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The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
Oh My God, the RSS Feed Actually Works!
Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
Praise for Daily Blah:
"It is fun to watch the author's navel-gazing joy." - Sunday Times (UK)
"It's really funny and informative." - Dave Eggers, author
"The Blah is becoming a daily destination for me." - Richard Marsh, Playwright
"I like it, and I don't." - Fiona Hogg, Teacher
"Better than Xanax." - Lessley Andersen, journalist
"Dude, lay off the crack pipe." - Souris Hong-Porretta, gamesmith
Friends, Bloggers, Countrymen ... lend your ears to these people. I come not to bury them, but praise them.
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My TIME articles
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Daily Blah for... Thursday, March 17, 2005
Once and Future Heroes
Okay, so I promised to tell you a little about all the stuff that was going on last week. Here goes:
George Lucas = the Star Wars honcho "in conversation" with journo Jim Daley, in front of an audience of teachers, talking about his vision for education. I say "in conversation" in quotes because this was no interview; Daley would ask a question, sit back respectfully, and Lucas would answer in a rambling manner for the next fifteen minutes, utterly uninterrupted. I had no issue with what he was saying -- let's teach kids the grammar of visual as well as verbal communication, because that's what they're bombarded with -- but had no interest in hearing it said fifteen times over in slightly different ways. "In conversation" suggests he's going to be guided onto a variety of topics, prodded to be as personal as possible, and perhaps -- dare I say it -- even challenged with devil's advocacy. In the presence of billionaires, I guess, even "why?" men become "yes" men. (Lucas is a recluse, after all; he's doing almost no press for episode III, and this was the first time I'd had a chance to catch a glimpse of him). Perhaps Daley feared that if challenged, Lucas might pull a Howard Hughes, run off to his private room, grow his fingernails and urinate in milk bottles. Or perhaps he was sitting there stewing, thinking the same thing as me: here is the man who filled my childhood with the light of imagination, earned the goodwill of my generation, and then squandered it all to make hideous sequels.
Best game ever = Will Wright, the man who has replaced Lucas in my affections, demoing Spore before an adoring crowd at GDC. Spore is the game that Wright has described to me in interviews over the years as "Powers of Ten" and "Sim Everything"; a game where you take your fully customizable species from the bacterial level to ruling a galactic civilization. I'd smile at the idea, but never assumed such an ambitious project would ever see the light of day in an industry famed for having shelved many such grandiose projects. "The demo is held together with duct tape and bits of string," said Wright before he showed it, in a masterful example of how to lower expectations. It was perfect. Every time he pulled back -- to a world view, a solar view, a galactic view -- our jaws would drop. We watched his unlikely species, galumphing tripods with stingers and googly eyes, pull themselves out of the sea, escape land predators, make whoopee (to a hiliarous smooth jazz soundtrack), lay eggs and mutate over generations, build cities, launch UFOs, and finally wipe out a civilization in a neighboring star system. The history of life in fifteen minutes or less. Wright has it absolutely, er, right when he says that this is what players want -- the ability to create their own stories in as vast a sandbox as possible. He got a standing ovation, and I sat there and thought: I'm going to be playing this game for the rest of my life.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Time Is Money
Fans of Napolean Dynamite will be delighted to learn that you can still buy a time machine on eBay. The seller, bless him, put a great deal of trouble into the backstory, to the point of providing a suitably dated-looking letter and pictures from a "Dr. J. S. Strauss", who took a temporal trip from 2239 to 1906 in pursuit of -- what else? -- a girl. This plus an astonishingly retro-looking (for 2239) suitcase-sized metal device covered in buttons and dials netted the seller $647.59 plus $43 shipping. Which is about a hundredth of what he would have received if he'd simply sold it to a Hollywood studio as a script treatment.
Return to Sender
This NYT piece on how to cope with life's little annoyances, like a lot of NYT articles, oscillates between the bleeding obvious and the hidden gem. How great a scoop is it that if you order a medium instead of a grande at Starbucks, they'll still fix your drink? Who didn't know that if you press zero during most computerized help line messages, you'll go straight through to a human being? On the other hand, the suggestion on what to do with all those horrid little subscription cards that drop out of every magazine (save them up and drop them in the mail without filling them out, because the magazine company has to pay for postage on each one) was for me a revelation of Eureka proportions. I cannot convey just how furious it makes me when I'm reclining with a cup of tea and a copy of the New Yorker, basking in the sunshine, lost in an article, thinking all is perfection and feeling utterly at peace with the world, when two or three of those postcard-sized interlopers jump out at me, rudely interrupting my reverie, getting caught on the breeze, littering my garden, my neighbors' gardens, or even worse, drop in the tea. It's like pop-up ads in real life, for which there is no pop-up blocker, or so I thought until now. Now I know exactly what to do, and I encourage you to do the same. Enough of us return them unscribbled, and eventually they have to stop printing the damn things. Power to the People's Republic of Magazine Readers!
Daily Blah for... Friday, March 11, 2005
Hell of a Week
George Lucas, good friends, conference geeks, a wake for a great writer, and a preview of the best game ever made. Much walking around. I needed a nap every four hours or so. Today the sun and breeze -- nature's glamor couple -- graced San Francisco like never before, and everyone on the street positively glowed. Weeks like this, who's got time to keep a blog?
Will fill you in on the details later, I promise. Nap time now.
Daily Blah for... Friday, March 04, 2005
Flocabulary
Call it English learning for the iPod generation. Flocabulary is a site where you can buy hip-hop MP3s that weave definitions -- sometimes subtly, sometimes not so -- into their rhymes. A sample: "'I travel on foot so I peregrinate/My love of nature’s natural so it’s innate/I have a penchant for rustic walks up and down the coast/When I can’t take a walk I get gloomy and morose." Not exactly Jay-Z, but you get the idea. At $2 per MP3, it's not a bad deal -- given that's $2 worth of vocab a kid is guaranteed to ingest once she happens to listen to it more than a couple of times (the poorer her music collection, the better). Nothing sticks in your head more quickly than a rhyme. Besides, she can at least pretend she's doing something cool.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, March 03, 2005
"Hammer" to Fall?
The Washington Post reports Tom "the Hammer" DeLay is in trouble in his Texas district -- partly because of the outrageous redistricting plan he rammed through, which siphoned off Republican support from his formerly safe seat. Another example of neocon stupidity, and another reason why these paper tigers in power will fall at the first stiff breeze of concerted opposition.
Smell the Glove
For a good laugh and an extra dose of sheer wrongness in your day, check out the Museum of bad album covers. Which reminds me, who doesn't know about the Museum of Bad Art (MOBA)?
EPIC 2014
I love this little future history of media, even though it effectively states I'll be out of a job within ten years. Or maybe I'll become one of these freelance news aggregators they talk about. Anyway, I'm sure the guys at Google and Amazon are having a good laugh about "Googlezon." Sounds like a Japanese rubber suit monster.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, March 02, 2005
Got To Get It Into Your Life
Seems like every time I trawl the web there's another fantastic mash-up doing the rounds. This time it's Revolved, a thoroughly overhauled remix of the best album of all time, Revolver. Never knew you'd be listening to "Got to Get You Into My Life" mixed with "In the Mood," did you? Let us all take a moment to give thanks for audio collage, the art form of the 21st century. Then go, hurry, download a copy before the RIAA zaps the poor guy's server with anti-copyright infringement death rays.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, March 01, 2005
Unhappy Birthday
Yes, that's right, people, the song Happy Birthday is owned by Time Warner. And I, as an employee of Time Warner, am required and licensed to come into your home and stomp on your child's birthday cake in size 11 Doc Martens if you haven't paid us the fee for singing it.
Or at least that's how I've been made to feel on more than one occasion by some righteous copylefter -- which annoys me even more as I'm a fairly rabid copylefter myself. A much more interesting response to TW's ownership of the song, one firmly in the best tradition of tongue-in-cheek political activism, is the site Unhappy Birthday -- which encourages you to write to our licensing department in mock outrage every time you hear the song performed without permission by wilful knee-high gap-toothed pirates in party hats.
And the Oscar for "Best Splatter Game" Goes To ...
Half-Life 2 just won six Bafta awards. For those unfamiliar, the Baftas are the British Oscars. Which begs the question: why isn't Oscar open to games, too? The Academy Awards are in dire need of novelty. Admit it -- for all Chris Rock's amusing quips, Jamie Foxx's dead grandma and Clint Eastwood's live one, not to mention the speedier gong handoffs, you found this year's Oscar race set a new low for dullness. Wouldn't it have been fun to see GTA San Andreas elbow Million Dollar Baby aside in the race for most intriguing entertainment of the year?
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