A Blog That Is, In Retrospect, A Retrospective On Blogs by Reece Turner

I’ve got a google doc that’s 24 pages right now and will be some number longer when I’m done writing this. On it is every idea for a blog that I’ve written or started to write or thought about writing. Some of them only have titles, some a couple sentences coupled with a vague outline for what in the world I’m going to fill a page with the night before it’s due (I, like [I’m assuming] the vast majority of you have written every one of these hours before midnight day-of). I’ll spare you the embarrassing or awful ones—turns out throwing anything at the wall and seeing what sticks tends to leave you with a lot of refuse—and run through some of my favorites that never were.

 

Untitled Story About My Friend’s Cat

 

My first blog took me hours to write mostly because I was hung up on the first idea that popped into my head, a story about my friend’s cat Big Guy and our love-hate relationship. He’s pretty shy, and it took him about a year to warm up to me so I figured I could dramatize that process somehow (think a la Dragon Ball Z and if that doesn’t call to mind any vivid images you’ll see why I never finished this one) but I could never figure out where to take it so this idea stayed in the doc.

 

A Guide to Garfield

 

This one was my actual first blog and it’s a bit bizarre. I think I just wanted to write about all the weird stuff Jim Davis has greenlit like he’s the real-life Krusty the Clown signing off on whatever the advertising execs put in front of him, such as the Garfield phone that’s now polluting some ocean or the Garfield-themed pizza place that opened and closed in Ottawa in the span of like 2 years total. He’s really like the newspaper comics George Lucas, except where people yell at George for making the Star Wars Christmas Special, no one calls out ol’ Jim, so he gets to wring his creation for all its worth before he dies at the age of like 130.

 

Musings on Musings on Jon Arbuckle by Kevin Jiang by Reece Turner

 

I’m leaving the name in this one because I think it makes it funnier. Kevin’s blog was the inspiration for my Garfield one so I felt like at some point I should make a more direct response. I got a couple paragraphs into this one but it turned out really boring so I could never motivate myself to finish it. If anyone knows what Kevin’s doing these days let me know and I’ll send him 5 bucks or something.

 

On Being Shot Out Of A Cannon

 

I had recently read about the False Dmitrys, a series of Russian pretenders who tried to claim that they were the son of Ivan the Terrible (and therefore next in line for the throne) in the early 17th century. Eventually the Russian royal family got so fed up with the constant uprisings that by the time they got to False Dmitry III they decided to shoot him out of a cannon. It’s a funny story but it would’ve just been me rehashing it which sounded incredibly boring so I didn’t end up finishing this one.

 

The Dayton Accords

 

This was another historical one, about the ending of one of the Yugoslav wars in the 90s whose peace talks were, inexplicably, held in Dayton, Ohio. This one succumbs to a lot of the same problems of the Dmitry idea. It would’ve been pretty funny (Slobodan Milošević apparently got irate and yelled “I am not a monk!” after like 2 days in Dayton, which is also how I react to spending any amount of time in that city) but I dreaded writing it so it never got finished.

 

There’s a few other, more boring ideas that are sitting on this doc, but the ones listed above are the highlight reel. I was originally gonna make this a “how to write a blog” for future interns, but considering the writing center might not exist next year (agh!) I settled on this instead, as hopefully a nice RIP to the medium.

4 thoughts on “A Blog That Is, In Retrospect, A Retrospective On Blogs by Reece Turner

  1. free the dayton accords from this unfinished google doc prison! i’m gonna need to read this blog before i die

  2. I’m gonna miss all of your wacky blog ideas, reece. but I do have to say that I initially thought the “shot out of a canon” blog was related to Mr. Klapholz’s physics test questions lol

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