Caitlyn's Point of View

For my story this week, I know I am going to continue the Avatar the Last Airbender theme.  I want to keep the character names, for the most part, and also as much of the main events that I can.  For notes over the reading, I am going to focus on keeping main points and then marking the little details from the original that I want to include in my story. The third part of Ramayana  starts off with Sita being captured.  Ravana is the one to take her and he tricks her by disguising as a poor old man.  When Sita offers him kindness, Ravan reveals himself and steals Sita along with the ground she stood on. Halong Bay from flickr *The fact that he took the ground as well works perfectly for setting him up as an earth bender. Ravana kills Jatayu when he attempts to rescue Sita.  Rama and Lakshmana track Ravana to rescue Sita and go through many adventures on this quest.  At one point, Sita had dropped her jewelry so Rama could find her and Sugriv...

The Four Elements If you haven't yet, go check out my portfolio and read up on the stories I wrote.  You can leave a comment here expressing your thoughts and feelings towards what you read there.  Let me know what you think and if you have suggestions for future stories.

Rama and Sita were traveling through the Earth Kingdom on their quest to reach the Northern Water Tribe to find a water bending master to teach Rama.  When they came upon a town, the decided to visit its market to gather more food for their journey.  Somehow, rumors spread through the town that the avatar was there.  Once they figured out it was Rama, crowds began to swarm them, wishing for even a glimpse of the avatar.  Rama and Sita were attempting to travel unnoticed, since they still did not know who they could trust, so they decided they needed to travel through the woods and avoid the towns more. Rama and Sita managed to lose the crowds and escape into the woods.  After hiking through the thick forest for several hours, they decided to make camp for the night in a small clearing.  They had made much distance between them and the town, so they figured they would be safe here.  While Sita unpacked their things and...

For this second chunk of Ramayana, I got to read about some really interesting parts of the story. Rama heads into exile and his brother is angry at his mother for her plots to make him king.  Bharata rules as regent until Rama returns.  Bharata and Rama In the forest, Rama meets Shurpanakha and tells him she wishes to marry him.  She starts planning to kill her rival Sita and then is captured.  Her capture, Lakshmana mutilates her and then Shurpanakha calls Kara to attack Rama.  Rama defeats them all, though. This section, along with the previous section remind me so much of the feel of the Avatar the Last Airbender Universe.  I think it would be really fitting to tell the stories as if the characters were from that universe.  This show was created with so many parts based off of different Asian cultures, so it wouldn't be stretch to fit it in.

Since starting  Ramayana , I have been very curious about this story and the history of it.  I decided checkout the Wikipedia article to learn more information about it. Since I love linguistics, I found myself drawn to the etymology section  It didn't have much to say, but it mentioned the word was a Tatpurusha compound of Rama.  I had never heard of Tatpurusha, so I clicked that article. This article discussed this specific type of compound in Sanskrit.  Sanskrit is such a fascinating language and I'm really excited that I'll have the opportunity to learn so many pieces of it this semester.  In this particular article, there were many examples, one that caught my eye was viṣṇu-bali  which means 'offereing to Vishnu.'  I was curious to learn more about  Vishnu since he is mentioned in Ramayana, so I followed this link. Bhaganan Vishnu While reading this article and learning more about Vishnu, I discovered that I really don't know...

If you struggle, like me, to keep off of time wasting sites, especially when you have a deadline soon, then something like StayFocused is super useful.  When I have a big assignment that I am having trouble with, I tend to look for distractions so I don't have to work and can avoid my problems.  With online classes, it's even easier to become distracted, because you are already using the internet (and it's filled with infinite rabbit holes).  The Chrome extension  StayFocused  is a nifty little tool that helps you block or limit sites that you use to waste time.  You can set a timer for how long the site will be blocked and can easily turn it off if you finish your work earlier.  There is also the Nuclear option.  This will block all sites on your list until the end of the timer and the setting can't be stopped until the timer runs out.  I pair this setting when I use the Pomodoro technique when working and just set the timers to go off at ...

In this first bit of Ramayana, we are introduced to King Dasharatha.  He seems to have everything right in his life except he has no children.  At the same time, the gods are searching for a human to defeat Ravana, so they agree to have the god Vishu be born as Dasharatha's son. This is where I was very intrigued by the story.  I am currently watching the Avatar the Last Airbender series with my boyfriend and as I'm reading Ramayana, I keep picturing the characters in this universe.  I think it would be super interesting to write my story for this week based on Ramayana, but told in the universe of Avatar.  I may try and do this for all of my stories based on this tale. Ancient City from flickr

To all of my fellow college students out there, this one is for you.  Textbook prices are off the charts these days and it seems like every semester we are having to order more books per class and more expensive ones.  So, at the beginning of each semester, we're constantly trying to find the cheapest way to get all of our books.  Well, get ready for another Chrome extension that is about to save you a lot of money on textbooks. I used to use an amazing Chrome extension called Occupy the Bookstore, but the site that ran it shut down about a year ago.  Now, I use a newer extension called Discount Textbook Finder .  This extension allows you to paste an ISBN into the little box and then it will search the internet for you and find options to buy new or used versions of the text.   I find it super useful to see if it is worth it to order the text from another site, or just run over to the OU Bookstore and pick up a copy. For example, one of the boo...

This week, I am going to talk about an awesome Chrome extension.  This is something that wasn't on the recommended list of Tech Tips, but since I did almost all of those last semester, I'm getting a little creative with things.  This Chrome extension is called Imagus  and it's about to become your best friend.  This extension lets you hover over a picture on a website and it will instantly "zoom."  What the extension does is allows you to hover over a picture and show you the full size of the image.  This comes in handy for websites like Reddit.  When you want to take a quick break from everything to look at cute animal pictures on reddit.com/aww,  Imagus lets you easily see each picture without having to click each link, let it load, and then see the picture.  By just hovering over the link to the photo, Imagus will show you the full size picture!  Screenshot taken from Chrome extension page I highly recommend this if you look...