ricardocabellov5.5

Right, this was weird, really weird. At the moment I don't know what to think about anything.

Where is the demoscene going?

First of all, about the demoscene. Seems like it's not for fun anymore, I mean, seems like you have to spend 6 months working on something so the people are happy with you.

Just an example, kb/farbrausch giving his thoughts about Media Error by Fairlight, CNCD & Orange:

This must have been a shitload of work. Still the result is as incoherent as it can get, the soundtrack is annoying (don't get me wrong, I can enjoy music like this when it's done live by three stoned people with some synth equipment at some small club, but there's a reason those sessions almost never get recorded), and the whole thing is SO not my cup of tea.

Some sporadic visual beauty in between saves it from a thumb down tho... in the hope that next time you all think about what you're doing instead of being so desparately wannabe post-modern.

This is just silly, specially coming from a group that has (imho) no design taste at all (just check his site, or farbrausch site, or any of their prods, they still live in the 90s, even with Debris (of course, their stuff is good for other reasons, but not specially for their visual taste :)). I just felt that saying "wannabe post-modern" after all that amount of good work makes him totally opinion-ignorable from now on. It's also funny that weeks ago, kb was complaining that the demosceners didn't let he do a fast prod just for fun.

Seems like years ago being able to do "good" stuff for what they expect was easier. As always it's all about beating the last demo released. But as there are no hardware limits anymore, what you have to beat is the amount of time the last group spent on the prod. So, if you want to be the new demoscene god, you need to spend at least 1 year working on a demo (Debris was done in 2 years afaik, working in a relaxed way I guess). All for what? I don't know... But this doesn't look fun anymore, looks like a job, with people expecting too much.

Maybe this is why there is every year less people doing stuff, the people can't be bothered to spend that much time on it. I guess I'll eventually move out of the PC category.

15th on the democompo

I'm usually quite pessimist, and even after watching the democompo, I was even considering that *maybe* we could even get the 5th position. Even with a prod that we mainly put together at the party place. So, when I saw that it got 15th (last) frustrated me quite a bit, mainly because this time I was just showing my "art", I wasn't following nobodies style, just trying to put something original together, and I think the music was quite cool too. So, it's weird... At least, people which I admire (navis, loaderror, preacher, nytrik, critikill ...) seemed to like it, so that's saved me of getting really frustrated.

The prod didn't shown alright on the democompo, we have an issue with the demo launcher and the aspect ratios so in the demo compo was shown distorted, but you could only see that on the first scene...

However, what do you expect of a party where Chimera was disqualified years ago, and also Platipus.

So, right now, I don't know what to think/do... start working on a stupid chown-pleaser demo and try to compete "seriously" on next year's Assembly or just forget about Assembly and don't ever attend...

Final words

Congrats to ASD and the Fairlight&friends guys. Both demos are really nice.

Oh wait!

There was something quite impressive, something that I can't see it being done at Euskal, which was that whenever a compo was being shown everyone was stopping everthing they were doing, turning off the sound, and the screen and watching the compo (probably motivated by the 'kill all the video & audio' movie tho). It was really impressive.

The best (and only) demoparty in UK has its site up and ready for you to go there and see pictures of some geeks having fun ;) Also, if you never went to one of those, and you live in UK, you may consider spending one weekend of your life in one, just to be able to share the story with your kids.

http://www.sundowndemoparty.org

I'm on the "who is coming?" list, but seems like my parents are just coming to London the same weekend... however, we may just go visit the town, and then I'll pop there (and release if possible) for a couple of hours (demoshow maybe? :D), and then go back London the next day.

Tomorrow we're flying to Helsinki (Assembly), Heathrow seems to be very busy these days, so maybe it will be a bit of a pain. But finally, after so many years, I'll be able to see the demoparty where the best prods are usually released o/ As blackpawn mention in his post, we're working on a little prod for it, something -not great-, but cute and solid :)

We've also the tickets ready for going to bcnparty (although we weren't planing to go). Now that the party is back in the right track again, we can't do other thing that support it. So, for the spanish guys, we'll see you there :)

Ah... this facebook thing is just like orkut. I tried orkut some years ago, it was fun but then I was spammed by random brazilians that I didn't know. I tried to avoid facebook because that, but I registered last week just to see why the people were talking so much about it, and I though it was more clean. And it's good, it's more clean, better designed, good ideas on it and all that... but it has been only a week since I registered and I already received the first spam-ish email. Same shit.

So, consider myself out of it (if not now, soon).

Well, those guys have been busy for months since I did the first re-designs for the site. Yes, it was me ;) Mainly I set the overall style, icon styles, layouts, IA and a bit of UE reseach... and then Antti did the real hard work and continued everything from there.

One of the most important things in this new version is something that Andre Michelle have been working on for months now, the new sequencer.

And well, these are the big news for today, I got the feeling the project is going to be quite successful, and, although the new sequencer its a bit glitchy, as soon as everyone gets moving to the new CPU's it all will work much better (or Adobe makes the player even faster :D).

http://www.splicemusic.com/

Enjoy!

I'm developing a site that is giving me some issues and for some reasons I can't test the compiled swf inside flash, the only way to test it is in Firefox (well, or any browser). That means that I don't have trace() there.

Well, after trying to solve the issue blindfolded I decided to do a quick search and I found this nice Add-on for Firefox that lets you see the trace() output inside Firefox :)

Thanks Sephiroth (once again!).

Can you believe it? News like that make me see that I'm not that crazy for spending the time I spent in this stuff, this thing is cool enough to rise interest for a companies like Pixar.

Read about what I'm talking about here.

If you're not sure what's the name of the style of electronic music that you like, in this (ugly) flash you'll find a list + evolution:

http://www.di.fm/edmguide/edmguide.html

http://www.cutandpaste.com/events/index.html

It looks a little bit silly imho...