Episode 534 - Biting off more than you can chew
Jun 7, 2021
Taking on more than you can handle - i.e. James Cameron and JJ Abrams are good directors and writers but neither could handle the demands of a complex Sci-Fi project that needs full world building and internally consistent logic etc (Avatar and Star Wars). They're great with more simple SciFi that's based on 21st century earth and simpler stories, but epic SciFi was clearly a long way beyond the capabilities of either. We're talking about when WE have been caught taking on stuff we couldn't handle, how we dealt with that and also how other creators dealt with it too.
Topics and Show Notes
It's very easy to get overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task that you take on, whether the story style is too much for you, you can't get a good ending, the research is too much, the artwork is too hard, the schedule is too demanding etc. We've all been caught in some way or other, usually multiple ways! One strategy is to break stuff down into more manageable chunks, but sometimes that's just too hard anyway. It can be worth it to battle on because it forces you out of your comfort zone and makes you learn new lessons and techniques. Sometimes you can still produce something great even if you didn't reach what you were originally aiming for. And sometimes it actually makes more sense to quit because you find yourself wasting too much time and energy on it when you could be spending that more profitably elsewhere. There are no single right answers here.
The cover image is emblematic: an antimissle installation developed for billions by the US, which was abaondoned soon after. They bit off more than they could chew... Not only with the idea of hunting and killing balistic missles before they hit the US coast, but pursuing a concept that would have fundamentally unbalanced the M.A.D. docterine of the late cold war: If one side can defeat the other's missles then it becomes practical for them to strike first which makes nuclear war far more likley, which means that the other side becomes more desperate... fortunately the idiocy of this path was abaondoned before it led to further escalation.
(Image: By Pitface, abandoned antimissle site in ND)
This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to COSMIC SAFARI: A trip through the wilderness of the vast galaxy, along beautifully coloured nebula filaments, past the rings encircling gas giants, and through the tails of comets! This is Jean-Michele Jarre meets a small remote controlled car!
Topics and shownotes
Featured comic:
COSMIC SAFARI - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2021/jun/01/featured-comic-cosmic-safari
Featured Music:
COSMIC SAFARI - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/COSMIC_SAFARI/ - by Frenemy, rated E.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Pitface - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/PIT_FACE/
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 531 - Same Stories From Differnt Perspectives
May 17, 2021
The famous film Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa gave its name to the style of a story that has the same scenes told from different perspectives. Many comics and movies have done this, it's a really cool trick to try. Not only can it help you show a different perspective of a scene it can also show your story in a completely different style when you show things through the eyes of a particular character and how they “see” the world. It can even be a great trick for making a sequel- rather than a linear continuation of a story you show a story that happened in parallel to the sequences shown.
Episode 529 - Time loops!
May 2, 2021
Time loops in stories are a lot of fun, they can be really complicated and interesting. Groundhog day is the most famous version of this trope. Banes tells me it's a “trope codifier”. In a time loop story characters are caught reliving the same events over and over with the main character being the only one who's really aware of it, Sometimes the loop happens only once or a couple of times, or many, many times as in Groundhog Day and Palm Springs. We chat about some of the different time loop stories, their characteristics and why we like them.
Episode 526 A return to Mary Sue!
Apr 12, 2021
Mary Sues are always a fun topic! There are some misconceptions about them though… Mary Sues aren't all female, they can be any gender. Being super powerful or super popular or super pretty etc doesn't equal a Mary Sue, not even if your character super stands out next to all the others, those things ONLY indicate they might possibly be one. What equals a Mary Sue is a character that doesn't have to struggle very hard for anything, a character that is almost universally admired, and or loved (even by the enemy), a character that masters hard skills with ease and ends up teaching the teachers and beating the masters, a character that's destined to succeed and does in spite of internal story logic… All these things and more can add up to make a Mary Sue.
Episode 517 - money in Scifi Utopia
Feb 8, 2021
Weird one this week! A monneyless system in a working Scifi utopia. This was based on an idea Banes came up with talking about Star Trek and how the federation has “evolved beyond money”, We discuss if this is possible, why it is and how it is. That means no need for money substitutes like credit or barter either. It's a really interesting topic and a brave choice for a world setting. The most common type of scifi world by FAR is a dystopia so the fact that Star Trek is a working utopia (at least in the original and 1990s series) is a very brave and unique choice and the idea that it functions without money is even more clever and interesting.
Episode 503 - Changing attitudes
Nov 1, 2020
An old man tries to explain modern culture to an even older man… Attitudes change! Things don't stay the same, culture moves on and when we try to hang onto old ideas we can look like idiots, and even worse than that we can hold up cultural progress and hurt people. That's what we're trying to talk about…
Episode 501 - Horrorcast
Oct 19, 2020
We are the Pretty Things That Live in the House! We all dressed up for a Halloween themed cast today! You can see our weird looks in our Patreon video ($5 and up subscribers). Pitface was a yellowfaced corn vampire with amazing teeth (very midwest), Banes was an old, oooooold terrifying baldy vampire, Tantz was a beautiful, big eyed doctor vampire, and I was an 18th century Vamp (Lestat/Varny), with a face messy with the blood of my victims! And I had in rubber fangs held in by chewing gum, just like a REAL vampire, because the denture glue didn't hold in my good fangs… it just filled my mouth with disgusting glue that stuck all over my teeth XD
Episode 499 - Life's worth?!
Oct 5, 2020
What is the worth of human life in your stories? This isn't something people often consider, we just tend to have a fairly accurate guess based on our experience of the real world, but sometimes stories get it really wrong and that can harm suspension of disbelief.
