Quackcast 710 - Ducks in in the wind

The QuackCast

-Cover image: female Sagittarius silhouette pic by Tantz that only took a moment to create but its impact was way larger!

The fleeting greatness ducks of in the wind! This is a weird one based on a notion I had: Life and experience isn't typically based on long moments, rather it's all based on very short, lightning quick highlights: a song that lasts 3 minutes is massively striking and important and its impact can reverberate down through the decades, despite only lasting such a short amount of time. Things like comics can take days, weeks or years to make and yet each page is consumed in no more than seconds! But even so, it can have a huge effect.

This goes into all aspects of life and creation because it's how the brain of most adult neurotypical people works: we don't experience the world as a real time 24 hour, 86400 second long drag, taking in every instant as it happens, rather we phase all that out and only focus on a highlight real of interesting moments- those get expanded in importance and we think they take up more time and space than they actually do, this is why you constantly forget routine things that you do during the day (did I put sugar in my tea? What did I come in here for?), because your brain is on autopilot for the unimportant routine things. And this is why we think time slows down when something scary happens: because our brains actually start taking in awareness in real time and noticing everything!

In reality any fight only lasts a few seconds or a minute or two at most, most things in sex are like that too, and the old adage with war is that it's a few minutes of action and many hours of boredom… And yet when we depict those things in stories for comics or film or whatever we always massively stretch out those moments of action far longer than they could ever last because that is the only way to make them realistically relatable to the viewer: Because when you experience those things your awareness is extremely focussed and so they seem to last much, much longer.

It's not always like that- When you're a child your brain (for a neurotypical) still needs experience in order to understand how things work so it has to be constantly taking in everything, which is why it's so easy for children to get painfully bored and why time seems to last SO much longer. There are also unfortunate people who's brains are always stuck in that mode so all life and experience to them is absolutely interminable. I feel like I have the opposite issue where I have very little awarenesses of anything specific and time zips past at a breakneck pace, like the Rolling Stones song Rock Off “I'm zipping through the days at lightning speed” but change “days” to “decades”.

To get back to the point of this- Things that take hours, days, or years to create but only a few seconds to enjoy and experience, can STILL create an impact that lasts forever. Even a movie which can go for 2 hours or more is usually only enjoyed as a few import but very short scenes that we increase in importance in our own brains - Which is why we often remember things differently to how they really were. I think it's extremely important for creator to understand this: how people take things in and consume media and reality as a “best off” compilation of important moments, but also that even though something might take forever to make and most people will only take a few a seconds to experience it, its impact can be huge and last much longer.

This week Gunwallace gave us a theme inspired by Nose Bleed - A fiery raw blast of hot rocky goodness spewed forth like a cloud of burning super hot plasma, excited electrons contained by a powerful magnetic field as they race far and wide, spreading hellish red illumination and destruction.

Topics and shownotes

Links

Featured comic: Geist Gears - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2024/oct/15/featured-comic-geist-gears/

Featured music: Nose Bleed - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Nose_Bleed_/ - by Skudsink M.

Special thanks to: Gunwallace - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Gunwallace/ Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/ 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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