11 reasons why we shouldn’t bother with pandas

  1. The giant panda is a part of the Carnivora order… but 99% of its diet consists of bamboo.
  2. Bamboo has a nutritional value equal to that of paper. Hence why they have to eat a stupid amount of it.
  3. Because the giant panda get so little nutrition from bamboo, they have to eat for up to nine hours a day. Pandas are lazy fucks basically.
  4. As a result of eating a stupid amount of bamboo, every damn day, the giant panda is too fat to run away from danger when faced with predators or hunters.
  5. Giant pandas have a pointless and rather stupid camouflage system. Their black and white fur acts as a deterrence only. Again, they’re too fat to run away.
  6. Giant pandas are so dumb that when they first give birth, they often don’t recognise their own screaming infant and try to kill it. Just to be sure.
  7. To further the previous points made on their stupidity, giant panda’s give birth to twins an estimated 47% of the time, but are capable of only looking after one infant at a time. So they abandon the other one.
  8. Kudos to their shitty diet, giant panda cubs suffer from malnutrition from the get-go.
  9. In captivity, the new mothers are often surveyed 24/7 just to make sure they don’t squash their own newborns in their sleep or accidentally step on them.
  10. They have no major impact on the environment. At all. China isn’t suffering from a bamboo infestation last time I checked anyway, which makes all efforts on conserving their species a moot point.
  11. The species is completely reliant on conservation. It’s so retarded that it needs human intervention in order to survive.

So in short, I’ll never understand why a stupid amount of money goes towards conserving the Great Panda when essentially, it’s very species is an example of natural selection and Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Drypoint etching

It took four hours, a little patience and a steady hand, but for a first attempt I’m proud of how it ended up. Drypoint etching, fortunately enough, isn’t as hard as it looks. Time-consuming, yes, but a fun experiment nonetheless that you can easily get stuck into. You soon learn through trial and error that just lightly scratching the surface works just as well (if not better) than trying to dig the scribe in so the line gives underway, and that the way in which you hold the scribe affects the pressure the point will make on the surface. Basically, there’s a lot you can do to create a variety of lines in drypoint etching.

 To break it down into technical terms, drypoint is a kind of engraving made by scratching lines into a plate’s surface with a sharp point. It’s called drypoint because no acid is used, basically. Once the lines have been etched into the plate’s surface, you can cover it with ink and use it to transfer the image onto paper as a screen print. Or just keep the etching for wall decoration like I did.