Fans of long, chronological blog projects will know that when one actually finishes it’s cause for no small celebration. Phil Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum reaches its final entry today, an essay notionally about the 2008 episode “Silence In The Library/Forest Of The Dead” which serves, recursively enough, as a handy digest of his entire blog project to date. It’s just under 100,000 words long, which must have a decent shot at being the longest blog post in the history of the medium.
Anyhow, TARDIS Eruditorum is a mighty achievement – and importantly for me at least it was the direct inspiration for getting back to grips with my own writing last year (see the Billie “Because We Want To” post for more). It also sent me scurrying back to my Who DVDs, yet again. Even when I disagreed with the blog, it almost unfailingly found something interesting to say about every episode of one of the most over-examined TV shows on the planet.
Since Eruditorum started, what Sandifer calls “psychochronography” has become very fashionable – though not, oddly, in blogging, even though his blog has inspired a rash of direct imitators. The surge of interest in the approach has come from podcasts, where there’s a trend for chronological deep dives mixing laughs and analysis. But I’m old school: I like my critical blogs written, and commentable, and basically serious. And I have the most enormous admiration for someone who gets to actually finish one of the bloody things.
Well done, Dr.Sandifer!