Welcome To Dragon Of The Day, Where I Give You Your Daily Dose Of Dragons. Heres Todays Dragon. My Favorite,

Welcome to Dragon of the Day, where I give you your daily dose of dragons. Here’s todays dragon. My favorite, Paarthurnax.

God I love Paarthurnax so much. I love that dulled golden color of his scales. I bet they’d be soft if I hugged him. Speaking of hugs, I bet being wrapped up by his wings would be nice…

Anyways, Paarthurnax is from the hit 2011 game, Skyrim. He does cool stuff like debate philosophy, teach you a new language, and get you to kill his brother. He is pretty epic, I give him a 10/10. Screw you Delphine for trying to make me kill him.

That’s all for today’s dragon. I would say come by tomorrow, but you probably shouldn’t.

- me pulling up to Kelsier on a corpse boat

- Kelsier strolling up to Kriss and Nazh

- Vin demolishing Kredik Shaw

- Vin deleting Staff

- Dalinar "I'd never kill you Elhokar, also Im courting your mother"

what cosmere scenes would do numbers here as a gif set?

Empathy. Motivation. Progress.

The secret to making your readers care about a character lies in these 3 sliding scales, according to Brandon Sanderson.

Show throughout the story the answers to the following bullets:

Empathy (likability)

How relatable are they?

Are they kind or sympathetic to others?

How do other characters treat them?

Motivation (proactivity)

Are the character’s motivations interesting?

Can the character have what they desire? Do they initially avoid what motivates them?

How do a character’s motivations conflict with their flaws, and/or tie to the plot?

What steps is the character taking to get what they want?

People have many things that motivate them. Sometimes they can never have something they desire, sometimes they don’t want the thing they actually need at first. Motivations can conflict with each other, the plot, and a character’s morality.

Progress (competence)

What flaws does the character need to face in order to progress?

Does the character overcome their flaws, fail, step around them, etc.?

Will the character fulfill their promise(s)?

Motivation and progress often go hand-in-hand. Progression should be hard, to keep characters in check.

These sliding scales work just as well for protagonists as they do for villains, and everyone else in between.

Remember, the scales shouldn’t be maxed out. A character perfect at all three sliding scales is difficult to care about, and your characters are your story’s lifeblood.

Brandon Sanderson’s free 2020 lectures on YT

Honeslty this is my one of favorite thing about these stories, how those characters are mentioned and you can find them elsewhere. And sometimes they do stuff like Gaz or the slaver who's name I forgot, or sometimes they don't, their life just continues away from the protagonists, like Hav.

Fun stormlight easter egg!

You remember Hav? A minor character, Kaladin's mentor when he first enlists in the army?

In Words of Radiance, when Kaladin meets Zahel and thinks about his past as an ex soldier (close but no cigar buddy), he wonders if Hav wound up in a monastery

Hav is not in a monastery. When Shallan is out on her first foray for the ghostbloods, we learn he's only a couple warcamps over guarding Amaram's manor!

And him and Kaladin never ended up seeing each other. Shame really.

Let's go visit it. Who's with me?

JWST Looks Towards the Most Distant Star Ever Seen

JWST was designed to look towards the early universe, and there we see countless galaxies, but individual stars are usually far too faint to really be able to separate from all the other stars around them. Even galaxies fairly close to us can be a huge technical challenge to zoom in to the point of being able to see individual stars, and when you consider the closest star (not counting our sun) isn't even visible in the night sky to the naked eye at 4.24 light years, when we're talking millions even billions of light years, just seeing the galaxies is a miracle within itself.

That was until Hubble picked out Earendel, an actual individual star gravitationally lensed across 12.9 billion light years.

What was exciting about this was that this star was in existence within the first billion years of the universe, so maybe it was a population III star, one of the original stars theorised to have populated that early universe. The problem for Hubble was, being an optical telescope, it couldn't see all of the wavelength data coming from the star, only that which had become visible after being red shifted.

Now, JWST has also done the same, and it has the data to see what kind of star this is, and interestingly it's a blue B type star, much more massive than our Sun, but similar to the kind of stars most visible in open clusters, and born today in our own galaxy.

What's more, JWST also detected red light, potentially pointing at a companion star, which wouldn't be too surprising given most B type stars are binary in nature.

While this star doesn't appear to be a Population III star, it is evidence that we can pick out light from some of the earliest stars in our universe, and expectations are that it's only a matter of time before such a star is detected.

Source:

Space.com

Earendel revealed: James Webb Space Telescope lifts veil on the most distant star known in the universe

Earendel is about twice as hot as the sun, and it probably has a stellar companion.

See this is why I'm studying space