Monthly Archives: April 2016
Play the game! International Tabletop Day hits Cardiff Saturday 30 April
Fancy playing games this Saturday? You’re in luck – Rules of Play are hosting International Tabletop Day at the Angel Hotel: TWELVE HOURS celebrating tabletop games in all forms; from kid-friendly puzzles and imaginative role playing games to beautifully crafted board games and highly-inappropriate-to-play-at-a-family-reunion card games. It’s an annual event, celebrated around the world – and Cardiff is hosting Wales’ biggest event!
There will be games there for you to play or you can take your own, plus the other smaller events running throughout the day. Here’s what’s happening:
- Kids Zone (for families)
- ‘learn-to-play’ events (for newbies wanting to try out something different),
- fully licensed bar (which, along with drinks, will be serving up chips and pulled pork baps).
The day-long board game extravaganza has something for complete beginners, casual players, hardcore hobbyists, plus parents looking for something stimulating to do with their kids while they can enjoy a quiet pint.
There’s also a real indie vibe as many independent publishers will be setting up their own stalls and showing off brand new games that you may not have seen before.
There will also be game tournaments (with prizes), a raffle (where you can win a fat stash of International TableTop Day goodies) and a VIP area where you can reserve a slot on a professional gaming table.
VITAL INFO:
International Tabletop Day Facebook event page
Saturday April 30, 10am-10pm
The Angel Hotel, Castle St, Cardiff, South Glamorgan CF10 1SZ
Tickets: £5 adv / £6 on the door
MORE ABOUT INTERNATIONAL TABLETOP DAY:
Last year, Rules Of Play hosted the event in Chapter (day time) and The Gate Arts Centre (night time) and had over 200 attendees. The event was so popular some people had to sit on the floor to play their games. This year, however will be Rules Of Play’s biggest event yet time with
over 500 people expected to attend and several rooms booked at the Angel Hotel.
International TableTop day was started in 2013 by gaming and lifestyle website Geek & Sundry (created by Hollywood actress and famed geek Felicia Day – best known for her roles in Supernatural, Doll House and Doctor Horrible’s Sing Along Blog). It was a day designed to celebrate the weird, wonderful and diverse world of table top games and it is now celebrate across the globe every April.
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WIN!!! Four tickets to SSE SWALEC Finals Day at the Principality Stadium, Sunday 1 May!
Okay, so who DOESN’T like winning free stuff? That’s right, nobody.
Here’s the deal: our friends over at SSE SWALEC have given us FOUR TICKETS for you and your family or friends to watch some of the best grassroots rugby in Wales at SSE SWALEC Finals Day, at the Principality Stadium on Sunday 1 May.
Wanna know how to win?
Go to Farcebook, like the We Are Cardiff page, and then like and share this post.
OR
Go to Tweeter, follow @WeAreCardiff, and retweet this tweet.
If you’re not on either of those platforms, leave us a comment below telling us why we should pick you!
Once you’re entered you’ll be put into our prize draw – the winner will get four tickets to watch six clubs from across Wales compete to win the SSE SWALEC Cup, Plate and Bowl.
Aaaannnnd ….. GO!
x
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Register to vote in Wales on 5 May – deadline for registration is MONDAY 18 APRIL
On May 5, all citizens of Wales will get the chance to vote for their representative in the National Assembly, which is like our parliament. Laws about things like health, education and the environment are all made in Wales by the Assembly.
Every year, around £16 billion is spent in Wales, on things that affect your life – like hospitals and schools. Decisions about these things are made here – in Wales, for Wales – but, in the 2011 Assembly election, fewer than half of us turned out to vote. So if you care at all about schools, hospitals, or our countryside, YOU SHOULD CARE ABOUT VOTING ON MAY 5.
In order to vote though, you gotta be registered.
YOU CAN REGISTER TO VOTE IN WALES HERE: gov.uk/register-to-vote
So be smart, son! REGISTER!
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Cardiff street theatre company to perform Glasto – and you can help!
Ooooo an exciting new performance company! Bad Egg Theatre tells us about their campaign for a new pram so they can perform their hilarious material at Glastonbury!
We are Olga Kaleta, Rosy Roberts and Maddy Lennox. Together we are The Bad Egg Theatre Company, an emerging company specialising in street theatre. As a company we were brought together by a shared desire to create work focused on current issues. Using a unique blend of physical and verbal comedy, our ambition is to create highly entertaining, multi dimensional work that makes the audience think & question. We’re developing an outdoor street show that will be performed at arts festivals, community events, parades & fairs.
“The Sprats”
The Sprats are a wicked take on the limits of our responsibility and knowledge. The twin babies contemplate. They debate. They discuss political apathy and the wealth divides. They also cry a lot and poop. They want to entertain you, but they’re on the edge. Kind of like Robbie Williams, but much more naughty and a little bit less famous.
Story so far…
… we have spent two weeks devising and have showcased the project in Somerset. We’ve developed a prototype pram with support from Take Art. But our main issue is that our pram doesn’t move… This limits us in both a practical and artistic sense. Therefore we’re currently crowd funding for a new pram that will be motorized, all-terrain and easily maneuverable (in collaboration with former Scrapheap Challenge winner- Paul McGarry).
We are scheduled to premier the new version of The Sprats at Glastonbury Festival 2016!!
Why do we do it?
We really believe in this project. In addition to being highly entertaining and visually striking, it also creates a platform to speak about uneasy social and political issues. Children are the ultimate buffoons. Unconfined by social sensitivity, they can say the unspeakable and get away with it.
Here are some lovely things that people said about “The Sprats”:
“Startling and very funny- made some sharp observations too. Great script and acting. As good as any sketch I’ve seen on TV.”
“Spectacularly odious children! Grand children of Jeremy Clarkson? Clever staging and utterly brilliant!”
“Up to date comedy- appropriate for all ages…”
Fundraising
We launched our Kickstarter campaign on the 4th of April. The project will only be funded if we reach our target by the 4th of May 2016. You can support by donating here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1495800494/the-sprats?ref=discovery.
You can also help us by sharing our campaign with your communities.
http://thebadeggtheatrecompany.weebly.com
https://mobile.twitter.com/thebadeggs
https://www.facebook.com/The-Bad-Egg-Theatre-Company-1384244728541512/?fref=ts
A guide to creative Cardiff
Are you looking for a guide to creative Cardiff? Look no further! We teamed up with the Creative Cardiff team at Cardiff Uni and I Loves the ‘Diff to produce a rather natty guide to Creative Cardiff.
You can read the whole thing, or jump straight to one of the sections:
Helia wrote these ones:
Spaces to work : The city is overflowing with lovely places to hang out. Recently Cardiff has enjoyed something of a coffee revolution, with an array of new, independent coffee shops with free wifi scattered across the city. Nomadic workers armed with Macbooks and seeking caffeine to fuel their big novels, screenplays, or start up proposals can be found around every corner.
Cardiff’s creative spaces : The architecture in Cardiff is a glorious mish-mash of everything from Roman to brutal modernist, so Cardiff doesn’t really have an adopted architectural ‘style’. Instead, the city piles different influences on top of each other, throwing up cream and glass luxury apartments next to listed, stone buildings.
There’s also these articles in the series (the European one gives some good background info on the city):
If you haven’t seen the Creative Cardiff project, here’s what they say about themselves:
Creative Cardiff is a new network which connects people working in any creative organisation, business or job in the Cardiff region. By encouraging people to work together we believe that we can make Cardiff the most creative place it can be.
Pretty good, eh? Find our more about Creative Cardiff here.
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#towerlives: a festival of storytelling and music in Butetown
#towerlives is a week-long festival of storytelling and music, on air and on the ground, around the council estate tower blocks of Butetown in Cardiff. How fabulous!
Looks great – and how awesome for this part of the city with such a diverse community to get this kind of coverage.
More please! #towerlives
Butetown History and Arts Centre
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Welcome bloggers of the world to Cardiff for #Traverse16!
There’s a pretty big blogging conference taking place in Cardiff this weekend, put together by the Traverse organisation. Welcoming bloggers from all over the place, and with a pretty impressive range of speakers, it’s pretty fab they’re having 2016’s event here in our fair city!
So, welcome, #Traverse16 bloggers! I thought I’d put together a quick welcome pack for you, in case you haven’t been to Cardiff before, or don’t know much about the place.
The city itself has a population of around 350k, with a greater metropolitan area population of about one million people. We’re a small but vibrant city: the centre is small enough to walk around, we’re nestled between the seaside and the mountains, and packed with places to eat / drink / dance / shop / walk your dog / hula hoop / play ultimate frisbee.
Have a flick through our archives to see a flavour of the alternative side of the city; check out our @WeAreCardiff Twitter feed for live updates of what’s happening, our We Are Cardiff Instagram for beautiful snaps taken by local residents (a different one each month!) or We Are Cardiff Facebook for key links and information.
We made a film about Cardiff that gives you a whistle stop tour of what’s so great about the city:
A couple of years back we made a Little Guide to Cardiff, which is still pretty much on the money.
You can read it below, or download it straight from the We Are Cardiff Scribd page (it’s a PDF, 9MG).
We also recently collaborated with Cardiff University and I Loves The Diff to help write a Guide to Creative Cardiff which covers Cardiff’s creative networks, spaces to work, Cardiff’s creative spaces, studying in Cardiff, our creative economy and Cardiff as a young and vibrant creative capital.
Helia recently wrote about urban adventures in Cardiff, a good read for a short weekend trip.
If you want to hear about the city from the words of its residents, you can flick through our articles by Cardiff people.
I guess our main focus is ‘the arts’ (darling), but on an alternative, lo-fi scale: gigs, pub theatre, pop-up poetry readings, arts festivals – all that jazz. Read our articles about the arts in Cardiff.
If you want to know about what’s coming up, look in our What’s On section. If you’re really keen to know about what’s going on, befriend our local culture vulture Joy on Facebook and have a look through the events she’s going to. She’s everywhere!
If you’re interested in the team behind We Are Cardiff, we are mostly Helia and Hana, with support from a cast of thousands (mostly notably Ellie Pilott, Ellie Philpotts, Adam Chard, James O’Brien, and many more).
So welcome, Traverse bloggers – hope you have a truly epic weekend here in our most wonderful little city
Lots of love
We Are Cardiff
x
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We Are Cardiff: Guest Lecture for ICMP Cardiff
Since launching, Cardiff’s Institute of Contemporary Performance has had a series of guest speakers in to talk to students about a variety of things. And next Wednesday, We Are Cardiff blog boss Helia Phoenix (hi, that’s actually me, writing this in the third person like some sort of a) total boss b) raving lunatic c) symptomatic personality disorder) is giving a guest lecture about “strategic digital marketing” and the role it has played in creating the local media behemoth that is WE ARE CARDIFF!
(me, arsing around under a flyover, photo credit Simon Ayre)
Oh, didn’t you realise this was a behemoth? Well, I’m not sure it’s one either, but I couldn’t think of anything better to call it (suggestions welcome, keep it clean please).
I don’t really blog personally much anymore – doing We Are Cardiff in my spare time doesn’t leave me with much writing capability, and whatever is leftover from that has been spent writing a novel for the past year or so. But I wrote my own We Are Cardiff post a few years back and I do have a personal/professional website which I used more when I used to freelance a lot. I don’t freelance much anymore (there aren’t enough hours in the day!), but there’s more info about what I’ve done on there.
I’ve never given a guest lecture before, though I do enjoy talking (as per my friend Elf’s comment “well done, big mouth” on Facebook when I posted the event on there, ta mate) so I’m sure we’ll be fine. You can expect some or all of the following, depending on how I’m feeling:
- a potted history of We Are Cardiff
- partnerships and working collaboratively (finding friends, avoiding a-holes)
- useful websites / third party apps / functions you can use to make blogging a billion times easier (low cost or free)
- useful equipment / tech (again, low cost or free)
- digital content production and promotion in Today’s Digital Media Landscape (what can you do to make your brand/band/label/whatever stand out, etc).
My background is mainly in music journalism so I’ll talk a bit about that probably, I might start talking about Kruger Magazine or Catapult Records and start tearing up (someone bring the Kleenex please). (Also I just noticed that James Maclaren wrote that Kruger piece. Double Kleenex.)
Anyway …
The guest lecture is on Eventbrite and is open to the public. Plus it’s free! Here’s what they say…
Wednesday April 13: 1pm – 3.30pm, Guest Lecture Helia Phoenix (We Are Cardiff)
“We Are Cardiff’s mission to create & share interesting stories about culture, arts & people took them on wondrous journey that has resulted in 40k followers, a published book & prestigious awards. Hear how strategic digital marketing played a crucial role in the blog’s success, straight from the horse’s mouth”.
Neigh!
Helia x
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Cardiff in the city: photo blog from March 2016
In March we handed over our Instagram to the fabulously talented @rhysioanannett who took some wonderful snaps of Cardiff!
Can you spot where these were taken?
More information on all pics (including locations!) can be found in the March Facebook album.
If you fancy taking over the We Are Cardiff Instagram for a month, email us
x
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Out of Cardiff: Walking up Table Mountain
Occasionally we like to leave the safety of our favourite capital city and explore the beautiful countryside of Wales that surrounds us. This weekend, honouring the fact that 2016 is Wales’ Year of Adventure, we decided to jump in our campervan and head to the Black Mountains, in search of some good walking.
Table Mountain, Crickhowell, by Nick on Flickr
We parked in the tiny, picturesque town of Crickhowell, in the Usk Valley, just south of the Black Mountains. It’s on the eastern side of the Brecon Beacons National Park, and is a great starting point for lots of good hiking trails.
There is a car park in the centre of town, but during weekends getting a space is a cut-throat affair … luckily we found a space and went into the Crickhowell Visitor Information Centre to have a look at maps and local info. We bought two maps on local walks (for a whopping £1.50), popped across the road to have a quick coffee at the nattily-named ‘Latte-Da’ (see what they did there?), and then decided on the Table Mountain Walk.
It’s an energetic walk, and a quick ascent up the 380m to the peak of Table Mountain, where the Iron Age hillfort is located. There are some pretty special views from the top, but expect tired legs getting up there!
From Crickhowell town centre, it’s a circular walk that you can either do steep side first (up Llanbedr Road – this was how we did it), or if you’re carrying a child on your shoulders or accompanied by an older dog, you can go down to start at the Cwmbeth Dingle, so the ascent is much longer, but less difficult.
The route up. Legs burning …
The sun-kissed peak!
Views from the top: alright, like …
On the way down …
The walk took about about three hours in total, including a very enjoyable pause on the peak to look at some wild horses and some lambs frolicking around in the field below us.
Vital statistics:
- Cardiff – Crickhowell: 40 miles (up the A470)
- Crickhowell has limited amenities, so we suggest taking a packed lunch with you.
- There is parking on Llanbedr Road if the car park in the centre of town is full …
And that’s all from us on our out-of-Cardiff jaunt for this week. Get out in the countryside and have a lovely time!
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