Episode 492 - Impermanence of the new digital age
Aug 17, 2020
This Quackcast is about the impermanence of online services and the lie that services are provided for fee and providers have no responsibility to the creators and viewers that use them. Hushicho posted in our forum about Tapas newly restricting nudity in comics which suddenly disenfranchises hundreds of creators who've built up followings on that site with comics that were well within the the Tapas content rules. With that one change these comics have been wiped out, destroying all the hard work by creators to build up their audiences over a long period of time. That can happen with ANY digital service, we are at the mercy of the corporations that provide them.
Topics and Show Notes
One might say that these things are “free” services and that the hosts have a right to do whatever they like, they provide it all for us and we just use it, but that's not actually true. ALL digital services are completely dependent on their users and content creators for their existence. Sites like YouTube would not exist if it wasn't for the users that content creators bring in through their own hard work and money. And those passive audiences themselves are also responsible for YouTube existing because it's them who bring in the ad revenue and use the services google sells through the site, as well as exploiting them by onselling statistics about their online viewing habits and information about their other online behaviors. Even us on DD, who make no money of off our users and collect zero information about people, we STILL rely on content creators and their audiences for out existence because if there were no people to post comics on our site and no one to read them then we'd have no point and we'd shut down.
What we chat about here is the fact that you can't rely on any one service, no matter how big the company (i.e. Facebook, Google, Apple) to respect your content and to always be around. Services aren't as free as they seem and they're more than happy to exploit you and then discard you. So the answer is to diversify and use as many different ones as possible! Don't be loyal to them because they're not loyal to you! I'd say the one exception is Drunk Duck because we really DO care about and respect our members but the the reality is that no online service is completely safe: even though we are one of the longest running comic sites (18 years and counting), there have been times in our distant past where our service was unreliable and we were even down for almost 3 months once. So mirror your work and do not become reliant on subscription services.
The musical feature this week that Gunwallace has given us is theme to Ingenimia Aus - The start reminds me a bit of Cowboy by Bon Jovi, It has an awesome mystical, exotic medieval guitar sound. This one really takes you away to another place and time with its atmospheric synths, hand drum percussion, and delicate guitar sounds. I love it when the rhythm is taken over by tapping on the guitar strings, it’s a very pretty sound.
Topics and shownotes
Links
Join the Discord server to chat in real time with other DD comics people - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Death-knell for Tapas, by Hushicho - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/forum/topic/178480/
Featured comic:
Filaments a KerBop Story - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2020/aug/11/featured-comic-filaments-a-kerbop-story/
Featured music:
Ingenimia Aus - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Ingenimia_Aus/, by DFlimbingo, rated T,
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Pit Face - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/PIT_FACE/
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
kawaiidaigakusei - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/kawaiidaigakusei/
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Episode 490 - Genres of webcomics!
Aug 3, 2020
Aren't genres great? They're so useful for categorising what we like and selling our work. Today we're chatting about all the genres that are popular in webcomics now, that we know of. Back in the day webcomics were mainly defined by TWO genres: slice of life, and gaming. And out of those two gaming was king! Actually a lot of comics combined the two. The biggest were things like 8 Bit Fantasy, PVP, Penny Arcade, and Ctrl Alt Delete.
Episode 487 - DD Anthology introduction!
Jul 13, 2020
Boundbun joins us to talk about the plans for the upcoming Drunk Duck Anthology that the proud people of the DD Discord (Aggie and Mel), are talking about. It hopes to be a true mammoth of a project at something like 130 pages! So if you'd like to get in on this and have your work actually published then join the Discord and navigate to the correct chat. You can have your say on what form the anthology takes.
Episode 480 - In Style!
May 25, 2020
Styles are a very individual thing. Emma Clare did a great newspost on them last week featuring a pic of Sailor Moon that she drew in her own style. The cover image here features my own version. Pit, Tantz, Banes and I had a good long chat about all the different aspects of style and how you develop them.
Episode 479 - Big ideas in fiction
May 18, 2020
My original idea for this Quackcast was: “Genre fiction is the best place to explore ideas, straight fiction doesn't do it as well” What I meant was that diverting from straight reality in fiction makes it easier to conceptualise, simplify and explain complicated ideas to a general audience for a whole number of reasons. There was some disagreement between Tantz and I because I expressed myself poorly so she'd thought that I was saying it was much easier to write SciFi and fantasy (Genre fiction), and it was easier to write about big ideas, while straight fiction wasn't good for that- Which is fair enough! My initial statement is so badly worded that's a valid interpretation! Fortunately Banes and Pit were on hand to smooth things out and explain things properly. Pit mediated between us and Banes conceptualised my concept FAR, far better than I did! Unfortunately you don't get much of that disagreement on the Quackcast. You DO get a bit of it on the PATREON only video however ^_^
Episode 476 - Tell me about your childhood
Apr 26, 2020
How does where you grew up influence your comicing? This idea interested me, so I posted about it on the DD forums and asked other people. I didn't really know about it myself: how did my childhood environment influence my later comicing? The conclusion I came to was that since my childhood experience was so alien to the worlds depicted in the media I enjoyed so much most of my comicing and creation was based on imagination out of necessity: Historical fantasy set in mountainous, cold, hazy Europe, vs my own experience of a new country without much history, with sunny weather, clear skies and a beachy lifestyle in Australia.
Episode 475 - Tropeagedden! overuse of fashionable tropes...
Apr 20, 2020
Certain tropes or stylistic ways of telling a story can get really, really popular and trendy very quickly and it seems like they're everywhere! Suddenly many story are all told with the same sort of stylistic flourishes. The first few times it's done that way it's clever and meaningful but after that people just use the same thing without understanding it properly and consequently usually do a really crappy job!
Episode 472 - CoVid-19-cast
Mar 30, 2020
In this strange time of global pandemic it'd be crazy NOT to acknowledge what we're all experiencing together, so that's what we're talking about today: How the virus stuff is affecting us. Pitface joins us once again so today the quartet is complete: Pitz, Banes, Oz, and Tantz!
