Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

Feb. 4, 2003: Ego Search

A friend of mine recently did a search for his band, Vineyard Pilgrim, and was disappointed not to find it online anywhere. Granted, the band broke up seven years ago, but he'd been hoping for some lingering proof of its existence.

I don't tend to have this problem: my Internet presence is secure. In fact, things I wrote 10 years ago still have an Internet presence today. "Alyce Wilson" is likely to exist in the Net long, long after the real Alyce has moved on.

It's kind of like a William Gibson novel.

Doing a search for my name on Yahoo, the very first entry is my portfolio site. Just what I wanted. The next is the contributors page from the Birthday Blue issue of Wild Violet.

Then there are a couple things which aren't me at all. I'm not the historical Alyce Wilson who has a room named after her at the Wilson-Lee House in Virginia. I'm also not the Alyce Wilson who works in the Department of Physics at the University of Texas.

I am, however, the one who put together the Monty Python Fan Club List, which despite being more than 10 years out of date, still exists in a variety of forms on the Net. And I am the Alyce Wilson who won an honorable mention in the Pennsylvania Center for the Book 2001 Public Poetry Project.

For some reason, though they stopped buying columns from me more than a year ago, Comcast still has my Halloween column on their OnlineSchoolyard.com site.

And one of my poems, published at Zuzu's Petals Quarterly Online, was selected for the top 10 favorite poems, unfortunately still bearing my married name.

I am also the Alyce Wilson who founded the club newsletter of the Penn State Monty Python Society and whose work survives online to this day on their club web site. Along the same lines, the Britcomedy Digest includes in their archives an essay I wrote a hideously long time ago.

Interestingly enough, my entry to David Bowie's online e-greeting for his 54th birthday still survives. And for a single poem published in a Science Fiction mag, The Leading Edge, in 1995, I've been included in The Locus Index to Science Fiction.

But then you get to the realm of the bizarre. Why anyone would still need access to a calendar notice for a 2001 event, for a place where I no longer work, is news to me. Why it still comes up relatively high on Yahoo! is another question.

However, I actually find it rather flattering that when a publication I used to write for, Voices of Central Pennsylvania, began a web site, they decided to include an article I wrote on subcultures.

By far, most of the web searches that come up are from my participation as a priest for the Internet Oracle, although my priestly biography is woefully out of date.

A few of my articles occasionally make it online for Pennsylvania Business Central, which gives me regular assignments.

And I am the person behind Otaku Research, although I've put that project on hiatus for now.

Then for an incredible time trips: I once participated in a composite story which made its way online, courtesy of a friend. Much more recently, another friend credited me for inspiring him to start his online comic, Radioactive Fanboys.

Here's something I hadn't seen before, actress Elizabeth Cherry includes a blurb from one of my reviews on her portfolio site. My first blurb! Well, unless you include my entire article on the Poptart Monkeys, which they include on their Web site. And it seems as if BookSurge has picked up the Wild Violet review I did on Cindy X. Novo's book Why Should Guys Have All the Fun?

The recommended vampire non-fiction reading list I wrote for alt.vampyres is now so old they include it in their "Oldest Known Alt.Vampyres FAQ."

This is interesting: I ended up in some Bucknell students' Management 101 project for happening to interview them for a newspaper article. An article I wrote about a teacher visiting the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary was archived in the PRISONACT site. They picked it off the Associated Press, which ran it back in 2000.

Along the same lines, IntegratedPsychology.com put an article I'd written about Shiatsu on their Web site. This story had also gone out over the Associated Press.

Now get ready for the way-back machine. "The Daily Collegian," the Penn State student newspaper, must have kept the cub reporters busy for several years by archiving their issues, going back to the days before the Web even existed. From way back in 1990, there's an article about the Free the Hole protest sponsored by the Penn State Monty Python Society. I am the subject of a Collegian article from 1992 for a program I did on vampires. They've included letters to the editor I wrote in September 1988, February 1989, October 1989, 15 March 1990, 26 March 1990 and January 1996 I'm also mentioned in a 1993 article about ATM machines, a 1994 article about Roy Rogers restaurant, and a 1995 article about the MFA reading series.

Strangely enough, a magazine that was once e-mail only, back in 1994, archived their issues on the Web and included an issue featuring an e-mail interview I did with them for a series I was writing called "Fun Things to Do on the Internet." I don't recall ever giving them permission to publish that interview.

Speaking of strange, a cartoon drawn based on one of my dreams is still online at Slow Wave.

And this doesn't even include the frightening prospect of typing my name into the archives at Google Groups. Back in the day, I was a frequent poster to various USENET newsgroups.

Looking at the overwhelming evidence of my Net existence, I think that maybe one day the Raelian dream will be realized. As I remember, the plan goes something like this: Step One, create clones; Step Two, upload your consciousness onto computer; Step Three, download consciousness into clone.

Perhaps all the little bits and pieces of me will morph together, and download themselves into a bright and shiny, techno future. Or maybe I've just been wasting time "ego searching" on a rainy day.

More of Alyce on the Web:

August 2, 2005 - Return of the Ego Search

Moral:
Any plan for immortality that begins "Step one, create clones" is a bad plan.

Copyright 2003 by Alyce Wilson

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