So, it finaly happened. I came home, a fresh '7' in my index,
Physics off my mind, and I can sit down and type away about my
memories of Scene Strike 1... Here goes;
The odd thing about people is that they never read the invitations
to stuff they attend. We had clearly wrote that the partyplace opens
up at 12:00, that the deadline is 18:00 and the projections start at
20:00, but people don't seem to have noticed that.
At first, some of them showed up at noon, got all surprised to see
that the "party didn't begin" (?!) and left, only to return at six,
AFTER the bloody deadline, to turn in their work. Next time, people,
READ THE FUCKING INVITATION! Okay, now, that's enough about that.
Although for most people the party, as I said up there, started at
either noon or six o'clock, for us it began three days ago. But I
already wrote a CTW review, so I'll skip those three days, and hop
on over to the morning of Scene Strike. The only thing I remeber
doing, after the clock buzzed at 09:00 sharp, was busting the poor
thing to pieces and somehow, automagicaly, appearing at Rex an hour
later. Amazing, aren't I? I am still wondering where did I loose
that hour. Was it, perhaps, one of those _abduction_ things? "The
truth is out there..."
Anyway, there wasn't much work there for most of us. Dominator, Dule
the Bauk, Q, Arhimed and M-G were quite busy, but most of us, the
_others_, just bummed around, helping out from time to time. So, I
said to myself, it's about bloody time you finished up your goddamn
demo. I sat down by the "Motherfucker" and started typing away. I
typed for quite a while, and had all the procedures ready, when I
noticed the guys mentioned above; The People Who Didn't Read the
Invitation. I didn't pay much attention to them, since I was in
desperate search of axs to one of the pentiums lying around useless,
to be able to stick all my procedures into one program and time the
whole thing to the music. Someone has taken away the key. That
someone was M-G. And he was nowhere to be found.
So, what the fuck, I sat back by the machine and made another
procedure or two, by the time we were supposed to lay out the
chairs... oh, yeah, people were starting to arrive. I gave up on the
coding for a while, to greet all the attendants and bypassers I
knew... and there were quite a few of them...
Zordon somehow managed to appear, but only briefly, as well as
Norge, Dragon, and most of the oldskool fuckarounds from Ecstasy.
The Hex people were there, and they brought a couple of machines
along, one of them being a C64, which has an entire paragraph of
it's own a bit lower in the article. Then there were the
Hyperopia/Juice people, who also have a paragraph or two of theirs,
though not for quite the same reasons as the Hex guys... Phew...
then there were most of the people from the yu-scena mailing list,
most of MindEscape, Simargl, better known as "Panta the Amazing",
along with Sony, and quite a lot of other groups, whom,
unfortunately, I didn't get to meet, or have forgotten in all the
chaos and darkness of C-Rex.
I started doing my code again, by this time it was around 17:00, and
got nowhere, because M-G appeared, but he had to do some stuff with
his pentium, so I was once again stopped in finishing the demo on
time. No big deal, though, because the deadline got moved because
of the BLOODY PEOPLE WHO DON'T READ INVITATIONS I mentioned a few
paragraphs above. Anyway, my girl arrived, so I was a bit busy
entertaining her, her sister, Nck, and a few other people who were
trying to help my (lousy) coding with their (even lousier) advice.
Paranoid hung around, and finding he had nothing to do, he wisely
concluded that he could collect entries for the Amiga on his
machine. So, still wisely, he entered DPaint, made a logo saying
"ENTRIES FOR THE PARTY - HERE!", then, since it looked too smallish,
he doubled the whole thing, and thus produced one of the more
entertaining entries in the pixel art compo.
After a while, M-G finished his work by the pentium, and I finaly
got axs to it, only to find out that my modplay routines don't work
on dos 7.0... FUCK, FUCK, FUCK!!! I tried like hell to fix 'em up,
but when, waaaaay past six thirty, it was obvious I couldn't do it,
I just gave up, and pissed as I was, created a 64k .exe which
blanked the screen and whistled. That was my intro compo entry, and
the story behind it. I packed all the other stuff I had, and gave my
entries over, some to ParanoiD, some to Dominator, depending on the
machine they were supposed to be run on. So, that about covers the
boring "what Phuzzy did for the compos" bit, and I can now get over
to the actual party report.
As I said, the deadline got delayed more and more, because most
people just DON'T READ INVITATIONS, and then, consecutively, the
projections were delayed as well, and most of the entries weren't
tested. This produced a couple of unwanted results. But, let's take
it one bit at a time.
Quite a while after eight o'clock, the projections finaly begun.
First were the Multichannel compos, which were... well... quite
boring... Hazma of Titan won, with his "Human Existance" track, and
second and third were, of course, BP and DJ Dot. Pop, or what?
ParanoiD did well, though, with my absolute favourite of them all,
SuperNindzaOsvetnik (SuperNinjaAvenger)... Not much to say, except
that the insane Hazma dude made, if I recall things right, a 15Mb
module (?!) with loads of guitar samples... another module refused
to run under Cubic Player, which made for a bit of screech-scratch I
enjoyed a lot, but most of the audience was deeply disturbed.
Whatever...
Right after this, my girlfriend had to leave, so I had to walk her
and Bepa up to the tram station. Next in line were the 4-channel
modules, my fav cathegory, so I strongly believe I beat the "running
down Jevrejska street through rain" all-time speed record. But, I
got back in time.
Most of the tunes were sort of hardcore, and although well done,
they strongly lacked originality. So, all the "not-hc" tunes were up
at the top of the list. Haralampie, a motherfucking INSANE kickass
cool dude, won, of course, with his oriental-hindu-singading-hare-
lampije-swami tune... I was, of course, second, with the best module
of them all (modest, aren't I? ;-) and next were Kozmo, DJ Nick (of
course... pop, or what?) and a LOUSY tune I thought sucked big time.
But whatever. The thing that surprised me is that Alex didn't do
better, because his mod was, by my oppinion, near perfection.
Technicaly excellent, with a gr8 idea and everything... but... what
the hell... life goes on, or somehing...
Ok, now, FUCK me if I can recall the order in which the compos
followed, so I'll just take them at random... the 64k intro featured
a boring, but nicely coded intro from Mad Virgin (a cube, shaded,
mapped, and all sorts of other chilly-willy stuff being done to it),
an intro by Nevermind which, of course, won, because at the time it
seemed like an original and great idea, although the code was even
beneath my standards... and, as it turned out, the idea was ripped,
too, from some other party (basicly, they had a "texturemapped"
dot)... if I had known this at the time, they would certainly not
have gotten my vote. Third was, of course, my intro called hardcode,
for obvious reasons, and it amazed me by actualy getting VOTES!
Hehehhe...
The demo compo was completely dominated (dominatored?) by Branimir
and Tosha, Hyperopia's coders... although it didn't have the best
gfx, nor the best sfx, the code was abso-fuckin-lutely-amazing, so
their "washing" got the well deserved first place. Pas Maters, on
the other hand, got the also well deserved second spot, with great
pixels, a funky tune, and an excellent message... Corrosion had
great pixels and a great tune, no message, and the code... well, I
think it is sufficient if I say that we have installed a mechanism
in Suffocator's and Griffin's Amigas that detects any unauthorised
movement away from the screen and sends 20,000 volts up their
bottoms. So, as you may guess, they are working hard on improving
their technique
The wild compo was a tough one. Three entries, all of them
animations, two of them kickass productions. Hive studio won, and
they deserved it, although I prefered the CoRRoSioN promo anim. Both
were complex, well designed, excellently timed, and plain fuckin'
wonderful. The third one, in my oppinion, sucked, with no sound and
not much gfx, either, but that is probably only because it was
facing such mighty opponents.
Soooo, now we come down to the pixels... Jamon, of course, won (pop,
or what?) and pain following close by (do I have to repeat the "pop,
or what?" anymore?)... nice pictures, I am not a pixelator, so I
can't judge them, but I found no original idea in them. Alex found a
few bugs on the pictures, but if you want to discuss that, ask him
about it. I know zilch. Although that didn't stop me from entering
my own pixelation of an Alien... which looks kind of a bit like the
Riddley Scott "Alien"... only mine looks a bit different... and has
only two colors... and has only contours... and not much of a
contour... oh, well... back to the masters at work... nope's flower
pot man, a beautiful autoportait, was third, although I like it
best, and Alex was fourth. Paranoid, unfortunately, only snitched
ninth place, with his aforementioned "APPLICATIONS" pix... pitty,
that bitmap font was realy something.
The photoshop compo, or the "effects allowed" compo, didn't have
many entries, and I won't comment it much, again, because I am not a
gfx artist, so I know dick about what I am saying. Fodder won, and
Vita was second, although for the life of me, I couldn't see why
wasn't Vitomir's picture disqualified. Don't get me wrong, it was
funny and everything, but among three beautiful DRAWN pictures, a
simple snapshot of a TV screen kind of seems out-of-place. Hive
studio was only fifth, even though they had the only true artwork in
the competition. Even my resistance, created in about 15 minutes of
screwing around with "smooth" in DP got placed better. Something
stinks there.
The trace cathegory was OK, although, again, a "piece of cake" work
won. Konzerva (Can) by Eagle is a simple "Whiskas" texture wrapped
around a cylindrical object. Whereas the second spot, vitomir's
proba19, was a complex mirror-balls object traced in his very own
tracing routine... the others were nice, but no cigar for them this
time.
Last, but not least, the ascii compo. Remember that I told you how
the Hex dudes get an entire paragraph of their own? Well, here it
is. Abyss won the ascii compo with his ABSOLUTELY AMAZING piece of
asc2 art made on his C64!!! He brought it along, we hooked it up to
the video beam, and by George, he did it! The pictures weren't much
to look at, but the sole fact that he made them on his C64 were
enough for him to win.
The other pictures weren't much to look at, technicaly great, most
without an idea, except for green tooth's which had an idea, but no
technique, and mastermind's, which had neither. Mine I will not
comment, because it was just a piece of shit I threw together in 30
seconds after I realised that my demo will now be finished and that
I still didn't have an ascii compo entry.
Phew, that about covers the compos. Now, let's talk a little bit
about attitudes. Here comes the paragraph I said would be dedicated
to the Hyperopia/Juice people. I don't know if it was jealousy,
hatred, or simply idiotism on behalf of some (notice; some, not all)
members of the aforementioned groups, but whatever it was, it was
plain stupid to shout out smartass remarks about some of the
CoRRoSioN entries, and not only CRS stuff, but also anything that
didn't meet up with what they thought was "good". BULLSHIT!
If they realy are the _artists_ they consider themselves to be, they
should know what kind of an effort goes into creating any tiny bit
of a splotch on the screen, or even the lousiest of bleeps through
the speakers. If they know that, then it is plain shitty manners
that allow them to behave as they did. Grow up. We can bullshit
about each other on boards, fuck each other's moms in productions,
but when we get together to liven up our limp scene, I think a
little collegial attitude is expected and welcome. If you hate
something, don't vote for it. It is as simple as that. If you
_realy_ hate that something, tell everybody sitting beside you not
to vote for it. Actualy, you can go around the room telling people
not to vote for it. But shouting out stupid "supposed-to-be-funny"
comments about others' efforts, is a major assholish thing to do.
Think about all this. I hope none of that will happen again at Scene
Strike 2. Because if it does... well, you should know that we keep
Alex heavily armed and feed him only once a week. He is _hungry_ for
blood. Oh, yeah, just so that I don't seem biased against the H/J
people; this doesn't go only for them. Others were noticed doing
this, too, but not as intensely as they did. What I said goes for
all of you. Think about it, and stop acting like immature children.
After the projections were finished, with only three mistakes by the
guys in the control room, one of them being them not playing
Zordon's module - for which I humbly appologise to Zordon right here
and now, on behalf of the entire organising crew, we collected the
vote sheets and started the long and strenuous counting. There were
"only" 91 sheets, with three votes per cathegory, but trust me, that
is a whole LOT of counting to do. And the vote count proggy wasn't
finished in time. So, six of us insane people locked ourselves in a
room with a bottle of Coke and counted away, while the crowd outside
got more and more nervous... fortunately, noone broke in the door
and stoned us to death, and after quite some eyesight lost, we were
done, the results were out, Dominator, ParanoiD and myself announced
them, and handed over the prizes to the winners. I must notice that
Nope Dope was the only cool dude amongst them, he was the only one
that gave me a sweet little warm hug after the "strong and manly
handshake" we exchanged. By this time, most of the people packed
their stuff and left, but we stuck around and screwed around with
the remaining chosen few... then, at early morning, we packed up as
much stuff as we could, crammed ourselves into two cars, and went
out to, finaly, after a starved out night, get some food into
ourselves. So we did, and the part of SS1 that stuck in my brain
hardest, was the entire CoRRoSioN posse munching franticaly at bits
of pizza and sipping coke at the "Orao"... oh, yeah, and reading
chosen quotes from one of the books we were supposed to give away as
prizes, but were too ashamed to do so... "Programming in Clipper"
bullshit... I snitched one, just in case... money makes the world go
around, you know? After that, we split up, each of us heading home
to grab lots of sleep to be as fresh as possible (which means;
stoned motherfuckers) for the concert the next evening. You can read
all about it in the next article in here, "Damage 2", by yours
truly...
Okay, that about covers everything. Okay, so it doesn't cover
everything. But I have no more NRG left in me, I just passed a
goddamn exam, and I am finishing this (already too long) article
right here, wishing to see all of you, with a shitload of
productions at Scene Strike 2, which will, most likely, be held in
September, this year (1997)... I wish you all a good night and sweet
dreams!
Phuzzy Logik of CoRRoSioN