So I’ve been busy with several things lately.
No, not the three week holidays on the South Island (and the 400 pictures I should classify one of these days).
I just got this idea while from the usual nonsense banter on Facebook. Here’s a teaser (it’s turning out to be more of an effort than I thought it’d be):
alice@wonderland
Chapter I. Down the Cyberspace.
Alice was getting quite tired of sitting by her sister at the desk, and having nothing to do. She was using the family computer to do research on the Internet, or so she said. But Alice had peeked over her sister’s shoulder and had seen only text on the computer screen, ‘and what use is the Internet,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or videos or sound?’
So she took her cute little laptop out and set it by her sister. It wasn’t as good as the family computer, and the pages always loaded dreadfully slow, but at least she could look at Twitter or Facebook, and hoped one of her friends may be doing something interesting.
She only had one little message waiting for her on her Facebook page. There was nothing so very peculiar about it, she always had messages waiting. But this one came from someone not in her friends list.
‘Now, now, remember not to open e-mails from strangers.’ She told herself. She usually gave herself very good advice, but the hot day was making her sleepy and slow, and her ideas were more tumbling out of her brain than flowing into it. ‘But I guess if I was to meet him, he wouldn’t be a stranger, and then I could open the e-mail.’
A click of the mouse took her to her correspondent’s page, and she was quite startled to see it belonged to a White Rabbit. He seemed to be in a real hurry too, because his wall looked something like this:
White Rabbit I’m going to be late!
Today at 16:45.
White Rabbit Heavens! I’m so late!
Today at 16:44.
White Rabbit Oh dear, dear! This is such a bother, to be so late!
Today at 16:43.
White Rabbit I’m late! Goodness gracious, I’m so late!
Today at 16:42
Curious, because she had never seen a Rabbit on Facebook, or known one who would keep track of time and even be late for it, she decided to become a follower.
Instantly her Facebook home started to get filled with messages from the Rabbit, saying one way or another how late he was going to be.
‘He ought to leave in a hurry,’ Alice told herself, ‘instead of posting on Facebook how late he is.’
Perhaps it hadn’t occurred to him, so Alice opened a chat with the White Rabbit. But he would close it immediately, after remarking the late hour and how little time he had.
‘But he should leave then! Oh if only I could reach and tell him…’
Alice reached for the screen of her laptop, and plop went her hand through it, followed by the arm, and the shoulder, and soon Alice found herself sucked into the screen, and down she went along the Rabbit’s Facebook page.
‘And isn’t it a curious thing!’ thought Alice to herself, ‘this way I can just see without having to scroll down! How convenient! But now I’m at the bottom of the page, and I’m still falling. Well, goodbye then, Facebook’ she chirped as the page disappeared high above her head, ‘and what a long way to fall this is, to think I was so scared of the terrace in our house! I should think nothing of it if I were to fall from it after this!’
Down she went, little fluttering lights and pixels rushed past her, and yet it didn’t seem to Alice that she was falling at such great speed. ‘I must be falling through the pipes of the Internet. I wonder why I haven’t seen any turns yet, how should I know which way to go to Germany, and which way to go to Japan? It is no wonder I am falling so fast, I hear we run the internet at one hundred megabits –‘ (for, you see, Alice had learned many grand-sounding words, which she was fond of using when appropriate, and even though there was nobody to impress there, it was good practice to do so) ‘– I wonder how many miles per hour that is?’ (Alice had no idea how the units related, but as they were always talking about how fast the Internet was, she thought there had to be a connection somewhere).
