Must... Control... Fist... Of... Death

I can’t not write about the Weekend FT any more, it’s making me so angry. In a moment of fiscal weakness last year I arranged to have the Financial Times delivered to my flat every morning, and on Saturday mornings it’s become my habit to read the weekend edition in bed with a nice cup of coffee.

I thought this would keep me up to date with what’s happening in the world of business*, but instead it just fills me with uncontrollable, coffee-spilling RAGE.

First of all, that paper is just so straight. If you compiled a list of things that the Weekend FT deems to be cool, it would look like this: hotel lobbies, diamonds, watches, swanky restaurants, skiing, Zurich. Jesus. (That last one is an expletive, incidentally).

But in a masterstroke of poor timing, this morning the FT decided that what’s *really* cool is – gasp! – smoking cigarettes. It’s the 14th of January! I - and no doubt thousands of other FT readers - are fourteen days (give or take) into a new non-smoking régime, and what we don't need is some straight-laced business paper telling us that smoking is actually pretty hip, dontcha know.

So turning the page quickly away from the article about how smoking is really sexy and seductive and how giving it up destroys all creativity and you might as well condemn yourself to a life of eternal mediocrity etc. etc., I discovered an even more contemptible article, which was a review of a book about the economics of online gaming.

The FT seemed to want to atone for having gone slightly off the rails with the whole smoking-is-so-cool-and-bohemian thing, because this one was pure, soulless, City-boy rubbish.

“Online role-playing games are..hardly worth scholarly analysis”, sneers the reviewer, before becoming slightly aroused at the discovery that RPGs have economies that have spilled over into the real world, with people buying weapons and stuff on eBay.

He concedes that this might be quite interesting if these economies were really big, but as it stands, they’re actually quite pathetic. “All the synthetic economies put together…are about the size of Bosnia-Herzegovina,” he notes, laying the blame for this squarely at the door of the hapless losers who’ve spent years in World of Warcraft but *still* haven’t managed to create so much as a single in-game hotel lobby where one can purchase diamonds and expensive watches while planning one's next ski trip to Zurich.

Yes, according to the FT, the trouble with RPGs is that no one who plays them is sufficiently motivated by good old Western patriarchal capitalist greed. "There is no technological progress, little gain from specialisation and no opportunity to invest in capital stock," the reviewer moans about World of Warcraft. No, what these games really need is a bunch of wine-bar wankers to take over and set them straight. "For me, the interesting moment will come when - if? - a world with the popular appeal of Warcraft or Star Wars Galaxies allows entrepreneurial players to invest and invent," he says.

Which just goes to prove my theory - well, it's either mine or Antonio Gramsci's - that wherever there are people minding their own business and having a nice time, you can bet that sooner or later the whole place will be over-run by hordes of twats who want to ban it, trash it, or sell it back to them. It happened to the Neanderthals and it'll happen again. Oh yes.

On another note entirely, I had a dream last night that I was rubbing green chilli pickle into my own hair, which I found curiously erotic.


* A job that's done much better by the Economist, anyway. Plus it sometimes has jokes in it.