Tanya is an infoholic, linguist, computerjunky, semiotician, feminist, contributor to FeministsSA.com, teacher, writer, facebookian, tgifan, dog trainer, typesetter, webmaster, activist and reader.
These are just bookmarks with her briefest notes.
Infoholism Wandering sorts of things
- Marc and Angel Hack Life offers a list of 40 places to learn something every day.
- StumbleUpon.com ~ Instead of surfing in a linear way, surf via other people's interests and recommendations. Stumble over, stumble upon and stumble together.
- Harvard Crimson has a staff opinion section. On the day I passed by they were talking about refusing bribes, and on another note, arresting the pope.
- Google Insights for Search allows you to compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.
- Richard Dawkins on militant atheism on TED (ideas worth spreading).
- Google Trends lets you see how relevant your search terms are over time.
- Mental Floss Fact Generator is addictive. You know those rats that sit on the lever delivering stimulus, here is the human version.
- Flickr Trends is fun, key in any two words to see a comparison between the amount of words tagged with those two words. Dog and Cat resulted in a huge spike for Cat since the Credit Crunch. Hopefully this is a sign of more independent times.
- NETucation is a Johannesburg-based psychology of the internet researcher.
- GreenDimes, you pay (if you are American), they plant trees on your behalf and take your name off mailing lists.
- Change this publishes how-to make changes manifesto collection
- Scribd is a free, web-based, document sharing community and self-publishing platform.
- Shoebox - a tiny little division of Hallmark. Some of the Hallmark myths shatter... kablink!
- Webcheck Strategic Internet Insights - some interesting South African internet stats. Nice plain site that gets to the point.
- Google Operating System is an unofficial blog that watches Google's latest attempts to move your operating system online.
- Pipl is a people finder that includes fascinating statistics about the social networking sites.
- WholeHealthMD.com is the perfect website, honestly. I know you think I am exaggerating, but you would be WRONG. Organized, beautiful-ish, comprehensive, pertinent. It is rare, but this is a site that you should put on your favorites bar, and not in your favorites menu.
- Library of Congress has webcasts, and tons of other stuff. Includes an online digital picture catalogue of American culture that you can search. Some pictures in the public domain are available for free to download an up to 24MB version. Pictures not in the public domain can be ordered in various ways. Here is the picture that tore my South African heart - called Slave Pen. For Ameriphiles and Ameriphobes..
Catalogue
Women's role in the Civil War
Webcasts
- British Library Images Online is a massive site where you can buy images from books. Thumbnails and larger versions. Not a mountain of pictures, but tons of really old ones. Feminism brought up no results, Feminist gave me six hits. Suffragettes gave me a diferent set of hits - searches are not cross-refenced.
Home
- Homework Center is well-organized fanaticism, an ugly thoughtful linklist, categorized, a sampling: Biography Megasites, African Americans, Authors, Canadians, Suffragists, Trappers, Traders Frontiers & Mountain Men, Women, Women of the West
- NoName DataBase is a fast, person-profile database, you will love, and you can give input easily on entries, but not add your own, understandably, Paul Voster is on but not Pieter Dirk Uys...
- Time Magazine Archive, if you are a member
- New Scientist, all the discoveries, mmm a subscription to this would be the yummiest, especially because they are the counterpoint (all the good news) to Time (all the bad news).
- Scientific American should be downloaded straight into my brain. If you are a member.
- Museum Victoria makes you want to move to Australia. Click on What's on and see 55 events the day you have selected. Tours, activities, exhibitions, displays. Well organized. I would've liked to have a wee online foretaste.
- Apartheid Museum has a totally gorgeous site, more like going to the movies than surfing. So professionally done. I have never (and I know you think I am exaggerating again) seen anything so beautiful. And yes, you would be wrong, again. The Mousefollower is to die for.
- Guggenheim Museum internet art virtual gallery.l
- BBC Science and Nature: The Human Mind and Body is interactive learning for adults
- Internet Archive is a digital library of Internet sites, movies, sound files.
- Wikipedia Where people like you and I contribute to the copyleft situation in the world. Open source for ideas. An ingenious web-based encyclopedia of what people are thinking about. Cross-referenced, naturally. Beauty. And they are many.
- AskOxford Key in 'independence' and see the most divine results. Lateral thinking on any subject.
- The Straight Dope is a guy, who once a day, answers a trivial question, wittily. Here is the straight dope on aphids being born pregnant.
- Bartleby Ask it a definition and get mountains of references, quotations, history, tootlet
- Exiles Walpurg is an intellectual. He blogged before he knew he blogged probably, and he blogged with expertise and interesting essays. Teaser titles: Sartre and Erotic Love AND Hierarchic Masculinity.
- Memepool is a place where the infoholics collect and share, the quirky, the bizarre and normality explained and shared.
- Shambles.net Information literacy page of links with descriptions. Well thought out and many hours of work into this collection. How to get infoskills.
- CrankDotNet collects, daily, the nuts out there and then ranks their nuttiness. Here is the A-Z.
- Trivia, I bump into. And it's child, visual trivia, and its sibling, statistics. And, tucked under the skullcap, really important pictures.
- Joblistings is a collection of places where people like me should hang out when we are dreaming about alternative jobs. In this section because it's collecting info for info's sake.
- Jobmasters has the look, their website look and feel is perfect for their function. Matched to perfection. And very pretty... design a bit been-there, but I can handle that!
- Urban Desires (Hurrumph - they are now a forbidden directory, which makes me curioser and curioser - Trancy Quan wrote for them, am off to hunt...) Contemporary cultural commentary. Wandering sort of item. Not beautiful, but the visual image is not ignored. Appetite whettant: Camille Paglia interview in the Dog issue. Their homepage is prettier, but difficult to use, good concept though.
- Reconstruction is a magazine on contemporary culture by other webphiles. Whettant from Spring 2005: Who Owns the Medium Owns the Message? The Ambiguity of the Right to Communicate in the Age of Convergence / Aliaa Ibrahim Dakroury
- Time's 50 Coolest Websites 2005
- Arts and Letters Daily is pop culture and serious culture combined. But the thing to get excited about is the divine way this site is architectured. The short intro with the invitation to read more, the emboldened point, the two-coloredness pares a huge quantity of information into simple units, the quicklinks to all the original newspaperson the left.
- Pop Occult-ure has interviews with other Gnostics and the titles of the articles are brilliant ~Transhumanism Can Eat a Dick!
- Lifehack.org knows how to make bullet points, his are fleshy but his selections are those of a true manic depressive (I don't know if he is one). The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People expanded, exploded.
- Rotten Dead Pool is really macabre but clearly organised. I couldn't click, what if it happened that I click and the guy dies, ag nee! But for all those thousands who have clicked, it is a poll of people that don't believe that if a butterfly shits...
- ZMagazine (gone offline) impressed me so much because they published the article by bell hooks on gangsta rap (although their archives don't go back far enough for me to supply the direct link, ironically), that I now trawl their archives regularly. They must be non-conformist publishers, I reckon.
- World of Wonder is a place to hang out with a bunch of people who have a witty and wild imagination. Whoops, it's a kind a TV station that we are being denied.
- You thought we wouldn't notice blogs stolen ideas
- ArtandCulture.com used to be this amazing site of wandering connections. It sortof still is. It's been reconfigured in some way. But there is a certain interconnectedness still.
- BoingBoing, another site that Cory Doctorow is linked to, is an archive of wonderful things.
- Gadgeter is a place for all sorts of goodies that one doesn't really need, but one would buy the entire stock of if one won the lottery. For the poverty struck it is just a place to spend hours indulging infoholism.
- TED provides inspiration from the world's greatest thinkers and doers
South Africa Tics
- South African Beer Micro-Brewers and their festivals. Collected this for a random person who asked me a question. Love questions.
- Crime statistics for South Africa (August 2009). Crime has really become insane here in South Africa, and it is vicious. I have hope. I believe that as the young generation grows up, they will show us an easy comraderie. They don't approach each other with suspicion, and don't set each other off on the wrong foot. They are educated, they have prospects. Education is paramount. The young will be our role models.
- Get closure is a free South African complaint service, they follow it up.
- HelloPeter I thought South Africans are apathetic, but here is a guy that provided a forum to prove me wrong. Here people can post compliments and complaints about the big corporates. And, according to a 702 interview, the corporates are taking the site seriously. Thanks Peter.
- 50/50 is a television program that has run on South African television for 20 years. Although the website is not pretty, the information is great. Up-to-date conservation information, your questions answered, factsheets, bite-sized.
- MFSA The Marketing Federation of Southern Africa's declaration about the right to privacy. This is my - accessible - version of it.
- Go-za Tourist Accommodation Directory A site where you can find the telephone numbers (and website, email, etc) of tourist accommodation type places to call when planning your trip to South Africa. I designed the front page, and architectured the information. A Google map of go-za site visitors.
- Corcoran.com I could never leave, and even if I could they would never let me in without a Green Card, and even if they gave me a Green Card, I couldn't afford it. Oh well. But If I could, I would look at this well-organized site to find a little small place to call my own.
- SAHistory.org.za is a bunch of brief articles, sourced all over the universe, including real peoples' contributions. Better than the dry dates found in our schoolbooks twenty years ago, now including the history of culture and art and music and younameit. If you feel that you have to hunt down more detailed, formal information, the South African Society of Archivists collection of Archive resources can lead you off on a several-hour tangent.
- South African cultural organisations, a linked list.
- Encounter Africa has all the gen about how to best experience South African culture. Urban walking tours intrigue me. I once went on a tour with guide Peter Rich - it was really memorable. It's a site for tourists, but it has a section for us locals.
- Crime is killing South Africa is a site dedicated to the war at home. Also, I have to include it just to keep a record of what our (M)inister of (S)ecurity says. Petitions, latest bungles, polls, tip off or tell your story.
- Inhouseplans.com is searchable by style, size and price criteria. You can look at the plans, the 3D version or some views of the house, and then you can buy the A1 plans for a coupleahundred Rand.
- Vuka Awards are local South African awards given in the advertising industry.
- SETAs are Skills Education and Training Authorities in South Africa, our effort to fast track skills development because of our icky attitude about who was to be given an education during the apartheid days.
- Community Organiser's Toolbox is a South African site ~ good to know.
Language Words
- Wordorigins.org is searchable, see Google's site search at the bottom of the page. Includes words like Fuck.
- Phrase Finder, of course I like it for the origins of the phrases, naturally.
- Wordspy For Neologist who don't need a quickfix. More of a linguistic site,
with sample usages, dictionary-like entries, and cross referenced
- Langmaker Beautifully organized by a neologizing fanatic.
- Eggcorns is another (savoury) word for malapropism, I think. And I want you to know that only pure infoholism won't let me let this site go. I would collect them into a tighter space if I thought it was a finite site.
- Etymological curiosities is, naturally, a list of things I find curious and might not be to everyone's taste.
- Urban Dictionary is an internet-community-made dictionary of slang (slang is just a whistlestop on the way to entrenchment in the lexicon). Great info architecture. Great slogan 'Define your world', which I like because as a woman this opportunity has been denied to me in so many forums.
- Project implicit Still wondering what I think of this. Serious, not fun. Important. Cleverly constructed tests about attitudes, set to expose bias.
- Semiotics at the University of Colorado, comprehensive, ugly.
- Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler, comprehensive lecture notes with an index, all the literature sources mined. General, no specific gaze.
- Language and identity, how we are shaped by language in the patriarchy.
- Onelook Search a trillion dictionaries at once, links through to that dictionaries definition, i.e. google of dictionaries.
Computers People
- Cypherella Romana Machado's interests are transhumanism, extropianism and cryptography. She's a Playboy model. Extropians - Cypherella, Geoff Dale and Max Morse, want their heads frozen when they die, but in the meantime they want to live the opposite of entropy - extropy.
Computers Beauty
- The Tyee is a beautiful news site, lots of links but nicely organised and visually appealing.
- Shift Space has a clear and beautiful website. Communication in it's best form.
- Dalia Lama website is the most beautiful, the most functional site I have seen in a long time.
- Airbag is a webdesigner and journalist that blogs his thoughts about design and information architecture and his advanced learning curve. Very pretty.
- Aroots Antonio Luis' Flash site that is well organized.
- Beetnik... my obsession with beets continues.
- Conclave Obscurum. Some people are capable of taking language and using it in such a way that the rest of us see only our own mortality.
- Digiguru is a beautifully organized self-promotion site of a web designer, using color and icons as signifiers, all project info at a glance.
- Flying Puppet is a site inspired by Hans Hoogebrugge, made with Director and the first site that I started to think, "Gee there is a real digital art." Make sure you download the latest Shockwave Player.
- 4 Images is a commercial site, but beautiful, well-architectured and confidence inspiring. From my home town, nogal.
- Joshua Davis Studios Cool flash site. Wow. The info architecture, the speed, the beauty, the talent. Yummy.
- The Language of New Media tracks the history of computers, from Babbage to Eisenstein and, whoops, onto the internet. Visual articles, keyword sentences, and essays. Depends on your attention span, or the amount of time you have available.
- Modern Living by Hans Hoogerbrugge. Flash site. Black and white can be beautiful. Narcissism is intriguing. Interesting hierarchies of information and site organization - imaginative.
- RITZ Toasted Chips has fun javascript coding. I like the floating George Hamilton and popping balloons.
- Tokyo Plastic Flash site, sound is very effective, visuals amazing. Makes you want to go through the whole site. Links to other high-quality flash sites under friends.
- Website gallery collects pretty sites
- World-changing, does. Lets. Visual, searchable, bits, Doctorowed.
- Dripbook is a portfoliosite for visual designers. Like Face, only Drip, and pay.
- Klipplaatz Bush Lodge marries print and web nicely, for those who want them to overlap. I'm not usually a fan of this thinking, but this one is good.
Computers Downloads and information
Computers Games
- Gamestudies.org is a sort-of-annual journal about games, with article titles as evocative as Grandmothers are cooler than trolls.
Eclectic
- Eclectic Energies Enneagrams are types of inner geography, like astrology. There's a free test to help you work out what type you are - from hedonist to moralist.
- Paranormality.com Comprehensive, takes itself seriously
- Randy Cohen is an ethicist and here are some sound files.In listening to them the thing that amazed me was his easy understanding of what the key issues really really were and the verbal acuity of his listeners.
- Pruned is way not in my field of vision, about landscape design. But Alexander Trevi is so interesting, and has such a sense of aesthetic, I keep looking.
Feminism Uteral
- Go... It burst its seams.
Teaching
- Vocational Information Centre Well ordered links about lifeskills, a collection to informative sites, no descriptions about what makes each individual site better than the rest, requires wandering.
Writing
- Crimethinc is positioned against the tyranny of the modern world, where desire is normalised into consumption and beauty is crushed underfoot as fodder for the empty cycles of grey hegemonists, our aim is wakefulness. Our enemy is dreamless sleep. Activists. Eloquent Activists.
- Mousehand Self-publish your book in South Africa. It would belong to you and not the publishing house.
- Future Perfect is a grammar and good writing site, that explains the rules in simple sentences with examples.
- Tropes are storytelling devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations.
- Wired for Books posts audio interviews with authors, among others Margaret Atwood and Douglas Adams.
- South African copyright information Collected into one page, everything you need to know about copyright in South Africa. And here are my own thoughts about copyright in terms of my webpage.
- Creative Commons South African licence is a variation on the current 'Thou shalt not' copyright attitude. Spelling out what respect means. International version.
- Publishers' Association of South Africa (PASA), for the absolute complete list of all the publishers in South Africa, contact details, et al, with 161 web pages filled with companies and contact details. For one day.
- Interactive fiction Dennis Jerz is a fanatic - academic resources, online gallery, how-tos. Ugly but organized, not him, Silly, his page.
- Art Directors Club fun and games. I found a way to 'get' the joke. I'm not American, so this is my decoding of the cultural references in their pamphlet soliciting nominations for the 2005 Art Directors Club Show Awards. 83 Excuses why I Didn't Win the Award.
- Fontifier lets you have a font of your own writing in a few minutes for only $9 - step-by-step instructions.
- Novel-writing tips, assembled from all over
- Science fiction genres, they are so many and I needed a place to haul them into order.
Columnists
- Dategirl is an advice columnist that often provides marvelous fodder for anti-patriarchy arguments.
Books
- Shakespeare network Well organized, info architect.
- Scriptorium, a trés intellectuelle version of a library. I am green with envy, free workshops at coffee houses in New York.
- Google Book Search - the bottom line is that we, the people, need to discover books, rekindle our joy, not substitute it with surfing. Compare to Questia if you have $90 lying around. $90 per year is not really a lot of money though.
- Mumpsimus blogs about reading and writing - and boy does Mathew Cheyney do a ton of reading and writing. See his list of Internet resources. SuperFanatic.
Art
Me Personally
- Curriculum Vitae (CV)
- Siclets and Phrases that appeal to me. Sicleting is the self-generation of words by a word-a-holic and there are some now that are other-generated. And some inclusions of mine in Urban Dictionary.
- Myers-Briggs personality test ~ ENFJs are lively and enthusiastic facilitators who apply warmth and vision to helping people and meeting their needs. They are aware of people's aspirations and develop plans of action to make those aspirations into reality. They like organization and closure. They are at their best facilitating situations that require interpersonal sensitivity. ENFJs are tolerant and appreciative of others, seeking involvement with them in life's tasks. They are able communicators who are liberal in showing appreciation for others... read more.
- Amazon ~ my reviews.
- Ansisters, I am published elsewhere than here, on business writing. I wonder if it is an irony or a co-incidence - the picture of Janine Lewis running as a teaser in the column next to my article is of Lewis carrying a very large man. I am a feminist you know. [Giggle]
- My thoughts on copyright are here to help you get your thoughts and arguments organized so that you can strike up a dialogue with me.
- Vhemt.org, or 'Vehement' believes we humans are the problem and should voluntarily phase ourselves out.
- People I like, strangely inclusive.
- Quotations I like, overflowed out of Facebook.
- The Ultimate Survey About Me, I adapted an idea of Steph Mineart.
- Reading list ~ a bunch of books I have read or want to read.
- 21s lists - a tribute to my passion for Irving Wallace's books of lists.
- Favorite songs, nuttily eclectic
- Movie-holism, I have an addictive personality, what can I tell you?
- Funny stuff A collection of exerptian bits and pieces (that I didn't write).
- Inspirational stuff (that I didn't write).
- Wikipedia stuff, (that I did write).
- Pretoria, where I live. And Pretoria Social Events is a Facebook group which I admin.
- Me, pictures
- Flickr, pictures
- Facebook, yes
- Twiitter, yes. Tweetstats for @fetsiboomsticks.
- Weekly Inquiry I decided I couldn't bear the shruggy attitude Facebook has to the abuse we suffer at the hands of third party applications, so I deleted them all. I said goodbye to some fun things that I couldn't harvest. I am still reeling from them removing the How did you meet section, which I had also wrangled to express me and had some amazing exchanges in. Thank goodness all my captions are safely stored with my pics in Picasa. A sad day when you don't trust your continued safe presence on Facebook.
- Flying Shortbread, blog. Subscribe to my Flying Shortbread RSS feed.
- Dillycious, blog (same one)
- Frappr maps are Google maps that show where your friends are. Go add yourself to mine, or make your own... Why not?
- Geni, where you can work out your family tree and invite family members to join in the build.
- Recipes, beware - girth increase zone.
- Dreams of a new housie. You have to have a dream, so that the idea of lying on your deathbed with this pile of dreams-unrealized towering over you, so that you can do something about it.
Palm readings
I do palm readings and have done for good on 20 years. They cost $60. Here is a sample palm reading, and instructions on how to email me high resolution scans of your hands. |
