Episode Quackcast 367 - reply notifications And titles!
Mar 26, 2018
In this Quackcast we discuss a couple of things. First we chat about the prototype comment reply notification system that Alexey our programmer has just now come up with and people like Albino Ginger helped to pay for! And we talk about ways to make it more user-friendly, like having the first line of a comment show up on the comment notification pages… We'd LOVE more feedback on that! So please consider testing out the system and giving us your take on it. Then we chatted about the art of the TITLE! Why do things have the titles they do? What are some good or bad titles? Why did you choose YOUR title? Star Wars is an example of a good title for a movie: it told people exactly what to expect in a time when there weren't many other films like it, this is why it was never called “A New Hope” or “Episode 4” the way we mistakenly call it today, because no one in 1977 would have gone to see it ;) Happy birthday!!!!!!! Mr Banes! Banes Had his birthday DURING the Quackcast! Woot! Please show some love for this amazing guy ^_^ This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to Holy Bible the Albino Ginger Version: Wonder into the giant cathedral of our lord, the revered and sacred Albino Ginger, watch the dust motes dance in the multicoloured sunbeams, tinted into rainbow shades by stained glass windows depicting the mighty feats of the Albino Ginger god as he was creating our world… This is techno trance church music for a new age!
Topics and Show Notes
Topics and shownotes
Featured comic:
Demon Plague - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2018/mar/20/featured-comic-demon-plague/
Links:
Titles newspost - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2018/mar/14/say-my-name-titles/
Comment reply notifications newspost - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2018/mar/23/test-the-comment-notifications-today/
PLEASE TEST OUR COMMENT REPLY SYSTEM! - http://next.theduckwebcomics.com/user/replies
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
PitFace - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/PIT_FACE/
Tantz Aerine - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Banes - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
Ozoneocean - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Featured music:
Holy Bible the Albino Ginger Version - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Holy_Bible_the_Albino_Ginger_version/, by Albino Ginger, rated M.
Episode 366 - Spicy times with Albino Ginger
Mar 19, 2018
We have a very special Quackcast this week. We interview Albino Ginger, AKA Bo Knowles, creator of the hilarious and subversive Holy Bible The Albino Ginger Version! Bo gave a VERY generous donation to our Indigogo fund-raiser to help us pay for the a new comment notification and comment reply notification feature, and his reward was a Quackcast interview which we were more than pleased to give. After reading his Holy Bible you'll understand why, it's very funny and quite naughty. We look forward to more chapters! Bo was fun to chat to and we all had a great time ^_^ READ THE GINGER BIBLE! There is just so much hilarity in there and sneaky jokes on flat earth theory, young earth creationism, evolution denial and many more. Read to find out ;) This week Gunwallace has given us another theme to Cybertech! It's a slow panoramic introduction to a dark future, promising action and adventure across the dim blackness of space. You can listen to the first one on Quackcast 292.
Episode 364 - JUST DO IT!
Mar 5, 2018
All the planning and set up in the world will never count for anything if you never start your webcomic, so just put your own to paper and begin! “Getting started on a webcomic” is what we chat about here. I was inspired by PitFace's newspost about a crappy horror film and how the creators just went for it. As a webcomicer that is what you HAVE to do! You can plan, research and gather resources for years, but the reality is that it just makes you more and more scared to take the plunge. You'll develop a LOT faster as a webcomicer if you throw caution to the wind and go for it. I'm not saying that research and planning are uneeded, it's just that most if it can be done while you're actually working. Do not worry about putting out a perfect piece of genius work from the getgo- your comic WILL get there regardless if you're dedicated and put the work in AS you work, but the first few pages or chapters don't have to be there. Your audience will appreciate the chance to grow with you a lot more than if you put out a polished gem to begin with. Starting out at a place like Drunk Duck is your best bet. It's a nurturing, easy to use, creator run platform, focussed around promoting webcomics. So what are you waiting for? This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to Flesh and Wires: Dirty and distorted electric guitar and determined fuzzy bass, weaving together over a haunting synthesized Melodica. Portentous and evocative, this music tells a story in it’s own runtime! The main riff reminds me a little of my fave part for We don’t Need Another Hero from Tina Turner.
Episode 361 - Primordial Creations
Feb 12, 2018
Today we talk about where our characters began, not their origin stories or why we started writing them but rather what they used to look like! Pitface was inspired to create a thread based on this idea by Emma Clare's newspost series of origin stories. So we just HAD to have Emma Clare along with us to discus this too! Pit, Tantz, and Emma discuss their bishie origins and talk about maybe doing a bishie DD calendar… We HAVE to make them do that! Emma Clare of course does our Friday newsposts as well as the comic Puppets and Strings and is the artist on Constellation Chronicles. What did your character look like when you first started? This week Gunwallace has given us the theme Wolf Moon - A slow, rich acoustic beginning lulls you calmly, then we roar into a rough, electric feast, a veritable tidal wave of sound washes over you and carries you out to sea.
Episode 360 - How did you start in webcomics?
Feb 4, 2018
In this Quackcast I thought we'd chat about Emma Clare's great and thoughtful topic of webcomic origin stories: Basically, what was happening to make you start your webcomic on DD, all that stuff in your life back when you first began posting… Emma's newsposts are a great read and they made us all think back to how we began. Pit, Tantz and I have a long talk about our comicing origins. What were YOU doing when you started webcomics? What made you begin? This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to NanoCritters. It's a minimalist white expanse, dotted with mysterious little marks of sound. What do they mean, what do they represent, is it code? Read NanoCritters to find out! Also included in the Quackcast are extracts from a lovely Starwars themed rap that Tantz's Greek students performed in English.
Episode 352 - Help make DD better! Comment notifications! More play
Dec 11, 2017
n this Quackcast we cover a few different things! FIRST up is our latest campaign to give YOU comment and reply notifications so that you can see who has commented on your comic pages easily, you can respond to them right away, then they'll KNOW you replied and they can respond back and so on. But before we can do that we need to raise money via Indiegogo to pay for it. YOU will be helping to pay for a feature that you want. That's how the site works these days, it's our site: yours and mine. In the next part of the Quackcast we have a series of short plays that we act out. They're based on comics here at DD. We start out with custom scripts written by Tantz Aerine for Without Moonlight and Brave Resistance. And then we have a go interpreting comic pages of The Epic of Blitzov, Bottomless Waitress, Typical Strange, and Pinky TA. Which brings us to our next thing: One of the perks you can pay for to help us out with our campaign will be a custom script based on your comic. WE will write it and act it out. YOU don't have to do anything but donate. Finally we have a note from KAM that we read out, informing us of the experience of adapting his comic into a script structure and we talk about that ourselves. If you'd like to write a script for us to act out on the Quackcast, just PQ me and I'll tell you where to send it. :) This week Gunwallce has given us the theme to Bram and Vlad: Welcome to the mysterious, echoing notes of a celestial funhouse. Then settle down to a demonic, yet friendly game of cards accompanied by a jaunty, yet cheeky tune on the piano!
Episode 344 - Active/Reactive characters
Oct 16, 2017
Some characters are active and others are reactive. Reactive characters mostly only react to things rather than make them happen so they can be very boring if not done right! Active characters are the ones that drive events by doing things and making stuff happen, these characters grab your interest. This idea was based on Tantz's fantastic newspost, we talk it out, coming up with some good examples of each character type. Our epiphany for this Quackcast was that if you want a “strong” female character what you REALLY want is an “active” female character. The mistake people made with the trope was that they thought the female character had to be either a main character or a kick-arse masculine style character, when in reality neither is required. Make your character “active”; making decisions, causing things to happen, having an impact, causing OTHER characters to react etc and they will be a “strong” character. She could be a minor character who never lifts a sword or fires a gun but still be the strongest character in the story if she's the most active. ;) This week Gunwallce has given us the theme to Boys Land - This one surprises you, sneaking up with a gentle beginning, then it hits like a bomb bursts of rainbows and warm breezes! Beautifully, the same tune is repeated in many different forms, there’s even a bit of Primus type bass in there. It finishes as it begins, with a gentle acoustic guitar.
Episode 342 - Seen unseen
Oct 2, 2017
What is the best approach to make a scary story? To directly show the monster, the horror and the gore, or to hold off on that and let the audience fill in the blanks and guide them to imagine something far more awful and real than you could conceive of yourself? That's what Banes and I talked about in the Quackcast that comes out on the first day of the month of October, the scariest month… the month when my Tax return is due! OOooooooo nooooooo! o_O But it's also the month when Halloween comes around and people like to think about scary things… And THINKING about them is often more scary than seeing them. Or is it? This week Gunwallce has given us the theme to KAYN KOURAGEOUS! Groove on down to the funk! Let’s go back to the 1970s, chow down on some fat tasty bass, a lick of catchy repeating riff, the music of the streets; hot, fresh and savoury!
