This year via my on-line shop I offered a £10 'blind valentine' where I would post a drawing to anyone a buyer wanted, but they didn't get to see it - not the message, not the materials, not anything. Valentine's day is good like that, you see, cos the normal stuff you can buy for it is so putridly pathetic that ANYTHING is an improvement.

MOONPIG YOU WANKY CHEESEMERCHANT BASTARDS JUST FUCK-OFF.

At the point of inception of this concept I was kind-of taking the piss thinking no-one would be brave enough, but amazingly I sold 9 out of the 10 I could produce, leaving 1 for my own girlfriend, which saved me buying an Asda card or doodling on a piece of wood, or something.

I asked all buyers to send me whatever details they liked about their relationship to the receipient, and that I might use it in some way. Interestingly 8 out of the 9 buyers were men, who had my girlfriend melting a bit reading their emails about how much they loved their partners. It was pretty emotional for all involved.

In the end I decided to design a base artwork, and customiseify it to fit the various recipients. I then etched the art onto copper clad boards and mounted in some craft-shop-from-hell chintzy heart aperture cards, which kind-of looked surprisingly good, and made a few people's day from the feedback received.

This mini-project could never have been completed successfully without my amazing girlfriend, Jo, who was totally supportive of my use of highly corrosive chemicals in her kitchen, and more-than up for getting completely covered in black gunk cleaning off the copper boards. I also couldn't really avoid her seeing her own one of these prior to Valentine's Day... Though I did insist on making this one myself from start to finish to prove that chivalry is not dead.

Thanks to all the buyers, I will be doing something similar next year, but for now.... It's mother's day approaching, and I have an idea in mind which I'll be talking about soon. If the new puppy doesn't eat my pencils.

You can follow my crappy artness on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/BoyVsWorld

<3

There is a saying... Give a man a fish, and he can eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he'll empty the oceans of absolutely everything in sight, pour it down the bellies of his 12 children, and become a huge burden on our health service. BUT THIS IS WHAT THE GOVERNMENT WANT YOU TO DO!

Tree decorations can cost quite a lot, and you only use them once a year. Inkjet printers cost a bit  more, but you use them all the time, and they can make anything.

There is a message here for everyone.

I can't bear Christmas generally. I think it's a very, very hollow event. It's the epitomy of the term anticlimax, due to this emptiness. A highly flawed concept, all in all... Bit like football.

I've already tackled anti-xmas cards this year with some success, and so I thought why not stare the monster in the face, and attempt going through the motions of having an average Christmas (which people may often incorrectly call 'a good Christmas').

I have a tree, which I've slung a string of fairy lights round, and hung a few baubles my mum gave me on. I realise this is quite undertrimmed by most Christmas afficinados' standards, but I refuse to let this pointless annual event cost me money... I'll need all that for whatever intoxicants I can get my hands on to blot out how horrendously poor the event itself will be. Which brought me directly to home made crap to stick on the dead tree in the name of 'aren't we having such FUN!'.

To cut a long story short, I had some fuseable beads, like kids use, and Jo decided we should make something to top the tree with real meaning, not just the same irrelevant, predictable symbols everyone has been brainwashed into using for all time.

Through maybe an hour's worth of effort by the pair of us (me sorting the right colours of beads out and Jo doing assembly), we produced the Christmas Heart. A thing of naive simple beauty, with inherent geek value due to the pixel construction. (l33t h4x0r pwned!!!)

I have been listening to the Mariah Carey and Diana Krall Christmas albums on repeat to increase the festiveness inside my heart, maybe I'm getting there... Maybe indigestion.

--- JESUS vs SANTA : The Ultimate Showdown!!!

Nothing, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING says ppppaaaarrrttttttyyyy like hedgehog cake. Well, not when you are about 6 years old anyway.

As none of the people I think of as friends plan on growing up anytime soon, this was the obvious choice for the Breakin' Bread Xmas Special.

Breakin' Bread

The art of communal mealtimes at Islington Mill, the idea being to bring some food and share with others over lunchtime chatter. Extreme purists say you should always make the food you bring, though many less-able and less-organised attendees are allowed to attend (but silently shunned) with pre-bought foodstuffs from Sainsbury's.

Back to caking... And specifically some general instructions on making your own hedgehog.

What we are trying to create here is a rustic novelty abstract animal cake which is stupendously sickly and consists of as much chocolate as possible. It also must have a face. These are the rules we're playing to here.

Ingredients

• 1 * Tesco Chocolate Fudge Cake Mix (easiest because it contains cake and icing mix, some other brands only include the cake mix)
• 2 * Eggs
• 75ml Cold Water
• 2 Tbsp Milk
• 2 Tbsp Vegetable Oil
• Buttery Stuff

Cooking Shiz

• 2 * Sandwich Tins
• 1 * Mixing Bowl
• 1 * Measuring Spoons
• 1 * Measuring Jug
• Greaseproof Paper

Commence Bog-Standard Cakery

First bake the cake as per the cake mix instructions. You will end up with the two halves of the standard cake sandwich, which then need sticking together using the adhesive that is 'fudge icing' (part of the cake mix pack).

Stop with the cake mix pack instructions at this point... This is where we have to go freestyle on this shit.

Pimp My Cake

Take your stuck together chocolate cake and cut it in a similar pattern as above. You will want to cut the side parts slightly thinner than I did here, or your headgehog will turn out tall and thin like mine did. I was okay with this look as I'm so anti-obsesity, and despite me taking the time out of my life to write this blog entry about a dumb cake, didn't really care that much.

Next, stick the two sides on the top using glue, I mean fudge icing, and get rid of the two smaller offcuts of cake somehow... Maybe these could be used to add extra appendages to your hedgehog if a genetically deformed form is preferred (e.g. trying to approximate a 'mong').

Hopefully you should now have the vision to turn this thing into a hedgehog through complete coverage by fudgey-mortar, and then using rows of chocolate buttons cut in half.

Style out the face in whatever way you like. I used a glace cherry for a nose, and spent about 15 minutes cutting thin strips of chocolate out of some buttons to make 'I AM FUCKIN DEAD' eyes... Thereby making this a deadgehog. Bringing death to a party is always a good way to remind people that WE ARE ALL GONNA DIE.

Delivery and Consumption

You can action this part of the process in your own personal way, but I put mine on some tin foil and drove 40 miles to deliver it in a specialist tupperware cake box, which any heterosexual male should have at least one of.

I have to admit a lot of the spines had subsided overnight, and the hedgehog had suffered quite a major spinal prolapse due to the top of my cake being so convex, thereby forcing the two cut off/stuck on bits to lean in opposite directions... Not the general look you are aiming for, though it kind of worked in the context of it being so DEAD.

Here are Breakin' Bread hardcoreists Sarah Jay and Lou Gardner enjoying deadgehog like cutesy toddlers at a birthday party just before we all played musical chairs and had a 'quiet time' lie down with some milk and security blankets.

I talked at Cornerhouse (Manchester) on Saturday afternoon as part of their 'Show & Tell' series.

I could have spent some time putting together a relevant and interesting presentation with some kind of point, but instead (of course) I left it until a few hours before to throw together some unrelated slides featuring a polaroid of me on the verge of tears at age 3, some stickman doodles, and various other sketchy evidence of stuff I've done the last couple of years.

I found it liberating to be allowed to talk about my inane activities as though they had some creative or artistic merit, and was touched by the number of people going 'awwwwww' and looking sorry for me when stickmen came on screen.

Many thanks to Design by Day for recommending me to talk, and to Cornerhouse for the chance to participate, I highly recommend getting involved if you have the chance.

PS - I now have man flu, and have only moped around and grumbled at 100% of everyone I have come into contact since its official diagnosis yesterday. I cannot pass up this opportunity to let others know that they are not alone, and it will all be okay someday.

I've been going on and on and on and on about this for so long that I've completely bored myself to death with it, so I can only offer a brief summary here for fear of alienating myself and having to do some serious self mutilation.

Our render farm blade servers produce nice 3D imagery, but the main by-product from the process is heat - LOTS of heat. This heat is a big problem for server rooms as it makes computers very sad, poorly, and buildup can be a fire risk... Bummer :(

So, in the 'real world', (which features 'serious companies', 'careers', and the UK-wide 'pretending to be a bigger company than you are' mentality.... oh, and also 'crippling amounts of debt and falseness' I have written about before), you'd normally fit a ton of air conditioning to throw the heat outdoors - completely pointless and unethical. But pleasing to shallow IT managers and profit-centric corporations.

The fourth floor toilet features a shower, it also features holes to the outdoors which make it very, very cold. We had heat, it had inverse-heat... Logic dictated that we pipe the heat into the area of negative heat, thereby bringing a small corner of the world into social, temperate, and spiritual equilibrium.

I can only take credit for the server ownership and the idea, the real work was carried out by Glen (pictured). Now the toilet seat is constantly warmed giving you that uneasy thought that someone was recently, intimately, in proximity to it with their anal zone.

Happy Birthday dude! X

I could never have made this infantile masterpiece without the art-supporting Sarah Louise Jay - thanks for the loan of the yellow Sharpie :)

My instagram stuff from the last year or so, all in one place together, taking up space on the internets, with absolutely no point at all... Isn't technology great!

My friend contacted me asking if I could record a vinyl record in and 'make digital now please' for his mum. I don't always exclude favours for those of a parental nature (only try to dodge the never ending house maintenance tasks my own mother saves up for me), so I said I'd do it. When I got my hands on the record it was in fact a tiny piece of actual history... A one-off personal voice recording sent home from the front lines of WW2.

I put the record on, and discovered it was poorly recorded at 78rpm, which very few turntables have as it went out of fashion so long ago that it's become redundant. I thought, no problem, I'll play it in at 45rpm and then time stretch it, complete with pitch adjustment, to make it about 57% of its original length and that should compensate for the difference in speed. This did not produce good results at all, in fact it was unaudioifiable... I had created something of a constant tone punctuated with all sorts of pops and scratches.

I thought, what with my international superstar DJ career, that I would have to go full manual on this thing and rotate the platter by hand at a constant speed close to 78rpm. I did manage to pull this off, of sorts, thanks to my 'mad skillz'. The recording is listenable below.

Did this masterful and important piece of art a while ago: Stuck up in the fourth floor toilets earlier today.

Peace yo.