Episode 710 - Ducks in in the wind
Oct 21, 2024
The fleeting greatness ducks of in the wind! This is a weird one based on a notion I had: Life and experience isn't typically based on long moments, rather it's all based on very short, lightning quick highlights: a song that lasts 3 minutes is massively striking and important and its impact can reverberate down through the decades, despite only lasting such a short amount of time. Things like comics can take days, weeks or years to make and yet each page is consumed in no more than seconds! But even so, it can have a huge effect.
Topics and Show Notes
-Cover image: female Sagittarius silhouette pic by Tantz that only took a moment to create but its impact was way larger!
This goes into all aspects of life and creation because it's how the brain of most adult neurotypical people works: we don't experience the world as a real time 24 hour, 86400 second long drag, taking in every instant as it happens, rather we phase all that out and only focus on a highlight real of interesting moments- those get expanded in importance and we think they take up more time and space than they actually do, this is why you constantly forget routine things that you do during the day (did I put sugar in my tea? What did I come in here for?), because your brain is on autopilot for the unimportant routine things. And this is why we think time slows down when something scary happens: because our brains actually start taking in awareness in real time and noticing everything!
In reality any fight only lasts a few seconds or a minute or two at most, most things in sex are like that too, and the old adage with war is that it's a few minutes of action and many hours of boredom… And yet when we depict those things in stories for comics or film or whatever we always massively stretch out those moments of action far longer than they could ever last because that is the only way to make them realistically relatable to the viewer: Because when you experience those things your awareness is extremely focussed and so they seem to last much, much longer.
It's not always like that- When you're a child your brain (for a neurotypical) still needs experience in order to understand how things work so it has to be constantly taking in everything, which is why it's so easy for children to get painfully bored and why time seems to last SO much longer. There are also unfortunate people who's brains are always stuck in that mode so all life and experience to them is absolutely interminable. I feel like I have the opposite issue where I have very little awarenesses of anything specific and time zips past at a breakneck pace, like the Rolling Stones song Rock Off “I'm zipping through the days at lightning speed” but change “days” to “decades”.
To get back to the point of this- Things that take hours, days, or years to create but only a few seconds to enjoy and experience, can STILL create an impact that lasts forever. Even a movie which can go for 2 hours or more is usually only enjoyed as a few import but very short scenes that we increase in importance in our own brains - Which is why we often remember things differently to how they really were. I think it's extremely important for creator to understand this: how people take things in and consume media and reality as a “best off” compilation of important moments, but also that even though something might take forever to make and most people will only take a few a seconds to experience it, its impact can be huge and last much longer.
This week Gunwallace gave us a theme inspired by Nose Bleed - A fiery raw blast of hot rocky goodness spewed forth like a cloud of burning super hot plasma, excited electrons contained by a powerful magnetic field as they race far and wide, spreading hellish red illumination and destruction.
Topics and shownotes
Links
Featured comic:
Geist Gears - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2024/oct/15/featured-comic-geist-gears/
Featured music:
Nose Bleed - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Nose_Bleed_/ - by Skudsink M.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Gunwallace/
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Kawaiidaigakusei - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/kawaiidaigakusei
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
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Episode 708 - Cyberpunk
Oct 7, 2024
Cyberpunk is a cool genre we have never covered exclusively on a Quackcast before. But what IS cyberpunk? It's a subset of SciFi, it's usually near future, involves body modifications, grittiness, street level computer use, techno body modification, and hacking. At least that's the way it started. Formative influences on the cyberpunk genre were the first Tron movie, Bladerunner, and Escape from New York. Tron showed us what cyberspace was, while Bladerunner and Escape from New York gave us gritty near future dystopias with cool tech, modified humans, and most importantly the punk aesthetic which was the gritty street youth fashion of the late 70s and early 80s.
Episode 706 - wrong
Sep 23, 2024
Being right on the internet is Sooo important… Being right in life and at all times is essential too! At least that's how a lot of us tend to think. Being told we're wrong, especially on the internet, can be so embarrassing and shameful that we try and avoid it at all costs. But realising you're wrong and being able to admit it and to learn from your mistakes is actually more empowering, powerful, and fulfilling than any amount of rightness can ever be.
Episode 704 - The Cultcast
Sep 8, 2024
The topic we're talking about today was inspired by my ruminations on Bullshido martial arts promo demonstration videos. These are the videos where a martial arts master shows off their skill in a patently fake demonstration, usually starting with breaking concrete slabs or wood and then progressing to a performance where they show how easily they can defeat all of their students who try and attack them.
Episode 702 - Expression-cast
Aug 26, 2024
Following on from last week with our Quackcast on faces, this week we're chatting about expressions, which is a very natural progression! expressions are a great way to enhance communication in comics. they can be fun to play with but tricky to master. Though when you get them right they really help lift your game.
Episode 700 - Mythcast part 2
Aug 12, 2024
We chatted about Greek Myths last week and found the subject so interesting that we thought we'd do a part two! So even MORE Greek myth stuff for Quackcast 700.
Episode 698 - the Haircast
Jul 29, 2024
Hair is a weird thing isn't it? It's just a bunch of thin filaments that stand out and hang from the body, most visibly from the head. Everyone is bald as an egg underneath this coating of head-fur, but the floof on top takes on a life, body, and shape of its own even though the truth is that it's just thin threads all buffed up with a lot of air. Hairstyles can indicate class, status, wealth, occupation, style, coolness, lack of cool, age, date, and any number of other factors about a person and where and when they fit in society. We also have strong reactions to hair: love, hate, revulsion, or disgust. It can indicate whether a person belongs to a community, a society, a religion or a sect.
Episode 696 - Tropes
Jul 15, 2024
We're talking about tropes that we like hate. Some we brought up were conspiracy theories, especially the ones that involve a whiteboard where all the info and photos stuck on there are connected by red string and the ones in anime where at the end of the episode a mysterious character looks at the action from a distance and says cryptically “ah, this is all going exactly to plan…”