Tue, 31 December 2024
It's not the new year yet but this is the final Quackcast of 2024 and it's coming out on New Year's Eve! Another big point was that our programmer, Alexey, finally left us. That was very sad but he didn't feel he could keep up the work anymore. So we will be looking for another programmer or programming team with Python of UI capabilities to pick up on his work. The test site with the unfinished updates is linked bellow. Banes started Continuity Falls, replacing HPKomic's Panel by Panel feature, which was a much loved deep-dive into comics on DD and the web in general by the learned and experienced HPKomic (linked bellow). HPKomic wound up his segment to move it to his own website. While Continuity Falls is the first front page comic DD has had for almost 20 years, since Duck and Quail, it's slated to be a collab comic though it's just Banes for now, it will be an interesting ride! It has a very retro 1930s feel and I love it! We had another successful DD awards AND a Secret Santa recently too, which are marvelous little community projects by Drunk Duckers and really bring people together. The awards recognises people's great work on the site with their comics and the Secret Santa is a way to have fun, gift some art to someone and get gift art in return! All linked bellow. What were your biggest moments of 2024? Did anything cool happen with your comic? This week Gunwallace gave us a theme inspired by Imago Nebraska - Like a super-dooper slow and chilled out Oxygene 4 from Jene Michelle Jare, this is thoughtful, sleepy, spacey, relaxed and otherworldly.
Links
Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Comments[0]
|
Tue, 24 December 2024
Happy Christmas eve! In this penultimate Quackcast of the year we decided to have a free day and just chat about any subject that interested us at the time. Next week will be our final cast of the year when we'll do a year in review. We even went back to our roots and did some silly accents, mine were of course A-mazing! (they were pretty crap TBH) We touched on many subjects from the Adams family and Wednesday, even the Munsters (which I mistook for the Adams Family at one point… OMG what a dumbarse), the new Superman movie, Asterix, Corto Maltise, Chinese anime, Lower Decks, Shangri-La Frontier, Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online, and a host of other silly things. Happy Christmas to all who celebrate it! As a present I'm making this week's Patreon vid freely available here - https://www.patreon.com/DrunkDuck This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Hyacinth Webcomic - Heavy bass introduces the cast of usual suspects in this theme that beautifully echoes the intro of an 80s action TV show, blended with something more arty and eerie!
Links Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Comments[0]
|
Tue, 17 December 2024
This Quackcast was inspired by world renowned idiot Robert F Kennedy Jnr. We decided to talk about writing dumb characters. I keep calling him John F Kennedy Jnr because I am also an idiot. Some context: he wants to remove approval for the life saving Polio vaccine and allow dangerous unpasteurised milk to be widely sold, among other things. He's a classic idiot. This put us in mind of fictional idiots. Some classic fictional idiots: Lil' Abner, Jethro from the Beverly Hillbillies, Breckinridge Elkins, Mr Bean, Baldric, Biff Tanner, Dark Helmet, Homer Simpson etc. Idiots as protagonists are often rather innocent while idiots as antagonists are usually comic relief sidekicks (like Bebop and Rocksteady from TMNT), or comic relief villains. We don't usually get a serious villain who is also a fool,except in reality unfortunately. Who is your fave fictional moron or do you have any tips for writing an idiot? This week Gunwallace gave us a theme inspired by The Side Characters - A solid piano groove that bounces and judders along before being joined by a snake charming synth bass that takes us on short exotic side-trip to the middle east and back! Topics and shownotes Links
Featured music: Special thanks to:
Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Comments[0]
|
Tue, 10 December 2024
Non-linear stories are a different way of telling a tale. There are many famous examples (Pulp fiction, Mulholland Drive etc), where the sequence of events isn't in strict chronological order. This style has gained a false reputation of being superior or more advanced or challenging to an audience than linear stories. That is of course false, the nonlinear style as been around since storytelling existed are more closely mirrors the way we think about stories and tell them to each other : We often tell people about the end of a story first and then back track (“I had a terrible day today”, “I broke my leg”, “I won a thousand dollars!” etc) , we also jump to important parts , introduce other figures and give them back stories (“Then I saw Gene! You remember Gene? The lady with the sleepy eye, she used to look after you when you were a baby…”), and so on and on. Pure Linear story-stelling is actually much harder to do because it isn't natural to us, though a lot of non-linear stories are made by people constructing liner stories first and then going back and rearranging them. Life and time are linear but our thinking and awareness is not. I would posit that the reason we sometimes seem to find non-liner stories a bit more difficult isn't because of the style, rather it's because those examples are not well constructed. When they are, you don't even notice the form! Neither linear nor non-linear is a more advanced form, they're both simply different ways to tell a story. This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Secret Agent British Intelligence II - A cross between classic Spanish guitar by Rodrigo, and those cool wiry guitar riffs from James Bond Dr No, all mixed up into a little hacienda party melange! Topics and shownotes Links Inspired by Banes's newspost - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2024/dec/04/im-out-of-order-youre-out-of-order/ Featured comic: Featured music: Special thanks to:
Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_717_-_Stories_out_of_order.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
Comments[0]
|
Tue, 3 December 2024
Is it important to Identify with characters? This question occurred to me as I was watching a rather banal sitcom, Rules of Engagement. I love two of the stars, David Spade and Patrick Warburton, but it's not really that engaging a show, the humour is anodyne and a lot of it is based around traditional gender roles and expectations, but I forced myself to watch it anyway just to see more of the aforementioned stars. The only way I was able to get into it was because I somewhat identified with David Spade's character- being a small blonde guy with long hair and a bit of a perv, haha! We discussed the idea long and hard in this Quackcast and came to some interesting conclusions. One of the ideas floated was that you don't have to identify with any of the characters at all as long as the story is good enough. Another idea is that there are ways to make the audience identify with ANY character regardless of who they are; first person writing is the easiest, making them the main POV character can work, making them an underdog, or giving characters a relatable feeling, experience or situation works too. The classic way of doing it is to make the character somehow similar to the audience it's intended for. This is a banal, amateurish, and basic way of doing things, but it makes up for basic writing. It's why most action films have traditionally have average, bland male stars, usually white and looking between 20-40, and “chick-flicks have the same thing but with a woman. It's why animes often have an extremely bland male star as the main character, especially for harem anime. And this is also the reason for the current fad of gender-swapping and ”race-swapping“ in everything, though through that they're attempting to broaden appeal. I think representation is a related factor (But NOT the same thing), and that IS important: to be able to see that people like you are ”seen" by the rest of the world and represented in the stories you consume is essential for a sense of self and how you fit into the world. It's something that's needed: people who look like you, talk like you, with lives like you, the same sexuality, gender etc. being represented positively in the stories you consume. That will never not be important! But main character doesn't need that unless the writing is super thin. I rationalise this because even though I'm a straight, white, middle-aged, Australian man I easily identify with any main character regardless of age, gender, sexuality, nationality or ethnicity when the writing is good. But when it's not you cling to what you know: Anything familiar. What do you think? Should main characters always be made to be audience proxies? And if so how should that be done? Can you name things where you identify with none of the characters but still enjoy it anyway? This week Gunwallace gave us a theme inspired by the Railroad of the Wallachian Library - Creepily atmospheric… grey twilit mists swirl and eddy, tensions build, electricity crackles the air as your hackles rise… a ghostly locomotive charges out of the billowing fog only to disappear into the darkness. Topics and shownotes Links
Featured music: Special thanks to:
Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Direct download: Quackcast_716_-_Identify_with_characters.mp3
Category:Webcomics -- posted at: 12:00am PST
Comments[0]
|
|
The QuackCast features Ozoneocean, Banes, Tantz Aerine, and Pitface, talking about writing, movies, webcomics, art, politics, philosophy, sexuality, and everything else! We're the hosts of the oldest webcomic host on the net, Drunkduck.com, aka theduckwebcomics. 20 years this year!
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
