Oh how time has passed...

So, I've been away for a fair while and I've amassed a small collection of sightings. I've found myself actually getting annoyed with them now...

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 80: A while back I stumbled upon the "U.S National Debt Clock", which happens to be hosted on brillig.com (the homepage of some guy called Ed Hall).

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 81: A recent mass Turing test featured a bot named Jabberwacky (which I actually encountered back before my Alice obsession).

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 82: Due to my lack of internet, I hadn't been on DeviantArt in a fair while. I'd amassed a fair few deviations on my watch list. The first of which was the lovely FetishFreak dressed in an Alice costume.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 83: An advert that pops up a lot in my feed for icanhascheezburger.com is for some game named Wonderland. I'm starting to ignore the use of the word "wonderland" as it's too prevalent. This is probably how William Gibson feels when he hears the word "cyberspace".

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 84: So, you all know how much I love Violet Blue. A recent post (NSFW material within) of hers features the line "This *somehow* came from an internet rabbit hole I went down when".

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 85: Dene who I work with showed me this site which contains this video,"Quick and fun experiment done with Processing: the first 3,000 characters of "Alice in Wonderland", mapped to a cylindrical surface and rendered with varying radius and rotation properties."


Alice in Wonderland with Processing from zeh fernando on Vimeo.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 86: An advert for a new BBC programme on children's illustrations began with a quick shot of one of Tenniel's Alice illustrations.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 87: Volume 8 of Y: The Last Man features a piece of dialogue where Toyota refers to Dr. Allison Mann as "Allison Wonderland".

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 88: Another DeviantArt one. I happened to find myself on the homepage and one of the recent deviations was an Alice picture.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 89: My band are playing a gig at the Shed on the 24th of this month. We're apparently supporting a band called The Junipers. They've apparently released a single called "Callooh Callay!".

I'll be finding them in my shoes next...

I seem to be becoming a bit of an "Alice magnet". In preparation for the essay I'm writing for my Digital Cultures module on anonymity and identity on the internet, I picked up a few books from the library. Some of them I picked up randomly by going to the section where another book I wanted was and then looking around to see what else grabbed my attention. I started reading one of those books today. I looked at the contents and flipped to a chapter that seemed relevant and got this from the second paragraph:

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 22: In chapter 7 of Technoromanticism by Richard Coyne; "Schizophrenia and Suspicion", the second paragraph contains this:

"The mirror provides a potent metaphor in the surrealist concept of the image, featuring prominently in the absurd (Alice Through The Looking Glass) and surrealist iconography [...] For IT commentators such as Chaplin, Alice's looking glass is a precursor to cyberspace in which the fundamental laws of physics, logic and language are inverted."

Note: I have previously not included any texts I have read for Digital Cultures in these sightings. This was because those texts were prescribed for me to read, whereas as this book was simply a random one I picked off the shelf because I liked the title.