The Simpsons Already Did It!
Bloggings hard.
I once watched an episode of South Park called “The Simpsons Already Did It” where the story was based around the fact that it was hard to be satirical, and original, about current affairs when creating a cartoon, because The Simpsons had already covered the subject.
It is much the same with blogs. This usually takes one of two forms for me:
- I am thinking about something I want to write about, so I sit down to write it. One of the first things I’ll do is see what other bloggers I like have said on the subject I am about to begin. I’ll find that they’ve covered every argument that I was going to. And done it better. So I bin my idea.
- I have just written a blog post I’m quite happy with, and, whilst looking at something else, I’ll find one which is the same, but was written in 2005. And is, arguably, better. So I delete what I just spent a fair chunk of time writing.
Both of these are frustrating.
However, this also makes me strive to write something of worth, something unique. Simply churning out regurgitated stories (as many print journalists do) will not cut it. So thanks all you people out there who persistently steal my thunder or shatter my illusions that I have something new and interesting to say on any given subject. You’re the reason my writing is slowly improving…
Incidentally, I’m just praying that today I will not find another blog post entitled “The Simpsons Already Did It!”…
***Update***
Wikipedia Already Did It!
I went to see if anyone had any pictures of the episode in question and found that Wikipedia had a full entry on this episode of South Park!
This raises another issue I had not considered. For bloggers, the equivalent of The Simpsons is surely Wikipedia. As soon as I’m done writing a big long post on something, I’ll discover a Wikipedia post which is much more in depth. The swine.
Plus ca change, plus c’est le meme chose!
Er, je ne comprends pas. En anglais, s’il vous plait.
The more it changes, the more it is the same thing.