Exploring Wonderland

 
Thoughts about the rarely explored depths of Wonderland
This is an entry from my journal which date back a few weeks. Today I'm posting it here! 



Lewis Carroll wrote Alice's adventures in Wonderland for Alice Pleasance Liddell, and later was published for kids all over the world. It was implemented and adapted in many forms, out of which some became legends, like the Walt Disney's version.


There are hardly any one who hasn't heard of Alice in Wonderland during their childhood. As for me, this particular story wasn't something which attracted my great attention. Even when I grew up, I never took any effort to take a look at the details of this popular tale.

A panel from Batman:Arkham Asylum

Then, I happened to read a Batman Comic titled Batman:Arkham Asylum. More than the usual adventure, this was an out of box comic - set in a dark, vague atmosphere, it explores the nightmares in the irritated minds of Batman and his archenemy the Joker.
In the beginning pages of this comic, I saw a portion from Alice's story quoted:

Click to enlarge

At this moment, I was largely surprised to see the depth of an otherwise celebrated children's story. The words pictured the exact intensity of madness and chaos dealt within the comic. Right then i badly wanted to read Alice's adventures in Wonderland, and I kept pondering about the scope of the book's content.

The Tim Burton movie
Very soon, justifying my (late) admiration of the book's depth, I could see the trailer of the latest movie adoption of Alice by Tim Burton. The book goes through a number of crazy and weird characters out of their minds. The movie was brilliantly crafted to group these characters, to define relationships among them and thus to weave an excellent story.



Curiouser and Curiouser
Back to the topic, let us take a closer look at Alice in Wonderland.
The ideas in the story are so consistent even when they are ported from a childish sense to adulthood or to philosophy..
The flow of events in the book takes abrupt turns. Conversations are cut off at curiosity awakening questions. The book challenges everything conventional. At many points, we see the rules of language and grammar twisted acording to one's thoughts. Remember the opening where Alice says "Curioser and Curioser". This implies the freedom of thoughts. It is not necessary that we go by predefined rules to get at anything. Our mind has the power to be free. the jabberwocky underlines this idea in its complete sense.

 The Mad tea party

Adventures of the mind
Alice's story is of exploring one's own mind, and the world around. the little girl Alice jumps into adventures and risks and experience a series of wonderful things, in the Wonderland. Speaking of adventure, here's a portion from a letter written by Christopher McCandless, the aesthetic voyager, to his old friend:


So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.

At the end of Alice's adventures, Lewis Carroll concludes it as the wonders of childhood:


..and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood: and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago: and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days.

This highlights the statement  "The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure".


Madness

"Anything's possible in Human Nature... Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy."
The God of Small Things

Alice is everyone. And Wonderland is all that world of crazy adventures waiting for us. On a deeper context, this amazingly written children's story takes in a bunch of basic philosophies of life. That's truly a lot of moral we can expect from such a simply told story!
There's no element of wonder in why people heart this book even when they're in their teens, in their twenties or even forties. If you haven't yet had a lucky chance  to read through these fascinating pages, do so at the next slightest opportunity. Wonderland - This is one place you'll blindly fall in love with!

Tale of the spiral head


Here's the story of how the little white character, the blog, and the comic came into being. 

The one above, may be called the first ever digital representation of et. Well, he was not 'et' when this picture was made; he was just nameless.
So, after numerous doodles of et in notebooks during my bored-to-death college hours, I draw him on the computer. The way he sits, the way he looks, everything was either a whim or almost accidental.

That was a time when I was looking out for a sensible name for my blog(I had almost given up after giving weird names like 'The smiling firefly'. Now seriously, what does that even mean?!). And then I sit and look at this character who is carried away in his own world of thoughts. Right then the right name came to my mind. That's it - the eternal thinker.

We have a name now. I was thrilled. But soon I looked back at the character and realized that he was still nameless. This is the one who inspired the name Eternal Thinker. Suddenly I picked up the first two letters of these words and gave him a name: et.

Identity crisis
Now you see that et is one original character with one original name. Nevertheless he had to face a lot of difficulties in establishing his individuality. et reminds everyone of the extra terrestrial, of course. And together with his alien-like looks, our et lost a major part of his originality.



Extra Terrestrial and Eternal Thinker

But et somehow was catching up. He was defining his own place on Earth. Then came the deadly blow.



The Killing Joke

Zoozoo came a year after et. But et still wasn't a brand icon. The awful result - severe loss of identity.
I have this et-made-of-egg thing on my desk, presented by my sister. After vodafone introduced their own fair white character, people would look at this craft and say, "Hey where you got that zoozoo from?!". 



After all
And after all, et found his amazing place in comics. It was a nice deviation. et now starred in a web-comic which is even named after him - et On Fire.
Hopefully the nightmares of identity crisis isn't haunting him much, in this new world of fun. I've set him free by establishing it as an independent webcomic, rather than a secondary section of this blog.
et is on his journey forward. Join him in the discussions, encourage him and wish him good luck. :)


See the very first of et goodies >>
* et window logon screen
* first et wallpaper
* first et wallpapers - more blood!

PS: Today I included transcription in the et comics, where you people can help out in making the comic better. Take a look at it here and see how it works.


Custom icon for your USB drive

This is a simplified version of my earlier post on USB drive icon customization : Little about the USB stick.

In this post, I intend to explain only the simple steps to get your own icon displayed when your USB drive is plugged in. For detailed information, check the above mentioned post.



So, how to display your custom icon for your USB drive, actually?
#1 Plug in your flash drive. Now you see any lame hard drive icon displayed in its place, of course.

#2 The first thing you need to find is the icon you are going to use. So get a file with a .ico extension. You can google and get like hundreds of icon files, so no worries.

#3 After this, you need to create the autorun file. Go on, create a new text file with the name autorun.inf. Make sure the extension is .inf and not .inf.txt
Now type in the following lines in the file and save it:

[autorun]
icon = et.ico

Here et.ico is the name of the icon file I use. You can replace it with your-icon-name.ico

#4 So well, that's it! Copy the two files (the icon and autorun.inf) into the USB drive, and you're done. The next time you plug in your drive, be ready to see your new icon in action.  



Note #1 This can involve more issues. You may want to hide and protect the above two files so that it doesn't accidentally get deleted every time - in both windows and linux platforms.
Again, you'd have a favourite game or a cool icon for one of the softwares. All you'll have is their .exe file with the icon. Still you can use it as an icon.
Find out more in the old post : Little about the USB stick
 
Note #2 On a quick run, you can download the et icon and autorun.inf files and copy them onto your usb drive in a go.
Download zip