Helloo everyone .. This is chriz writing a nice little party report from the notorious party The Gathering'98. Written in a hurry , write errors may occur The partys in the tg series has a tendency getting more and more commerce. I was attending TG96,97 and they both greq in quakelameness and this year its worse than ever. aprox. 95% of all the people present are pc dudes. Actually , this Wednesday , the first day of tg98 , things is looking like this is going to be the worst TG ever . At least in my eyes, the amidemo compos will probably not have any truly great demos , since haujobb will release a pc demo. TBL is present , even without the legendary coders offa and equalizer , still it's rumoured that rubberduck and co. will release an amigademo , if so it will be the first in the so far one year ld hiatus. But let's not count out limited edition just yet. This High quality group came third last year , their tp7 demo was great and let's hope they kick butt here! I arrived early at "the place to be". I was 'ere 07:50 , the doors were said to open at 08:00 so i got in line 5 mins prior to that. the doors opened at aprox.08:10 , and since they only let in 5 people at a time to register , I wasn't in until 09:30 ! And let me tell you , standing in that line , was NOT funny! But never mind the bullocks.  We who appear to be the children of a dying breed are still present. Allthough this partys is just as lame as any commercial shit. The network was off to a bad start. And the big screen displayed that a vital part was on a plane from usa and tehy expected to have everything ready at 16:00. However , the internet was delayed , and it was still not up when I went to sleep at 02:00. Second day I woke up a little prior to 08:00, and everything seemed to be ok. However , surpise , there was still no network. And 14:00 I presume the internet to be functional , however . It doesn't interest me much. They want us to registere aswell now. When we were first let in , they only hgave us a 24hour pass. And now you're supposed to go in this big line and register. Well .In time. Yeah .. and the registration took time . the rest is written after the party since i had some hd trouble and little time .. The guards kept harassing unregistered peeople , telling us to registere at once or you'll be kicked out , or if you're not registered the next time I see you you will not be let in etc. So when I finally decided to get in the  line , I'd been in line for an hour , and the machines brok down! ahh nice one .. I stood in line under one of the wild demo compos ( they had split it up this year since it has grown to become to long to show all at once ) and the part I saw was the home made movies wild or whatever, and most of it was pure bullshit and crap. I registered the next day after standing 15 minutes in line. I did not get to check out the moview room this year cause there was a lot of old movies ( most i'd seen) the internet continued not to work properly on the second day ( thursday) and when the network crashed under the quake compo , some houndred people marched in line around the hall shouting ( we want network ! in norvegian) this didn't lead to anything , and altghough the internet was up later on the second day , it was to be very slow , quite unbearably slow , a lot of the time. The LAN was ok though. One of the things that sucked most of the party was the over-prescence of pc nerds and the under-prescence of amiga peeps. I don't know how many attenders but less then 100 amiga people were prescent ( I think somewhere about 50  ) and this year . The cd copying thing had grown to what the disk copying was for the amiga 4 years ago. "Everybody" with a pc was burning .  10 packs of cd-rs everywhere. The nice thing abooout this is that I got to burn some cd's too :) ( My hd is really grateful :)  I wouldn't call this "an exclusive interview" or something, but i can tell you I overheard a conversation between rubberduck/tbl and frequent/eph under the amidemo compo , where rubberduck expressed his thoughts about how the amiga is really dead and so and so on , how tbl did't allmost nothing of their work on amigas and so and so on , well .. go figure. The pc demo compo wasn't nothing to shout about . Except from of a couple of demos the 3d was half hearted , and the impressive winner was done by none other than the great GODS . I'm not complete sure if we'll ever see another amiga demo release from them , but I can tell you they are doing well on the pc. The amigademo compos didn't let me down , although fewer entries then last year (this years 9 versus last years 16 or something) it still rocked , and most of the demos were of very high quality. Especially lamatron , :) The trsi demo deserved to win if you ask me , and dcs was allso a real nice one. I totally loved the creds sequence :) The 4k compo was fucked, they cut some intros before they were finished and the first time they showed them it was with two channels only :) .. err .. rite .. so they showed it twice.  The bigscreen this year was actually much better than last years one, which was actually a smallscreen , and this year you could nicely watch the compos from most of the hall. If you want to know about c=64 , there were some people actually present, and the tp97 winner was shown on the bigscreen. And it rocked , it was a c=64 version of the pc classic , second reality by future crew . and it was cool :) Every year you notice the tg "hits" , the songs that are played by almost everybody . This year some of the songs were : it's like that , higher state of conciousness , overdose , and everything from the fat of the land. Yepp , a lot of people only went to tg for these reasons : To play games , to watch vivos and mpegs with sound , to listen to mp3 really loud , to surf the internet for four days. Yeah .. it just gets lamer and lamer. If I look back to the other two tg's I've been to (96,97) for me last years was the overall best. But I think I had more fun now than 96 but hey , who really cares.