/\ /· \ _____ _____. _____ _____. // \ ______ .__ \_ \_ | .___\_ \_ | // .\/ _ \_ | | | |____|_ _| | |____|_ | | | | |____| ______/ \_ | ______/ | | | ¯\____ \| |____| | | |____| | |____| | | | | | | | | | | |____. |· | |· | |· | |· | | |· | | |: | |: | |: | |: | | |: | | || | || | || | ||_ | | || | | | | | | | | | \ | | | | | ¯\_______/¯\_______/|____| | \_____/| |\_______/¯ cRu|________\ | | Issue #42 |· __|__ /\ ____ ____ |: \ / __/· \__\_ \___\_ \_ _. January, 2003 || / \ \__/ / / /___// | 300 Subscribers World Wide | /___/ \ / / __/_ / | | / / / / / / // | ¯\____ /___/___/ /¯\____ //____| \/ /___/ \/ --=--=-- --=--=------=--=------=--=---- Table Of Contents ----=--=------=--=------=--=-- Opening: Message From the Editor Letters From Our Readers Features: Your View and Response -- Your Favorites (Replies / New Challenge) Mindcandy DVD -- In-Depth Review Mindcandy DVD -- Another View Party Report -- State of the Art Competition Announcement -- The Spectrum Music Competition Reviews: Music: The Lineup -- The Best of the Month Opinion / Commentary: Editorial -- Art All Around Early Dawn Reflections -- Unfinished Business Link List: Get Somewhere in the Scene Closing: Staff and Contact Information --=--=-- --=--=------=--=------=--=---- Message From the Editor ----=--=------=--=------=--=-- After a month off, we're back for another issue. Initially, we held off the December issue pending the release of MindCandy. By the time it came out, the holiday week was upon us, and my life got crazy. Sadly, I never got around to editing everything until the New Year celebration had passed. So, it seems as though we missed a month. But nevermind that, this is a great issue. This is also a rather unusual issue. By the time I'm finished writing this message, it could potentially be our second or third largest issue of all time. What makes that wierd is the fact that you'll notice that many of our regular columns are missing this month. We did this to make room for the important stuff. A lot happened the past couple of months: MindCandy, The State of the Art Demoparty, to name a few. As tradition holds, December was not a very good month for new releases anyhow, so it all works out in the end. Well, the big feature is the MindCandy review. Seven was kind enough to review the disc for us in his official in-depth review. The kind folks at Fusecon and Hornet (Dan "Pallbearer" Wright and Andy "Phoenix" Voss, specifically) sent Seven a nice little press package so that he could review the final product. The postage system held things up a bit (big surprise), but it finally arrived in Seven's mailbox for him to review. He sent me a very quick message that day stating that he had given up his ticket to see "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" just so he could get started on the MindCandy review. That would've been a hard decision for me to make, but I probably would've done the same thing. Regardless, we're all glad that he had the time to review the product, and we've brought it to you this month. I also did a small review which is published immediately after Seven's official review. But if you had to choose between the two, read his. Information about getting your own copy of the DVD can be found at the official website: http://www.mindcandydvd.com Seven was busy for this issue. In addition to the incredible review of MindCandy, he also provided us with everyone's favorite feature article: The Party Report. This time around, he gives us a full account of his interaction with the "State of the Art" party. As always, his reports give us a glimpse of what it was really like. For those of you looking for an internet based music competition, you'll want to check out the details on the Spectrum Music Competition. There's a chance that I might be one of the judges. There are many more things that you'll want to check out in this issue. I think I've been rambling on too long as it is. So just check out the table of contents, and read whatever suits your fancy. Please note that the In Tune and Screen Lit Vertigo columns will return next month with fresh material. As always, articles can always be sent in plain text to coplan@scenespot.org. News briefs can be submitted to SceneSpot at http://www.scenespot.org. Until Next time. --Coplan --=--=-- --=--=------=--=------=--=---- Letters From Our Readers ----=--=------=--=------=--=-- -=- A Message from Sergeeo -=- How's it going? I've just finished reading your Static Line e-zine #41 and...I've been looking for something like it for ages! Articles are incredibly pleasant and I must say that the ascii format is just perfect. I've found it as a very well-done work and I encourage you to keep on releasing it. I especially liked that article called "My addiction". In my opinion it expresses in a perfect way the tracking philosphy...and its problems :-) Every paradigm reveals its weakness sooner or later! A neat work this e-zine of yours! Well, I haven't introduced myself! I'm Sergio de Prado (aka sergeeo). I'm Spanish & I'm keen on tracking since '96 or so. I use to take a look around and upload tunes to www.modulez.org I love demostyle and chip music (I am now experimenting with Paragon 5) but I love all kinds of music. Let's go with the suggestions: -What about an article about the increasing number of releases of chipdisks? -It would be nice to review the whole trajectory of some ass-kicking trackers: Beek, Virt, Skaven... To sum up: keep up the good work! Best Regards: --Sergeeo of Niako -=- Reply From Coplan -=- Greetings Sergeeo, First off, I'm glad you like this little magazine that I carry under my wing. We miss a couple of months here or there, but that's due to my busy schedule. All in all, I always try to release a good quality issue, and I'm glad it's working out for some of our readers. As for Vill's Article (Inside My Mind: My Addiction, Issue #41), that's a great read. Vill submitted a sample article to me a couple months ago and I really enjoyed his style. You're absolutely right, he catches the mood perfectly. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to get anything in this month. Nevermind that. He'll be contributing when he can. We all look forward to his next release. In response to your suggestions: As far as the chipdisk article, I don't claim to be a chip tune expert. I enjoy the style, but I don't feel that I know enough about it to write about it. It's definately a widely respected art form, and one that isn't often done too effectively. I'd love to have such an article, however. Know of anyone willing to write it for me? Your idea about an article reviewing a whole bunch of tunes from one artist is a good one. I'll keep that in the back of my mind. Maybe I'll do such a thing in a future edition of In Tune. As always, I enjoy your feedback. I intend to be here for a while publishing Static Line (give or take a month here or there, heh). With readers like yourself, it would be hard to leave. --Coplan --=--=-- --=--=------=--=------=--=---- Your View and Response Your Favorites (Replies and a New Challenge) By: Coplan ----=--=------=--=------=--=-- Last Issue, Issue #41 (Released in November), I challenged the readers of Static Line to write in about their favorite tunes. I got a few responses. Not nearly as many as I would've liked. But the cleanest responses will be published here today. For those of you who havn't responded yet, my mailbox is still open. If you would like to write in about your favorite scene tune of all time, send your contribution to me: coplan@scenespot.org. I will continue to publish cleanly written responses so long as they are sent to me. -=- Favorite Tune from Andrew 'Truck' Holland -=- Well, certainly we've capitalized on this idea at Nectarine - where we not only have the ability to mark 'favorites' but we have voting and rankings and then the 'most requested' lists. Having listened to Nectarine for over a year straight now, and having spent much time talking to scene regulars there and getting more sceners addicted, I'm happy to say that it's a fair bit representative of the scene's favorites. There are too many votes for 2nd Reality tune 2 by Purple Motion, but for a long while 2nd Reality 64 by KB was #1. And that's kinda indicative of the scene, we appreciate quality work that pushes limits. We've also introduced folks to some new favorites - substitutionology by Beek, for example, was a chiptune that won a compo. Well, tiny instruments; the tune itself is a tad large for a chiptune. Still, the results are impressive, and it's in the top 50 highest voted. You might want to take a look if you haven't at the rankings - we've added a bunch more to what we used to have (which was top 50 requested and top 50 ranked.): http://www.scenemusic.org As for me, the best mod ever is 'Nice Wet and Mean' by Trixal, from the demo 'Materialized' on Amiga, included on the 4th Dimension diskmag by Cryptoburners in '89, I believe. Maybe it was '90. All I know is I love that tune, the way it builds, the instruments used, and the overall production on it. Many others are great but that's the one I'll peg as my all time favorite. --Andrew 'Truck' Holland -=- A New Challenge -=- As for my next challenge, I would like you to also write in about your favorite demo of all time. In light of the release of MindCandy, it should be pretty easy to refresh your memory. I'd be willing to bet that many of you will write in with a demo on that DVD. After all, it's pretty likely that the scene favorites will be found on the first Demo DVD of all time. There's absolutely nothing wrong with stating your favorite demo from the DVD. But if you have a demo in mind that isn't on the DVD, please share that with us as well. After all, Hornet and Fusecon will be looking for ideas for the next Demo DVD (we hope). Once again, I'll start you off: My favorite demo of all time apparently hasn't been as widely accepted as I would've liked. The demo is called "Sunflower" by Pulse. It is a DOS demo from a while back, and I honestly can't remember when it was released, or when I first saw it. Sadly, I would have to dig through my massive collection of CD backups to find it again, and I don't have that much time right now. The demo sticks out in my mind for three very good reasons. First is the fact that the music was pretty incredible. I wouldn't say it was the best music I've ever heard, but for the average demo at the time, it was very dynamic and deep. It wasn't the hardcore, oldskool demo music that you're used to hearing. It had moods, it eased its way between moods, or it turned on you without any notice. It was a trancy type tune, and well fit with the demo. Next was the art. It was some of the best hand-pixeled art I've ever seen, especially at the time. There were cut-scenes to show you some life-like still images; a woman feeding a fish, for example. The bowl looked real. The fish looked real. The woman looked real (and pretty cute at that). But one of the most interesting things about the art was that these high quality images were parsed in throughout the demo. I'm not saying they were stuck here and there. The 2D images were given depth, and folded into butterflies and flowers. They moved, they floated around, and they were one small piece of the demo. Sure, this had been done before, but I had never seen it done with such high quality images. Finally, I would have to say I was intrigued by the demo design. This wasn't anything special in the world of demos, but design is something that I have to appreciate in order to consider it a good demo. Everything followed some sort of nature theme. And you traveled through the landscape with the camera. Sometimes you discovered waterfalls. Sometimes you were following dragonflies as they ripped through a small cave system. The transitions between scenes were pretty neat, and the music always seemed to fit perfectly. So now it's your turn. What's your favorite demo? And if you havn't yet, tell me what your favorite tune is. --Coplan --=--=-- --=--=------=--=------=--=---- MindCandy DVD -- Volume I: PC Demos In-Depth Review By: Seven ----=--=------=--=------=--=-- -=- Introduction -=- I had been waiting for the Mindcandy DVD for weeks. Once, the mailman even rang to say I needed to sign for a package, but he had pressed the wrong bell (aaaaarg!!). But today I found a large padded envelope from Fusecon in my mailbox. Praising the god of the postal services, I danced up the stairs, phoned a friend to tell him he could get my movie ticket for LOTR:The Two Towers this afternoon because I wouldn't go, shut down my mobile phone and any other distraction, and carefully started opening the envelope with ridiculously high expectations and a sharp knife. -=- The Package -=- Inside the package I found the shrink-wrapped DVD, a sticker, a postcard and a sheet with product information. The sticker is 5.5x7 cm, and shows in black and white the Mindcandy logo and a skull-like head. The front of the postcard has the same image as the DVD, on the back there's a short description of the Mindcandy DVD over some stylish line work. Note that depending on the distributor and availability, you'll get either the sticker or the postcard. The front image of the DVD case shows a face connected via lightning to a chaos of cubes and jiggly lines in a green-blueish tint. The back shows four thumbnail demo screenshots, a content listing for each side, and a list of the special features. The case itself is your typical black DVD case, with clips holding the booklet left and the DVD right. The push button that holds the DVD in place is of the sturdy two-part type, instead of the 6 or eight pins in CD cases that always break after some time. The booklet counts 12 pages on glossy paper. Following the one-page introduction are 42 short descriptions with thumbnail screenshots (one for each demo), and info such as the year it was created, and which rank it reached at which party. Random fact: 19 of the demos are from Finland! At the bottom of each page is a continuing timeline from 1986 till 2002 describing the evolution of the demoscene. Both the case and the booklet look very professional looking. A well polished presentation. -=- The DVD -=- The DVD is in the DVD-10 format, which means that each side contains one 5 GB layer. Most DVDs are in DVD-9, in which only one side contains a 5 GB and a 4 GB layer. I'm not a fan of DVD-10: you can't randomly browse the entire DVD without turning over the disc, and both sides look identical except for some text written around the center in a microscopic font. In this case, the text is white on a dark green background, which is quite readable after all. An advantage is that you can give each side a different menu system, which Fusecon made good use of, and of course you have a gigabyte extra: that's about 4 demos more! Linux users will be happy to know that the DVD is all-region, so it's not CSS-encoded. Xine plays the raw movies without complaining. Both sides contain a calibration section, so you can optimize your brightness, contrast and volume levels. Very useful, but it doesn't explain what to do if you run into troubles. I've tried it with WinDVD and PowerDVD (Xine doesn't show the interactive menus), so I'll share my experiences. First you need to select the type of display you use: TV or computer monitor, this determines the test image. I've only used monitor, since I've no standalone DVD player. The first image should be a series of 9 gray colums, from black to white. In my case the 2 last columns were both white, and changing the brightnes or contrast didn't help. In PowerDVD, I had to change the color profile from the default "Vivid" to "original", in WinDVD I had to disable hardware accelerated decoding to fix the problem. Next there's a test pattern to see how your player shows NTSC image data. A short explanation: NTSC is an 60 MHZ interlaced format. That means that in the first frame only the odd lines of the image are updated, and in the next frame only the even lines. So the full image is changed only 30 times each second. This is the way TV works, and due to the hexagon pixels there's automatic blending between the odd/even lines anyway. But a computer monitor has square pixels, and updating alternative lines, or "weaving", can look ugly, especially when displaying fast-moving high-contrast objects (most anime falls in this category). The alternative is called "bob", and interpolates between the lines. The test pattern should look like a square with two flickering halves. Left and right are shown two wrong patterns: a solid white square and a square with alternating white and black lines. Weave results in the zebra-square, bob results in a solid grey square, so it seems my equipment can't handle 60 updates per second, but bob is definately the better way. Both PowerDVD and WinDVD autoselect bob but allow you to force either bob or weave, Xine always uses weave. Maybe this can be changed but I haven't found yet how (I'm new to this Linux thing). Both sides also contain the credits and the greetings. Each of the 5 greeting screens come with their own music and background, but they auto-forward after 45 seconds, which is sometimes too short to read f.e. Trixters page-long text in a tiny font. -=- Side 1: Trancedental vistas -=- This side contains the best demos from 1999-2001, and is meant to impress the audience as much as possible. After the Fusecon/Hornet presents/Mindcandy opening sequences, which contain some demo effects themselves, a futuristic menu with metal and plastic circles on a smokey background is shown. It took me a while to recognize the impressive opening music: Kerosene by Acumen, which was the soundtrack from the winning Assembly'02 animation. You can actually skip the opening sequence when you're bored with it, unlike those annoying non-skippable company logo animations on movie DVDs. This side contains 22 demos: Wonder/Sunflower, 604 (by AND, Sly and SynSun), Kosmiset Avaruus Sienet/Haujobb, Further/Moppi Productions, Chrome/Damage, Volatile/Addict, Tesla/Sunflower, Broadband/T-Rex, Mikrostrange/Haujobb, Moral Hard Candy/Blasphemy, TE-2RB/TPOLM, Le Petit prince/Kolor, Energia/Sunflower, Gerbera/Moppi productions, Lapsus/Maturefurk, Enlight The Surreal/Noice, Experimental/Wipe, Live Evil/Mandula, The Nonstop Ibiza Experience/Orange, Codename Chinadoll/Katastro.fi, Art/Haujobb and Kasparov/Elitegroup. You can play the demos consecutively, or pick one from the animated chapter selection. Bad point: during playback, you cannot move to a specific point with the slider, you need to fastforward. The next/previous buttons jump between the demos. The videostream is in 720*480 format, but most demos (on side 1 they're typically in 640*400) have a black border around them. For the demos that already used a fake "widescreen" mode, this can result in a border using over 1/3th of the screen, but scaling the demos up would've probably looked worse. The demos are slightly more fuzzy than the originals, especially if you're used to see them in 1024*768. There are some artifacts visible (for example a vertical retrace during the volumetric light tunnel of Moral Hard Candy), but there's probably no PC that ran all originals perfectly either; f.e. I've never seen Kasparov/Elitegroup and Mikrostrange/Haujobb run on my PC. [ Editor's Note: The vertical retrace that Seven speaks of for the Moral Hard Candy demo was visible when I played it through my PC's player (Xine for Linux). The problem does not exist when played through my standard DVD player. I should also mention that the quality of the graphics is increased tenfold if you have an HDTV. I pipe my DVD player through my monitor as well, and I get a resolution of 1024x768 by default. If I drop it down to "normal television" mode, it does blur a bit. My point is that you'll likely get different results depending on your personal setup. ] The two most interesting special features are the "Demographics: Behind the Scene" featurette and the production notes. Demographics is a 16-minute movie made by Jeremy Williams (of PC Demo Fanclub fame), with Trixter/Hornet explaining the history of the demoscene, why people form groups and go to parties. There are also interviews with Statix (over a webcam), Skaven, Marvel and Abyss of Future Crew, and there's even some footage of the making of Second Reality! There are demo fragments sprinkled through the entire movie, the soundtrack rocks, and overall it's extremely entertaining and informational to watch. Next time I have to explain to someone what the demoscene is about, I'll show them "Demographics". My only complaints are that you can't jump to a specific point with the slider, and that you can't enable subtitles: the accents make it harder to understand what's being said in places, and I can read English better than I can understand it. The production notes is a text-only slideshow in which Trixter explains in detail what they had to do to capture the demos as best as possible, and compress them as much as possible without compromising quality. This ranges from using specially shielded cables, over mixing frames from different recording sessions to even creating masks by hand in Photoshop to separate moving parts from their static backgrounds and compress those only. Sounds like a really heroic effort! So far I've also found three easter eggs, some if which are definately must-sees. They are not hard to find, because moving the mouse over a button selects it, and the last selected button stays highlighted. So just move the mouse randomly over the different menus and you're bound to find something. -=- Side 2: Kickin' it oldskool -=- The second side contains demos from 1991 till 1998. The opening sequence is the same as side 1, but the music is a oldskool tune that I don't recognize and the menus is based on low-res cubes, starfields and more cubes. For the rest the menu options are identical to side 1. The 20 oldskool demos included are: Second Reality/Future Crew, Megademo/The Space Pigs, Cronologia/Cascada, Unreal/Future Crew, Amnesia/Renaissance, Panic/Future Crew, Crystal Dream 2/Triton, Show/Magic 12, Verses/Electromotive Force, Dope/Complex, X14/Orange, Stars:Wonders of the World/Nooon, Reve/Pulse, Paimen/COMA, Inside/CNCD, Megablast/Orange, 303/Acme, Saint/Halcyon & Da Jormas, Square/Pulse and Riprap/Exceed. Unlike side 1, the demos here are ordered chronologically, except for Second Reality. Especially the oldest demos have been changed a lot in order to get them on the DVD. Most noticably, all the long scrollers have been cut with a circular wipe after a few tens of seconds, simply to prevent most watchers to die from boredom. For the same reasons a lot of spinning cubes or similar simple object shows have been shortened, looping parts where you had to press a key to advance fade out after a while, and upscrolling credits at the end are cut too. The helicopter animation at the start of Megablast sadly couldn't be included because Orange ripped a sample and Fusecon couldn't get permission to put it on the DVD. Let this be a lesson for would-be rippers: years later your production may not (fully) be archived for eternity due to copyright reasons... Then there are conversion artifacts: most oldskool demos ran at 70 frames per second, converting this to 60FPS leads to jerky movement here and there, or blurry edges on fast-moving objects. Some parts had to be scaled up, leading to more visible aliasing than in the original. But overall I'm surprised at the quality of the capture: interlaced or fake-highcolor modes look like intended, and even vectordot routines look like I remembered them (One exception: the pixel-flag in Unreal has lost the dark blue dots on the black background). I'm glad to finally see and hear Show/Magic 12 and Paimen/Coma, which I never got running because I didn't have a Gravis Ultrasound. The best feature of the entire DVD is IMHO the audio commentary. It's filled to the brim with funny stories and interesting facts I never knew before. The Future Crew guys talk about how they put their demos together, Statix tells how Vic sang the vocals of 303 at the party while he was suffering from a hangover 3 hours before the deadline, etc etc. Although only 1 out of every 4 groups has taken the chance to speak their minds about their productions, the Hornet team (Pallbearer, Trixter, Phoenix, Stony) and Jeremy provide insight in the rest of the demos, drawing from their accumulated knowledge of the scene. The first CD I ever bought was the Hornet CD, and to watch the DVD in the middle of the night with headphones and hear these guys spontaneously debate over the demos, correcting each other, cracking jokes and telling what they admire in each production, simply blew my mind away. I was a bit reluctant to try the audio commentary due to the lack of subtitles, but they're very understandable, better than the featurette IMHO. (Side 1 contains a comment track too, which is also very good, but somehow I didn't get the same feeling of excitement. Maybe it's because I watched it during the day, or because I was in the scene from '98 and witnessed most of the events myself). The only special feature not present on Side 1 is a dedication to White Shadow, who passed away in 2001. It shows fragments of his demos, reactions from friends and a slideshow of pictures. I remember watching DoWackaDo on my 486, little did I realize it ran equally smooth on a 268/16! Respect for such a skilled coder, and judging from the reactions, for an overall great guy. I've found two easter eggs on this side, and they're equally interesting as the actual demos. One of them is really historical, and relates to the demoscene in the same way the moonlanding footage relates to the space program. -=- Overall: -=- Mindcandy managed to exceed all my expectations: it's a very professional product, and shows great respect towards the demoscene. Glitches are few and far between, and the people at Fusecon, Hornet and Blue 7 Media obviously put an incredible amount of work in it (As they tell in the commentary, all of them did this besides their full-time job. Someone should give these guys a medal!) The only thing you could validly criticize is the choice of demos, but that's a thorny, subjective problem. Suffice to say that all kinds of styles are represented, so everyone should find something to enjoy. Also, since Mindcandy is subtitled "Volume I: PC demos", this suggests a sequel could very well be possible. I don't know if this will show Amiga demos, PC intros, wild entries or the PC demos that didn't make Volume I, but I'm really looking forward to it. --Seven For More information on the MindCandy DVD, visit their official website: http://www.mindcandydvd.com --=--=-- --=--=------=--=------=--=---- MindCandy DVD -- Volume I: PC Demos Another View By: Coplan ----=--=------=--=------=--=-- Seeing as I'm not exactly the demo expert that Seven is, I wasn't going to write anything about the MindCandy DVD. In fact, I gave up my rights to the press package to Seven. After all, he's the official reviewer for this publication. But then I got my disc. And the next three days were a blur. I ate almost every snackable item in the house. There is now a sunken spot in my couch. I must've seen that DVD about 5 times. And that's not counting the times I played some of my favorite demos. So I feel as though I gotta write something about it. There are just certain things that always stand out in your life. The Demoscene has been a huge part of my life for the last 12 years. So it goes without saying that some of my memorable moments came from the 'scene. Getting my copies of the DVD in the mail now ranks among the best, most memorable moments of my relationship with the PC demoscene. It goes without saying, Fusecon, Hornet and anyone involved in the project did an exceptional job with MindCandy. Right from the very beginning, they've had everyone involved that needed to be involved, even you, the scener and potential buyer for such a product. There were nominations and elections to determine what gets on the DVD. There were commentary feeds recorded by the creators of a given demo, and they are available on the DVD as well. Every effort was made to preserve the true presentation of each demo so that this DVD would become a historical book of the 'scene. And it turned out pretty damn good, in my opinion. I won't go into too much detail about the demos. As a regular observer of the scene, you can make your own deductions about all that. The presentation, the menus, the extra features were all very well done, and very aesthetically pleasing. But think of this DVD not as a piece of memorabilia. Think of it as a tool. With this tool, I was able to introduce several people to the scene. Most notably, in fact, was my father. He's relatively computer literate, but he never really did understand what the demoscene was all about. If anyone asks you what the demoscene is about, you don't have to look flustered anymore. Just play the "Demographics" feature. It's a professional documentary style video that describes in broad strokes the scene. You might even learn something new yourself. Your guest will learn about the history of the demo to the world of Demoparties. No one would believe an auditorium filled with 4,000 people (and almost as many computer monitors) until you see that video. But my father was also quite interested in the demos themselves. The full-color pamphlet tells you a little bit about each demo, and where it sits in the timeline. As I said, my father is pretty computer literate, so he was able to relate a given demo's placement relative to the technology at the time. 2nd Reality, for example, wouldn't be so impressive if it were done last year. But seeing as it was written for computers that couldn't do half of what they do now, it's quite impressive. My one complaint about the extra information that had been provided for the pamplet: It would've been nice to know what machine each demo had been coded for. Was 2nd Reality coded for a 386? Or was it coded for a 486? How much memory was required to run it? What sound cards were needed? This is information that I would've liked to have seen right in the pamplet. All in all, the DVD is well worth the money. If you havn't already, you should swing over to http://www.mindcandydvd.com and order your own copy today. Order a couple. It's pretty cheap, considering what you get, and you won't regret it. If you don't believe Seven's or my account, ask anyone who already has it. I've asked hundreds of people about it now. I have yet to find anyone that dislikes the DVD. --Coplan --=--=-- --=--=------=--=------=--=---- Party Report State of the Art By: Seven ----=--=------=--=------=--=-- -=- Friday 13 december -=- A few days before State Of The Art (hereafter SOTA), I had mailed DJefke to inquire whether he got ahold of a car to drive us to Lille, France. Unfortunately, he was under the impression SOTA took place the next week, and his sister had already claimed the car for the weekend. So we had to rely on the most whimsical of transportation methods in Belgium: the NMBS, or the Belgian railway company. I managed to catch up with Djefke on the train without a hitch (Ghent, where I live, lies between Antwerp, where he resides, and the partyplace), but due to the typical NMBS-delay we had exactly one minute to switch trains in Kortrijk. We succeeded with 20 seconds to spare and a heartrate ten times higher. Having arrived in Lille, we navigated to the point where a shuttle bus from the organisers should have been. After two false alarms (a bus from the Post and a police van), we met three Spanish sceners, one of them from Threepixel, who were in the same situation as us. After a failed attempt to phone the orgos, we decided to go to the partyplace by metro. 17 stations and a walk later, we were at Le Fresnoy, a large cultural center with several halls, in one of which SOTA takes place. After paying the 15 Euro entrance fee we get a wristband and our login/password combo needed for voting. 18:40: We've installed ourselves near the back of the party hall, although "back" is a bit ambiguous: there are two identical bigscreens on both ends of the large rectangular room, and there's no single mega-powerful soundsystem, instead there are several tens of medium-sized speakers suspended from the triangular ceiling. In the middle of the hall is an empty boxing ring, to be used as a podium, and behind that (at 2/3th of the room) is a scaffold, used to film the partyplace from higher up. Looking for familiar faces, Djefke spotted Brioche/Aspirine, who had shaved his hair since I last saw him on Inscene. After watching an old Aspirine 64K text-intro, I tried connecting to the network, which worked immediately. Praise the greatness of DHCP! Unfortunately Djefke didn't have DHCP on his Slackware Linux CDs, so we had to turn to linux.google.com to find it. (I thought I was pretty oldskool with a Pentium 166 laptop, but Djefke beat me with a 486 one. I have much to learn.) The organizers have been very thoughtful: they've not only supplied switches, but even UTP-cables to every seat! The bigscreens shows several old Amiga demos including, of course, State Of The Art/Spaceballs. 19:20: The bigscreens tell us free food and drinks will be served at 20:00: there's pizza, sandwiches, coffee and cola. After that more demos are shown, but the info is transparently shown over them from time to time. Good idea I think, this way people who missed it the first time can still notice it, while the rest of the crowd can keep enjoying the classics. 20:35: After carefully testing the free pizza, I've to say it's not the best I've ever tasted (plus only lukewarm), but you can't beat the quality/price ratio. Djefke, who has helped organising several LAN-parties, wonders how the SOTA orgos can finance feeding 250 sceners during the whole party, in addition to the other costs, for only 15 Euro/person. I've no idea, but I'm grateful for it. 21:21: The only bad point about the LTP4 party is still present in SOTA: lots of announcements in French only :( I can understand one of them, something about a car being parked at the wrong place, but the typical dialogue between Djefke, our Spanish neighbours and I is more like "Did you understand that one?" "No" "I hope it's not important". The bigscreens shows a grainy image of a large dark place, illuminated by green and blue spotlights and filled with sinister, barely moving creatures. Must be either a zombie movie or a webcam stream of the party place. 21:58: A loud singing announces the arrival of the Haujobb guys. They have flyers advertising the new Breakpoint party, which replaces the late Mekka/Symposium. After proudly summing up the highlights of the new party, it says "Your family will hate us!" (Breakpoint is also scheduled on Easter weekend). Melwyn makes Djefke and me pose for a photo for Slengpung, the demoscene photo archive. He intends to take pictures of all sceners in the party hall, because currently Slengpung is filled with pictures of the same people over and over again, mostly boozing outside the various party places. Meanwhile Tres and Brioche are DJ-ing chiptunes: starting with a Second Reality mix, they provide a really fitting soundtrack for the party (I really liked the happy-sounding loops). And now, a special guest-appearance: And since this seems to be an official party report for Static Line I have to write some greetings to following people: Tobi for driving us from Brussels to Lille, Azzarro for drinking our salmiakki vodka and DJefke for giving me one nice can of white beer. --Melwyn/Haujobb (The beer was Hoegaarden, if you want to know) 22:51: I also met Skrebbel (he used to be Eggbird/Green) & Warp, who informed me there will probably be no other dutch sceners, despite several more registrations on the SOTA website :(. I've some 3D code on a floppy that I want to check on Skrebbels laptop, to avoid the dreaded "Runs only on the coders PC" syndrome, but his high-end Pentium 4 laptop with Geforce Go 3D card does not have a floppy drive. Grmmbl, damn progress and innovation! We fall back on the network, and everything works fine. Thanks Skrebbel! 23:32: I've been talking with XXX/Haujobb about the demise of Mekka/Symposium and about what to expect from the new Breakpoint party. It will still be a real scene event, with no gamers allowed, and there should be more room than at the old MS location. I've also a chance to watch the new MFX and Haujobb demos: the MFX one looks great but has very boring music, and the Haujobb one is, well, vintage Haujobb (I had hoped that they would continue with the style of Liquid Wen, but alas). The chiptunes just finished, and the opening ceremony will start (according to the bigscreens) in "10 and 3/4 minutes", a mere 5 hours late. 23:44: Djefkes laptop suddenly died, and it takes us a while to realise a quarter of the hall has lost power (Due to the increased popularity of laptops, this is less visible at a single glance). My battery is only good for 1 hour, let's hope the problem will be fixed by then... 23:51: Some orgos are sitting in the boxing ring, it seems like the opening ceremony will start Real Soon. -=- Saturday 14 December: -=- 0:07: The power is back in the hall, but now the beamers don't have any! So we have to wait a little longer. In the meantime the organisers presented themselves, and Melwyn volunteers to sing a Finnish song while the audience is waiting. 0:21: The opening ceremony is over, it consisted of a video with fragments of various famous demos, also from other (non-PC) platforms. I asked Melwyn what he was singing, and it translates to "I have a huge penis, tralalalalaaaa, it's true, tralalalalaaaaa". Crazy Fins :) 0:31: Some old VESA2 demos are shown that I haven't seen in a long time: Squeezed/Bomb for example, and No Exit/Nomad. I've the impression they shown mainly French productions, though. 0:57: "Feelings are rising to the roof. People are starting to have striptease and taking their clothes off. Especially tobi (xxx of haujobb) looks very handsome without a shirt. grrrr." --Melwyn (again) Melwyn! Stop messing with my party report! If you feel like writing porn, do so on your own computer! (And take credit for what you write, or XXX/Haujobb will never be aware of how you feel about him :-P ) 1:13: The power is down again in our part of the hall :( The bigscreens were showing japanese pop videos, but now they've switched to modern Amiga demos. 1:53: The power is back, and I notice that our neighbours on the table before us are watching Ghost In The Shell: Standalone Complex! I've seen the movie, and I'm really looking forward to watch the TV series. 3:37: I had a long talk with the guys before us about our favorite anime series, and when I'm back I notice Djefke and Melwyn have been smuggling insults and lewd remarks to each other in this report. For the sake of Static Lines quality, I've deleted them. No luck, guys ;) 9:59: Back awake after a refreshening sleep! I grab a sandwich from the food table, which is conveniently located right behind us, and check some news websites. The internet connection is working great, although I've heard people have problems with IRC because everyone uses the same gateway-IP and most IRC servers allow only a single connection per IP... 10:24: Like at Assembly, several presentations are planned, and the first one is about to start. It's about 3DS Max tools, and the Spanish guys decide to attend it while I keep an eye on their laptops. Again the announcements are in French only, but at least the bigscreen shows the most important info in English. 10:57: The Fast compos are announced. Note that these are different from the surprise compos: in the fast compos you've only 2 hours to make something. For the coders, the assignment is to find a single bug in a decompressor for a weird graphic file format. I have done my master thesis about compression, and the flashbacks of gruelling 6-hours long debugging sessions make me feel I better skip this compo. Some scars take years to heal. 12:39: Lunch is available, as you can guess it consist of... pizza and sandwiches :) Dunno if it's done for the sake of variation, but my pizza slice is rather charred this time. The bigscreen is showing Stars/Nooon at the moment, and one of the French announcements may be saying that showers are available (mais je ne suis pas sure). 13:06: Another presentation is about to start in another hall, this time it's about programming on mobile devices. 13:48: The FTP for uploading the compo entries is open, and the surprise coding compo rules are made available. The objective for the coding compo is to make the smallest version of the decompressor of the fast coding compo. After some doubts, I decide to give it a try. 15:07: There's yet another presentation, about "Specials numericals effects" on some machine. I'm struggling with Tasm under DOS, trying to remember all the limitations of 16-bit DOS mode. 16:06: In the hall next to us, several tens of flatscreens are suspended in mid-air with thin wires. On a trip to the toilets I notice the screens are now on, and visitors (non-demosceners) are walking around looking at them. It turns out to be some kind of digital art exhibition. After reading a flyer, I realize that State Of The Art is only one part of a larger event, the "PIX festival de la culture digitale". It consists of the exhibition, the presentations, a web designer gathering in another building, an electronic music night with lots of DJs and of course the demoparty. There are guards standing at the entrance of the party hall, to prevent random people to get in and walk away with some hardware, so we've to show our wristband every time. Stamba is starting his live music set. It's techno, I like the visuals that are well synced but without annoying hard flashes. 17:14: Stambas performance is over, it was a bit monotonous at the start but got better near the end. Djefke is happy showing off the free PIX-festival T-shirt he got. I guess the PIX festival must be well sponsored, I've never seen a demoparty with so much stuff for such a low entrance fee. 17:42: I've been walking around at the exhibition, it shows mostly flash animations and a few "interactive art"-thingies on the floating flatscreens. The visitors can walk up an improvised stair to the balcony around the party hall, looking down on the chaos below. So now we're an important part of an highly artistic exhibition! Who'd have expected that? We finally get recognition of the cultural importance of the demoscene in the modern world! How cool is that? As if to prove me wrong, several people who are relaxing in the boxing ring start singing "Father Jacob" in four different languages, and an off key version of Yesterday/The Beatles is followed by someone repeatedly screaming "Jesus must save you". So much for our artistic reputation :) 18:39: The only oldskool entry has been shown, on an Oryx computer. Either it crashed or it was very short, only a red State Of The Art logo scrolling up. Aha, it's reshown, with sound this time: there's a logo, scrolling copper bars, a funny cartoon, a wobbling logo, some waving credits, a beautiful picture of a two-headed dragon, and an effect looking like a phonograph. 19:51: Willbe and Chaosnet are playing a very nice ambient set. The deadline for the surprise coding compo is tomorrow at 11 o'clock, which is great because a) my code doesn't even work, and it's very non-optimized, and b) I want to catch some sleep before the compos start. The pizza for dinner is perfect: warm but not charred, but the cheese on my sandwich looks menacingly orange. Ah well, you only live once. 22:33: Lots of compos have passed! There were 4 wild entries: 3 low-quality but funny ones plus one more serious entry from Cocoon. The fast Gfx compo had only 3 entries, but the raytraced one had 13 images, there were several oldskool entries and the handdrawn compo is still going on with over 20 pictures so far. As can be expected, a lot of them are of very high quality. The scaffold in the room has two comfortable couches on top of it. I've no idea how the orgos have gotten them up there, but they make the perfect place to watch Vip2/Popsy Team, State Of Mind/Bomb or the other demos they're showing right now: it's right in front of the bigscreen, you don't have to stare upwards so much, you can rest your feet on the handrails,... But since I start to fall asleep, I go back down, vote for the compos that have passed and unroll my sleeping bag again. -=- Sunday 15 december -=- 0:08: Djamm is now playing his set, I thought I would have missed the music compos but they have been delayed. I continue messing around in Alab, hoping to get something that assembles correctly. 1:08: The music compos should start in 30 minutes, says the bigscreen. I've completed the translation from C to Asm, but my code doesn't work as it should :( The Spanish guys consider me crazy to do the translation by hand, instead of starting from the ASM-output that the C-compiler gives you, but I think you have less overhead that way. 2:00: History repeats itself: the music compo should start "very s[ota]oon now", and my code is still not working... 2:27: The music compos have finally started: first the chiptunes, then the fast music compo (with some bladerunner remixes), and now the oldskool music. 3:54: The music compo is still running, but people are losing interest due to the length and their tiredness. I feel sorry for the musicians who spent a lot of effort to make a great tune which gets barely any applause. 4:26: Joy! The code works as it should, and is really small, even with some debug stuff still in it: 761 bytes after packing! The Threepixel guys, whose entry is currently twice as large, are impressed :) The music compo is still going on, now a happy hardcore tune is playing that is most probably written by Skrebbel (The solo compos do not show the name of the creator, to prevent namevoting, but who else in the scene likes happy hardcore?) 4:40: The vocal music compo has several songs that could be played straight on the radio IMHO. The increase in quality is impressive, compared to the vocal compo at Assembly. 5:36: Everyone tries to stay awake for the democompos. I'm happy with my progress, the entry is already less than 670 bytes! 5:59: The demo and intro compos should start any minute now. Not a moment too soon, because people are really having problems staying awake. Besides, the compos should have started 10 after midnight... 7:27: The demos and 4K intros are over! There were no 64K intros at all, and only 3 4Ks, but almost 20 demos (2 of which where disqualified for unspecified reasons). Besides the MFX and Haujobb demos, there was also a Cocoon demo in their old Shad-style: blood and torture everywhere, but now in high-res. Superjam Superstars is a really cute and funny entry worth getting, and the Ketchup Killers (a old Belgian group) made a comeback with some weird bezier-spline compressed movie. There were also a few software-rendered 3D-demos, one of them looked better than most accelerated entries. 8:36: The FTP is open for downloading all entries, and for the upload of the surprise code. Skal, who's the orgo responsible for the surprise coding compo, told me someone had an entry of 521 bytes, but that it was still a bit buggy. Panic! My code is still over 600 bytes big! Aaargh... 9:31: I'm still trying to remove a few more bytes, but exhaustion is taking its toll. Meanwhile my FTP program is leeching all compo entries. Djefke comes back from a visit to the Ketchup Killers, confirming that they really want to start over, so their entry was not a single release for nostalgias sake, as I thought. Cool! We could really use some more active groups in Belgium! 11:26: Aaargh! No matter how many time you have, it's never enough for size-optimisations. Especially if you mess up, over-optimize to the point that the code doesn't work anymore, and then are too tired to remember which changes you did recently (Yes, some people who will remain unnamed are that stupid). I had to submit an older version that is still over 600 bytes big, because such things happen of course half an hour before the deadline, and I couldn't re-apply all the changes that made it slightly smaller than 600 bytes :( In a foul mood, I attack the breakfast table, and then start mindlessly browsing the LAN. On a positive note, there *will* be hourly shuttles back to the trainstation, which is nice. The compo results should be ready at 14 o'clock, but quite a few people laugh unbelievingly at this announcement. The frequent schedule slippage has made them a bit cynical, and since the doors are open til 18 o'clock... 14:14: Lo and behold, the prize ceremony starts at the promised time! There are lots of hardware prizes, which are all stocked in a big heap in the midlle of the boxing ring. After thanking the sponsors and all people who helped organizing SOTA, Krafton starts the usual 3th place, 2nd place, 1st place cycle, with the audience applauding their hands in between. I lose my confidence in my coding abilities when Silex wins the surprize coding compo with an entry smaller than 500 bytes. Where on earth did I used more than 100 bytes too much? The arrangement of the prizes (all stacked in a pile) poses a problem: it might look nice, but it's hard to find a specific item. After each new name, three orgos dive in the pile to find the winners prize, which can take a few minutes. This greatly prolongs the ceremony, and Djefke and I have to get the shuttle of 3 o'clock, so we have to leave before the demo winners are announced :( Overall, State Of The Art was an amazing party. I've never seen so many releases on the first edition of a party, although that may be because many people see SOTA as the successor of the LTP series. There were about 250 visitors from 18 countries, people even came from as far as Poland! The organisers were friendly and tried to fix problems such as the power outages quickly. My only peeves are the French announcements, and the schedule slippage. It was also funny to be part of a big "Digital culture" festival, although I wonder what this means for future SOTA parties: will they continue on their own, or will the PIX festival also be repeated on a yearly base? Guess we'll just have to wait and see... Greets to everyone I met at SOTA, and see you again at Breakpoint! --Seven --=--=-- --=--=------=--=------=--=---- Competition Announcement The Spectrum Music Competition By: Coplan ----=--=------=--=------=--=-- The Spectrum Music Competition 2003 has started. The Spectrum Music Competition is a music contest with a really unique concept: You choose one of three colours (red, green, or blue) and make a song inspiered by it. A couple of reviewers will listen to all songs and give comments, as well as points for different things, like how good the song expresses the choosen colour, creativity, musical quality, and technical quality. Also, I will play the songs for random people asking them what colour they think it represents. Your song gets extra points if the guess is right. The prizes for the competition winners are glass oil lamps with a treble clef and "Spectrum Music Competition 2003" engraved. Handblown from Visby Glasblåseri, Sweden. Visit the Competition Site: http://www.nifflas.com/spectrum/ --Nifflas --=--=-- --=--=------=--=------=--=---- The Lineup By: Novus ----=--=------=--=------=--=-- Welcome to The Lineup! Every month, I scour through the hundreds of new releases on the scene's major archive sites to find the best new music, saving you the trouble of having to download 20 instant-delete songs to find 1 that's worth keeping. I have an important note regard November's Lineup: it has been brought to my attention by Gargoyle at The MOD Archive that one of last month's selections, "A Moment In Tears" by Norma Segui and J Graham of the group CavinCrew, is actually a rip of "A Moment In Time" by Saboteur, and that other CavinCrew songs are under scrutiny as well. I was not aware of this at the time, and I thank Gargoyle for bringing this to my attention. I'm also looking for feedback from you folks on how good a job I'm doing so far. Are the songs listed in The Lineup as good as you were hoping they'd be? Do I need stricter standards? Looser standards? More openness to other genres? E-mail me at vince_young@hotmail.com and sound off! In the meantime, you may consider the following 23 tunes to be the best tracks of November/December 2002: "A Storm In Paradise" - FleshDance - dance http://www.homemusic.cc/Songs/songs.get.php?soId=1782 "Against the Wind" - FireBot - pop http://www.homemusic.cc/Songs/songs.get.php?soId=1755 "Atlantis Lost: Storm Remix" - Storm - trance http://www.homemusic.cc/Songs/songs.get.php?soId=1724 "Awakening Of Venus" - Louigi Verona - orchestral http://www.homemusic.cc/Songs/songs.get.php?soId=1784 "Beyound The Space" - A. C. S. - trance http://www.homemusic.cc/Songs/songs.get.php?soId=1821 "Dark Teknoid" - Double D - techno http://www.homemusic.cc/Songs/songs.get.php?soId=1765 "Detuned" - DJ Keys - trance http://www.homemusic.cc/Songs/songs.get.php?soId=1701 "Earth Cycles: Awakening" - Solo - ambient http://www.homemusic.cc/Songs/songs.get.php?soId=1779 "Funny Blue Sky" - Ultrasyd - disco http://www.homemusic.cc/Songs/songs.get.php?soId=1749 "Impaler" - Zond 3 - drum'n'bass http://www.homemusic.cc/Songs/songs.get.php?soId=1820 "Kajahtaa: Slow Mix" - T-DJ - pop http://www.modarchive.com/cgi-bin/download.cgi?K/kajahtaa_slowmix.it "Let Your Self Go" - A. C. S. - trance http://www.homemusic.cc/Songs/songs.get.php?soId=1822 "Mental Decay" - Zond 3 - industrial http://www.homemusic.cc/Songs/songs.get.php?soId=1691 "November Times" - Dusodril - pop http://www.homemusic.cc/Songs/songs.get.php?soId=1788 "Pandora's Box" - Christofori - demostyle http://www.homemusic.cc/Songs/songs.get.php?soId=1713 "Reflected" - Abyss - trance http://www.homemusic.cc/Songs/songs.get.php?soId=1825 "Shemida" - Aitrus - ambient http://www.modplug.com/mods/nrdetail.php3?session=&detailno=10183 "Sphinx" - Virgill - pop http://www.homemusic.cc/Songs/songs.get.php?soId=1794 "Surrounded" - Pete H - dance http://www.modplug.com/mods/nrdetail.php3?session=&detailno=10182 "Technicolor Combustion" - Christofori - pop http://www.homemusic.cc/Songs/songs.get.php?soId=1708 "The Climb Of The Mountain" - Storm & Stance - trance http://www.modplug.com/mods/nrdetail.php3?session=&detailno=10215 "The Sunny Flower" - Cooth - orchestral http://www.homemusic.cc/Songs/songs.get.php?soId=1834 "Trance Impulse" - Storm - trance http://www.homemusic.cc/Songs/songs.get.php?soId=1760 Take care! --Novus --=--=-- --=--=------=--=------=--=---- Editorial Art All Around By: Coplan ----=--=------=--=------=--=-- Now that I have the Mind Candy DVD, I've been showing it to everyone that I feel might have some appreciation for the art at the core of the demoscene. As expected, I got a lot of oooo's and ahhhh's. The demos were quite the talk of my group of friends. One person in paticular, my girlfriend, asked a question that isn't so easy to answer: "Where do these people get the inspiration for these things?" I couldn't answer that right away. I honestly had to think about it a very long time. Today, I think I'm ready to answer that question. Inspiration for an art is not something that has ever come very easy to me. I write music, but I have never claimed to be very good at it. My personal inspiration comes from the fact that I tool around with song ideas almost every day for a couple of hours a day. If you start a new song idea that often, you're bound to come across something that you like. But that's not a very efficient way to come up with ideas. You end up throwing out hundreds more scrap tunes than you keep. Someone, I'm not sure exactly who, has been quoted millions of times: "Stop and smell the flowers." It is my belief that the best inspiration for any art form comes from this type of philosophy. Sadly, in this day and age, this philosophy is hard to embrace on a daily basis. We all live lives that require us to be running almost as soon as we wipe the sleepy dust from our eyes. And we continue running through our days until usually late evening. I, for one, only get a couple of hours a night to relax. Through the course of our day, how often to we have the opportunity to "smell the flowers" as it were. Especially in these days of high powered, amplified, high resolution electronic entertainment, what benefit does the average guy get out of such a simple practice? I'm not saying that such a philophy is bad, or even boreing. I'm just not sure many people realize the benefits of noticing your surroundings. To an artist, the simplist detail can easily be an inspiration. The sound your ring makes against a wine glass could spark a whole new song in your mind. The way a plastic bag blows across an empty parking lot could light a new image in your mind, just before you put it on canvas. There's no telling what will spark your thoughts or make your mind glow. Just imagine what new song or new images might come out of the every day tasks that you take for granted. After thinking about such a thing, imagine how much you've already missed? When you watch a demo, it's often very obvious that a lot of time was spent on its design. Regardless of that fact, however, everything started with one idea. One simple idea. The same goes for music. The same goes for a drawing. That riff in the middle of the song could have been the starting point for its writer. To you, it's a central point in the song. It might not even be all that significant to you. It might not even be anything more than a drum riff. It might not be anything more than a given sample as it chimes out at random points in the song. Does that matter to you, the listener? I doubt it. I doubt that the song's writer thinks so as well. I would even wager that the song's writer doesn't much care. But to the writer, he knows that it was the single, most inspirational piece to the song. At least to him. I wrote a song the other day. It's a pretty good one, and I might even release it to the public. I realized the answer to my girlfriend's question when I sat back and listened to a pre-mix of the song. My starting point for the song was actually the ending. It sounds crazy, but my inspiration was a laugh from a girl at work. It's a crazy laugh, and it often annoys me. But she laughed at something I said last week...and it chimed in my head. I got home on thursday night, and sat down at my computer and my synth. I started playing with the sounds on my synth to see if I could duplicate the sounds of that girls laugh. I was able to, and started forming a song around it. That became the end of the song. 6 notes is all that came from that. Those notes were played on an oboe, and it doesn't really resemble the laugh at all. In a 4 minute song, it really only makes up about 3 seconds. Who knew that I would be able to devise a tune from such a laugh (an awful one at that). What would really happen if I didn't do something stupid enough to make this girl laugh (at me)? Would I not have a song? Honestly, I might still have a song. I can force a song. I can create music all the time. But it wouldn't be tight. It wouldn't sound nearly as clean or as inpsired as this song would. The best music, the best art, the best demos all have something in common. They come from great inspiration. Inspiration comes from many places. Most are natural. Most inspirations are as simple as paying more attention to your mother when she talks to you. Many are even as simple as watching parts of a movie that aren't in focus. Look at the things that you aren't supposed to. Listen to the things that are just out of ear shot. Feel the things that you might often ignore. Inspiration is about the things that the average guy doesn't notice. It's about the things that are often overlooked. So when you go about your daily routine tomorrow...stop and smell those flowers. When you hear, see or feel something new, think about what you can derive from it. It might be the next competition winner. --Coplan --=--=-- --=--=------=--=------=--=---- Early Dawn Reflections Unfinished Business By: The Watcher ----=--=------=--=------=--=-- Saturday morning, back home after a mid-week spent in Disneyland Paris. After days and days of roller coasters, puppets, dreams, and an almost deadly dose of "it's a small world", I can't wait to get back at my desk, put Audiophonik in my CD-player, and crank up the volume. Of course it was good fun, but I'm sure glad to dive back into the demoscene, where the real magic is happening. Every so often, I get a little depressed by the sheer amount of unfinished scene-material rotting away in 'temp', 'test' and 'scratch' folders on my harddisk. I know I am not alone in this, I think almost every scener, be it coder, musician or graphician, struggles with the fact that less than 40% of the things that takes us so much effort to produce, actually ends up as part of a finished production. So much time and energy we waste on fragments of code that produce not quite the cool visual effect hoped for, single patterns of soul-moving, hearth-pumping melody that somehow won't fit into any song at all, brilliant details in drawings that are thrown away for being ugly as a whole. Although I've always been the first to complain about this rather frustrating aspect of the demoscene, of late I am starting to realize that maybe it is not such a bad thing at all. Finishing things is hard work, and the last 10% of any production always takes up about 90% of the total time. That last 10% is also the least rewarding part, since all the fun stuff has been done and, worst of all, there is nothing left to learn from the production. All this from a coder's perspective of course, but I guess it must be pretty much the same for all you performers of the arts of color and sound. Unless the production is really worth it, finishing it just isn't fun. And fun is what this is all about. If I wanted to code boring stuff, I could just sit at the office and earn money while doing so. Imagine what would happen if we would always finish every single thing we started. Not only would we all be peevish and cranky because of our miserable, boring hobby, the demoscene would be flooded with worthless pieces of work! Just think of what it would do to the overall quality of the scene if every crappy experiment you ever started (after, say, you just broke up with your girl and just reached the bottom of the bottle) was made into a full-blown production. Not the kind of things I would like to see topping the scene-charts, definitely. One way to look at it is that by discontinuing projects that aren't promising enough, we perform natural selection. Assuming that works, fun enough to finish, are also the ones most renewing and creative (which I think is a quite safe assumption), it is simply a case of survival of the fittest. I think Darwin would be proud of us! (Note: Yes, I know that his evolutionary theory is actually all about propagating, but for the sake of decency let's keep away from disturbing alliterations like copulating code, mating music and groin-grinding graphics). So please, don't feel too sad about flushing another project. In a way you are saving the scene from extinction! --The Watcher P.S. Off-topic piece of advice: when playing oldschool SID files using winamp, don't forget to turn off winamp's preamp first. I think I might be needing a new pair of speakers now. And a new pair of ears too. --=--=-- --=--=------=--=------=--=---- Link List ----=--=------=--=------=--=-- Portals: SceneSpot (Home of Static Line).......http://www.scenespot.org CFXweb.......................................http://cfxweb.net Czech Scene................................http://www.scene.cz Danish Scene..............................http://demo-scene.dk Demoscene.org.........................http://www.demoscene.org Demo.org...................................http://www.demo.org Diskmag.de...................................http://diskmag.de Hungarian Scene........................http://www.scene-hu.com Italian Scene...........................http://run.to/la_scena ModPlug Central Resources..........http://www.castlex.com/mods Norwegian Scene........................http://www.demoscene.no Orange Juice.............................http://www.ojuice.net Planet Zeus..........................http://www.planetzeus.net Polish Scene...........................http://www.demoscena.pl Pouet.net.................................http://www.pouet.net Russian Scene..........................http://www.demoscene.ru Scene.org.................................http://www.scene.org Scenet....................................http://www.scenet.de Spanish Scene............................http://www.escena.org Swiss Scene..............................http://www.chscene.ch Archives: Acid2.....................................ftp://acid2.stack.nl Amber.......................................ftp://amber.bti.pl Cyberbox.....................................ftp://cyberbox.de Hornet (1992-1996)........................ftp://ftp.hornet.org Scene.org..................................ftp://ftp.scene.org Scene.org Austra........................ftp://ftp.au.scene.org Scene.org Netherlands...................ftp://ftp.nl.scene.org Swiss Scene FTP...........................ftp://ftp.chscene.ch Demo Groups: 3g Design..............................http://3gdesign.cjb.net 3State...................................http://threestate.com 7 Gods.........................................http://7gods.sk Aardbei.....................................http://aardbei.com Acid Rain..............................http://surf.to/acidrain Addict..................................http://addict.scene.pl Agravedict........................http://www.agravedict.art.pl Alien Prophets.....................http://www.alienprophets.dk Anakata..............................http://www.anakata.art.pl Astral..............................http://astral.scene-hu.com Astroidea........................http://astroidea.scene-hu.com BlaBla..............................http://blabla.planet-d.net Blasphemy..............................http://www.blasphemy.dk Bomb..................................http://bomb.planet-d.net Broncs..................................http://broncs.scene.cz Byterapers.....................http://www.byterapers.scene.org Bypass.................................http://bypass.scene.org Calodox.................................http://www.calodox.org Cocoon..............................http://cocoon.planet-d.net Confine.................................http://www.confine.org Damage...................................http://come.to/damage Dc5.........................................http://www.dc5.org Delirium..............................http://delirium.scene.pl Eclipse............................http://www.eclipse-game.com Elitegroup..........................http://elitegroup.demo.org Exceed...........................http://www.inf.bme.hu/~exceed Fairlight.............................http://www.fairlight.com Fobia Design...........................http://www.fd.scene.org Freestyle............................http://www.freestylas.org Fresh! Mindworks...................http://kac.poliod.hu/~fresh Future Crew..........................http://www.futurecrew.org Fuzzion.................................http://www.fuzzion.org GODS...................................http://www.idf.net/gods Halcyon...........................http://www.halcyon.scene.org Haujobb..................................http://www.haujobb.de Hellcore............................http://www.hellcore.art.pl Infuse...................................http://www.infuse.org Kilobite...............................http://kilobite.cjb.net Kolor................................http://www.kaoz.org/kolor Komplex.................................http://www.komplex.org Kooma.....................................http://www.kooma.com Mandula.........................http://www.inf.bme.hu/~mandula Maturefurk...........................http://www.maturefurk.com Monar................ftp://amber.bti.pl/pub/scene/distro/monar MOVSD....................................http://movsd.scene.cz Nextempire...........................http://www.nextempire.com Noice.....................................http://www.noice.org Orange.................................http://orange.scene.org Orion................................http://orion.planet-d.net Outbreak................................http://www.outbreak.nu Popsy Team............................http://popsyteam.rtel.fr Prone................................http://www.prone.ninja.dk Purple....................................http://www.purple.dk Rage........................................http://www.rage.nu Replay.......................http://www.shine.scene.org/replay Retro A.C...........................http://www.retroac.cjb.net Sista Vip..........................http://www.sistavip.exit.de Skytech team............................http://www.skytech.org Spinning Kids......................http://www.spinningkids.org Sunflower.......................http://sunflower.opengl.org.pl Talent.............................http://talent.eurochart.org The Black Lotus.............................http://www.tbl.org The Digital Artists Wired Nation.http://digitalartists.cjb.net The Lost Souls...............................http://www.tls.no TPOLM.....................................http://www.tpolm.com Trauma.................................http://sauna.net/trauma T-Rex.....................................http://www.t-rex.org Unik........................................http://www.unik.de Universe..........................http://universe.planet-d.net Vantage..................................http://www.vantage.ch Wipe....................................http://www.wipe-fr.org Music Labels, Music Sites: Aisth.....................................http://www.aisth.com Aural Planet........................http://www.auralplanet.com Azure...................................http://azure-music.com Blacktron Music Production...........http://www.d-zign.com/bmp BrothomStates.............http://www.katastro.fi/brothomstates Chill..........................http://www.chillproductions.com Chippendales......................http://www.sunpoint.net/~cnd Chiptune...............................http://www.chiptune.com Da Jormas................................http://www.jormas.com Fabtrax......http://www.cyberverse.com/~boris/fabtrax/home.htm Fairlight Music.....................http://fairlight.scene.org Five Musicians.........................http://www.fm.scene.org Fusion Music Crew.................http://members.home.nl/cyrex Goodstuff..........................http://artloop.de/goodstuff Hellven.................................http://www.hellven.org Ignorance.............................http://www.ignorance.org Immortal Coil.............................http://www.ic.l7.net Intense...........................http://intense.ignorance.org Jecoute.................................http://jecoute.cjb.net Kosmic Free Music Foundation.............http://www.kosmic.org Lackluster.....................http://www.m3rck.net/lackluster Level-D.................................http://www.level-d.com Mah Music.............................http://come.to/mah.music Maniacs of noise...............http://home.worldonline.nl/~mon MAZ's sound homepage..................http://www.maz-sound.com Med.......................................http://www.med.fr.fm Miasmah.............................http://www.miasmah.cjb.net Milk.......................................http://milk.sgic.fi Mo'playaz..........................http://ssmedion.de/moplayaz Mono211.................................http://www.mono211.com Morbid Minds..............http://www.raveordie.com/morbidminds Moods.............................http://www.moodymusic.de.vu/ Noise................................http://www.noisemusic.org Noerror.......................http://www.error-404.com/noerror One Touch Records......................http://otr.planet-d.net Park..................................http://park.planet-d.net pHluid..................................http://phluid.acid.org Radical Rhythms.....http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/merrelli/rr RBi Music.............................http://www.rbi-music.com Ruff Engine................http://members.xoom.com/ruff_engine SHR8M......................................http://1st.to/shr8m Sound Devotion................http://sugarbomb.x2o.net/soundev Soundstate.........................http://listen.to/soundstate Sunlikamelo-D...........http://www.error-404.com/sunlikamelo-d Suspect Records........................http://www.tande.com/sr Tequila........................http://www.defacto2.net/tequila Tempo................................http://tempomusic.cjb.net Tetris....................................http://msg.sk/tetris Theralite...........................http://theralite.avalon.hr Tokyo Dawn Records........................http://tokyodawn.org Triad's C64 music archive.............http://www.triad.c64.org UltraBeat.........................http://www.innerverse.com/ub Vibrants................................http://www.vibrants.dk Wiremaniacs.........................http://www.wiremaniacs.com Zen of Tracking.........................http://surf.to/the-imm Programming: Programming portal......................http://www.gamedev.net Programming portal.....................http://www.flipcode.com Game programming portal...............http://www.gamasutra.com 3D programming portal.................http://www.3dgamedev.com Programming portal......................http://www.exaflop.org Programming portal............http://www.programmersheaven.com Programming portal.....................http://www.freecode.com NASM (free Assembly compiler)......http://www.cryogen.com/nasm LCC (free C compiler).........http://www.remcomp.com/lcc-win32 PTC video engine.........................http://www.gaffer.org 3D engines..........http://cg.cs.tu-berlin.de/~ki/engines.html Documents...............http://www.neutralzone.org/home/faqsys File format collection...................http://www.wotsit.org Magazines: Amber...............................http://amber.bti.pl/di_mag Amnesia...............http://amnesia-dist.future.easyspace.com Demojournal....................http://demojournal.planet-d.net Eurochart.............................http://www.eurochart.org Heroin...................................http://www.heroin.net Hugi........................................http://www.hugi.de Music Massage......................http://www.scene.cz/massage Jurassic Pack...........................www.jurassicpack.de.vu Pain..................................http://pain.planet-d.net Scenial...........................http://www.scenial.scene.org Shine...............................http://www.shine.scene.org Static Line................http://www.scenespot.org/staticline Sunray..............................http://sunray.planet-d.net TUHB.......................................http://www.tuhb.org WildMag..................................http://www.wildmag.de Parties: Assembly (Finland).....................http://www.assembly.org Ambience (The Netherlands)..............http://www.ambience.nl Dreamhack (Sweden)....................http://www.dreamhack.org Buenzli (Switzerland)......................http://www.buenz.li Gravity (Poland)............http://www.demoscena.cp.pl/gravity Mekka-Symposium (Germany)...................http://ms.demo.org Takeover (The Netherlands).............,http://www.takeover.nl The Party (Denmark).....................http://www.theparty.dk Others: <*> MindCandy DVD......................http://www.mindcandydvd.com Arf!Studios..........................http://www.arfstudios.org #coders..................................http://coderz.cjb.net Demonews Express.........http://www.teeselink.demon.nl/express Demo fanclub........................http://jerware.org/fanclub Demo secret parts....http://www.inf.bme.hu/~mandula/secret.txt Digital Undergrounds.....................http://dug.iscool.net Doose charts...............................http://www.doose.dk Freax................................http://freax.scene-hu.com GfxZone............................http://gfxzone.planet-d.net PC-demos explained.....http://www.oldskool.org/demos/explained Pixel...................................http://pixel.scene.org Textmode Demo Archive.................http://tmda.planet-d.net #trax e-mail list............................................. .............http://www.scenespot.org/mailman/listinfo/trax Underground Mine.............http://www.spinningkids.org/umine IRC Channels: Scene.........................................ircnet #thescene Programming.....................................ircnet #coders Programming....................................efnet #flipcode Graphics.........................................ircnet #pixel Music.............................................ircnet #trax Scene (French)..................................ircnet #demofr Programming (French)............................ircnet #codefr Graphics (French)..............................ircnet #pixelfr Scene (Hungarian)............................ircnet #demoscene Programming (Hungarian)......................ircnet #coders.hu Programming (German)........................ircnet #coders.ger --=--=-- ----=--=------=--=------=--=------=--=------=--=------=--=------=--=------ -=- Staff -=- Editor: Coplan / D. Travis North / coplan@scenespot.org Staff Writers: Coplan / D. Travis North / coplan@scenespot.org Dilvie / Eric Hamilton / dilvie@yahoo.com Novus / Vince Young / vince_young@hotmail.com Psitron / Tim Soderstrom / tigerhawk@stic.net Setec / Jesper Pederson / jesped@post.tele.dk Seven / Stefaan VanNieuwenhuyze/ seven7@writeme.com Tryhuk / Tryhuk Vojtech / vojtech.tryhuk@worldonline.cz Vill / Brian Frank / darkvill@yahoo.com The Watcher / Paul-Jan Pauptit / watcher@tuhb.org Tech Consultant: Ranger Rick / Ben Reed / ranger@scenespot.org Static Line on the Web: http://www.scenespot.org/staticline Static Line Subscription Management: http://www.scenespot.org/mailman/listinfo/static_line If you would like to contribute an article to Static Line, be aware that we will format your article to 76 columns with two columns at the beginning of each line. Please avoid foul language and high ascii characters. Contributions (Plain Text) should be e-mailed to Coplan (coplan@scenespot.org) by the last Friday of each month. New issues are released on the first Sunday of every month. See you next month! -eof---=------=--=------=--=--