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
VIDEO exclusive!
Become a subscriber on the $5 level and up to see our weekly Patreon video and get our advertising perks!
- https://www.patreon.com/DrunkDuck
Even at $1 you get your name with a link on the front page and a mention in the weekend newsposts!
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 357 - Power, baddies, and sexiness
Jan 15, 2018
Sexy badguys: power vs confidence vs sexiness. That's what we chat about here. Why do we have sexy bad guys? Are all bad guys and girls sexy? What makes them sexy? Is power truly sexy in fiction or is it confidence? There are so many aspects to this and so many totally unexamined assumptions, misconceptions, and cilches. We try our best to examine all these aspects because we all love a sexy villain and we loved talking about them even better. This week Gunwallce has given us the theme to Really? It's ultra poppy Daft Punk-like, bouncing with joy and enthusiasm, this one wants you to get up and go and it wants you to do it now! Really!
Episode 356 - Readers
Jan 7, 2018
READERS are a massive part of Drunk Duck! Actually readers are a huge part of ANY comic. But Drunk Duck tends to focus far more on creators than perhaps we should… This idea was inspired by a newspost of Tantz's. We talk about ways to make DD more accessible to readers, including highlighting comics in similar genres and guest representatives giving us recommendation lists of comics they like from a genre so we can promote them on the front page. Emma_Clare has done some GREAT mockups for a redesign of DD and in those is an example of the DD front page where we highlight comics by genre! We chat about comic listing sites like Comic Rocket, Top Webcomics and the brand new Archive Binge, along with other various topics like who are the best hosts for adult comics, cross promotion etc. This week Gunwallce has given us the theme to Blood and water: Cool, quiet, and creepy. This one will have you on edge from start to finish. There’s an undertone of cool nonchalance that’s surprisingly at odds with the on-edge feel! Please donate to our our Indiegogo drive to raise many for the latest improvement to DD: Comment notifications! We know that everyone wants those.
Episode 354 - Christmascast
Dec 25, 2017
Merry Christmas! It's that time of year again… well, the end of the year. Banes was ill with the dreaded lurgi so Pit, Tantz and I were left to our own devices to chat about Christmas and our fave Christmas movies. What's yours? This week Gunwallce has given us the theme to The Portland Express: Come with us on an adventure on the high seas! This music is redolent with the exotic, action, and intrigue. Flavoured with the sounds of the east, this tune is clearly on a mission!
Episode 353 - Beautycast
Dec 18, 2017
This is the Beautycast. We decided to have a chat about beauty. What IS beauty? is it universal? I would contend that it's not and that's what we tended to agree in the Quackcast. Beauty is a highly relative concept dependent on many factors like symmetry, rarity, ethnicity, time, geographical area, economic conditions, exoticism, what you're used to, aspiration, age, clothes, hair, health, fashion etc. Add to the fact that it's not really just based on what a person looks like but what they look like in relation to others around them. There's also the much derided old aphorism that “beauty comes from the inside” or that it's based on personality. We discus the fact that this is surprisingly actually quite true! Personality, expression and the way a person conducts themselves hugely influences your perception of their beauty or lack of it. This was a very interesting and enlightening discussion. This week Gunwallce has given us the theme to Mercenary Bound: This one has a slightly disco, early 1980s feel to it. It pumps along with the nice easy pace of a trained fighter, with a hint of threat and a touch of danger, like the music to a level of a side scrolling beat-em-up videogame. —————————————————————————— Don't forget our campaign to give YOU comment and reply notifications so that you can see who has commented on your comic pages easily, you can respond to them right away, then they'll KNOW you replied and they can respond back and so on. But before we can do that we need to raise money via Indiegogo to pay for it. YOU will be helping to pay for a feature that you want. That's how the site works these days, it's our site: yours and mine.
Episode 352 - Help make DD better! Comment notifications! More play
Dec 11, 2017
n this Quackcast we cover a few different things! FIRST up is our latest campaign to give YOU comment and reply notifications so that you can see who has commented on your comic pages easily, you can respond to them right away, then they'll KNOW you replied and they can respond back and so on. But before we can do that we need to raise money via Indiegogo to pay for it. YOU will be helping to pay for a feature that you want. That's how the site works these days, it's our site: yours and mine. In the next part of the Quackcast we have a series of short plays that we act out. They're based on comics here at DD. We start out with custom scripts written by Tantz Aerine for Without Moonlight and Brave Resistance. And then we have a go interpreting comic pages of The Epic of Blitzov, Bottomless Waitress, Typical Strange, and Pinky TA. Which brings us to our next thing: One of the perks you can pay for to help us out with our campaign will be a custom script based on your comic. WE will write it and act it out. YOU don't have to do anything but donate. Finally we have a note from KAM that we read out, informing us of the experience of adapting his comic into a script structure and we talk about that ourselves. If you'd like to write a script for us to act out on the Quackcast, just PQ me and I'll tell you where to send it. :) This week Gunwallce has given us the theme to Bram and Vlad: Welcome to the mysterious, echoing notes of a celestial funhouse. Then settle down to a demonic, yet friendly game of cards accompanied by a jaunty, yet cheeky tune on the piano!
Episode 259 - Drawing Crowd Scenes
Feb 22, 2016
Crowd scenes of any sort can be horrible to draw. There are many, many reasons for this, one of them is that it's quite boring to invent a whole lot of new character models just for the purpose of making a group scene. My own way of combating that problem was to do cameos of other characters that I stole from my fellow Quackcasters, Banes, Pitface and Tantz. There are many other tricks and clever ways of managing crows though which you can hear bout in the Quackcast or see us talk about in the Quackcast video. Gunwallace's theme for Phineus Magician for Hire is VERY Sword and Sorcery! It reminded me a little of the famous music to the first (and best), Conan film, and brought to mind the writing of Fritz Leiber.
Episode 257 - Accents in Comics
Feb 8, 2016
Using accents and different languages in comics can be a challenge, or at least a challenge to represent. Some people will actually have their text IN a different language or even a made up language in the case of aliens, and they'll have translations in a footnote. Some will use pointed brackets to represent the different language, some will use different fonts, and some won't bother showing that there is a different language being spoken at all. We spoke to Tantz Aerine and Pitface about this because that's something they both have to tackle in Brave Resistance and Tantz's solo comic Without Moonlight because it's very central to the plot: Tantz uses different colours for the languages. Pitface phonetically represents different accents in her comic Putrid Meat quite expertly. However, there can be challenges to phonetic representation when you get it wrong, most frequently in the case of Irish and Scottish accents! This was inspired by a newspost by Hippievan! Listen ad enjoy Gunwallace's audio interpretation of Aidana. VERY Pink Floyd!
