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!".
Showing posts with label deviantart. Show all posts
Showing posts with label deviantart. Show all posts
Monday, November 10, 2008
Monday, March 31, 2008
Writing about writing about writing...
So, as some of you will know, I have a fair few blogs. One of these is documenting the development of my major project, currently code-named "Open Words". The idea behind my project is a website that allows users to post various pieces of creative writing and uses various web technologies in order to build and foster a helpful community. This community would allow users to help each other improve their writing.
As my programming/web design/etc. skills aren't very advanced, the project will be focusing on the creative side of things. This means I will mostly be working on designing the various elements rather than implementing them. For example, it will be much more important for me to design (at least conceptually) a set of tools and/or a system that would allow users to easily post and edit various pieces of writing and have other users comment on them, than it would be for me to build a database to store all the pieces/comments.
I came up with this idea after thinking about how I improved my writing. As a member of the Tabcrawler forums, I found the community of helpful users that existed in the Lyrics & Poetry section really helped me improve my pieces when I posted them. As the membership of the forums shrank, I found that the help offered on the forum dwindled (in quality as well as quantity). I also found that the forum, as well as other sites like DeviantArt, didn't work well when posting longer works (even a short piece of prose on DeviantArt is rather unwieldy).
Another thing is that on sites which cover a variety of creative work, I found that writing is often pushed to the back, as visual or audio art is more "immediate" or "accessible". There are some sites dedicated solely to creative writing, but I feel that these don't encourage enough discussion of a piece, or don't allow you to go into a lot of depth easily. Comments are stuck at the end of a piece, meaning that if you want to comment on specific lines, you either have to start referring to "line 33" or whatever, or you have to copy and paste chunks of the text into your comment. Another annoyance is edits of work. If you read a piece and then the writer updates it, how are you to know what they've done? You could be stuck reading it all again, when all they've done is added a full-stop.
Other than trying to create a site which addresses these issues, I'm hoping to build a community that values openness and collaboration. I'll attempt to create the site using open source tools and technologies and I'll encourage users to give their ideas on how to improve/enhance it (and even to help with the programming, if they're so inclined). I'll also encourage users to release their work under Creative Commons licenses. This means that not only can they give each other advice, but they can also share ideas and maybe even things like characters and whole worlds!
Further down the line, I could turn this site into some sort of business. Initially starting off making money via things like advertising and subscriptions, but then moving onto independent publishing of works (or collections of works) from the site. Sort of like a book version of CDbaby. There's probably various other directions it could go that I haven't even thought of yet.
So, if you want a more in-depth look into what I'm doing and how things are progressing, click the link over on the right. I've just started posting my initial ideas/notes on what I plan on doing. After I've finished all that, I'll start posting some of the design mock-ups I've come up with. This should be good. Fingers crossed it all goes to plan.
Alice in popular culture sighting no. 45: The Devil's Panties is a comic by Jennie Breeden about various odd things that happen in her life. The comic for the 31st March depicts her sister, Summer, stating that she's "got rocket ships on [her] undies", to which Jennie replies "I've got the Cheshire cat, see?". Jennie then proceeds to accidentally give herself a wedgie.
As my programming/web design/etc. skills aren't very advanced, the project will be focusing on the creative side of things. This means I will mostly be working on designing the various elements rather than implementing them. For example, it will be much more important for me to design (at least conceptually) a set of tools and/or a system that would allow users to easily post and edit various pieces of writing and have other users comment on them, than it would be for me to build a database to store all the pieces/comments.
I came up with this idea after thinking about how I improved my writing. As a member of the Tabcrawler forums, I found the community of helpful users that existed in the Lyrics & Poetry section really helped me improve my pieces when I posted them. As the membership of the forums shrank, I found that the help offered on the forum dwindled (in quality as well as quantity). I also found that the forum, as well as other sites like DeviantArt, didn't work well when posting longer works (even a short piece of prose on DeviantArt is rather unwieldy).
Another thing is that on sites which cover a variety of creative work, I found that writing is often pushed to the back, as visual or audio art is more "immediate" or "accessible". There are some sites dedicated solely to creative writing, but I feel that these don't encourage enough discussion of a piece, or don't allow you to go into a lot of depth easily. Comments are stuck at the end of a piece, meaning that if you want to comment on specific lines, you either have to start referring to "line 33" or whatever, or you have to copy and paste chunks of the text into your comment. Another annoyance is edits of work. If you read a piece and then the writer updates it, how are you to know what they've done? You could be stuck reading it all again, when all they've done is added a full-stop.
Other than trying to create a site which addresses these issues, I'm hoping to build a community that values openness and collaboration. I'll attempt to create the site using open source tools and technologies and I'll encourage users to give their ideas on how to improve/enhance it (and even to help with the programming, if they're so inclined). I'll also encourage users to release their work under Creative Commons licenses. This means that not only can they give each other advice, but they can also share ideas and maybe even things like characters and whole worlds!
Further down the line, I could turn this site into some sort of business. Initially starting off making money via things like advertising and subscriptions, but then moving onto independent publishing of works (or collections of works) from the site. Sort of like a book version of CDbaby. There's probably various other directions it could go that I haven't even thought of yet.
So, if you want a more in-depth look into what I'm doing and how things are progressing, click the link over on the right. I've just started posting my initial ideas/notes on what I plan on doing. After I've finished all that, I'll start posting some of the design mock-ups I've come up with. This should be good. Fingers crossed it all goes to plan.
Alice in popular culture sighting no. 45: The Devil's Panties is a comic by Jennie Breeden about various odd things that happen in her life. The comic for the 31st March depicts her sister, Summer, stating that she's "got rocket ships on [her] undies", to which Jennie replies "I've got the Cheshire cat, see?". Jennie then proceeds to accidentally give herself a wedgie.
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