UPDATE: I suppose I should amend this post to point out that I've The Godzilla Cycle has... I guess launched. It's just a tiny bit of information, but I cover the details better on the site itself which is here. Obviously this isn't all I've done in the... oh I guess it's been four months, but the posted articles are the only ones finished or near enough to finished that I could justify releasing them. I WAS going to hold off until I got in an article for all the topics relevant to the 50's, but, uh... the scope and detail of my articles kind of ballooned to a kiiind of unmanageable size, or at least unmanageable with regard to the fact that I'm trying to work on a number of other things as well. Anwyas, on to the original post:
So recently I made some resolve to make this whole "unseen" project thingy, because none of this info is out there and most of the stuff that is is either a rumor, lie, or both. It came about of course because of a kind of retreat into denial after Godzilla died, but with the recent news of Godzilla fighting back against his most deadly enemy yet - Hollywood - it kinda moved from "a thing I'm doing because what else is there" to a full-on preservation attempt. I figure, if Godzilla loses and this death is permanent after all, someone, somewhere, should be keeping a record in the first world's most widely spoken language.
And there's no one more qualified than me, really. Nor is there anyone who comes even remotely close who's actually trying.
So that means I have three main concerns that the last two posts I made (and the presumed future ones) are addressing:
1. Preservation - To keep ALL parts of the Godzilla myth cycle alive for as long as I am capable. The whole point is that, as our cultural keystone, Godzilla is supposed to outlive all of us and represent us to whoever inherits the future, be they wandering aliens or teenage cavemen or reptile people from the Hollow Earth. I can only keep the legends alive for so long and with a limited amount of reach, but if I can get it out there, there's a chance future generations will keep the flame going. Homer's epics were written in the mid-700's bce, if Godzilla can't survive for a mere 60 years, then we, as a civilization, have failed utterly.
2. Illumination - There are stories that, for some weird reason, have simply gone untold. Not rare, obscure details lost to time, but public, well-known and oft-repeated tales plastered over something as widely seen as wikipedia. There is something wrong with that. Why is it that so much is made of Godzilla vs. the Space Monsters and yet things like Bride of Godzilla and Super Godzilla: God's Angry Messenger are just outright ignored by millions of people? Where is the sense in that? All it takes is a minute of one's time, but instead this stuff, largely, remains buried despite its ease of access. I want to change all that, and not only keep what's already printed in English alive, but to tell the whole story, to the best of my knowledge, aggregated from all over the world. After all, Godzilla belongs to all the people of the world, not just a single nation.
3. Education - Because of language barriers, and the 30 some odd years when enthusiastic people existed but a clear "fandom" or source of information to most of the world did not, there are many, many half-truths, rumors, misunderstandings, and of course outright lies. In contemporary times, there are many websites with a somewhat "respected" status, that are looked up to as being trustworthy, but do nothing but spread their horrid lies and filth all over the collective imaginations of those who simply don't know who to trust. Toho Kingdom is the main source of all the lies, obviously, but they're not alone. And really, Toho Kingdom isn't even the worst there is, but the less I say about the Zilla Deniers the better. Hence, there's needs to be an actual trustworthy source out there, somewhere you can go to get the real story. Naturally, I'm just a fallible human being like everyone else, and I don't and can't know everything. However, unlike some *ahem* other places out there, I don't have to know everything, because I have this incredible super human ability to admit when I don't know something or if I'm unsure or when I don't have all the facts. Presenting information simply as it exists allows the record of the rumors to persist, and leaves the power of logical thinking in the hands of the reader. Where absolutism was once king, I can introduce doubt back into the world. Psuedo-Apollodorus (whoever that guy was) never claimed to say exactly which versions of the myths were true, he simply presented the information as he knew it, to record ALL of it, and leave the rest to the reader. That is what I hope to accomplish.
These points have, more or less, already been made in the introduction to my "master list" article, but I'm reiterating them here because they tie directly into what this post is about. See, I said that in that article that I would update it as new information became available or changed, to make that a current go-to list and the other bits would take longer to come out as I checked everything. So it would go research > update master list > write decade specific article. However, in just a few days after writing the list, I learned so much more that large portions of it became outdated all at once, including information about Bride of Godzilla, meaning I would have to go and update both articles.
Not a big deal, just some simple updates, right? Well, it's more than that. What I'm doing here is not enough, and the formatting, the way the information is presented, I realized, isn't conducive to portraying it in the most meaningful and effective way. In order to correct those problems, and hold true to my three main goals, a brand new approach is needed.
What I need to do is create a dedicated database, something like a "wiki" I guess you could call it, where each page leads into another, where the development of various ideas, stories, creatures, and the like can be traced and cross-referenced with their respective histories. A simple list of drafts by date wasn't really accomplishing the sort of thing I now realize I'm "destined" to create.
So, for starters, I'm staying the fuck away from wikia, and that goes for Wikizilla too. I have nothing personal against the de facto Godzilla wiki, it's just... weird. The rules there are random and make no sense, it's scope changes every other hour, and no one seems to really be talking to each other. It's certainly fine for what it is, but a pile of randomly split and merged pages containing not much more than a gallery of sprites and a few statistics isn't really what I'm trying to do. More importantly, I don't really want to mess with whatever they have going on over there. It makes absolutely no sense to me, but they seem to be doing just fine, so there's no need for me to jump in. Frankly, I have bigger fish to fry.
So what will I do, then? For now, I'll be using blogger, and using tags, main page links, and links within articles to keep things into a sort of organized whole. However, I'm hoping this will be a temporary solution, and that sometime in the future I'll find a more appropriate host, one that isn't a wholly owned subsidiary of Skynet, to store information that might be considered subversive to Google and Hollywood's agenda. They haven't taken down anything I've done here yet, but it probably won't be long until the "sponsored" thoughtocracy becomes a techno-mediated mandatory one. It's already headed there now, with only the weakest token attempts at resistance to a few "Call of Duty" advertising campaigns which are completely ineffective.
So, since there's really not much else for me to do at this point, expect to see the new database grow at a pretty steady pace. I'll of course link it here when it's live.
And yes, that means I won't be updating the article series I started here anymore, that'll exist on the new database from now on. In fact, I will more than likely abandon this thing altogether.
So recently I made some resolve to make this whole "unseen" project thingy, because none of this info is out there and most of the stuff that is is either a rumor, lie, or both. It came about of course because of a kind of retreat into denial after Godzilla died, but with the recent news of Godzilla fighting back against his most deadly enemy yet - Hollywood - it kinda moved from "a thing I'm doing because what else is there" to a full-on preservation attempt. I figure, if Godzilla loses and this death is permanent after all, someone, somewhere, should be keeping a record in the first world's most widely spoken language.
And there's no one more qualified than me, really. Nor is there anyone who comes even remotely close who's actually trying.
So that means I have three main concerns that the last two posts I made (and the presumed future ones) are addressing:
1. Preservation - To keep ALL parts of the Godzilla myth cycle alive for as long as I am capable. The whole point is that, as our cultural keystone, Godzilla is supposed to outlive all of us and represent us to whoever inherits the future, be they wandering aliens or teenage cavemen or reptile people from the Hollow Earth. I can only keep the legends alive for so long and with a limited amount of reach, but if I can get it out there, there's a chance future generations will keep the flame going. Homer's epics were written in the mid-700's bce, if Godzilla can't survive for a mere 60 years, then we, as a civilization, have failed utterly.
2. Illumination - There are stories that, for some weird reason, have simply gone untold. Not rare, obscure details lost to time, but public, well-known and oft-repeated tales plastered over something as widely seen as wikipedia. There is something wrong with that. Why is it that so much is made of Godzilla vs. the Space Monsters and yet things like Bride of Godzilla and Super Godzilla: God's Angry Messenger are just outright ignored by millions of people? Where is the sense in that? All it takes is a minute of one's time, but instead this stuff, largely, remains buried despite its ease of access. I want to change all that, and not only keep what's already printed in English alive, but to tell the whole story, to the best of my knowledge, aggregated from all over the world. After all, Godzilla belongs to all the people of the world, not just a single nation.
3. Education - Because of language barriers, and the 30 some odd years when enthusiastic people existed but a clear "fandom" or source of information to most of the world did not, there are many, many half-truths, rumors, misunderstandings, and of course outright lies. In contemporary times, there are many websites with a somewhat "respected" status, that are looked up to as being trustworthy, but do nothing but spread their horrid lies and filth all over the collective imaginations of those who simply don't know who to trust. Toho Kingdom is the main source of all the lies, obviously, but they're not alone. And really, Toho Kingdom isn't even the worst there is, but the less I say about the Zilla Deniers the better. Hence, there's needs to be an actual trustworthy source out there, somewhere you can go to get the real story. Naturally, I'm just a fallible human being like everyone else, and I don't and can't know everything. However, unlike some *ahem* other places out there, I don't have to know everything, because I have this incredible super human ability to admit when I don't know something or if I'm unsure or when I don't have all the facts. Presenting information simply as it exists allows the record of the rumors to persist, and leaves the power of logical thinking in the hands of the reader. Where absolutism was once king, I can introduce doubt back into the world. Psuedo-Apollodorus (whoever that guy was) never claimed to say exactly which versions of the myths were true, he simply presented the information as he knew it, to record ALL of it, and leave the rest to the reader. That is what I hope to accomplish.
These points have, more or less, already been made in the introduction to my "master list" article, but I'm reiterating them here because they tie directly into what this post is about. See, I said that in that article that I would update it as new information became available or changed, to make that a current go-to list and the other bits would take longer to come out as I checked everything. So it would go research > update master list > write decade specific article. However, in just a few days after writing the list, I learned so much more that large portions of it became outdated all at once, including information about Bride of Godzilla, meaning I would have to go and update both articles.
Not a big deal, just some simple updates, right? Well, it's more than that. What I'm doing here is not enough, and the formatting, the way the information is presented, I realized, isn't conducive to portraying it in the most meaningful and effective way. In order to correct those problems, and hold true to my three main goals, a brand new approach is needed.
What I need to do is create a dedicated database, something like a "wiki" I guess you could call it, where each page leads into another, where the development of various ideas, stories, creatures, and the like can be traced and cross-referenced with their respective histories. A simple list of drafts by date wasn't really accomplishing the sort of thing I now realize I'm "destined" to create.
So, for starters, I'm staying the fuck away from wikia, and that goes for Wikizilla too. I have nothing personal against the de facto Godzilla wiki, it's just... weird. The rules there are random and make no sense, it's scope changes every other hour, and no one seems to really be talking to each other. It's certainly fine for what it is, but a pile of randomly split and merged pages containing not much more than a gallery of sprites and a few statistics isn't really what I'm trying to do. More importantly, I don't really want to mess with whatever they have going on over there. It makes absolutely no sense to me, but they seem to be doing just fine, so there's no need for me to jump in. Frankly, I have bigger fish to fry.
So what will I do, then? For now, I'll be using blogger, and using tags, main page links, and links within articles to keep things into a sort of organized whole. However, I'm hoping this will be a temporary solution, and that sometime in the future I'll find a more appropriate host, one that isn't a wholly owned subsidiary of Skynet, to store information that might be considered subversive to Google and Hollywood's agenda. They haven't taken down anything I've done here yet, but it probably won't be long until the "sponsored" thoughtocracy becomes a techno-mediated mandatory one. It's already headed there now, with only the weakest token attempts at resistance to a few "Call of Duty" advertising campaigns which are completely ineffective.
So, since there's really not much else for me to do at this point, expect to see the new database grow at a pretty steady pace. I'll of course link it here when it's live.
And yes, that means I won't be updating the article series I started here anymore, that'll exist on the new database from now on. In fact, I will more than likely abandon this thing altogether.
