Episode 441 - Cooperation = cool
Aug 26, 2019
Cooperation Vs Competition. For decades the mantra was competition is good: it produces progress and makes things better… Well that's actually false. Competition is what you're forced into as a response to limited resources, so you do what you have to to win, which mainly involves losing everything that doesn't serve that specific objective. Competition is massively harmful to progress in general, it ONLY helps you excel in one small area to massive cost. Think of it in terms of an Olympic sprinter: they become the fastest runner in the world, but to what point? Only the artificial structure of a sporting event… they spend years training, exercising, eating right, wasting a huge portion of their lives, creative, and intellectual potential on that one meaningless goal, and IF they achieve it they might get a bit of fame and money and a footnote in history because someone else will inevitably take their spot. More likely though they won't achieve the goal and instead be forgotten.
Topics and Show Notes
Evolution is another process that is commonly misunderstood to be a competition to produce better, faster, smarter, stronger creatures… this is absolutely incorrect. Evolution is the name we give for the process of change over time. That change happens in response to all sorts of factors: changing environment, climate, availability of resources, sex selection, disease, mutation, predation, diet, etc. It doesn't produce “better” creatures, it produces creatures that better suit their circumstances (if they're lucky). They can be weaker, slower, smaller, and stupider and still be superior if they fit better with their environment.
The “goal” of life isn't to “evolve”, it's to exist in balance and stability. When organisms don't have to respond to change it's THEN that they thrive. Humans are a great example of this: we're a cooperative pack species that's created millennia spanning culture and civilisation precisely because of our drive to cooperate: Our response to the pressure of change is to adapt through cooperation so that we do not have to evolve.
So how does this apply to webcomics? Hahaha! Listen to the Quackcast! ^_^
But seriously, communities like Drunk Duck emphasise cooperation over competition, although we do not enforce it! We're a community that wants to bring everyone ahead with us. Cooperation encourages diversity of opinion, style and approach. Competition on the other hand has the opposite effect in webcomics: only a few can get ahead, but the very worst part is that it limits diversity and instead results in comics, stories, styles, thinking and opinions that are all very much the same- they HAVE to be in order to compete for what their audiences like or the rules and requirements of their webhost. Which is why when you look at more competitive comic hosts you won't see better comics, you'll mainly just see comics that all look the same.
This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to Moonscapers: It’s back to the mid 80s with Beverly Hills Cop! Not really, but this bouncy electronica sound will make you think it is. It has a jaunty little sound, a nice fast rhythm and a little bit of reverb for that authentic feel. It puts you in mind of neon light effects and retro 1980s futurism -bright, angular, vast, and slightly unsettling.
Topics and shownotes
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Featured comic:
The Adventures Of Kevin Kid - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2019/aug/19/featured-comic-the-adventures-of-kevin-kid/
Featured music:
Moonscapers - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Moonscapers/, by Pencilz, rated T.
LINKS
Tantz's commie newspost XD - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2019/aug/23/cooperation-vs-competition-in-comics/
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
Pitface - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/PIT_FACE/
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Episode 427 - Betrayal
May 20, 2019
Betrayal is an interesting thing to use in fiction. You can have betrayal of your nation, your organisation, friends, lovers, religion, beliefs, self. In stories it can be used to add a nasty twist or completely change the flow of events and alter the balance of power in a dramatic way! It can be devastating in relationships. The story of Judas betraying Christ for 30 pieces of silver is one of the most famous betrayal stories and became so iconic that the phrase “30 pieces of silver” or just the word “Judas” became synonymous with the act. Of course the inspiration for the best treachery and betrayal comes from real life and the names of the betrayers often echo down through history. IFrom Rome we have Brutus, in the USA the name “Benedict Arnold” has a similar meaning to “Judas”, the 20th century gave us the term “quisling” after the Norwegian political leader Vidkun Quisling who sold his country out to the Nazis.
Episode 420 - Substance abuse and use
Apr 1, 2019
The entire gang is here this time again. This marks number 420 of the Quackcasts we've done. 420 is code among some for smoking dope, so going with that theme we're talking about the influence of substances on creative endeavours. People try and use substances to facilitate their creativity, we chat about why they do it, how it works, why it fails, the benefits and the issues. We DO NOT advocate taking illegal things in any way at all. This includes ANY substance, from dope, to coffee, to redbull, tea, wine, beer, cold and flu medication, headache pills, opium, adderall, ANYTHING at all, as long as it produces some mental or physiological change, it counts!
Episode 400 - Pros&cons of webcomic creation!
Nov 12, 2018
In this Quackcast DD members tell us about their history with us as well as the pros and cons of webcomicing. This is the 400th episode of the Quackcast! That means we've been doing these for over 8 years now. That's quite a milestone for a podcast. We have JustNoPoint over to help us out, he's a Patron at the $20 “Royal” level so he gets a few perks. JustNoPoint has been with us since 2006 with his comic The Devon Legacy. He managed the awards for many years and was crucial to us getting the site back online when we had our hard crash in August of 2013 that destroyed the site so thoroughly that it had to be rebuilt, a job which took us all TWO months!
Episode 387 - History and Pastiche
Aug 7, 2018
In this Quackcast Tantz and I chat about the differences between working with historical settings and the different approaches we take. Tantz's comics (Without Moonlight and Brave Resistance), are both set in a real period of history: Nazi occupied Greece during WW2. Pinky TA is set in the 1920s in an alternative version of history, with Pinky coming from the fictional “Crimean Empire”. Tantz has to keep times, places, and details close to real history while with Pinky TA I can pick and choose the things from history I like the best and create my own idealised pastiche. The advantage of Tantz's approach is that everything is there, nothing has to be invented, just researched and reproduced, whereas my approach involves a lot of creation which slows things down and makes it harder. On the upside Pinky TA is much more flexible, I can easily fit whatever I want into the story, whereas Tantz's comics are bound by the rules of the history she's presenting.
Episode 375 - Categories, genres and rants
May 21, 2018
In this Quackcast we chat about the categorisation of work by specific genres and how it makes it easier to promote your work to people, while for fans it makes it easier to find what you're into, but it can also be a bad thing when people categorise too specifically and narrow their audience to nothing or just pointlessly confuse the crap out of people. I came to this topic because I saw a post on Facebook which was very badly explaining “Steampunk” and “Dieselpunk” while introducing the two utterly superfluous sub-genre names of “Ray-punk” and Atom-punk“.
Episode 340 - Reviews
Sep 18, 2017
In this Drunk Duck Quackcast we chat about the importance and the process of reviews! Good ones, bad ones, why they all matter, and also why they often don't! ;) Reviews are an interesting animal, they're a parasitic form of entertainment. They rely wholly of other forms of entertainment for their existence, while those forms do not require reviews at all! But reviews also serve a good function, they tell us what's bad or good, what fits with our tastes and emotions, and lets us know what we may be interested in seeing. They can also save us from wasting time on horrors. Sometimes though they can drive us away from something magical… Here we discuss all that and more! Gunwallace's theme this week was for Reversion, This is a really dreamy, evocative tune about warm, faraway places, it’s squinting into the distance down a long dusty deserted highway and sighing.
Episode 308 - Hyena Hell
Jan 30, 2017
Today on the Quackcast we interview Hyena Hell! You might remember the bombastic, punkrocker HyenaHell for her comic The Hub She used to be very active on all of DD (forums, comics, everything), before life issues took her away from DD. But she was still a prolific poster on social media after that when she wasn't creating comics, posting interesting and thought provoking blog posts about art, life as an artist, and living in a changing New Orleans… She has a unique art style- highly detailed, carefully inked drawings, which are quite similar to her work as a printmaker. You can see a great example of that in The Hub. We have sad news and hap[y news… The wonderful Hippievan has retired from doing Friday newsposts on DD. The happy news is that HyenaHell is going to dive into the driving seat of this out of control juggernaut! HyenaHell has a long history with DD and an amazing personal perspective on art and life that I think would be good for the site. It's always good to listen to a new and interesting voice! In the mean time, listen to Banes, Pitface, TantzAriene and I interview HyenaHell, who tells lascivious stories and her and I going into, Lipstixxx a stripclub in New Orleans… Gunwallace's featured music for today was: Mechaniko - it's the sound of nodes on a neural network firing, connecting, and cascading with shared knowledge: Multilayered, technological robo-future rock!
