BlindFish Ideas

For the last few years  David Schirduan  and  Marshall Miller , have run a 200 word rpg challenge . The simple concept is a competition to " Design a role-playing game using 200 words or less ." With a panel of judges going through the dozens and dozens of entries. Reading through previous years entries has inspired me to give it a go. Below is my attempt at writing a simple rpg in 200 words. I would love to hear any thoughts people have after reading it.  The Labyrinthine Library Need  Scrabble tiles, DM & 3-4 players Players are the Arcanist’s assistants. Sent into the labyrinthine library to find a lost spell scroll. The DM makes up a series of challenges. Character creation Characters have 2 HP. Take 2 scrabble tiles. The Letters are your Initials. Make up your names. The numbers give you 2 abilities from list below. 1 = +1HP 2 = nimble 3 = goodshot  4 = brawler  5 = small animal companion (cat/owl/ferret etc) 8 = academic 10 ...

Restarting blogging this year hasn't gone very well so far but here is something.  I've attempted to write a One page domino based rpg .  I was intrigued by the idea of a domino based rpg after reading about  Macabre Tales   and have heavily imitated their system to attempt to make a one page rpg system myself. I'm sharing this first draft online for feedback for both the rpg system and my attempt to explain the system. Game design is a big personal aim for my 2017 so I am going to try a number of small projects. I have some rpg ideas, board game ideas and card game ideas. This blog seems as good as place as any to share my working progress.

It's the starts of 2017 and I think I'm going to try and start blogging again. It's been over a year since my last blog. Since then I've changed jobs and got married. Life has been very busy but new year resolutions being something I never do I decided to try one this year. I think I will blog more short random notes like today and more stuff about board games and rpg. I probably won't have any posts about my RSE work but more general life stuff. At some point I will also redesign my blog, maybe.

For my holiday to Peru I wanted to find a small cheap and light way to keep my digital photos backed up every day.  When I travelled around south East Asia for 3 months I was paranoid about backing up my photos. I was terrified that something would happen and I would have lost every photo. So I carried a 1.5Kg net book and charger, a memory card reader and a bulky portable hard drive. It worked I didn't loose any photos and when my hard drive was stolen I bought a replacement and quickly backed everything up again. But it was a heavy and bulky amount of tech to take backpacking.  Doing some research I decided the best way to achieve a small, cheap and light back up was to make use of an OTG  (On The Go) Cable. This is simply a short cable with a male micro USB port at one end to plug into your phone and a female regular sized USB port at the other end for you to plug a multitude of normal USB devices into. This lets you do things like plugging a full sized keyboard ...

10 seconds of spoken word about teenage girl uploaded by Gareth Cheesman 10 seconds of Meg Cannon doing an awesome spoken word performance about life as a teenage girl. Look out for the full video soon. http://ift.tt/1o0tMzU

youth work berks 1 uploaded by Gareth Cheesman http://ift.tt/1qK4mI1

Today I am sharing a free resource I have made to help teenagers think about the type of images they are sharing online and by direct messages. I class this resource as in BETA, it is just my first attempt at making these images and I want to reshoot the photos. Get rid of the cluttered backgrounds and I need to find a male mannequin to use as well. You can find all the images I use at  Sexting Images Resources I have tested these images in a number of lessons for 14-15 year olds. The way I use them is getting the young people into small groups and asking them to put them in order from most risky images to share to least risky. They create a continuum of risk. Then we talk through a number of follow up questions.  Which images would it be ok to share on social network? Which images might be ok to share by direct message, such as snapchat or MMS? Which images should we never share? Which images do you think could get people into trouble with the police? Which ...

Siberian cat playing fetch uploaded by Gareth Cheesman So our Siberian Kitten started playing fetch this evening. She has not been trained to do this but she just started doing it http://ift.tt/1fKxGfI

New Year for Blogging  2013 was a bad year for my blogs, I barely posted. Not sure why. Maybe I was too distracted and busy but also I think I fell in to the trap of thinking every blog post needed to be a long post after lots of reading/research. Like this post in my SRE blog about 50 Shade of Grey in Aug 2012 or this one from my random blog about Cambodian Rice Paddy Fish Keeping  in Feb 2012. Both posts took over a week to write with all the reading I did for them. Both posts are some of the most popular post I have written. So Last year I got into a bit of a rut with always wanting to write long posts after lots of research. I started 3 or 4 different long posts that I never posted in the end. So in 2014 I am aiming to post every week even if it is a short post, like this one.  Enjoy this  Hey There Chlamydia - Parody video

My view of the channel 4 show "Porn on the Brain" which is all about how teenegers might be being impact by watching porn online. I have just finished watching "Porn on the Brain"   (if you live outside UK Tunnel Bear can let you watch this) a Channel 4 British documentary by a previous editor of Loaded (lad mag) Martin Daubney . In this documentary Martin looks to try and find out what is the situation of porn and teenagers. Now sometimes the show becomes a little sensationalist with phrases like "The internet brought about the end of innocence" but behind some hype is some interesting stuff. With Martin spending 15 years of his life dedicated to (soft core) pornography with his work in loaded his perspective on the porn industry is not naive, he describes himself as an "wanking expert". Early in the show he makes a judgment of how he views the changes in the porn industry.  "Porn has lost its sense of humour and become something mac...

On the 11th of June the commons voted against making Sex and Relationship Education a compulsory part  of the national curriculum and specifically this amendment including the following "(1) For the purposes of this Part, personal, social and health education (“PSHE”) shall include sex and relationship education, including information about same-sex relationships, sexual violence, domestic violence and sexual consent. " My MP for Chester, Stephen Mosley was one of the MP who voted against this clause. You can read a good briefing on why this clause was so important here   by the sex education forum. This was a key opportunity to get SRE into the heart of what schools need to be providing. But MPs voted not to help young people on this issue and my MP was one of those who voted against. If you want to read more about the no vote, what it means and why it matters you can read Brook here  or read this blog post exploring how the clause may still have life in it ...

For the Youth Work Summit I decided to attempt some collection and storage of tweets with the #hashtag #yws13. Twitter has a great tool for staying up to date with the tweets as the come in but I wanted to also have a nice document back up which I created with www.ifttt.com . I hope its useful to people at the event and away form the event. Read more below.   Document collecting ALL #yws13 tweets here   Tweets about "#yws13" This automatic backing up of tweets is possible due to a handle little service called If This Then That found at www.ifttt.com. You sign up for an account and then create recipes for all kind of cool automations. Cross platform posting, getting emails warning you of weather warnings. The digital world is you oyster. Especially using the immensely powerful RSS feed trigger.  RSS feeds are amazing ways to share, organise and collect information. Most search engines have an RSS feed built in so that you can get automatic...

Over the last 2 weeks, for the first time I have taught a full Sex and Relationship Education trainer course. In the past I have helped out on someone elses course and have lead workshops on specific topics at events/conferences. This was the first time I took  responsibility for an entire course. The course I taught is the 4 day  Esteem Resource Network  course. This was the course I was originally trained in and 5 years and 500+ hours of classroom experience later I was now teaching the course. The course had 10 people and I loved opening up the wide field of Relationship and Sex Education to them.  On the course I had 1 co worker, 1 local church based child and family worker, 2 third year youth work students (one who has been on placement with me) and a herd of 6 second year youth work students. So basically everyone was a youth worker or similar  This helped me as it's the group of people I work with the most. I know ...

GarethCheesman Radio 5 SRE The Talk uploaded by Gareth Cheesman On the 25th March I was invited on Tony Livesey's Monday night BBC Radio 5 Live talk show. Every Monday night they have a focus on Sex and Relationships. This week they focused on what should young people be told about sex and when and how should parents talk to their children about sex. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUwRQhU-Um4

Today I wanted to share a few short insights into the everyday realities for children and young people living in a HIV orphanage in Thailand. I visited this orphanage, The House of Grace, in 2012 whilst travelling around South East Asia (read my post about it here ). Like my work in UK this project is linked with ACET internationa l. Today I received an email from the project and wanted to share a few snapshots of what it is like for children and young people in Thailand being supported in The House of Grace. Funded and staffed by Christians the project provides a hope and a home for alone, rejected and something sick young people victims of HIV. Kitisak is the pastor who has dedicated his life to supporting these children and running the House of Grace. These hopefully give a snapshot of the rough and the smooth.  Arriving - Fah Nine year old Fah is one of the most recent children to join the House of Grace family. One evening, towards the end of December...

I think this is a great talk about charity. I work for two charities and live in the frustration of small scale and the desire to keep the overheads low. Now waste in overhead is always a bad thing but I cringe when I hear people being classed as overheads. Yes trim the budget on the travel by making sure people take the most reasonable train option but don't fire your face to face workers. Just because their face to face work involves talking to donors not clients. Your people are the real strength of any charity. please pay them a fair wage. If we believe non-profits serving communities deserve the best people doing the best they can. Then we need to pay a competitive wage. We can not short cut our way to success in the non-profit sector. We need to invest in growth and advertising.  I have two  lingering questions from this talk  "Is there a limit on what is reasonable to pay a charity worker or CEO?" "Can chariti...

BBC radio 5 interview about a drop in teenage pregnancy rate uploaded by Gareth Cheesman on the 27-2-13 I was interviewed by BBC radio 5 about the drop in UK teenage pregnancy rate. Read more about my work at www.SREstuff.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNWD_qfFB_k

I am a geek, I can not lie. I have always loved science, tech, sci-fi, LOTR, computers and board games. I regularly  get teased by my Girlfriend for checking my phone too often. Usually I am checking twitter, (my tech list) lifehacker, the tech and science section of BBC news and other sources of wonderful geeky news and information. But what I am trying to get my head around at the moment is this.  "Is tech running my life or helping me improve my life? " The tools that are designed to make my life easier and save time take time and effort. There is a huge range in tech in how much effort you need to put in. An example of low input high convenience is my amazon Kindle, kindle is a wonderful light ebook reader. It is meant to keep hundreds/thousands of books at your fingertips in one small device. The device is quite simple to use but you do need to keep it charged and have to get the books on it, Usually through the on board kindle book store or by using the webst...

I have started teaching a lesson on the media's portrayal of Sex and Relationship. The lesson focuses on movies, TV shows and visual pornography. But with all the media hype around 50 Shades of Grey I wanted to do a small scale survey of young people I work with to see if the hype had any grounding in reality. Are young people reading it and is it impacting young people?  At the end of a session looking at the Distortion of Media I handed out some small surveys. Just half a dozen questions and a space for general feedback. I did this with two year groups both mixed gender. A group of year 10 students (aged 14-15) and a group of year 12 students (aged 16-17). With the older group I also asked if the book had encouraged them to experiment with "BDSM/fetish/kinky stuff" but talking with school staff it was decided not to ask that direct question to the year 10 groups. Below are some of the figures from my study, please note it is very small scale and may not ref...