The stress during December is always something I hated about college. After this semester I only have one class left so I am not too sad about this semester being my hardest so far. While the start of December is always my most hated time of the year because of all the tests and deadlines the later half is something I look forward to a lot since my birthday is right after finals week followed by Christmas and then we have New Years partying!! This will be me after finals week!

CT101 was a really nice experience, and it was something different from what I have been doing so far for the last 4 years, which was just A LOT of math and coding. I have my hardest final coming up after I am done with this post and a part of me just wants to go lock myself in my room and just stay in bed but I have to take it. At the start of CT101, I knew I was getting myself into making a lot of gifs and using them to describe things in my post and looking back to it now, it definitely felt like that through this semester. I used GIPHY a lot since the start of this semester and even found some really nice memes which I wouldn’t have seen if it wasn’t for this class. CT101 will definitely go down as one of my favorite classes during my undergraduate at York College. The website we made was also something I really enjoyed as it gave way to expressing myself even if it was a little bit to my fellow classmates. I will try to update and make some more changes to my website as I go along with my life.

This class allowed me and others to show what they are passionate about and use their creativity into their posts using images, gifs, videos, and many more creative and fun ways. This class holds up as one of the best so far for me and Professor Ryan made the class even better. It sucks that we couldn’t be in person I think that would have made the class even better than it was already.

All the assignments we have done so far have been really great into me finding something new on the internet and also looking at other posts which showed me something new. Here are some of my posts so far from this semester:                                                                                                                 Assignment# 1:                                                                                                                     This assignment was all about what makes you happy on the internet.

Assignment# 2:                                                                                                              Blogging! Using gifs and describing things with them.

Assignment# 3:                                                                                                                    Here we looked at whether memes were considered art or not. Which I think they totally are .

Assignment# 4:                                                                                                                       We picked two posts that we found interesting and used the DS106 Repository to create our own version of those posts.

Assignment# 5:                                                                                                             Exploring creativity, something that is very hard to come by at times and then at times you can’t seem to run out of it.

Assignment# 6:                                                                                                                  Mid-Semester Reflection was when we looked back at what we have done so far and wrote about how we are feeling so far and the grades we can expect going forward.

Assignment# 7:                                                                                                              Picking a domain and the different choices we had was something really enjoyable experience. Also had some trouble deciding what I show be putting as far as the content of the domain go.

Assignment# 8:                                                                                                                       Set up the domain and it was ready to go from the start.

Assignment# 9:                                                                                                                      Did not have too much at the start but customizing the website as we went on felt really good. Customizing the website can be a little tough at times though.

Assignment# 10:                                                                                                               Setting up and messing around with my Domain and learning some WordPress.

Assignment# 11:                                                                                                                  Looking at others work was a nice touch to end all the assignments.

Wow, what a journey it has been all these posts and something a little  different in all of them.

Now on to the website!

Opening Page:

First Blog:

Some of my favorite fights from One Piece:

From there we have the dumb/lovable main character, Luffy: 

Following that section we have the Basketball side of the page!

Starting off with my favorite players to watch and follow along:

From there we go into some of my favorite plays from the NBA: 

And now to end it all off with some comedy! 

We are now finished off with my website. I tried my best to put in the clips which are really special to me as well as trying to put some in there which others will also like. I would still like to add more things to my website even after the semester is over as I feel like it’s still missing a ton of things. Using the tools to make the website was fairly easy as Professor Ryan did a great job at explaining everything that we needed to do to set it up. I do plan on messing with CSS a lot during the off time we have and learning some new techniques to build better websites and, in the process, use what I learn to hopefully keep this website up to date.

That’s all for my website and for all of the assignments we did together. As for my grade I did slack off during the semester and while I was able to complete all the assignments, they were still, late. The grade that I think I deserve in the class is probably B, or B+. While I want an A of course who wouldn’t I still want to be honest with myself and with the Professor. This class has been a blast and I will definitely miss it next semester when I take, yet again, another computer science course.

The amount of work people have put into their websites is really mind boggling. There’s a lot of new things I learned about my fellow classmates even though I have never seen them in person or talked with them. A lot of them shared what they liked as well as the hobbies they have. These are some of my favorite websites from my classmates.

I really liked Nader’s website because of the beautiful photography it shows as well as the bright color background which was nice to look at. It was also nice to see that Nader was very passionate about what he wanted to show and shows a really big interest in photography. The website is also all in your face, so it is very unique in my opinion.

Another website which I really liked was Ericka’s. I recently got a kitten so seeing her cute animals was really something I enjoyed. I love the pictures of her animals and the little description that she provided. I would love to see more pictures!! I also liked that she talks about her plant collection, while I am not that interested in it, my mom seems to know everything about them. She even has her own garden, so Erika’s post reminded me of that. I did end up showing the picture of the plants to my mom.         What a CUTIE!

I really enjoyed looking at all the websites. Professor Ryan’s website is very nice I love the art that we are opened to. Gives me an album cover feel for a Daft Punk Album. 

A lot of the things that I wanted to add to the website are now up, that include pictures of both One Piece and Basketball stuff as well as the some of my favorite videos about both. You can check them out by clicking here.

There will be more clip of plays/funny moments posted as I work on the site more. I have also added a small blog about the site and what’s to come going forward. Which you can access by clicking here. I plan on messing around more and add a navbar and some other features so it looks more clean and different things can be accessed without it all being on one big page.

Customizing the website so far has been a little annoying because sometimes I get things to work while other times things seem to be all over the place.

Me during website customization so far.

I have picked out a small chibi icon for the website as well as some images which I plan on including on the domain. Icon is of Luffy from One Piece. Icon is a cute chibi version of Luffy:

While these are the cover image and basketball image that I picked so far. The image I picked for the basketball side is one combined with LeBron James, Stephen Curry, and Giannis Antetokounmpo who have been my favorite NBA players for a while now.

The feature image of the site will be the whole One-Piece crew. Which is also taking place in my favorite arc of the show; Wano.

There is a lot of work to be done but this is a nice start to the site. Now that I have added some pictures I plan on adding clips from both the show and the sport as well as some comedic relief at the end of it all.

After a lot of trouble and going back and forth with preview/draft and deciding if I should publish or not my domain is finally up! It was a little confusing at the start but as I went along my WordPress journey things were starting to click. I ended up picking sauravonebasket as the domain because I wanted to post both One Piece and Basketball related clips onto my website. I have some clips in mind that I think are good enough for the start of the domain and will be adding on more as I go along. I was hoping it was a little bit similar to mmm.page where everything can be dragged easily instead of going into the taskbar on the side and looking for it but once I was able to put some time into it I figured out what I needed to do.

Setting up the domain was easily because I just followed Professor Ryan’s video. The way we post and make changes is also very similar to how we already post our assignments so that makes things really easy and I hope to be able to do better with this going forward.

Having my own domain for my portfolio is something I will be working on towards my last semester of college because it is something needed for my field of work. So, I have given some thought to what I would like it to be, but since this is CT101 I think I can choose something that doesn’t have to be too professional.

Five possible domain names:                                                                         sauravsingh: This feels the most professional.                                                  saurav: Just my first name to make myself standout I guess. sauravandonepiece: This domain is something I will most likely go with because I can see myself just posting random onepiece clips onto my website.                                                                                                                           sauravhoops: There are two things I love and that’s One Piece and Basketball and this domain could be used to post some of my favorite moments in the NBA.                                                                                  sauravonebasket: If I take too long to pick between the two above I will just choose this so I can hopefully put both of my interests in one page.

I have been playing basketball on and off since middle school and making a website solely for putting my favorite moments of basketball onto seems like a good idea to have even if I don’t end up doing it now, I can still do it later on when I have more experience working with domains and hopefully have my own. One of my favorite things to do is watch Inside the NBA a show with: Ernie Johnson, Kenny Smith, Charles Barkley and, Shaquille O’Neal. They usually make really funny jokes or just go off topic so seeing some of the basketball legends having fun is really entertaining and sometimes I might end up using for my favorite basketball clips.

Finally, of course, I can’t forget about One Piece. It has a special place in my heart, and it will always be there as it has been with me for a very long time even before basketball. There are too many moments that I know of which I can use for the domain a lot of them are just the main character, Luffy, being very simpleminded/dumb. One of those moments being this, where Luffy butchers the meaning of his crew mate so badly that he just goes with it. And many more to come!!

I am very excited about working on this project and in the end I might end up making a hybrid of the two topics which posted above because I don’t want to have to pick between the two, and hopefully others like what I also find very enjoyable.

 

While I am late on this assignment, the things I have worked on prior to this assignment have all been really enjoyable. I have learned to use gifs a lot more than I already did use with friends and now send them to friends for no reason. I do feel like I spend a lot of time trying to find the right gif to use for certain things when the first choice is always what I tend to go back to. As for the grades I feel like I don’t deserve the grade which I once wanted at the start but since I am trying to finish up on everything, I missed a passable grade would be very ideal.

I like the assignments we have worked on so far and these are the some of the things I have done so far: Assignment#1                                                                                                               Assignment#2                                                                                                              Assignment#3                                                                                                      Assignment#4                                                                                                     Assignment#5

CT101 has been very good when it comes to just having a bunch of ideas in your brain and putting them onto a blog like post for others to see and relate to or learn/see something new. Making posts interesting and also a little bit unique so they stand out is also something I have seen with some of the posts from fellow classmates.

Using gifs is something I do day to day and with this class it has become a better experience because I get to describe some of those gifs to people that might not know what they mean, and I have also seen some gifs which were very interesting.

Participation has not been something that I have done a lot, sometimes it’s the nerves when you’re typing something onto someone’s post and after writing up a few lines I suddenly get a random feeling of something that I don’t like and smashing the backspace button which leaves me with no interaction with others. But there are times when I have interacted with others, and it was a nice experience. In my opinion it takes a lot of effort to just post a comment onto another person’s post, but it can be different from person to person.

What I know now that I did not know before taking this class is definitely, telling a small story from using just a small one second gif. Seeing others use gifs and making things is very entertaining and sometimes its even relaxing just siting back and reading about assignments and randomly seeing a gif I wasn’t expecting. Just being able to relate with others is something I did not see myself doing a lot before so I kind of know that as well now.

As for my creativity expanding it is definitely something I notice. This is due to writing different assignments on different topics but using the right gifs and sometimes taking a really long time to choose that gif which feels just right for the assignment. It can be challenging at times to do something which I feel could work for an assignment, but I have to end up scraping everything and starting over. Looking at some of my older posts I feel satisfied with what I have been able to do so far.

Creativity for me is seeing something for more than what it is and more than what its labeled to be. While a lot of people will tell you to “think outside of the box,” that can make things harder than they need to be. Sometimes it’s hard to say where my creativity comes from when I work on certain things whether it is a coding project or if I am playing a game of basketball and there is a play I want to try doing. But one thing that I noticed about myself is that the more I enjoy doing something the more creative I seem to get in whatever it is that I am doing. As for Immediacy and Intuition in my opinion work well together because with immediacy you can be involved in something very fast and to do that you need to have good intuition which is understanding what you’ll be getting involved with.

My mmm page is very basic and I could not seem to put much creativity in it even though I know what I wanted to show but to bring it out onto the page is a lot harder than I thought. I put everything there which I think is fine and I picked things which interest me, and I hope that they might be of liking to others.

Using the mmm website was very straightforward and the small tips they gave were very helpful in creating what I wanted and it has many different options for customizing the pages. It was also very easy to pick up which was very helpful as I was able to not stress about how to do certain things on the website. I ended up using a lot of different small chibi (“Japanese slang word describing something short”) gifs of One Piece.

I have been using gifs with my friends for a long time now and we have them ready to send while talking about anything. From all of the choices on  ds106 assignment blank, I picked one in the animated gifs section.

I can relate to this a little because the NBA season started back up and while in a conversation with my friends we were sending each other gifs of random basketball plays. I thought of these block Lebron James did and thought to include them in this assignment.

This is one of the many blocks that Lebron James has done but I like this one a lot because this was during the 2016 finals where, in my opinion, he played one of his best series and it was the only time that a team has ever come back from a 3-1 in the finals to win the championship.

This was another block that he did which was in the same series and the trophy getting blocked away from the opposing team (Golden States Warriors) is Lebron James denying the repeat win for them and taking the win for himself and his team.

Another assignment that I find interesting is Profiles of ds106 Super Heroes. 

The idea for this assignment is very simple and its something I can write about. Since I have been learning front-end this assignment will take 20-30 minutes to do finish and it will take about one or two projects for me to be comfortable with this concept and it is something anyone can pick up. The tools needed to make a simple page about superheros requires the use of basic HTML/CSS which is very easy to pick up in my opinion. For someone going into software development I think the skills used for this are important as you go more in-depth learning about HTML/CSS.

Memes are here to stay, and they are very much pieces of art. I really like that memes can be made from anything and can be used to lift a persons mood within the first look. Even though they are fun to look at and are very creative I feel like it’s very hard to make a good meme but for some people it might just be something they dreamt of and some just need an idea in their brain and once they have an idea of what to make putting it into meme format is very easy.

With a quick search on YouTube for “are memes art?” I came across this video of Shia LaBeouf’s answer to “are memes art?” and I think he put it in a good way in which a lot of people can relate to that “anything that moves you is art” and memes tend to do that. I believe that memes are good and tend to be for most people but from this article by Sudipto Roy, they make a good point about memes being used for something Disruptive; “An ironic and light-hearted treatment of a fragmented subject, memes is now seen as a form of ‘everyday conceptualism’ in the modern world.” Some people do tend to see memes in a bad way but memes are in a way universal and while some can really like something others might not. But for me and my friends memes are great way for us to share good moments with each other and have a good time.

Here are a few memes that I really like:

This is from star wars and there are a group of people called the Jedi and they are not to have any relationship because they believe that it can be harmful for the person as it leads to “jealousy and fear of loss, and ultimately the dark side of the Force,” dark side being the exact opposite of everything the Jedi believe in. Of course because of this the above meme was made and I think its a really good one as it uses the pikachu face for the moment perfectly.

As much as I love the Harry Potter movies it still blows my mind that the main character of a film series that has 8 movies did not cast a single spell. This is a movie series about wizards going to school for the sole purpose of learning and controlling their magic. Still love the movies/books.

I had a few friends take CT101 before and they told me that this was a really fun class and that they just made memes all week long. I wanted to take this class a few semesters ago but wanted to get all my required classes for computer science out of the way. CT101 so far has been really fun, I never used GIFS with while also describing how I feel about something or just talking about something in general, so this class is different when it comes to that. I have a class at 8am before this so I am usually out of it so I am glad we have recordings just in case I miss something.So far this class has been very new with how we submit our work and the use of media/gifs in our responses. I was very curious hearing about this class from my friends and now that I am taking it, I can see what they were talking about. Out of all the stressful classes this is definitely a class that lightens the mood even when doing an assignment. I think it helps a lot that the professor teaching the course is also very invested in what they teach and are also invested with the students in the course makes learning and doing things a lot better then just showing up for class and doing the same thing every time without any interaction.CT101 is very different from all the other classes I am taking this semester. Out of the 5 classes I am taking this semester this is the only one that does not have any math in the course, and because of that there is no stress from this class compared to my other classes. I am learning some front-end in one of my classes where we are going over HTML/CSS and I can see those relating to the way we submit our responses and the layout that gets created when we publish our posts. When it comes to this class I feel like I can use the creative side of putting together words with GIFS and use them in my code for when I plan on making my own website/portfolio which is most likely going to be at the end of this semester when we get the month off. Hopefully I can use some of the stuff I learn/make in this class for that.

Anime is a form of Japanese animation which is usually based off of Manga. Manga are comic books/graphic novels that originate from Japan. I have been watching anime and reading manga for as long as I can remember. The internet also makes it possible for me to watch and read them. They are always published in Japanese first whether it is anime or manga and through the internet I have them available for me to enjoy in English via online websites or in the form of books(Manga). This has brought me many hours of pure joy and sometimes sadness as you get really absorbed in different stories.My favorite anime/manga of all time is One Piece, which started in 1997 and is still ongoing as well as the 2nd most sold comic in the world, Superman is first and Batman is third in-case someone was curious. The internet has made it possible for me to read and watch not just One Piece but many more and be part of something for 10 plus years! If it wasn’t for the internet, I wouldn’t have known if manga or anime even existed and I am very thankful for that.