Let's find the perfect blend

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 34: Alice Loft posted this picture in the Facebook group, "The Art of Neighbours" and Vanessa Parr described it as "Ringo in Wonderland"

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 35: In a performance at TED back in 2007, Jill Sobule and Julia Sweeney performed a song about "imperfect heroes" that mentioned Lewis Carroll and Alice.

Back off my shoe box

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 33: I recently bought the first two volumes of "Fables" by Bill Willingham. There's multiple Alice references in both books, though Alice is conspicuously absent from the entire series. In vol. 1, "Legends in Exile", Snow White is carrying a sword, which she notes "is the vorpal blade of Jabberwocky fame. Kills in one cut, snicker-snack and all that? Does all the fighting for you?"

Then in vol 2, "Animal Farm", some of the residents of "The Farm" are shown to be the Cheshire Cat, the White Rabbit (not to be confused with Br'er rabbit, who is depicted as white and wearing a waistcoat, the actual White Rabbit is dressed in his herald's uniform), and various playing cards. Also, a quote from Wizard on the back of the book states that the book "Tosses traditional fairy tales down the rabbit hole."

I wonder how many Alices there are in the world...

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 32: I just caught a banner advert for a book called "Alice in Genderland" by Dr. Richard Novic. It tells the story of Novic's life as "Alice". I'll let you make your own connections to parts of my earlier posts...

Howard Rheingold at TED

Comics don't make you dumb

Last night I attended a talk at Leicester central lending library by Bryan Talbot. I initially attended simply to have him sign my copy of Alice in Sunderland but it turned out to be a very interesting talk.

He talked about various things to do with being a writer and artist of numerous comics/graphic novels. Most interesting was his talk about the subliminal side of comic book artwork. He pointed out how a lot of various elements affect the way you read a comic without you realising it. Things such as how the pages are laid out (including things like panel grids, etc) and things like colour choice (even that of the background of a page). He also talked about his work on "The Tale of One Bad Rat" and how he tried to make it accessible to a non-comic reading audience. A lot of what he said got me thinking about my Digital cultures sessions and things such as signs and signifiers and "readerly" and "writerly" approaches to reading a work. If only we could've had a session where we discussed graphic novels!

Of course, I did get a chance to have him sign my copy of Alice in Sunderland and it's now part of my collection of signed graphic novels, which includes Alan Moore's V for Vendetta and Karl Kopinski and Gordon Rennie's first Kal Jerico collection.


Keeping with the comics theme, I thought I might mention Doktor Sleepless:

Doktor Sleepless is a new ongoing series by Warren Ellis. While this is of course something interesting in itself (especially as Warren has compared it to Transmetropolitan), what makes it especially interesting is that it also has its own wiki (along with certain other sites). This isn't just a place that summarises what happens in the comic, this is the entire virtual world of the comics. They affect each other and grow out of each other.

Being in the IOCT and being around people like Jess Laccetti, Sue Thomas and Chris Joseph, I hear a lot about Transliteracy but I don't often see it action. While I spend pretty much every day reading a wide variety of media, but I don't often find the chance to do that with one specific thing (such as a piece of writing or film). Even more interesting is that this is a step into mainstream media (while comics may be a niche genre and Avatar may be an independent publisher, I can still walk into town and pick up a copy of Doktor Sleepless quite easily). Also, this is maybe a form of media (that of the comic/graphic novel) that wouldn't usually be included in talks about transliteracy, despite the fact that it's transliterate in nature (the fact you have to read images as well as words).

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 29: In the game "Batman Begins" for the Xbox; during your training for the League of Shadows you have to ring a bell with a shuriken. You are asked for a passphrase that you took off a ninja as part of your training. The passphrase is "Looking Glass". (The writers of Batman are rather obsessed with Alice, as we've seen before)

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 30: Virgil Griffith has put together a list of "Books that make you dumb", which correlates set texts against SAT scores. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland equates to scores around 1100.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 31: Quote #182779 on bash.org features a trivia question regarding the "eat me" cakes in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I was lying in bed when I read this, so I had to get up and make a note of it. That's dedication for you!

I am unable to think of a pun...

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 28: In a recent edition of Pulp Secret's "The Stack", they review Detective Comics #841, which features "The Wonderland gang". This seems to consist of the Mad Hatter, Alice, and some short, stocky, bald guy with a gun. If you watch the whole episode, you should also recognise the name of the forum member they mention...

Congratulations and calculations

First things first, congratulations to Jess for getting her Doctorate this morning and becoming Dr. Laccetti! (as well as still being the most famous human Jess on Google)

I was looking yesterday at how many posts I'd put up here and how many Alice sightings I've made, so I did some calculating. As of yesterday's post:

25 posts with 26 Alice sightings over 93 days. Making 0.27 posts per day, 0.28 sightings per day, and 1.04 sightings per post.

Aren't statistics fun?

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 27: In Mr. Goh comic #140, Mr. Goh mixes up two parts of the Wonderland story. That of the Caterpillar (and his mushroom) and the "drink me" bottles.

Scenes from a mad hatter

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 26: Right now, I'm watching an old episode of "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" on Dave. In the game "Authors", Jim Sweeney chose Lewis Carroll. He began a story about Alice and alluded to the various drug-orientated interpretations of the Alice books.

My insights into daily life, let me show you them

You should know about this place already, I post enough images from it. If you don't, I don't think we can be friends any more...

Blood, Bunny, Larkhall

In an age of digital media, almost anything can be distributed freely an easily. Information is reduced to 1s and 0s and can be copied infinitely. So, as a musician, a writer, an artist, a creator, how does this affect me? There's huge discussions about music sharing across the internet and the moralities behind it and what should be done about it.

I like music. I listen to a lot of it and I own a lot of CDs. I like having CDs. I like having the cases and the booklets and the artwork and all that. I like the fact that I have a back-up of all the music I own. But, the amount of music I like is far larger than the amount I can afford. Hell, I think it's unlikely I'll ever own all the music I "want".

So, what do I do about all this music I can't own? I download it. I take an active role in "liking" this music. I can't afford to buy the music, but I do whatever I can to support it. Whether this is something simple like recommending it to someone else, or something that costs money like going to a gig. Without the freedom that downloading affords me, I wouldn't have discovered or considered many of the artists I now consider favourites.

So, as a consumer, I'm pro-downloading. But what about as a creator? Currently I don't play gigs, so the most common avenue for people to discover my music is closed to me. So I've turned to the internet. Initially I only allowed people to stream my music and maybe download a few tracks. I later thought about the way I listen to music. Rarely will I repeatedly stream music. It's hard for an artist to grow on you and find a place in your heart when you can only listen to them in a certain way or in a certain place (I have many albums on vinyl I haven't "got into" as it's easier to listen to music on my computer). So, I decided to make all my music freely downloadable.

People can listen to my music as much as they want without me making any money. How can this be a good thing? Well, they've heard it. Someone hearing my music and disliking it is better than someone never hearing it. People are far more willing to try something for free. So, I reach a larger audience because of this willingness.

Admittedly I pay nothing to record my music (except in time), so there's nothing I need to make back in selling it. But I'd still like people to buy it. So, how do I do that? Well, using the same idea as Radiohead did with "In Rainbows", I give them something better than the free version. If you buy music from me, you get a CD in a case, with art and everything and you get higher quality audio than you do if you download it. I'd love to offer more, but I can't easily produce something more.

This brings me to my dissatisfaction with optical media and the way it's produced and packaged. I don't buy mp3s because I don't feel they're worth paying for the same way a CD is. They're lower quality and I don't get things like cover art or a booklet or a back-up for if my hard drive fails. But then, I still don't like CDs. I don't like the plastic casing (if I can, I buy digipak format albums). I don't like the fact a tiny scratch can render a CD unplayable. Though I'm not some "audiophile" who wants everything on vinyl (though I do love to have things on vinyl, not least for the fact that the large covers are so much better). I like things to be digital. I like that I can easily transfer all my CDs to my computer and then take whatever music I want wherever I go.

What I want is somewhere between CDs and mp3s. Full quality audio on durable media that offers something more than just music. One thing I miss about using a personal CD player is that I used to be able to buy a CD from a shop and listen to it on the way home. This brings me to things like flash memory.

I borrowed a Nintendo DS this week for my Gaming Technologies module. The games and their packaging is a good example of what I'm thinking of here. Imagine a standard SD card holding the tracks in an uncompressed format, with all the information about the tracks, etc. on there as well. This would be packaged in a Digipak style case. Then you just need an SD slot in your mp3 player (which many already have) and you can listen on your way home.

This is just an idea right now. I don't know if it's feasible or anything. I doubt any major record company would be interested in it as the fact that you can easily copy the music to any device (a great feature in my eyes) is something they'd hate (unless they slapped DRM all over it). Though I'm sure they'd love the chance to tell people to buy all their music all over again in the new format...

For now, I'll just keep downloading mp3s and buying CDs and making my music.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 25: In episode 9 of series D of QI, Stephen Fry notes that Dodos were almost completely forgotten until they were mentioned in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. By that time, they were very much extinct.