At first I was excited about this. Combine two Japanese cultural traditions — contemplative poetic exercise and atomic age monster from the deep — and you get humor and existential melancholy, like so:

Pretty good, right? I thought so too. Then I checked in a few days later, and discovered that this was yet another little internet phenomenon whose shark had already been jumped. And so fast! There hasn’t been a single good entry since this batch. Probably because it got so popular that the site has been flooded with inferior entries. Yet again, Bearman catches on to something too late! But this is the problem with the participatory content cycle: something nifty starts up, develops a following, creating an incentive for more quality niftiness, then maybe hits critical mass, at which point the masses ruin it with low quality knock-offs. Maybe some proprietors of senseless internet trifles need to forget the 2.0 stuff, and get back to some fundamentals. I mean, if you’re gonna come up with a concept like Godzilla Haiku, back it up: quality, not quantity!

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