I shot for the moon, and Twitter shot back

On Twitter, I am just another drop in an ocean of snark.

Over five years, I’ve built up a grand total of 105 followers as @parryracer, about half of whom I can confirm are not spam bots. I mainly use Twitter to keep an eye on my interests, such as football and horse racing, and I make occasional wisecracks, seen by up to a few dozen people.

Once in a while, I’ll get a retweet, where someone shares your tweet on their feed; or a favorite, the equivalent of a thumbs-up. But even if I come up with something clever, I am usually just shouting into the void.

That is, until the evening of Sept. 27, the night of the blood moon.

After a day of watching football on TV, I looked up at the lunar eclipse and had an idea for a tweet. I used my Photoshop skills to tack a DraftKings logo onto the moon with the words “OK, this is really getting out of hand.”

Now, if this joke makes no sense, explaining it will definitely help, since that’s how jokes work.

OK, this is really getting out of hand. @awfulannouncing pic.twitter.com/wQVanT7eHq

— Doug Parry (@ParryRacer) September 28, 2015

Anyone who pays attention to football has been bombarded with advertising for DraftKings and FanDuel, two fantasy sports gambling websites. Their ads are everywhere: TV, online, podcasts, urinal cakes. Everywhere. Hence the joke.

This time in my tweet I included an “@” mention to Awful Announcing, a large sports media account I follow. An “@” mention is one way Twitter users try to get attention, the equivalent of Horshack raising his hand in “Welcome Back Kotter” and shouting “OOH! OOH! ME! PLEASE! ME!”

Usually no one pays attention, but this night, under the blood moon, someone did.

My phone, set to buzz when someone interacts with me on Twitter, suddenly started going absolutely nuts. I was being retweeted and favorited left and right. I had found the Holy Grail of Twitter — the world had noticed me — at least the part of it that follows Awful Announcing, which had blessed me with a retweet. Thousands of people were seeing my little masterpiece.

In all, I got more than 1,300 retweets and favorites, along with the smug satisfaction that is really the only reward for participating in Twitter. But along with the “LOLs” and the add-on jokes about moon-related promo codes, there were some that set off alarm bells. They were using words like “stolen” and “plagiarist.”

I clicked around and came to a disappointing conclusion: Someone else had the same idea first. Another user had posted a FanDuel logo Photoshopped onto the moon and even used similar words to mine, and had done so before I posted my DraftKings version.

I did not see the other tweet, even accidentally. I hadn’t been on Twitter for several hours because I was recording the Sunday night NFL game and didn’t want to stumble upon the score. (Yes, I am a huge dork, but that’s a different story.)

What is one supposed to do in this situation? There is no established etiquette. I didn’t want to delete my tweet, because that would imply I actually HAD stolen it, which I decidedly had not done. Besides, it wasn’t exactly the same as the other tweet, just too similar for comfort.

I tried to take the high road. I tweeted again, crediting the guy with the FanDuel version. My counterpart continued to post that I stole his joke, so I defended myself. I pointed out that anyone can read my timeline and see that I don’t go around stealing things.

But there was no way to prove I wasn’t a thief. I just had to hope the world took my word for it. Out of the millions of people who watch football and saw the eclipse, two of us took the short road to an easy joke.

Mine was just the one that caught on.

The whole episode made me wonder how people such as writers and comedians — those who make their living being funny and creative — can even do their jobs in 2015. When everyone’s passing thought can be broadcast instantly, how do you ever know if you’ve created something original?

So I shot for the moon and got the full Twitter experience. I earned mass approval, had mean people call me names, got in a public argument, and left unsure why I post on Twitter at all.

But I am sure about one thing: My joke was better.

Doug Parry writes at www.heraldnet.com/webmonkey. Follow him on Twitter at @parryracer.