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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:
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Daily Blah for... Monday, April 10, 2006
A Torrent Too Far
For half a decade of my young life, my passion and devotion was narrowly focused on a comic book, a relatively well-written and gloriously-illustrated weekly dose of British sci-fi stories called 2000 AD. The title sounds quaint now, I know, and that is pretty much the point of my story.
What the 11-year old me craved most, you see, was a complete collection of 2000 ADs; every early Alan Moore tale, every episode of Judge Dredd. This was, I knew with all the solemnity of youth, a Herculean task. For I had come late to this party. My subscription, I still remember, began around Prog 390 (it was "program" or "prog," never "issue" -- quaint, right?)
And so the hunt was on. Each week I would send my mother down the market, where one stall sold an uneven selection of back progs for 10p each. Every month or so I would get to go to Newcastle, the nearest big city, where a shop called Timescape, run by grown-ups in beards and cool T-shirts, held a much more permanent collection in mint condition, but at outrageous prices; as much as five or ten pounds for the earliest progs, and even they didn't have anything as rare as a mint prog one or two, the Elgin marbles of my world.
Still, over time I amassed an fairly comprehensive collection. By the time I went to university, and put away childish things -- around prog 700, when the quality began to diminish -- I was missing less than sixty progs. The collection went in the attic, and sat in suitcases, and occasionally I'd come visit them, and transport the best ones delicately back to the US, where I'd buy special storage boxes and transparent sleeves to preserve them from the ravages of time for as long as possible, still not quite able to give up what I had strived for as a kid.
A couple of days ago, in an Alan Moore mood, I found I could download a Bit Torrent that contained, in a single compressed file, the majority of his opus. The thought occured: I wonder if there's a similar single-file Torrent for 2000AD? And there is. Prog one to prog 1,443. In less than 13 gigabytes.
I felt strangely cheated. It was too easy. All that striving, all those years of collecting, and now I can get the whole damn thing on my laptop at the click of a button? I wish I could say it's better to have the originals, but it really isn't. They're crumbling and yellow and smudged, and I'd cut bits out of them here and there. By contrast, jpgs are pristine; rotate the images, turn the laptop sideways, and it's like reading the Platonic ideal of a comic book, one you don't have to handle with kid gloves.
Maybe this is it. Maybe I've reached that age where the onward march of information technology becomes vaguely menacing. Perhaps this is how Nick Hornby's generation, who sweated blood amassing shelves of rare 45s, feel about the rise of MP3s. You realize our kids will think nothing of carrying devices that come pre-loaded with every book, song and movie ever made, automatically updated? There will be no such thing as collecting. Copyright, already an outmoded concept in a digital world of endless easy copies, will be long dead. Even the idea of having to download a piece of entertainment will be meaningless to them. There will be no struggle, and hence, perhaps, no sense of true worth. There will be only searching, sorting and consuming.
And so I'll wait. Perhaps at some point the lure of those missing 60 progs will become irresistible to my inner child. Or maybe I'll decide this is a torrent too far, and stick with crumbling yellow paper, because ... well, just because.
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