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National Panda Day 2024
Just to make your Saturday a bit more cuddly, it’s National 🐼 Panda Day. I have a soft spot for these monochrome mammals and so do a lot of people. Let’s dive into the bamboo and have some fun.
Two-Tone Bears
China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese. ~Charles de Gaulle
Yeah, some of the quotes I pick are less profound than many others. Give Charles a break. He was busy trying to fight Nazis.
Pandas are ridiculously cute, even the full-grown ones. They look and act like giant teddy bears. My primary stuffed animal growing up was a panda.
How can you not like these things? They’re adorable. They’re mellow. They just roly-poly their way around the forest munching on bamboo.
That’s the life.
Pass The 🀤 Bamboo
Giant Pandas 101 | Nat Geo Wild
Not that I’m keen on chewing raw bamboo, but the bamboo shoots they put in chow mein are pretty tasty.
Did you know that pandas came in two varieties? There’s the standard black & white Kung Fu Panda variation that most of us are familiar with and there are the Red Pandas.
Cutest Red Panda Compilation
The red ones look like the teddy bear version of a raccoon. Like their monochrome cousins, they’re adorable and fairly mellow.
Crisis = Danger + Opportunity
When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity. ~John F. Kennedy
Depending on which AuthorTube videos you watch, plenty of them extol the role of crisis in storytelling.
It’s interesting that the kanji for crisis should be a combination of danger and opportunity. It sounds like the definition of someone engaging in a heist, a criminal racket, a rescue mission or even just daring to enter the dragon’s den in search of treasure.
There’s a lot of talk about making your characters suffer. One of the definitions of the Three Act Structure is that in Act One, you put your character up a tree. In Act Two, you throw stones at them. In Act Three, you get them back down again.
One of the things Brandon Sanderson brought up is the idea that when presented with a choice in your story, the answer to whether they succeeded should either take the form of Yes, But or No, And in order to heighten the tension.
Naturally, that only applies to things that matter to the overall story. Car chases, hiding from adversaries, getting the girl, saving the cat from a tree, winning the lottery. All pivotal inflection points should either be a qualified yes or an exacerbated no in order to put the pedal to the metal.
If a guy is eating a bowl of soup, unless there’s a pressing need for him to fail and spill it all over his shirt, there wouldn’t be much point in trying to ramp up dramatic tension over a mundane activity that we could assume he’s done a million times before.
How does that apply to The Sentinels? Superheroes are all about danger and crises. There will be plenty of chances for them to have Yes, But or No, And moments.
Of course, that depends on me not being mentally dead from all the work I have to do at my day job. It is absolutely killing me. I’ve got nothing left in the tank because there’s always more left to do than I possibly can. I’m definitely looking forward to my day off next Tuesday. It will put me even farther behind at work, but it will be nice to have an actual day off.
Yeah, I’ve had a long week and I’m severely beat. Not too much to say because I haven’t got enough brain cells left to say anything. I hope you’re having a restful weekend.