I started to realise that the characters people play follow some sort of pattern.

If you ever take a glance up to the top right of this webpage you will be aware that I put the book which I am currently listening to up there. Although most of these tend to be action, sci-fi or crime thrillers, the odd autobiography does creep its way into the schedule now and again. Every time I am listening to an autobiography I have this urge to write my own. Not that my life is very exciting - in fact I often think my life is reflected in those starting lyrics of the ABBA classic - "Thank you for the music" - 'I'm nothing special, in fact, I'm a bit of a bore.' What I do wonder about is how I would actually write the events of my life and came up with a title and format for my autobiography. Instead of waiting for a book contract, I thought I would get on with it and start writing it using the same format but as blog posts. So here is one of them. The title of the book would be "My life in Daydreams" and this waffle's topic is my radio career.

Recently, I have started to get involved in Reddits. Some people have a rather negative view about Reddits, although currently I have found the community really helpful and interactive. Now before you start to think I am watching videos of Chinese/Japanese game shows, the Reddits I get involved in are not those types of communities but more related to Shadowrun and Runequest/Mythras. To be honest, I haven’t even searched for a D&D one because I have a feeling that there will be more discussions about the finery of the rules rather than more direct understanding of the them – the latter is what I actually need as I embark on these new games. So am I writing this waffle about Reddit? not at all, I am writing it in response to a Reddit post that I often reply to…

Before anyone mentions it, I understand that a lot of games seem to annoy me and please don’t think I am a regular ‘salter’! (I’ve just learned what this slang means so I am keen to use it and any of its derivatives at every opportunity!). I always need a game that I just log into have a ‘blast’ with when I have got a few minutes to spare. Usually this has been Overwatch but recently I have become ‘salty’ with this game and so I have turned to another – Hearthstone. But I am finding that both games are causing me some ‘salt’….

Before you read or listen any further I would just like to reassure you that I am not dying! When you are young and living life to the full, you never really have time to stop and think, what do I actually wish to do with my life. When I say that, I am not referring to getting a job or settling down in a cottage by the edge of a lake. I'm referring to those adventurous things like throwing yourself off a bridge with an elastic band attached to your ankles - hopefully firmly! Or even sailing around the world in a plastic dinghy with only a blogging camera for technology. Well those examples are maybe slightly extreme - well the second one definitely, but these adventures we could put together in a list that we would like to complete in the future. Well since I over fifty now, I thought it was about time I made a list of the three things I would like to achieve which I would call adventurous. Tagging it as a bucket list would be inappropriate so here is my small pail list for the near future!