Whale Song

The busy has kept me from writing on the blog as of late, but when the things inside of your head start to go "click-click-click," it is rather difficult to stop yourself from telling people about it.

Therefore, CLOVERFIELDS. Again.

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/33852

AICN reports up there on a bunch of baseless rumors that keep flooding their inboxes, and if there's anything that Ain't It Cool News enjoys, it's meaningless speculation . Or it's desperate naivete.

Despite the utter unreliability and clear marketing arrangement that produces AICN's little tidbits of "news," I am experiencing a wave of apophenia: the mention of Whales, the sound file of the roar, the "Beast From 20,000 Fathoms," and the only officially recognized "CLOVERFIELDS" site's Japanese nature makes me keep thinking of Godzilla. Why?

Godzilla was called "Gojira" in the Japanese original, which, according to some sources, was derived from the nick-name of a worker at the studio, "Gorilla Whale." Who this worker was, or if he even existed, has never been been confirmed.

Godzilla also began life, in the pre-production phase, as an unabashed knock-off of the successful American film, "The Beast From 20,00 Fathoms." The producer even went as far as to give the film a name containing "20,000" in it's name. This, as well as the "Gorilla Whale" story, can be checked in William M. Tsutsui's "Godzilla on My Mind."

Then there's the "Japanese" site, of course.

Is it Godzilla? Could be. It could explain why the films' been kept secret like this: the last time a film depicted Godzilla attacking New York, results were... well, somewhat less than expected.

Of course, the connections that I make are rather limtied: in my life, I may have only seen a good five live-action Japanese films. Out of those, I've seen maybe three of them all the way through. The Japanese link could be much deeper than what my experiences can tell me, so if I were, you I wouldn't trust a goddamn word out of my idiot mouth. Like any good redneck-witness to a catastrophe, I just wanted to tell you what I saw, even if I'm the only one who happened to see that cow get turned inside out by the government/alien agents.

SLUSHO Is Still People

As the notorious Anonymous has just informed me,

At 28/7/07 3:05 AM , Anonymous said...

Slusho! is people? You wrote this on the 10th, yet as far as I know this quote did not appear on the Slusho site until very recently... where did you get it from?

I just may be in cahoots with ol' J.J.

But cereal, folks: I don't know what J.J.'s tryin' to pull, because I only used the "SLUSHO Is People" gag to reference, in my nerdly way, the Charlton Heston classic Soylent Green. Which, if you've never seen it before, I guess I may have just spoiled the ending for you. Sorry.

Well, now I'm clearly curious again. Mr. Abrams may have just lured me back to figuring out all this 1-18-08 bullshit. Well played, Mr. Abrams. Well played.

There's a Reason They're Called "Viral"

The latest craze sweeping the big entertainment and media companies is a new form of viral marketing: the puzzle form of the viral advertisement. These are interactive videos or websites that contain little hidden secrets about a particular product, but they are designed to look as though they have no connection with the product that they are promoting. In this way, this type of marketing can be insidious for the consumer, but it can even be dangerous for the promoter.

An example of this type of viral marketing is the "I Love Bees" website for Halo 2, or the recent "I believe in Harvey Dent" sites for the sequel to Batman Begins, "The Dark Knight," or the number of sites for the TV show, "Lost."

While the immediate goal of many people who take part in the viral marketing hunt is simply to find out what it all means, and what is actually being promoted, I believe that due to the ability of the internet to spoil, almost instantly, any secret, the searcher's ultimate goal is for a far more worthwhile prize: the first look. The people who are going to be the most dedicated to fishing through dozens of leads and surviving a load of puzzles isn't going to be your casual internet user, but a fan of the product that is being marketed, who wants to be the first to "crack the code" and discover the secret that it waiting at the end of the electronic rainbow. Hence, the many that sent their email addresses into the website "I Believe in Harvey Dent Too" we die-hard Batman fans who wanted to see exactly what information about the Dark Knight movie they would be treated to. The point of the viral marketing site isn't the marketing, but the prize.

And this is where the promoters enter dangerous waters: recently, there has been activity stemming from the owner of the website, "TheOneRing.net" (also owner of "KongIsKing.net"), in the form of the publishing of a website called "Rorschach's Journal," and another website seemingly tied to the character of Dr. Manhattan - both of these characters are from the comic series "The Watchmen," for which a movie has been rumored to be in development. These sites appear to be in the same vein as such viral marketing as websites for "Doctor Who" and "Lost." They are not.

Overzealous fans may take to creating their own viral marketing strategies, and as the very nature of the viral system is to maintain an appearance of non-relation to the corporate promoter, it can be difficult to determine exactly what is legitimate and what is wishful thinking. The legitimate viral site may lead to promotional stills from a movie, while the fan site may lead to a doctored or photoshopped photo of what the fan believes, or wishes, to be in the film. This can lead to all sorts of troubles, from anticipating fans being disappointed with the eventual film, to the image being so distasteful so as to cause "bad press" to form around the movie. Some sites may lead simply to nowhere, and confound fans who are expecting something, anything, to be revealed. At the very best, it will lead to frustration among fans, who must discern what to trust and what to dismiss.

I would even go as far as to say that fan-generated viral sites are akin to "cyber-squatting," generating hits while providing no benefit to the user. It is a double fraud, using the intellectual property of others to offer false promises to fans of that property.

There is such a thing as "bad publicity," and false viral marketing sites qualify as such.

SLUSHO It Is Then

Well, I just learned from my string of contacts (re: reading old news from Aintitcool.com) that the Ethan Haas stuff is actually part of the marketing push for a game from Mindstorm Labs, ALPHA OMEGA. All this makes me feel kind of like an idiotic sheep, since I had actually heard about ALPHA OMEGA somewhere, but completely pushed it out of my mind as soon as AICN connected CLOVERFIELDS with Ethan Haas and Cthulhu. I am but another victim of a media source's instigation of apophenia, and for that I feel... less confident. Less whole.

I feel a little like the scientists who tested Uri Gellar and numerous other "spoon-benders." The researchers thought they were seeing results that proved the existence of psychic phenomena because they simply could not conceive that the subject could be lying to them or tricking them. They were so used to the data being divorced from intent, to nature simply conforming to what nature does, that they couldn't anticipate that what was happening was anything other than what it claimed to be. They weren't frauds or con-artists, they were scientists - and so, they saw the world as scientists.

And that's me. I trusted AintItCoolNews because they've been my trusted source for "leakage" for a few years now, and because I figured that they had inside sources in most of the major studios - after all, some of the stuff that they've been able to find out has been remarkably on the mark. Now, I must learn to investigate further than one site's word when it comes to movies, as I do with other topics.

Damn, that seems like so much more work, and so much less fun, than just credulously repeating what I read on message boards as gospel. Why did you have to make the entertainment industry be subject to rigorous testing, AICN? I was happy in my blissful acceptance of anything you said.

In other random speculations, to show that I haven't learned my lesson one damn bit, Indiana Jones 4 is apparently titled "Indiana Jones and the Left-Overs From Stargate."

SLUSHO Is People!

You know what? I'm out.

Says here that the Ethan Haas site (sites?) is apparently not affiliated with Abrams' production...or it is, and this is J.J.'s way of spreading misinformation...or it is, but it's the studio that's doing it, and they haven't told Abrams, so he doesn't know anything about it...or something.

So I've decided to opt out of playing the guessing game. I'm not calling it stupid or a waste of time, because, hey, it might be fun for some people to try to get "in on it," and it's definitely spurring interest in this movie - if it's even that. I'm just not interested enough in something I know nothing about to go scavenging around the 'net for any strange sites that might have the slightest stamp of an "Abram-ism."

Of course, this could all be some kind of passively aggressive way for me to express my disappointment that CLOVERFIELDs was indeed not a code-name for "Star Trek" (I still believe! I believe!). Regardless of my motives, I will try my damndest to refrain from getting sucked into J.J. Abrams' little mind-games. I will resist!

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ADDENDUM:

CHUD has a neat little article about viral marketing's problems.

Also, check it out: the SLUSHO site is Japanese. Quick - I want you to name as many Japanese pop-cultural icons that deal with the apocalypse as quickly as you can, so that the rumors can spin way the fuck off-base. The more we guess, the higher the odds will be that we'll be right.

CLOVERFIELDS Gets Weirder and Weirder

Apparently, the CLOVERFIELDS project (which is disappointingly not Star Trek), has some connection to the following sites:

http://ethanhaaswaswrong.blogspot.com/ <-- The Truth of Ethan Haas http://www.ethanhaaswasright.com/ <-- which is apparently some kind of puzzle game. After you "solve" the first sequence, you're treated to a grainy, spooky, little video from a guy who claims to be one of Ethan's followers and that you must be "one of us" if you are viewing it. "Everything has happened just as he said it was...and then there's the predictions of the future..."

It's only rumored that these are connected with the CLOVERFIELDS project, but no one (except for maybe J.J. Abrams and Paramount) knows much else other than there appear to be a few references to... ugh... H.P. Lovecraft.

Could someone please explain the fascination with Lovecraft and his many-tentacled abomination? Lovecraft was a horrible writer. Is it like the "pirates and ninjas" thing? Is it just one of those inexplicable internet-anomalies that pops up and grabs a hold of LOLing freaks everywhere to construct flash animations, webcomics, and poor blogs around? I'm not asking it rhetorically, either - I'm genuinely curious.