Classic Poetry Aloud is a “podcast series for some of the greatest poetry in English.” So says it. Now you can listen to ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ (Tennyson) or ‘Because I could not stop for death’ by Emily Dickinson (incidentally, you can sing this to the tune of ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’). If you neglected your beloved on cough Valentine’s Day cough you could make up for it by playing some love poems perhaps.
Category: internet culture Page 5 of 8
If you use Facebook but are a bit worried about your privacy, or people tagging unfortunate photos with your name, check out this; 10 privacy settings every Facebook user should know. Facebook is complex: the website the article is hosted on, Allfacebook.com, has loads of useful Facebook news, applications and tips.
An oldie but a goodie for wasting time.
Googlewhack is a game where you type two words into a Google search to yield only one result (it even has its own website). It’s pretty difficult but infinitely rewarding (as all time wasters are). In a few minutes of trying the best I got was two results for “shwar aardvark”. You have to spell things correctly of course or else you’re cheating (even with spelling errors it’s still hard since lots of people can’t spell).
The first rule of Googlewhack: don’t brag about your Googlewhack find on the internet; you’ll unGooglewhack yourself. So if you get one we’ll just have to take your word for it.
The Wellington City Library Teen Page has gone all 2.0 with its new facebook profile. You can use it to keep up to date with all our happenings – things like upcoming events, new books and CDs will be posted. Become a fan of us (we know you are already …) and receive invitations and alerts first!
If you’re bored try this, courtesy of John Green’s blog (and here, Hank is his brother) via Marshall County Library’s Young Adult Blog:
Type your name into Google followed by a verb then hit ‘search’ to make all sorts of discoveries.
Example number 1:
Grimm says…
… he is ready for Steelers’ top coaching job.
I sure am, yes siree, let me at them! The Steelers, they play American football right?
Example number 2:
Grimm does…
… not need to hide behind some absurd mask
Actually yes I do – it’s much easier to write with mask firmly intact.
Other verbs to consider: eats, loves, needs, wants, wears, loves… basically anything you can think of.
This really is totally a great way of looking like you’re doing important work.
Did you know that you can download audio books through this library? Well you can!
Explore our growing collection of digital audio books and use your library card to download titles to your computer, transfer them to a compatible MP3 player (including iPods), or burn selected books onto a CD for listening on the go. Available 24/7, now your library is always open!
There are loads of books there worth downloading. Even Twilight is there. For a tour of Overdrive (the name of the audiobook service) go here.
Some neat and interesting websites. For the weekend! Or week. Whatever.
- 32 Nearby Stars – This is a ‘spatial representation of every star within 14 light-years of the sun’. You can zoom in, spin them around, and ultimately be in awe of the size of the galaxy. (Also, it’s IYA2009.)
- Hestekor – These four horses will start to sing when you click on them. And … that’s all.
- Grotrian Pianos – Play the piano with physics.
- Maps of War – Animated maps representing war, religion and government throughout history. Interesting!
- Strange and Beautiful Underwater Life – My favourites; the Vampire Squid and the Blobfish, whose flesh is a gelatinous mass.
- Light Saber simulator – Pick a Light Saber and fire it up.
- TV Theme Music and Songs – This site seems to have almost every theme song from every programme off the telly.
- Flower Maker – Make a flower!
- The Eco Zoo – Ecoda! Dobutsuen.
This Digital Inspiration blog post entitled, informatively, Create your own Garfield Comic Strip, will introduce you to the wonderful world of, well, creating your own Garfield comic strip. In summary, you can download this application and drag and drop (so you can do it if you can’t draw) and hey presto! I guess it’s similar to creating your own giant squid (mine has now swum 180 kilometres and most recently beat up a diver).
If you wanted to go to the Big Day Out but can’t, you can watch it instead via this live stream. You won’t get sunburnt and you won’t need to go to Auckland.
These photos of the Earth taken from space are amazing. And so beautiful! More may be found at NASA’s Earth Observatory site.
Related: International Year of Astronomy ’09.
Last year I did a post about authors who blog (regularly). I’ve dredged up some more, which are rather enlightening (to varying degrees).
John Green, author of Paper Towns, published last year (which we quite liked), writes in a chirpy, humorous, self-deprecating fashion, and even reads comments and comments on them.
Megan McCafferty of Sloppy Firsts fame, has an interesting take on blogging. She’s called hers a (retro)blog, and she includes writing assignments and essays she produced in school (going back to the 1980s). You’ll also find articles she’s written on the Twilight saga, containing a hint that Marcus Flutie (from Sloppy Firsts, not Twilight) is based on a real person (or persons).
Susan Beth Pfeffer, author of the horribly harrowing (really, really) stories about what happens to the earth when the moon is knocked out of orbit by an asteroid (The Dead and the Gone, and Life As We Knew It).
Brent Hartinger updates his regularly (the key to keeping a good blog, that).
Robin McKinley, author of Beauty and Sunshine (for those vampire fans). I love what she’s called her blog.
Ysabeau S Wilce, author of two of the coolest-titled books ever. Her website is pretty flash, too.
William Kostakis, who kindly responded to our questions last year.
And for those Bear Grylls fans, keep up with what the Bear is up to: http://beargrylls.blogspot.com/
Incidentally, the wonderful Neil Gaiman is going to win the 2008 Weblog Best Literature Blog Award, unless people start voting for Samuel Pepys (actually, I find Samuel rather dull).
Nothing puts a person in their place better than seeing themselves recreated in Lego. Some genius has produced Lego versions of classic Hip Hop album covers. They’re really special, so I had to pass them on. King of Rock by Run-DMC is my favourite.
Google Books is a pretty cool book-specific search engine (including magazines) which you can use to, as the name suggests, search for info on books. Being Google it’s pretty neat and tidy and easy to use, although (being Google) you still have to use your brain a bit when you sift through the information it gives you – it’s quantity rather than quality with Google, remember!
So what does it give you? Type in the title of a book and you’ll get a page with a synopsis, book cover (just to check you’ve got the right one I guess), a list of online reviews and references from web pages… plus the option to buy online (using Amazon or Fishpond) or check to see if it’s at your local library*.
If you have a Google account you can even create a library of items so you can keep track of what you like and what you’ve read.
This is all extremely useful if you’re doing an extensive book review – it saves you a lot of trawling and cuts to the chase.
* This is done via worldcat. Worldcat is a catalogue of every possible book/CD etc you could imagine which links to libraries around the world – you just have to type “New Zealand” in the location information field and then select “Wellington City Library” and you’ll end up directly in the WCL catalogue page for that particular book. Cool.
Austenbook is what you get when you cross Jane Austen with Facebook. My favourite line: ‘Mrs. Bennet joined the group Widows of Men Killed in Duels’.
The Young Writers Society is a website for writers aged between 13 and 25. It has a forum and a very nice blog, all geared to assist young writers hone their craft:
By promoting creative writing as a past time, the site seeks to encourage creative thinking, proper grammar, and better writing.
Today, the Young Writers Society is proud to boast well over 3,000 members, over 10,000 poems and stories, and a review to story/poem ratio of nearly 6 to 1. The average age on the site is 17.5, and the site receives over 400 posts per day on average. There is no other site for young writers on the web that even comes close.
Great stuff!
The Wellington City Libraries now has a Twitter page. Very Web 2.0! It lets us tell people what we’re up to. The Twitter homepage goes into more detail about Twitter and how it works; you can join up and let others know what you’re up to (if you want them to know).
It can be difficult writing a short story, essay or whatever, when there is a limit to the number of words you can write. But sometimes it’s fun to challenge yourself and embrace the difficulty. Drabbles, for examples, are short stories that have exactly 100 words. This post is a drabble, and so is this Christmas story by Neil Gaiman.
One sentence stories are perhaps harder to write (though it’s amazing how much meaning can be jammed into only a few words); see also these ten-word reviews of just about anything. Do you think you can write one yourself?
Well?
ThinkB4YouSpeak.com is an American campaign that encourages teens to think about their use of language; homophobic remarks like “that’s so gay”, while usually unintentionally offensive, can be pretty damaging. Although designed for U.S. schools, the aim of the campaign is pretty international, and the TV adverts are very funny.
Google Maps now has ‘Street View‘ for New Zealand, which means that as well being able to look at your house (or anyone’s house, for that matter) from above, you can also view the building from the street, as if you’re driving past. This is exceptionally interesting and useful for
a. People who dislike going outside
b. People trying to find a destination
c. Lazy flat-seekers
d. Everyone else
(The Street View of Karori Library is quite funny.)
