Just get on with it!

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 123: A random demotivational poster featuring some Tenniel artwork: http://www.motivatedphotos.com/?src=rss&id=32727

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 124: Ok, so it doesn't specifically mention Alice, but it mentions Lewis Carroll (and I doubt she'd be reading him The Hunting Of The Snark)! http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1601#comic

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 125: "I could be the Alice to your Wonderland" - A line from "Beasts" by Slow Moving Millie (Amelia Warner). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAPtp6AEgm0

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 126: A tin etched with some Tenniel art: http://www.flickr.com/photos/isitcrunchy/2099771364/in/set-72157603416203522/

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 127: "Through the geeking glass: Hanners in Con-derland" - http://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1428

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 128: Tony Franklin's Twitter background: http://a1.twimg.com/profile_background_images/10196570/TF_Background.jpg

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 129: Tulgey Wood designs: http://tulgeywooddesigns.com/

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 130: "Brainless through the looking-glass" - http://notalwaysright.com/brainless-through-the-looking-glass/2299

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 131: "I'm at a bar dressed as the Cheshire Cat with the White Rabbit, Mad Hatter, one of the Tweedles, Alice in drag and the Queen of Hearts." - http://mydrunktexts.com/view/s/5117

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 132: @mollycrabapple Off to Alice in Wonderland Dr. Sketchy's at the Slipper Room

@mollycrabapple Damn did Trina Rose rock it today. Total send up of Alice in Wonderland

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 133: @qikipedia Happy 4th July! In 1862, Lewis Carroll told the original 'Alice in Wonderland' story to Alice Liddell on a boat in Oxford.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 134: @amandapalmer suggestions for artists for evelyn&evelyn's upcoming record? think: tenniel (alice in wonderland), gorey, emily strange, circus. send LINKS.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 135: @Theremina O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! A newborn named Tallulah. Beautiful, strong, with delicate limbs, just like her mama and papa.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 136: @jephjacques And with a final thrust, Nightcrawler BAMFED into Alice's rabbit hole.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 137: @mc_frontalot Galactus in Wonderland #futuredisneymarvelmovies

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 138: @amandapalmer back from the stunning through-the-looking-house of jonathan ross (@wossy), jane goldman (@ferretprincess) & their magic kids. rad people.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 139: And finally, the Zero Punctuation review of Mad World features this:

The mutant returns

I'm really bad at this whole "motivation" malarkey. It's so often these days that I just can't be bothered to do things. I barely create any more. I've been too caught up in things like work and other people that have resulted in any spare time I have being wasted by inanity and such-like. This is not what I want. While I don't wish to abandon the new things in my life (though it may not be my choice when it comes to certain things), I don't want to lose what I used to do. I want to write again. I want to play music. I want to feel the satisfaction of doing something I'm proud of. I want to be myself again.

This blog is quite obviously one of those things I've neglected. There's been Alice references all over. Some I have forgotten about. Some I neglected to make a note of (I know there's one in American Gods by Neil Gaiman, but I didn't mark the page and it's an extremely long book to search through). This is what I have left.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 115: More stumbling brought me to a page full of art by Kurt Wenner. One being this piece featuring Alice and the white rabbit.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 116: Overheard in New York furnished me with this very odd conversation.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 117: This IRC quote features a username of "Haigha", which is the name the March Hare goes by in Through The Looking Glass.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 118: An arcade/trivia machine in a local Leicester pub offered this game of "Triple Towers Solitaire", which is obviously Alice-themed. Alice is looking exceptionally busty for a child. I also have no idea who the young guy is meant to be (possibly the Knave of Hearts).

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 119: I was watching the '80s TV adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy earlier and was reminded of the slogan for Milliways, "If you've done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways—the Restaurant at the End of the Universe!".

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 120: Finally, another picture from Rachel. This time of a bookshop named "Through The Looking Glass".


Oh wait, a couple more from Twitter:

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 121: @wilw There's a perfect Cheshire Cat moon out right now, with just the faintest Earthshine in a darkening sky. So beautiful.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 122: @zoetica Best morning in weeks. Coffee status: hot, black. Z status: Cheshire grin.

Time runs differently here

Oh look, it's been months since I updated this. This is what having a full-time job does to me.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 108: My friend Grace did a recent photography shoot with an Alice theme for a competition.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 109: A recent picture from I Can Has Cheezburger features the Disney version of the Cheshire cat.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 110: A recent blog by Amanda Palmer talks about her high school theatre experiences. One play was "Alice", "an original piece that married different versions of “alice in wonderland” together, including jan svankmeyers. it was basically a play about drugs and death."

And now, various Twitter posts:

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 111: @Zoetica:Escaping the sudden accidental rabbit hole for some proper Russian dining at Traktir. Mы пируем, суки.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 112: @MollyCrabapple: Drawing Alice in Wonderland pictures for the Box

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 113: @NeilHimself: RT O frabjous day calloo etc @mantene: @neilhimself The Graveyard Book won Audible.com's Tournament of Audiobooks! Congratulations!

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 114: @JephJacques: I'm at the Dirty Truth, tweeting about my characters drinking at the Horrific Revelation HOW DEEP DOES THE RABBIT HOLE GO

There's possibly a few more that I've missed/forgotten about. It just gets silly these days...

You should all follow Warren

I'm failing a lot at blogging these days. I haven't added anything to my writing blog in ages. My gaming blog is sadly neglected, despite the fact I've played some awesome games recently. And the others are just as bad, but at least I don't feel like I have content for them.

This blog has also been neglected. Every now and then I've popped in and added the small collection of Alice references I've amassed, but nothing else. This is what working has done to me. While I do still have a fair bit of free time (much more than other people do), I still waste a fair bit of it. I fall into bad habits where I prefer to just wander the internet or watch TV rather than do things like read or write or create. I hardly even play games as that requires me to take an active role.

I need to change this. There's so much I can do that I just never get round to. I need to get shit done! I've no idea if this will happen. We'll just have to wait and see.

In other news, I have fallen in love with Twitter. While I've neglected my other web presences, my Twitter has become more active than ever. It's a constant source of quick little bits of amusement and I follow some awesome people. Maybe one day I'll work out a way to do something awesome with it. Something more than just talk about how tired I am or how I'm eating something nice. Whatever it gives me and whatever I do with it, I love it. Follow me.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 106: Speaking of Twitter, a well-known fetish model named Apnea began following me. The first thing I noticed when I checked her profile was her Alice profile picture.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 107: And again discovered via Twitter (but also via my RSS subscriptions). It was Lewis Carroll's birthday the other day. Zoetica made a blog post about it and linked to a Coilhouse post. She also tweeted this image:

I am the girl Anachronism

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 104: Once again, Pyretta Blaze has been dressing up as Alice. This time she's done a shoot that also includes her as Alice and the Queen of Hearts.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 105: One I noticed a while back but completely forgot about is a Tom Waits album called "Alice". According to Wikipedia, "The album contains the majority of songs written for the play Alice, based on the forbidden love between Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell".

So finely surpassed

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 97: The lyrics to "Faerie Tale" by Venom feature the lines "In this wonderland called hell" and "The looking glass doth break".

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 98: Another stumbling session unearthed this answer sheet for the "74 bands" picture. Alice is of course used to illustrate "Alice in Chains".

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 99: A Facebook group, "I Stay Up Late and I Don't Do Anything Productive", features various images, most of them being internet-meme based. A few of them are Alice-themed.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 100: Thanks to an episode of Never Mind The Buzzcocks, I discovered that the video for Gwen Stefani's "What you waiting for?" is heavily Alice themed.



Alice in popular culture sighting no. 101: Following some connections on Twitter, I discovered Theremina, who had recently tweeted; "Huge, low-slung Cheshire Cat grin of a moon. Sure enough, the night grows curioser and curioser."

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 102: Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis features the line "Down the goddamn rabbithole again." Everyone needs to read this book.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 103: Finally, another one from Rachel. This photo was taken on Brougham Street in Edinburgh. It's apparently for a mobile disco named "Mad Hat Man".

Creeping ever closer

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 94: Another one from Rachel. This time it's an Alice calendar. No word on where she found it, but a quick Google search turns this up.


Alice in popular culture sighting no. 95: Bizarre magazine have come up with a holiday gift guide full of strange and interesting things. One of which is a lovely Alice necklace from Temporary: Secretary.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 96: Finally, I was once again using the Stumbleupon toolbar and came across a page full of complex sand sculptures. I was about to navigate away from it, when I realised what the subject of one of the pictures was meant to be.

Eating only apples

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 93: The summary for a recent Slashdot story about the Apple/Psystar conflict finished with "As Alice in Wonderland might put it, "It gets interestinger and interestinger."" (taken from the article itself).

The Scottish connection

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 90: I'm currently following Stephen Fry on Twitter. One of his recent tweets made great use of the word "frabjous".

Also, it seems I'm now influencing other people into finding these sightings for me. Both of these were sent to me by my friend Rachel:

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 91: She first sent me a link to a pair of boots, among other links to various pairs she was lusting after.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 92: Then, the other day, she sent me a text containing this picture. I asked her where it was taken and she replied with "on the underpass at Potterrow Port, near Edinburgh uni".

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!".

Alices old and new

So, my lovely friend Emma surprised me at work the other day with a random present. It was an old edition of Alice in Wonderland from 1943 (I think). The illustrations are by Rene Cloke, who is apparently quite collectible and most famous for illustrating some Enid Blyton books.






Alice in popular culture sighting no. 79: Another one I forgot is that I was looking at music magazines in WHSmith a while ago and turned around to be faced with a new magazine named Wonderland.

Oh so many!

A bumper crop of sightings now. They've been collecting up as I no longer have the internet at home...

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 76: "When I grow up" by Garbage, features the line "Floating out to Wonderland".

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 77: Paul Kaye's intro to Being John Malkovich on Film Four features him making the Alice influence on the film explicit. Saying that when you enter the office in the film you "enter Wonderland".

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 78: Another US episode of "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" features a talk show skit based around Wonderland/Looking-glass. Including Ryan Stiles playing the part of the "man who sold her the mirror". He notes that he thought "it was just a mirror, otherwise I would have charged her more".

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 79: In this weeks batch of PostSecrets, this card came up:

Also, today's XKCD is this:

Featuring the alternate text of "Except for anything by Lewis Carroll or Tolkien, you get five made-up words per story. I'm looking at you, Anathem."

One is far superior to the other

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 74: Thanks to someone's msn name, I discovered that the McFly song, "Lies", contains the lyrics "And I'm just one drink away/And I'm back in Wonderland like it was yesterday". However, it doesn't feature on their second album, "Wonderland".

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 75: Finding all that out jogged my memory that The Wildhearts have a song called "Geordie in Wonderland". They've also done a live album of the same name.

How about mint?

I started wondering earlier, do we actually know what butter tastes like? It seems most of what we use is actually margarine (stuff like Flora being made of sunflower oil, or Bertolli being made of olive oil) simply masquerading as butter. So I started to wonder, after years of having butter decried as unhealthy and instead being offered "butter substitutes" that are apparently just as good, do we know the difference? If someone actually gave us some real butter, made from real milk, would we like it? Would we complain that it doesn't taste just like Flora (or any of its variants that do many different things to your body)?

I wonder if there are any other products like this that we might have lost the taste for.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 72: It seems I found this one a while ago and forgot about it. I discovered a link to this page in my bookmarks on a site called "Blabberwocky".

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 73: Bash.org has been down for a while, so I've turned to qdb.us for my amusing IRC quote needs. The other day I discovered this little snippet.

I couldn't be bothered at first

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 71: So, two recent episodes of the US version of "Whose line is it anyway?" have featured Alice references in the "props" round. The first was Colin turning his props into a large smile and Wayne calling for "Cheshire cat, party of two". Then today there was Wayne making his prop into a hookah and saying "Welcome, Alice, welcome". Way too much Alice in that show...

Attack of the Alice

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 67: In a recent edition of Attack Of The Show's "The Loop" segment, Matt Schwartz describes part of his experience of researching into "trolling" as having "[fallen] down the rabbit hole of Encyclopedia Dramatica and 4chan".

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 68: Another AOTS segment, The Feed, recently reported on Tim Burton's work on an adaptation of the Wonderland story, with Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 69: The last in a trio of references from Podcasts, a recent edition of Diggnation had Alex using the word "jibberwocky" as an example of a gibberish word.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 70: So this is a pretty exciting one for me. I've mentioned Rockabaret a couple of times before. This time, the entire night is going to be Alice themed! Their next night is on the 20th of September and is entitled "Rockabaret in Wonderland". I shall endeavour to go and take copius amounts of pictures, which I will of course post here.

Seriously, could someone make me one?

So, here's Violet's video response to the Boing Boing debacle. It doesn't give much new information, but it serves as a nice overview of what's been going on and it amused me.

In other news, there's now an Open Words forum up and running. For more info about what's going on, you can check out the development blog. Feel free to join it and start posting whatever you like (within reason, obviously). I'm hoping to get a fair amount of activity on there, so feel free to invite friends or whatever!

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 65: Something Awful's most recent Comedy Goldmine article features sock monsters made by some of the forum members. One of them is a rather awesome Jabberwocky. I want one!

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 66: I picked up the deluxe edition of City of Heroes the other day. It came with various additions, including the first three expansions for the game. The first of these is entitled "Through the Looking Glass"

A little update. Still confused.

So, yesterday I posted various bits, including stuff about the Violet Blue/Boing Boing situation. This morning I awoke to my RSS reader telling me that Violet had posted a couple of new things on her blog (which I only got around to adding to my subscriptions after posting about it on here). One of these is an update on the Boing Boing situation. There still doesn't seem to be any explanation of the goings on forthcoming (other than it could be something to do with Violet's relationship with Xeni Jardin). More interesting is the fact that more posts have been deleted, this time just being anything that has even mentioned Violet, some of them being quite important. Also, Boing Boing is apparently being very restrictive of the discussion of this issue, apparently deleting comments/questions from anyone who's (at least seemingly) pro-Violet.

Really, this issue isn't just about Violet and Boing Boing, it's about the ideas of freedom and transparency on the internet. It brings to light some important issues, such as that of who really controls/owns content on the web. It also shows how things can't be done "quietly", as there's eyes on everything online. Also, thanks to things like the wayback machine, deletion isn't the end. Even if you have no interest in what Violet or Boing Boing do, it's something to look into.

I've never been a reader of Boing Boing and I don't think I'm about to start.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 64: I just looked up the Siouxsie and the Banshees album, "Superstition", on Wikipedia and stumbled upon the fact that they also released a covers album entitled "Through the looking glass". I should've noticed this before, as I actually have their version of "The Passenger" that features on it.

Collaboration and erasure

So, a few little things I fancied commenting on today.

First is the strange case of Boing Boing and Violet Blue (be warned, some stuff on Violet's blog is NSFW). To sum stuff up, Violet recently found out that Boing Boing deleted some posts she had made there. They don't seem to wish to tell her or anyone why exactly they've done this (which apparently happened a year ago). All they've said is that "Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her." and that they "were trying to do the right thing quietly and respectfully, without embarrassing the parties involved." Violet seems to be as in the dark about this as everyone else, stating that "I still have no idea what they’re talking about — except that it seems to be personal? — and really don’t understand why I’m being attacked, nor why they’re stating they kept it a secret (and are behaving this way) out of “kindness” toward me." There's lots to read about this and even I still haven't made my way through all of it. I'm a fan of Violet's work, so I'm on her side. I'll be interested to see if this ever gets solved.

Using Violet as a link, I'm jumping to NxE's Fifty Most Influential 'Female' Bloggers, where she appears as number 28. Also on the list (at number 41) is Cali Lewis from GeekBrief.tv, one of my favourite video podcasts. Looking through the list, I don't recognise many of the names, making me feel a tad "out of the loop". So, if anyone wants to point me to any good web stuff, whether it be blogs, podcasts or just anything along those lines, then feel free. I don't need any funny picture sites though, thanks.

Changing direction completely now, you might have seen the new Orange adverts. Their new slogan of "I am who I am because of everyone" is pretty much a translation of what Ubuntu means. I'm guessing it's meant to encourage people (at least in some abstract way) to communicate, rather than to collaborate and work together, the way Ubuntu does. I'm thinking it could be a bit too hopeful of me to start wondering if Orange might start producing phones running Ubuntu MID.

Sticking with ideas of collaboration, one of the newest TED talks is by Clay Shirky. In it he talks about institutions vs. collaboration and gives a great explanation of why stuff like open source software works and how he sees this as the future of technology.

Alice Pacino

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 63: There's an advert on Dave currently for a film called "The Recruit" (as it's playing on one of the other UKTV channels soon). In it, they show a clip of Al Pacino talking to a group of (I'm guessing) recruits and telling them that they've "stepped through the looking-glass".