raven != writing desk

I’m not sure how I feel about this “Alice In Wonderland Day” that I’ve seen gaining steam in odd corners.

A few months ago, I had a dream in which LiveJournal and everyone on it went completely nuts for a day. The entire world had turned upside-down and inside-out and nobody was their normal self anymore. And it was such a good read, that I think it should happen for real.

January 27th is the birthday of Lewis Carrol, author of ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND. Alice fell down a rabbit hole into a place where everything had changed and none of the rules could be counted on to apply anymore. I say, let’s do the same: January 27th, 2005 should be the First Annual LiveJournal Rabbit Hole Day. When you post on that Thursday, instead of the normal daily life and work and news and politics, write about the strange new world you have found yourself in for the day, with its strange new life and work and news and politics. Are your pets talking back at you now? Has your child suddenly grown to full adulthood? Does everyone at work think you’re someone else now? Did Bush step down from the White House to become a pro-circuit tap-dancer? Did Zoroastrian missionaries show up on your doorstep with literature in 3-D? Have you been placed under house arrest by bizarre insectoid women wielding clubs made of lunchmeat?

Let’s have a day where nobody’s life makes sense anymore, where any random LJ you click on will bring you some strange new tale. Let’s all fall down the Rabbit Hole for 24 hours and see what’s there. It will be beautiful.

Oh, in theory it’s a fantastic little burst of internet creativity meeting internet time wasting, but all I can see in my mind’s eye are the jackasses. I realize this isn’t supposed to be super wacky fan fiction day, but I recall a similar experiment meeting a short end after Boing Boing Gadgets attempted to do a week of pretending to be blogging from an authoritarian future. Worse still, I recall the launching of h2g2, Douglas Adams’ pre-wikipedia wikipedia, and I still wonder if it wouldn’t have had a better go of things if 80% of the user base hadn’t attempted to adopt the same jaunty-ridiculous tone as Adams’ prose, and failed.

Look, all I’m saying is your going to end up with 30% of the day’s content being fan fic involving the blog’s gothy owner meeting the mad hatter and 40% will sound like choose your adventure mash ups.

(A buffer of 30% may seem like a lot for ‘reasonable content’, but you’ve also got to factor in a certain amount of cushion for plain old ‘wtf?’)

In the end though I’m betting the only winner in this little contest will be apathy.