Thursday, September 28

Today is Thursday of WEEK 6. If you have not done your story yet for this week, that means today is Storytelling Day. May the Muse be with you! Here is a link to all of this week's assignments.

Class Procedures and Reminders

My schedule today. I'll be out of the office for part of today, so if you send me an email with a question, I might be slower than usual in getting back to you, but I should be able to get back to you by the end of the day.

Project Stack. If you turned in an assignment by 9PM on Sunday, you should have comments back from me now, and I'll keep working on the Sunday assignments today. While you are waiting on comments back from me about your Project assignment, you can check the stack to make sure I received your email.

Extra Credit. If you only did Part A of the reading this week, remember that you can use the extra credit reading option to do Part B. Find out more in the extra credit section of this week's assignments.

Storytelling style: Sci-Fi. Each Thursday I like to suggest a storytelling style you might try, and the style I wanted to suggest for today is science fiction style. For a great example, see Casey's story: When Home Is No Longer Home, which is an ancient Jewish folktale in a kind of Interstellar style. As Arthur C. Clarke observed, technology and magic have a lot in common, which is why it is such a natural to shift old stories into the far future, with technology that might as well be magic to us today.

Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Class Twitter. From yesterday's Twitter @OnlineMythIndia, here is the topic for today's #FolkloreThursday: Folklore of the Skies. If you use Twitter, #FolkloreThursday is an all-day chat, and it is so much fun to follow!

Storytelling. Check out this blog post for all of Pixar’s Rules of Storytelling.

Storybook Archive. This project is from the Myth-Folklore class: Desperate Goddesses: Life on Mythological Lane. Izanami-no-Mikoto, the Japanese goddess of creation, has left the world of the living long behind, but she still watches over the desperate goddesses of Mythological Lane — Aphrodite, Pele, Ishtar, and Devi — and shares their stories with you.

Free Book Online: Today's free book is My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales by Edric Vredenburg. See the Freebookapalooza blog for links and the table of contents. The beautiful illustrations are by Jennie Harbour:

Story of the Day. Today's story is from Aesop's fables: The Cat and the Fox. This is a fable about finding your focus!

Video: The video for today is a great example of another storytelling style option: therapy. The Mundane Goddess, starring Uma Thurman.

Growth Mindset: Today's growth mindset cat is getting ideas from other cats, just as you can get ideas from other students and their stories: Find inspiration in the success of others. You can find out more at the Growth Mindset blog.

Event on Campus: The American Indian Student Association Taco Sale is today from 11AM-3PM with campus delivery available (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

September 28: Confucius. September 28 is a day traditionally assigned to the birthday of the Chinese philosopher Confucius in the year 551 BCE. You can read about Confucius in this Wikipedia article, and also in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online. Confucius's philosophy was already famous in Europe in the 17th century, as you can see from this Latin edition of his works published in 1687; if you are a student of Latin, you might see how much of the text you can understand. Happy birthday, Confucius!

Check out the Twitter stream for information and fun stuff during the day, or click here for past announcements.