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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.
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
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My TIME articles
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Daily Blah for... Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Powell's Panic Redux
Another reaction to the discovery of the 2000AD torrent is what I like to call Powell's Panic. I named this condition for Powell's City of Books in Portland, Ore., the largest bookstore in the U.S., which is where I first felt it. Powell's is so large, the shelves are so tall, the purchase options are so many, that it gave me hot, stinging flushes -- the realization that, were I to spend the rest of my life here, I could never read everything I wanted to read. As Elton John put it so eloquently in the Lion King: "There's more to see than can ever be seen, more to do than can ever be done." And he was singing that long before the rise of Bit Torrent.
I bought a video iPod last week, because the only way to persuade myself to take the bus in the morning -- rather than go through the expensive and gas-intensive routine of driving and parking every single day -- was the thought of losing myself in downloadable television, escaping the hideous sardine-tin surroundings of Muni via Arrested Development and Lost and Commander in Chief and the West Wing. And it worked. I no longer fear the lurching, tortoise-like time spent on the 1 California. Instead, I relish it. Driving time, I now feel, is wasted, non-video time.
But I'm faced with Powell's Panic again. There's more worthwhile stuff to download than could ever be watched, even if I took the bus every morning for the rest of my career. It's more than Bit Torrent; I've discovered a program called DVD2Pod, which, as the name implies, can transform an entire DVD collection into iPod viewable files. Boredom is soon to be a malaise of the past, it seems, like polio or smallpox. But a plethora of options, a tyranny of choice, Powell's Panic -- are these new diseases the inevitable result of progress?
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