What is Moving the Scene?
This year's Easter weekend (April 3-4) broke all records. Five PC demo scene related parties were held simultaneously, namely The Gathering '99 in Norway, Mekka & Symposium 2k-1 in Germany, birdie 9 in Sweden, Spring Break 1999 in California, and The Meeting 1999 in France. At least the first two were of major importance for the whole demo community: Mekka and TG.
The parties' official IRC channels were almost bulging, filled with sceners who had to stay home for some reason and wanted to gather the latest news from the events by talking to some of the visitors in this way. Too bad only a few people from Mekka had Internet access at the party; most were in a party-internal IRC server which was protected by a firewall so that nobody could log in from outside. So the only choice for all curious onlookers was watching the webcam located at the party's official WWW realm.
The releases were awaited with excitement. People kept browsing to major FTP sites such as scene.org in order to look out for new stuff some generous party-visitors had uploaded. When after the parties the releases of some compos and most importantly the results were still missing, the traffic on the IRC channels grew even higher. Nearly every newcomer was asked whether he had been on one of the parties, could tell us what he experienced there and if he had some stuff with him he was able to share with the public. The scene behaved like a bunch of hyenas excitedly lurking for some fresh food. Equally disappointed they were when it turned out that most productions were just of average quality. With one exception: Mekka has brought us some excellent 4k intros! The Hugi Staff especially want to send respects to Shiva and Franky of Kolor for "void 3", the first 4k intro on PC with voice samples. Simply awesome! This should finally prove how wrong The Party organizers were by holding no 4k intro compo at TP98.
The next big demo party is going to be Takeover in Holland, held in June. Already, long before the start of the event, the organizers put a lot of effort in its promotion. One thing that has to be mentioned is their innovative web-site at http://www.takeover.nl. Using the latest technology like Flash 3 and Java, they show the scene where to go. Details about the organizers' plans can be found in the Takeover web-zine, which also includes high quality articles by old masters like The REW of Nostalgia and Aap/ACME, former co-editors of Imphobia. The article competition, which is hosted at this site, is just one of several new compos that will be held first at this party.
During the beginning of April, a new German book about the hacker, cracker and demo scene was released in the Cologne-based Tropen Verlag. Its name is "Hackerland", and it was written by two long-time Amiga sceners, Merlin-M! and eVRIMSSON of Nuance. In the 168-page paperback, the authors explain the history and the nature of the scene, easily understandable for all people, regardless of their computer-knowledge. Also included are interviews, scenish quotes, party photos, links to scene web-sites, and stylish group logos. If you want to find out more about the book, check out http://www.hackerland.de. German-speaking readers can also find a review in this Hugi issue.
- adok^hugi
"we are not a mag but an e-mag. we are not lite but elite."