Thursday, March 25

Today is Thursday of Week 9. Here is a link to the Week 9 assignments. For many of you, today is storytelling day, and I hope you have fun with that! Tomorrow I'll be able to update the randomizer with all those new stories. :-)

Also, I hope you will consider taking advantage of this opportunity to get vaccinated on Friday; you can register here: CovidVaccine.ou.edu. Find out more at the OU Daily article.


Class Procedures and Reminders

Microfiction Storytelling post. I wanted to remind everybody about the microfiction option for the Storytelling each week: instead of a 300-word story, you can always write three (or four or more!) 100-word stories instead. For example, here is my Brer Rabbit post with several tiny stories: Brer Rabbit and Brer Terrapin. You might give it a try and see what you think!

OU email outage. There were some serious problems with OU email yesterday morning, plus related log-on problems. If that caused you a problem with doing a Canvas Declaration yesterday morning, just let me know and I'll mark whatever you missed manually, no problem.

Project Stack. Yesterday I finished replying to all the projects turned in before 8PM on Sunday, and I'll keep working on the Sunday assignments today. As always, you can check the stack to make sure I received your assignment.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Blog stream. The Wikipedia Trail option is especially useful for those of you doing Storybooks, hopping around to see what you might learn about your topic. Ashley is doing a Storybook about vahanas, so she went from Vahanas to Parvati. Here's a picture of Parvati carrying baby Ganesha while riding her vahana, a lion: so cool!


Twitter stream. And here's a cat that doesn't look big on the outside... when your cat is secretly a fifth dimensional elder god.


This also cracked me up: For Sale, Not Haunted.


I'm very excited about this Google Art project on Indian miniature paintings:


And here's a video to ponder the spread of religions (and as those religions spread, so do the stories that are part of those religious traditions):


I often tell people this class is "mythological fan fiction," and this wonderful article addresses exactly that topic: Every King Arthur Retelling Is Fanfic.


Plus a cat to inspire your reading (via Sudesna Ghosh):


And an alphabet for the writer's life from Grant Snider (larger view):


March 25: Tolkien Reading Day. This Tolkien celebration has been organized by the Tolkien Society since 2003 to encourage fans to celebrate and promote the life and works of J.R.R. Tolkien.


Here's an interview with Tolkien from back in 1968 on the subject of inventing languages:



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