Mmm, never eat raw toast again. Well, except for the bits you keep artistically bready in order to create this fantastically geeky breakfast art.

Instructions for building your own artistic toast makers can be found here at instructables.
Author: Nathan Campbell
8-Bit Toast
Fandom Facts
I created the St Eutychus fan page on Facebook yesterday and became the number one fan. Literally. I was first. Now there are eight. That’s an 800% increase.
Three in eight fans share my surname.
One in eight fans is named Eutychus.
Currently 25% of my fans are named something piratey (one is named Roger, the other has the surname Davey)
It has useful benefits. If I get over 100 fans I can claim Facebook/st-eutychus. You can post links there for me to blog here, and if you do, you’ll win a nice, intangible prize…
True persecution
Atheists have a bit of a siege mentality going on when it comes to being a persecuted minority in the US. But they’re not the hardest done by… that’d be the Jedis…
“The founder of the Jedi religion inspired by the Star Wars films was thrown out of a Tesco supermarket for wearing his distinctive brown hood.”
Imagine if that was someone wearing a burka.
He got upset, and took them to court. Here’s the report.
Tesco’s response was priceless. A prime example of treating a fool according to their folly:
“But Tesco hit back in the spirit of the epic space saga and claimed that the three most well known Jedi Knights in the Star Wars movies – Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker – all appeared in public without their hoods.”
Five essential skills for being a better husband
This is perilous territory, but I’m running out of areas to hand out my wisdom… But two years in I know everything there could possibly be to know… except the parenting stuff… I am being sarcastic by the way…
- Learn to say sorry, and mean it.
- Figure out the subtle non-nonverbal communication – when your wife says something and means another, or doesn’t say something in an ominous way.
- Learn to cook dinner (and to clean up).
- Learn your wife’s “love language” it sounds dumb, but this was a pretty helpful book.
- Learn that when your wife comes to you with a problem she doesn’t want an immediate solution, but rather someone who’ll listen.
Five essential skills for the modern worker
I don’t really like giving advice where I’m not qualified. But I’m Gen Y. So I know everything about work. Here are my five essential ways to get ahead in the workplace…
- Communicate better. Learn to do public speaking – it’s invaluable in meetings and day to day interactions to be able to confidently put forward your views. Learn to write in plain language. Keep things simple. Don’t waste people’s time.
- Learn to say no to things you can’t do – outsource. Paying an expert is often the best decision you can make.
- Learn the 80/20 rule. Be prepared not to be perfect in order to do more stuff.
- Keep up to date with new developments in your field. Read the right blogs and magazines, keep in touch with technology, find new ways of doing things and suggest them to others.
- Learn a little bit about desktop publishing and graphic design. The basics are easy.
Five essential skills for trainee geeks
I’m not sure if I’m a fully fledged geek or not… but here are five areas I think are essentials…
- Learn to put together wires and boxes (like an amp, TV etc) – particularly learn about cable varieties and all the terminology involved in audio and visual stuff.
- Learn to put together a computer – learn what the parts do from the CPU to the fans, and everything in between.
- Develop an obsession – past the point of normality – for me it’s coffee. Once that obsession has gone past normal points pick something new.
- Learn as many subsets of jargon (or niche languages) as possible, particularly acronyms.
- Get a multitool, like a leatherman.
Five essential skills for men
As a follow up to my last post – here are five skills that are almost essential for successful manliness…
- Learn to BBQ – especially steak.
- Learn to kill bugs/mice/pests.
- Learn to buy flowers without thinking it’s a waste of money.
- Learn to read manuals.
- Learn to cook breakfast.
Again, feel free to share your own “skillz” in the comments…
Five not so essential skills
Kottke has a list of essential skills for living (ages ago, I’m clearing out my queue)… you should read it.
Here’s my list of not so common skillz that I’ve decided are important.
- Write a haiku – they come in handy for classy SMS invitations. Limericks are also useful.
- Make dangerous things that impress children – glove guns are a classic.
- Pull apart a piece of technology, try to get it working again, then turn it into a piece of art.
- Learn to tell dad jokes – this is an important skill – I don’t recommend starting with the tractor joke, but learn it to punish people.
- Get a party trick. You never know when you might need to save your life by performing some sort of miraculous and spontaneous piece of entertainment.
Share your non-essential skillz in the comments.
Human Tetris
These guys get style points for getting the piece shapes right, and getting the theme music spot on too.
Thanks to Scooter, whose blog seems defunct so I won’t link to it in order not to get your hopes up.
Spellbinding art
I love books. The idea of defacing them kind of hurts… but maybe if you find an old copy of something atrocious like Joel Osteen’s “Your Best Life Now” it would be worth turning it into something truly wonderful and edifying… like these sculptures that were used in an advertising campaign in Prague…

I love gangster books. Both novels and the “true” confessions of mob informers who use their tell alls to fund life on the run. I was going to write a gangster novel once. Then I got distracted.
By medieval books… I love medieval books – all those swords…

But swords get tired pretty quickly… what really gets exciting is undersea monsters… and pirate ships…

There are heaps of other creative book based artworks here. Well worth your time.
Pet peeves
Losing a family pet is never easy. I should know. I once had about nine pet birds die in one day, and then there was the night of the long flush this year when I said goodbye to four fish in once morning. I can understand wanting to preserve the memory of the good times shared with a pet dog through the miracle of taxidermy….

What I can’t understand is why you’d then try to sell your dead dog when you move house…
Broadening your culinary horizons
I haven’t had fast food from a major chain for more than three months. I stopped on July 1. It’s a pretty big effort because I love fast food. Especially KFC.
I was just reading an article about “secret menu items” that I’d kept in the blogging queue for a couple of months. I just hadn’t got around to posting it yet.
But the point of this post is to share with you my infinite fast food wisdom… some of you may know this already, but other people I’ve spoken to don’t…
You can literally create whatever you want at Maccas from the available menu items – and they’ll make it for you.
Some of my favourites included the Chicken Patty Big Mac, the Flake Shake with chocolate sundae sauce, double bacon cheeseburgers (before they were put back on the menu), and the legendary “pounder”… used in Christian bucks parties around the country.
If you really want to broaden your fast food horizons though – check out the Fancy Fast Food website I posted about a while back.
Block knock offs
An artist/photographer named Mike Simpson has taken a series of classic photos and recreated them using lego. Check out the gallery here.
He’s done everything from major political and cultural events…


Through to sport…


Merrie Maladies
Cartoon characters have all got a little something wrong with them. But perhaps you’ve never diagnosed just what was wrong with your favourite…
This little chart does the hard work for you…
