Still feeling overwhelmed by the shear amount of information and, if I’m still to pursue the original purpose of this site, how much work there is still left to do. My interaction with others on the topic of researching nuclear weapons has kept me motivated though, it seems many misconceptions are centered around information that just isn’t true. I’m hoping to mitigate that with extensive citing, which I’m hoping will also prompt more people to contact me to correct something if my source is incorrect. I’ve still been updating my notes on my home computer but the only page I’ve really updated on the site is the Milestones page. Cross-referencing documents to find which weapon system was testing in a particular operation is more difficult than I thought it would be.
Daily Thoughts
Posted the site to Reddit today in a hope that it will be received well. Even though this is just a hobby, the more serious I get about the validity and accuracy of the information that I post, the more I feel obligated to work on it. It’s especially frustrating to see the tiny amount I’ve been able to release on the site in comparison to my OneNote document that has all of my notes in it. The website is like looking at a glacier, you only see a tiny amount of what I have collected but I don’t want to post it as I have it collected right now. I see it as being too raw, each weapons page is just a collection of random facts that I’ve thrown together from various sources so as I create a page for each weapon on the site I want to re-write it all into a legible page of a traceable timeline across the weapons history.
Posting the site onto Reddit was a huge personal milestone of mine since I’ve been working on this for the past 2 years but it just reminds me at how much work I still have to do! Not losing focus, just working the whole project to be more defined. Still very excited to see what this site will become!
I believe context has been what is slowing me down the most. Not knowing exactly where to start because everything had a part to play in wherever you think you should start. I start writing up something about a topic and realize that there was an event that predated where I wanted to start that affected the situation in which the topic I’m writing about started. I’m going to have to make very conscious decisions about where I’m starting and why. I believe I can still explain the entire picture of what I’m wishing to share but I will need to split it up into their own separate pages. Then, at least, the difficult part will be how to blend the pages together so that the reader can, relatively easily, follow the story across the various pages. I want it to be specific enough too so that someone can find a specific topic they wish to look into and be able to dive right into it without having to comb through tons of related material to get to it. We’ll see!
I’ve actually got a lot more positive feedback about even the small amount of information I’ve posted so far. I’m starting to get a better feel for turning the information I have into a more legible format so hopefully I’ll be able to start posting more information on weapons a little more quickly. With the weapons, it’s pretty easy because they’re easily identifiable and other than small overlaps in their development programs, their histories are pretty straight forward and easy to trace. Attempting to trace the history of entire laboratories, personnel associated with those, and other testing facilities are going to be a little more difficult because of the shear amount of material they cover. Still excited though, not burnt out so I’ll just keep plugging away at this!
I don’t know how, deciding to move my notes onto a web-page has made this all so much more difficult than I thought it would be but it has. The moment I begin to work on a topic to solidify a page or a portion of a single topic, I find content that relates to another portion of the project and I get all excited and pursue that. Next thing I know, 4 hours later, I can’t even remember what topic I was on. I’m going to have to be much more deliberate in how I go about this or it’s going to take a very long time to get anywhere.
First post! Pretty excited to get this up and running but it has solidified in my mind, just how difficult and daunting a task this is going to be. There’s so much information! An overwhelming amount and it’s all so exciting. When my interest in all of this started, I really had no idea how much was involved, I figured the Manhattan project was pretty large in scale and science involved but it really does pale to the enterprise it would transform into. I really hope this site turns into something that is able to be used as a useful resource for interested people!
