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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.
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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.
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Daily Blah for... Thursday, November 24, 2005
One More Addiction
The big hit at said party was Guitar Hero, the very latest in a hugely successful series of PlayStation games where you plug in an unusual controller (a microphone, a dance pad, and in this case, a guitar), and follow the harmonic/rythmic steps on screen. Karaoke Revolution and Dance Dance Revolution are still very successful when it came to sucking in people who don't usually pay attention to videogames. But Guitar Hero makes them both look like obscure variants of Mah Jong.
Everyone wanted to strap on the cheap brown plastic guitar and start shredding. One guy from my office told the colleague who drove him home to stop off at EB Games along the way, so he could get his own copy and start practicing the same night. And hungover as I was the next morning, I couldn't start the day without taking one more crack at the riff from Franz Ferdinand's Take Me Out. (By the way, in the spirit of the previous entry, here's my friend Souris rocking out to the same game, at the same time as my party, three hundred miles to the south.) I can't see this game creating a generation of Claptons, so little does its button-pressing resemble actual chord-playing, but I can see that a lot of Christmas evenings are going to be lost to its charms this year.
Almost as popular at the party was the hot new paper-based game, intriguingly called Eat Poop You Cat. Call it Pictionary meets Telephone (the latter being known to British readers by the un-P.C. name Chinese Whispers). And I would be remiss if I didn't mention the other addiction to have sailed merrily back into my life this week -- the fourth and finest version of the PC game known as Civilization. Fellow addicts (whom I can now actually meet, since this is an online multiplayer version) will know the world-dominating bliss of these first few days, before the lack of food or sleep or shaving starts to kick in. To quote the website of CivAnon: you only stop playing when you want to stop playing.
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