Episode 688 - Artistic Evolution
May 20, 2024
How and why does your creativity change over time? It “evolves”. Evolution is often wrongly thought of as a process that leads to a goal, like the idea that humans are the pinnacle of evolution, or that we will “evolve” into something better and “more superior”, or that there is a “next level” of evolution… All of that is just silly comic-book nonsense and terrible sci-fi. Evolution has no goal or direction, it's simply how we describe change that occurs over time. Creatures don't get “better” due to evolution, rather environmental pressures influence changes that make creatures fit in and cope with those specific pressures better. And many factors influence evolution, not just environmental pressures.
Topics and Show Notes
With creativity the evolution influencers are things like age, experience, taste, style, family, friends, technology, culture… As you get older you have more experience but less time to spend on things because of the pressures of work, relationships, and increasing responsibilities. Your tastes change, you get smarter, you get more skilled, you change what you work with, your ideas and interests change. You begin with the influences of your parents and early childhood exposures to culture, then you break away from that and form your own ideas of popular culture in your early teens, then you try to desperately fit in with various subgroups till your mid 20s and then you mainly stick with the cultural influences you were exposed up till then as your main influences from then on -still picking up new things from time to time, but not having as big an effect.
In the professional world creators get more power and less oversight so they often produce worse stuff because they have more control and don't listen to people as much, have less collaborators and less influence by producers and editors to fix their bad ideas… that's not always the case but it's proved true all too often with musicians, film makers, and writers.
Wider environmental factors like technological change (the internet, digital photography, AI etc), culture change, and political change, all have major effects on people's creativity. Then there are internal factors like puberty, depression, happiness, grief, and more. All these things leave their mark and alter the course of our creativity over time.
And THAT is why most bands aren't producing the same good stuff now as they did when they started out, hahaha!
In this Quackcast we talk about how our own work has changed over time and why. How has your changed over time and why?
This week Gunwallace was influenced to create a theme for Craters Edge - creepy, ethereal, mysterious mist arises, deepening the enigmatic aurora of the presence… Then chaos is unleashed without warning! Rapidfire electronica overwhelms, before fading back into smoke and darkness.
Topics and shownotes
Links
Featured comic:
Somewhere in the Universe - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2024/may/14/featured-comic-somewhere-in-the-universe
Featured music:
Craters Edge - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Craters_Edge/ - by Jason Moon, rated M.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Gunwallace/
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Kawaiidaigakusei - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/kawaiidaigakusei
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
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Episode 686 - May the fourth be with you
May 5, 2024
We recorded the Quackcast on the 4th of May, which of course means that it was “May the fourth”, the Star Wars celebration date! So we decided to talk about Star Wars, but instead of our usual rants about what we think could be done better we kept it to mainly positive stuff, focussing on what we loved about the films, mainly original series, which are the best ones.
Episode 684 - The hero is dead?
Apr 21, 2024
What happens when the hero dies? Especially when it's early on in the story… do things fall apart or does someone else take over? Our topic is about a story style where you establish that a character is the hero or chief protagonist, only to do a bait and switch and swap them out with a less likely character like a sidekick. This makes the audience rethink the way things are going, instead of sticking to an expected formula you force the audience to wake up and wonder what will happen next. This can be very effective!
Episode 682 - Exposition!
Apr 8, 2024
Tantz came up with this week's topic: Exposition! It's because she's well on her way into starting her latest comic, Verdant, and working out ways to introduce the story, the world, characters, culture, magic systems, religion etc without doing a massive text dump, which people generally don't like too much. So how do you exposit in a good way?
Episode 679 - Correlation doesn't equal causation
Mar 18, 2024
The phrase “Correlation doesn't equal causation” is something associated with science and statistics but it really applies to EVERYTHING and that's important to understand. But was does it mean? If a bunch of things happened at the same time, those things aren't necessarily related or causal. An example Tantz gives is that statistics show in the summer there are more drownings and that people eat more ice cream. That means that those two things are correlated. We know they aren't causal though: ice ream doesn't drown people and people drowning don't cause people to eat more ice cream… the third hidden variable is that it's summer: it's the rise in temperature that causes people to want more ice cream and to swim more, which increases the chances of drowning.
Episode 678 - Panel order!
Mar 11, 2024
Banes did a really interesting newspost about panel order and how we read comics- not just left to right or right to left but which panel flows to what and how you get the reader to go in the right direction when something isn't intuitive. We're all comic people and we host a comic site so this was perfect for us to tackle!
Episode 677 - You can't spell "Fail" without "AI"
Mar 4, 2024
I remembered that a promised Quackcast was AI: slavery for artists and creators. This is an important subject to cover especially from this angle.
Episode 676 - Baby it's cold outside, cultural context
Feb 26, 2024
Oh baby it's cold outside… That's a tricky song, well it's not really but a few years ago the silly pop-culture warriors on Twitter started acting as if the song was all “rapey” with the male in the song trying to pressure the woman into sex. The problem was they were absolutely ignorant of the correct cultural context in quite a misogynist way.
