Meet Greta, a good humoured, earthy, pipe smoking woman with a great big box backpack and stylish leather travelling clothes. Greta is an apothecary, she travels the lands curing ills and writing down creatively horrible ailments in her apothecary book. On the way she meets a rather stuck-up knight on ...

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In Quackcast 245 we TRY to talk about my idea that fictional characters, stereotypes, tropes and situations in media have influenced their counterparts in reality, and in a lot of ways helped to create them. Fictional stereotypes and tropes are made out of simplified models of things that happen ...

Apparently the difference between “terror” and “horror” was first expressed by writer Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), who said that Terror is the dread and apprehension about something happening, while Horror is the actual encountering the frightening thing.
Maybe this is what they mean when they talk about “suspense” vs. “horror”. Have ...

Horror…and the baddies and creepies and long-legged beasties of horror…come in many flavours.
These divisions might be incomplete or somewhat meaningless in a way, but hey, I have to approach it somehow…

Reality Bites: Human Creeps, Scary Animals and Nature
-Serial Killers, Jason, Michael Myers, The Strangers, And ...

Cogs and Claws is a surreal odyssey for your imagination.

In the opening sequence, a giant flounder emerges from an underwater pod and boards a space shuttle submerged in water. Soon thereafter, the shuttle is blasted into space where it joins several other spacecrafts driven by various anthropomorphic creatures.

This ...

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Hello, hello, hello! This is the second part of our hugely long expose on the tricky art of WORLD BUILDING! And it really IS extra loooooooooooog… that's because we take so much time crafting the Quackcast world for you. To recap: world-building is a big part of ALL ...

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You always do a bit of world building in fiction, in some types of stories like alternative histories, fantasy and Sci-Fi you have to do a bit more, in things set in the real world you don't have to do nearly as much - maybe only limited to a ...

I'm not sure who the first fictional character was that I became attached to. The Cat in the Hat? Superman? Jason Voorhees, maybe?

In any case, Jughead Jones was somewhere in that early group of beloved characters. I liked Archie, and envied his dating life with Betty and Veronica ...

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Image by Ozoneocean

Content:
After several interesting discussions about Mary Sues, we'd like to talk about characters a little more.
We asked people to let us know their thoughts on what makes a well written character VS a poorly written one. People talked about their favourite and least ...

-Art by Gunwallace

I discovered a sketchbook sitting to the left of the counter during my last visit to my favourite tea lounge. The words “Before I Die…” were scrawled across the black cover, so curiosity got the best of me and I thumbed through the pages. Each page had ...