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Teen Blog

Reading, Wellington, and whatever else – teenblog@wcl.govt.nz

Month: August 2008 Page 1 of 2

Bond. Young Bond.

Young Bond is a free online game that will run until the 8th of October. It was started by Charlie Higson, the author of the Young Bond books (they’re in the children’s fiction section, but are also good for teens), to encourage reading. You can choose to be a British spy or a Soviet agent – although I think we know how that turned out. And the site has free downloads!

Billions of bilious blue blistering barnacles

Tintin is being made into a movie series, and Steven Spielberg is going to direct the first film (to be based on The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure – which we have in the library). Peter Jackson is going to direct the second film, which is even better news. More information here, along with a picture of the actor selected to play Tintin. No release dates are mentioned, sadly.

It’s not easy being red

Hellboy II: The Golden Army is about to come to a theatre near you, which is very good news if you’re a fan of the comics. Or if you like special effects. Maybe you just enjoyed the first Hellboy film (which we have on DVD!) Some may even be a fan of actor Luke Goss, who was once half of Bros, one of the most popular boy bands of the 80s. (We haven’t any of their CDs, unfortunately.) Perhaps you’re a fan of director Guillermo del Toro, whose next project is the first of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films (the filming of which begins in 2010). Maybe you are all of these things – it’s pretty evident that I am.

 (And if you aren’t, maybe start with the comics.)

The Jack Lasenby Award

If you enjoy writing stories you may be keen to enter the biennial Jack Lasenby Award competition, which is exclusive to Wellington residents. Your story must be suitable for readers aged 5-12. You could win $500! Details may be found on the wellylit4kids website. (You can pick up an entry form while meeting Robert Muchamore at the Children’s Bookshop!)

Oh hai, it’s you

Face Your Manga is a site that allows you to create your own manga-style avatar – which is a lot easier than trying to draw your own. Although, if you did want to draw your own, there is a load of how-to books in the library.

If you would like to create yourself as a superhero, however, you will want to try HeroMachine 2.5. It has thousands of variations! And it is very flattering.

R2-D♭

Do you play the guitar? Do you like robots? If you said ‘yes’ to both questions you may be excited to learn about the Robot Guitar!

For as long as the guitar has existed, guitar lovers have had two choices—live with a temperamental and out-of-tune instrument or make frequent trips to the shop for setups. Not anymore.

(I think this means that it tunes itself – I don’t know. I am not a guitar player.)

Week Six Theme: DVDs

subtext logoHello out there. You’ll be pleased to know that the theme for the final week of SubText 08 is DVDs. Nice and easy.

So, this means you get not one but two entries into the weekly draw (and the final draw for the iPod) if you send us a review of a DVD you’ve watched recently from the library’s collection. This week is your last chance to enter (before 12pm Friday 29 August), so don’t forget!

We will also have the weekly SubText quiz* ready for you to do on Monday (doing that (and getting it 100% right) will also give you a chance to win), so brush up on your movie general knowledge.

Cheers.

* Next month we’ll publish all the answers, so trivial mysteries will be revealed in due course.

The Rise and Fall of Olympic Branding

ColourLovers is a very nice blog about design. They have created a history of modern Olympic design, beginning with the 1896 games in Athens and ending with the proposed (and controversial) design for the 2012 games in London. I like the trivia noted next to each design. Did you know that one of the gymnasts at the 1904 Olympics won six medals – with a wooden leg? Or that in 1912 a wrestling match lasted 11 hours?!

It makes no mention of the mascots created for each Olympics, unfortunately.

New Digital Versatile Discs

There are only a few new DVDs in this time. Here they are!

National Treasure : The Treasure Hunter’s Collection – This DVD has both National Treasure and National Treasure 2, which is pretty good value considering it costs 50¢ for a young adult. The films are fairly good adventure films, and perfect for a rainy afternoon.

Power Rangers, Mystic Force : Dark Wish – Power Rangers is adapted from a Japanese franchise; Mystic Force is uses the 29th series. English-speaking actors (many are NZers) are spliced in with footage from the original. This DVD is a full movie.

Kurt Cobain : About a Son – This documentary is made up of previously-unheard interviews with the singer. Probably quite depressing, all things considered.

Dragonlance : Dragons of Autumn Twilight – A full-length animated film set in the Dungeons & Dragon world, featuring the voice talents of Lucy Lawless, and Kiefer Sutherland. It was poorly received by critics.

The Suite Life of Zack & Cody – Twins Zack and Cody live with their mother in a swanky Boston hotel (for she is a lounge singer there). They get up to all kinds of mischief in this inoffensive comedy that is perhaps more for younger viewers. If you like this you will go ballistic for …

That’s So Suite Life of Hannah Montana – This is a ‘mash-up’ of three programme: The Suite Life, Hannah Montana, and That’s So Raven.

Gossip Girl

Gossip Girl, the television series, begins tomorrow night on TV2, at 8.30pm. Based on the very successful book series – which we, your public library, has in abundance – Gossip Girl is about a group of uber-wealthy socialite teens who go to an elite school in Upper East New York. The ‘gossip girl’ refers to one such socialite, who runs a blog that exacerbates the group’s internal rivalvries. The first season has screened in the US already, and a second series is due to begin shortly. If you’re a fan of the books and the lives of the rich and fabulous, or at least a fan of Chace Crawford, then you will enjoy watching this.

NZ wins gold – /grats

Our Olympic medal tally mightn’t be too wonderful, but NZ has done very well at the World Cyber Games Asian Championship in Singapore, winning a gold medal in Guitar Hero III and a silver medal in DotA All Stars – and so earning them the Asian Championship Trophy. NZ’s top gamers are represented by the eBlacks (you can listen to an interview with an eBlack that aired on National Radio this morning here). Nice one!

All your database are belong to us

There are a number of online databases that members of the Wellington Library can use for free. All of them can be accessed via this page here. The Gale PowerSearch database has several useful ‘products’ that students at a high school level will find useful; the Student Resource Centre has loads of info about all kinds of stuff, including video, audio, articles, statistics, news, viewpoints, and creative works. Which is pretty sweet. Another product is the Opposing Viewpoints Centre, which offers similar information about today’s hottest social issues.

Other useful databases include Oxford Art Online, Press Display (up-to-date online scans of hundreds of newspapers from around the world), and Break Out (a database of scholarships, awards, and grants available in New Zealand).

A wealth of resources! And all free so long as you have a valid Wellington library card.

By your command

If you’re a massive fan of Battlestar Galactica (and you’d be right to be – it’s one of the best things on television) you may be interested to learn that some web-only episodes were made to bridge the story between the second and third series. Previously they were only accessible to viewers in the US, but now they’re available through the C4 website.

We have the DVDs (in the adult collection, so the full charge applies):
Mini-series (start here)
Series 1
Series 2
Series 3

The fourth – and final – series is still yet to be released.

The final countdown…

It’s a matter of hours before the Opening Ceremony of this year’s Beijing Olympics. The modern Olympics have been captured on film for almost a century! The official Olympic website’s history archive has a clip from every Olympic Opening Ceremony since the 1912 Opening Ceremony in Stockholm

From midday each day over the next two weeks, TV One will be offering extensive coverage of the Olympics. Those of you with easy access to hi-speed connections and plenty of bandwidth may want to watch online via TVNZ’s website; they will have four channels streaming live.  

Reviews of the Week 4 & 5

Waiting for the Weekend : Vol 2
Various artists

Contains many cruisy songs that are great (as the cover suggests) for the weekend. Relaxing songs you can just shill out to as it contains a range of recent famous singers, usually played on the radio. Suprisingly I found, they were mainly male artists which was a shame because as a female, it’s nice to hear some female artists too. Didn’t know that many songs when I looked at the playlist at the back but it was ok.

~ Jessica (17)

Pegasus in Space, by Anne McCaffrey

This story was a really good read and I am giving it 5 stars. This story revolves arround Peter, a Kinetic who is also a Paraplegic. At the beginning of the book he moved his body with Kinesis and by the end he could walk normally thank to a Micro-Talent Amariayah. I recommend anyone to read this book.

~ Zach (15)

Review of the Week 3

This isn’t a review of a CD but it’s topical nonetheless!

Breaking Dawn, by Stephenie Meyer

This is an amazing author, she knows exactly what people want from a book and she gives it, and more! Her books are about romance. And not the kind of puppy love that you get in high school and can’t even remember the name of when you’re older. This is the kind of love that exists until the end of time, that renders both parties useless and unable to survive without the other. Everyone who I have talked to has read this book and absolutely loved it, because it’s not just about vampires that only fantasy lovers read. This is a book everyone loves because although it’s about the supernatural it’s so completely human that it makes you want to cry. This is a truly amazing end to a mystical, magical spell-binding series about true love that conquers everything.

~ Alex (15)

Review of the Week 2

Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No!
The Mint Chicks

I liked the fact that the Mint Chicks are a New Zealand band. The titles of their songs were original e.g. ‘ She’s back on crack’. I liked their use of guitars. I think that you should listen to this CD in its entirety because then you really get the feel of the music. My favourite track was no. 10 – ‘Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No!’ The message that the CD gives to me is that you’re unique & just because you’re crazy doesn’t mean you’re dumb. The cover artwork was unique because they had a guy on a green bull with red horns. The guy on the bull says the last word of the CD title, it’s in his speech bubble. They used all the colours of the rainbow, so the CD is really colourful. I’d recommend this CD because it’s a pretty good CD & you should support NZ music.

~ Anneke, 15

Review of the Week 1

It’s that time again… we got some interesting reviews again this week (keep sending them in). Here’s one that grabbed our attention:

Machina: the machines of God
The Smashing Pumpkins

Machina is a rock album with soul. The lyrics to all the songs are deep and meaningful, and the band experiments with a range of different instruments to support Billy Corgan’s signature (almost whiny) voice.

Without damaging the album’s flow, The Pumpkins explore various music genres. ‘The Everlasting Gaze’ has a relatively fast pace, and a hard edge to it, whereas ‘I of the Mourning’ (one of my favourite tracks) is slower and softer. Billy Corgan’s vocals range from heartless to heartbroken … he has complete control over the amount of emotion he expresses in his voice.

Overall, Machina is a brilliant album, but it just doesn’t compare to Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (another of The Smashing Pumpkins’ albums). Still, I would DEFINITELY recommend it.

~ Mereana, 13

L’art du déplacement

The thing I really like about alternative sports is that when any sport starts to become a bit too mainstream someone dreams up something new. When adrenalin junkies got bored with bungy jumping and skydiving they came up with base jumping, which stepped things up to a whole new level.

Free-running is an especially interesting development because although it’s a physical activity it is not considered a sport. Free-running developed out of Parkour which originated in France in the 1990s. The idea of Parkour is the aim of moving from one point to another as effeciently and quickly as possible with the abilities of the human body. Both are considered to be more of a physical or performance art. Where the two movements differ is that Parkour is all about efficiency of movement whereas free-running is about absolute freedom and expression of movement.

The development of free-running is a move towards the mainstream – there is even a world championship run by Urban Freeflow next month in London. This is in conflict with the principles of the art so it will be interesting how it handles this development like many alternative sports before it. Some groups are performing in movies like Bond and The Bourne Ultimatum. There was even a challenge on Top Gear where free-runners raced a car to the centre of a city. Anyway there is no point talking about an activity that is all about movement, so here is a clip from Wellington – where free-running has quite a following (the back of the central library is popular) – after the jump, and for much, much more, check out this page.

Read More

Do you know all of the words?

The 100 most common words in the English language – how many do you think you know? You have five minutes to find out! I got 44/100, which was quite reasonable. (There are some words that are more common than you‘d think.)

A few clues for you.

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