Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He loves Jesus. His wife. His daughter. His son. His other daughter. His dog. Coffee. And the Internet. He is the pastor of City South Presbyterian Church, a church in Brisbane, a graduate of Queensland Theological College (M. Div) and the Queensland University of Technology (B. Journ). He spent a significant portion of his pre-ministry-as-a-full-time-job life working in Public Relations, and now loves promoting Jesus in Brisbane and online. He can't believe how great it is that people pay him to talk and think about Jesus. If you'd like to support his writing financially you can do that by giving to his church.

DIY Dinosaur Comics with this whiteboard

I love Dinosaur Comics. Do you? I don’t really care. You should. Sample:

Now you can fill in your own awesome T-Rex storylines with this ready made whiteboard.

Buy it here. Now.

A lightbulb moment: Let there be (environmentally friendly) light

I love this little design project from Mirscher’traxler and I’m wondering how hard it would be to copy at home…

The start of this project was a focus on light sources.
Instead of completely designing a newly shaped lamp, ‘Relumine’ plays on the fact that we all have to switch from old light bulbs to new energy saving light sources.

Each ‘Relumine’ uses two, discarded lamps, which are disassembled, sanded, newly lacquered and adapted with newer technology, before they are connected by a glass tube which holds a fluorescent tube.
By introducing a different mean of light source to the old lamps, their look and feel changes completely. They become one new unit, each with its own character.
Together these two lamps need less energy than each one in its previous life.

Spread the word: “awareness raising” that doesn’t raise awareness is stupid

Apparently breast cancer awareness week is a movable feast. It happens whenever somebody decides that Facebook hasn’t had enough “awareness raising”… this time round it’s not quite as innuendo laden as the last few years. Women are being asked to put a vegetable as their status.

This one is pretty dumb, so it hasn’t caught on with the same gusto that the others have…

But, in case you’re wondering, this is what they mean.

Blueberry: I’m single
Pineapple its complicated
Raspberry: Im a touch and go woman
Apple: Engaged
Cherry: In a relationship
Cucumber: I just had sex!
Banana: Im married
Avocado: Im the “other one”
Strawberry: Cant find the right one
Lemon: Wish i was single
Grape: wants to get married.

How this relates to breast cancer is just completely beyond me. I think people just want to launch a meme, so they tack a popular cause onto it, say “this is a secret, don’t tell any men” and then release it into the wild.

I’ve made my opinion on this kind of “awareness raising” pretty clear previously, at least this one is relatively free of gutter level innuendo, but please. Just stop. It was funny (almost) once, it was hackneyed the second time, and now it’s just ridiculous. Why don’t we try just talking openly and honestly about breast cancer rather than copy and pasting for a cause or engaging in this “lets not talk about the elephant in the room” style of drumming up awareness for your cause.

Gary posted this the other day, it also goes nicely with my rant the other day about annoying status updates.

The power of a good visualisation

Nuclear power. Two words, that when combined, are guaranteed to polarise. Especially now. I’m ambivalent on the issue. It seems like a good idea, until things go wrong. But the other day Seth Godin posted this little visualisation of some real data that is effective in its ability to frame the debate.

He puts the dissonance between opinion and reality down to the influence of coal marketers. Which opens up an interesting can of worms in the energy debate. I’m nonplussed about the debate, I’m more interested in the simplicity of turning data into a visual and the persuasive power that has.

Here’s what Godin says is the underlying reason this visual has the impact it has:

“I think that any time reality doesn’t match your expectations, it means that marketing was involved. Perhaps it was advertising, or perhaps deliberate story telling by an industry. Or perhaps it was just the stories we tell one another in our daily lives. It’s sort of amazing, even to me, how much marketing colors the way we see the world–our reaction (either way) to this chart is proof of it.”

There’s truth in that, but there’s also truth in the idea that the simplicity of a graphic like this one is a much more powerful manner of persuasion than the complication of talking about figures and research. That has always been the case, but the way the Internet works (this visualisation has gone, and will continue to go, all over the internet) means that a simple picture like this cuts through in a way that numbers don’t.

I for one welcome this coffee ad overload

Over on thebeanstalker.com I’ve posted a bunch of vintage coffee ads and a link to a gallery of 300 that I pulled from all over the internet.

To get you in the mood, here’s a video advertisement for coffee – the drink of winners.

Spoiler Alert

Do you like movies with twists?

I like nothing better than spoiling those movies because somebody once spoiled the Sixth Sense for me (he’s dead).

Here is a montage of movie endings (with a language and violence warning).

Oh yeah, and Donnie is dead.

You might also like the Spoiler shirt, one of my favourites.

Your present distress solved with find-a-word wrapping paper

Keeping Christmas wrapping paper lying around the house all year is a recipe for disaster come the July birthday season. Not everybody likes getting birthday presents wrapped in santa wrapping paper. Trust me. As a Christmas baby I know this to be true.

So get a batch of this all purpose stuff.

The Wire as Dickens

The Wire, polarising TV classic, pretentious and damaging art, or Victorian period piece stolen and passed off as modern… It doesn’t matter what you think of it (be you a West Wing fan, or Baltimore’s Chief of Police), The Wire raised some bars for television production in a manner that suggests it will be one of the lasting cultural texts of our generation, much like Dickens was for his…

You should read this – and read the particularly hilarious (but f-bomb ridden) retelling of a piece of the Wire’s dialogue, which, in the show, consisted simply of the said f-bomb being used in all its adjectival forms.

Check out this essay that treats The Wire as a Dickensian piece of culture that our current cultural milieu can’t stomach properly.

“In our age, we can never experience a modern equivalent of The Wire. We would be unwilling to portray the lower classes and criminal element with the patience or consideration of Horatio Bucksley Ogden or of Baxter “Bubz” Black. We would be unwilling to give a work like The Wire the kind of time and attention it deserves, which is why it has faded away, instead of being held up as the literary triumph it truly is. If popular culture does not open its eyes, works like The Wire will only continue their slow slide into obscurity.”

Move over cowbell, more banjo…

I’m in a bit of a bind. I’m starting to think “this song is great, but it needs more banjo” and I’m worried that means I’m turning into some sort of yokel.

First it was Gomez (embedding is disabled on this one)

Then Mumford and Sons…

Then Boy and Bear…

Now it’s Fleet Foxes.

Am I broken?

These deaths we die: A collection of classic game death animations

Set to a nice 8 Bit rendition of the song Mad World.

Via BoingBoing.

Truths for the Facebook generation

We spend so much time cultivating our image online. But everybody knows the truth. Which is why I prefer to look like the guy on the right (at least that’s how I hope you think I look, metaphorically speaking).

I am really a 6’3 tall, athletic polymath. So there. My profile doesn’t lie. Well, I am tall.

From Comical Concept.

Venn Piagram

This is my kind of pie.

Via Reddit.

Say it with style: Letterpress Cards

Dear ____, from ____ templated jokes are one of those little internet memes you probably haven’t heard of and I don’t care about. Or you might have. I don’t know. There’s a tumblog somewhere. Most of them aren’t funny.

But these are kind of clever.

Available from etsy

If Owl City was a middle aged Christian woman in pink…

They might sound a little bit like this.

This reminds me of a karaoke act at a church concert I was at once. And that is not a good thing…

The subtitle thing on YouTube says:

“A great song with a powerful message! Enjoy!”

Here’s my powerful message. I didn’t.

She has heaps of songs on YouTube. You can watch them all.

This one, perhaps ironically, is called “Your Voice Is My Healing”…

Based on the birth year in her username this is a 67 year old woman. So she should know better. Or perhaps this is what the 66 year old men are looking for these days.

The Ten Commandments according to a two year old preacher

This child preacher (skip to a minute into the video) is edited a little bit to make him sound like he’s on speed or something. Which isn’t a nice thing to do to your kid. His dad’s website, (his dad’s name is Michael Pedrin and he also makes videos), says he’s 2 years old.