On my regular trawl through my Google Reader this evening, I stumbled upon a massively disturbing post. I've not experienced anything quite like it before.
Some background: My friend Chris and I had been kicking around an idea for a few weeks, namely that we should create a blog that combined obscure literary references with blatant popularity. We settled upon "LOLrature", a blog that would create Lolcat versions of famous writers.
On the 13th of October, I reactivated a long-neglected Tumblr account.
On October 19, I sent a pedantic email to Chris asking him whether we should call it "LOLrature" or "LOLerature". We decided on the former. I spent fruitless hours trying to superimpose the phrase "I CAN HAZ VOGELZ?" onto a picture of Tim Winton, but to no avail. We agreed to find Photoshop and unveil the site in the next few weeks.
And so it was to my absolute surprise to see reference to a Tumblr blog called "LOLerature" in one of my favourite literary resources, The Millions:
http://www.themillions.com/2009/10/lolerature.html
For one beautiful moment, I thought Chris had set up the blog under a different name, and my Millions fame dreams had come wildly true. But alas, he knew nothing about it.
The first post on "LOLerature" was made on October 22, days AFTER I'd set up "LOLrature". I still can't decide if this is intellectual property theft, or a really really bizarre coincidence.
If you're out there, creator of "LOLeratre", drop me a line...
*nb. You can find our much less funny blog at the now-useless URL: http://lolrature.tumblr.com/
3 comments:
Apologies if I'm a little slow on the uptake, but I also found it interesting, and thought you might, that the Popular Penguins have adopted a 'Twitterature', or something along those lines, into their range. Honest - check it out if you haven't already. Mini sagas in line by line accounts of peoples' lives.
Yeah, I had a peek at this the other day. It's not even a single tweet for each book. It's just a whole lot of short sentences with paragraph breaks in between. If they're going to ruin the classics, they should do it properly.
O HAI!
This is a truly bizarre coincidence. I set up LOLerature on last Thursday because I'd been telling friends on Tumblr about "Preved" (Russian internet LOL-speak) - the first posts were here: http://faithandbegorrah.tumblr.com/page/10
And then I started dicking around with nerdy jokes I've been making with friends for a while anyway and set up LOLerature to amuse myself. I honestly didn't expect anyone other than my acquaintances on Tumblr to follow. I'd say something trite about "Great minds...," but I really am sorry if you and your friend were distressed at the thought that you'd been plagiarized. This may sound obnoxious, but I would love to add you two as members; my reading tastes are rather circumscribed, and the more literary variety the better. You can email me at faithandbegorrah at gmail.
- F&B
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