One point advice for the internal arts

In Japanese TV series Midnight Diner, there is a "one point advice" for making the dish mentioned in the episode. No such advice in the manga, and no such advice in the move. Midnight Diner started out as manga, became so successful that three mini-TV series were made and ultimately this year a movie is released. Different medium demands different contents. Individual magazine manga series asks for distinct comic elements in each issue (three stories in each issue for Midnight Diner), so that readers will come back to buy the next issue. TV mini-series caters to a broader audience, in Midnight Diner the producer added one extra element: "one point advice" (or more appropriately called "key point advice") for the housewife or anyone interested to a featured dish, which itself forming part of the plot. And there are many webpages on the internet (in Japanese and Chinese) featuring how to make such dishes, sometimes with additional advice! Movie industry is different. Here you need an impressive or sustainable theme to tie everything together, scattered pieces of individual stories won't work in movie.

Book is more like a movie. An attractive theme is asked for. For example, you can write on tai chi, or better yet, part of tai chi (like standard form, tai-chi as healing, tai-chi nei gong, tai-chi pushing hands etc) as a single subject. An author cannot ramble on different subjects. The author can choose a theme, but once he has chosen a theme he cannot divert from it without raising some negative comments from his readers.

Blogging is different. True, good blogging also needs to write around a specific subject, and better yet, on a specialized subject in which the author knows a lot about, being an expert on the subject. Yet blogging can ramble around individual areas of a defined subject almost randomly. Chances are that most readers jump into a certain area of a subject through a search engine. With the overflow of information, an online researcher (defined as anyone who intends to find particular information on the internet using search engines) typically look for information from different sources. He or she has limited time to read an article in a particular blog. For this reason, the contribution of blogs and bloggers lies in whether they can shed some sights onto the mind of a researcher, on first reading. This is de-facto the requirement or contribution of "one point advice" or "key point advice".

I hope my blog posts can give researchers relevant one point advice or key point advice on the subject matters of internal arts, namely tai chi, chi kung, nei-gong, and meditation.



One point advice for Japanese egg roll: "use rectangular pan, pour egg, fold into small rectangle, pour another egg, fold again..."