Skyhigh 10 ch04 The 1993 Party Report
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the 1993 party report
report from THE PARTY'93
--------------------------
by PRI/TIA/OXYRON.
hello and welcome to another, already
almost traditional party report of mine.
as usual, it contains:
1. the party and its events
2. competition results
3. a list of the groups present
4. a personal comment
the party was organized by camelot (64),
and silents,lemon and spaceballs (amiga/
pc). it took place in a big exhibition
centre at herning,denmark, starting mon-
day, december 27th,at 9.00 hours (or was
it 10.00 ?) and ending wednesday, decem-
ber 29th, at 15.00 hours. the exhibition
centre really was a huge place, twice or
even three times as big as on any party
i've ever been to - aars'91,'92 and tcc.
five (!) of the nine halls were used,
the biggest one as main party hall, two
smaller ones in addition for the same
purpose, as well as two for sleeping.
the entrance hall had a very representa-
tive design, and institutions such as a
a bank, a kiosk , a cafeteria , a large
bistro, an ice-cream stand, and of cour-
se the information counter were to be
found there. furthermore, there were se-
veral exhibition and selling stands of
well-known computer firms in one of the
smaller party-halls.
the facilities in the sleeping-halls
were very good. many separating walls
had been put all around there, so you
had many little corners you could lay
down in. also special corridors were
marked, so you didn't have to walk over
people. best, however, were the large a-
reas of isolation mat laid out every-
where! the only disturbing thing were
the loudspeakers which never were swit-
ched off in these halls, so every few
minutes you were woken up by the organi-
zers' calls!
talking about loudspeakers, there did
not seem to be any electronical signal
or jingle to introduce the calls, so
they kept making "ding-dong"-like noises
with their own voices which really got
on your nerves later on. but on the who-
le, the technical equipment was rather
good and also well-positioned: there we-
re two big screens, one quite big one
in one of the smaller party-halls, and
one very big one in the main hall. the
projectors were fixed high above on wi-
res hanging down from the ceiling, which
saved a lot of space. the speakers were
not that big, but of good quality. for
my taste they only could have been a bit
louder during the competitions, in order
to draw more attention to them and to
carry the sound also to the further cor-
ners of the hall. furthermore, the big
screen was positioned not on the short,
but on the long side of the rectangle-
formed hall, which made it possible for
more people to watch it.
at last - the showers, as well as the
toilets, were very clean, so the clea-
ning staff did a really good job!
like at aars'92, the party's own tv-
channels were broadcast. inbetween
events the screens were used in a very
informative way, showing info such as a-
bout upcoming competitions and deadlines
which also were announced via loudspea-
ker. furthermore, the whole pogramme and
time-table printed on paper was to be
found in several corners of the halls.
quite a bit of surprise-competitions
such as tug of war, karaoke and body-
crashing (1,5 l coke ex! ) were being
held, which was real fun. for the first
time ever, programming seminars were of-
fered; there also was the new category
"dealer demo" in the amiga competitions,
which, however, only had two entries.
another new event was the c64 cult-demo
show, in which important highlights from
the old times were shown.
in the competition shows one got to
see some rather nice stuff on all sys-
tems. it was, however, striking that a-
bout half of the pc demoes crashed.
therefore we saw an excellent 64 demo
show with lots of quality stuff - all in
all 10 demoes. also in the graphics and
the music show there were some rather
nice contributions to be found.
regrettably, the time limits for the
music and the demo contributions had
been reduced from 5 minutes for music
and 20 minutes for demo (according to
camelot's invitation file) to 4 minutes/
15 minutes (paper invitation). but most
of the participating tunes were already
faded out after 2 minutes or even 1.30,
for no obvious reason -there mostly even
were long breaks in between. during the
demoshow, however, the total limit of
2 hours and also the 15 minutes' limit
for each demo even were exceeded: many
demo groups, especially those whose de-
moes were of a longer duration than 15
minutes, had criticized the lowering of
the limit, so after long negotiations
with the organizers a jury was formed by
one coder each participating group. out
of a total number of 18 this jury selec-
ted the best 10 demoes to be on the com-
petition show, which finally lasted for
over two and a half hours.
just like last x-mas, votes had to be
delivered on a specially formatted disk
which in the end were to be read out by
the organizers' computers. this was dis-
played on the big screen and was called
"live counting". the display, however,
was quite confusing for many paople, and
even the organizers themselves didn't
always seem to be sure about the results
when handing out the prizes: the guy who
did the talking during the amiga ceremo-
ny seemed quite uncertain and sometimes
wasn't even able to read the winners'
names from the screen. while the 64 re-
sults concerning demo and music seemed
to match with the screen display, the
graphics results even differed totally,
which was supposed to be due to (quote)
"some amiga guy" who had "fucked up the
system".
before i come over to the results i'd
like to say that we in oxyron do not ta-
ke them fully seriously as we strongly
believe the competitions have been mani-
pulated! (see my comment)
but now here are the full results.
+--------------> demo <----------------+
place points group
----------------------------
1. (1640) CAMELOT
2. (1328) CENSOR DESIGN
3. (1044) FOCUS
4. ( 704) fairlight
5. ( 400) oxyron
6. ( 224) dual crew
+---------------- demo ----------------+
place point
-----------------------
7. ( 168) silicon
8. ( 96) antic
( 96) spirit
10. ( 48) w.o.w.
+------------> graphics <--------------+
place points artist
-------------------------------
1. (740) OXIDY/FAIRLIGHT
2. (604) DANE/TRIAD
3. (364) DEEKAY/CREST
4. (288) mad/padua
5. (224) creeper/antic
6. (220) stasi/noice
7. (204) ivan/smash des.
(204) joe/antic
9. (196) scat/red sector
10. (188) floris/chromance
11. (160) felidae/reflex
12. (140) mirage/focus
13. ( 76) electric/extend
14. ( 72) syndrom/crest
15. ( 64) mystic/crossline
16. ( 56) ?/?
17. ( 52) hein holt/focus
( 52) shadowolf/paralyze
19. ( 48) hi-lite/success
20. ( 40) sander/focus
( 40) rob/camelot
22. ( 32) sdi/alpha flight
23. ( 24) p.s./eastgang
( 24) drunken man/?
25. ( 20) avalanche/atlantis
( 20) sundancer/regina
27. ( 12) the leader/bsab
( 12) awa/tsr/wow
( 12) pollux/equinoxe
( 12) aeg/smash des.
31. ( 8) mike/?
32. ( 4) alcohol/bronx
( 4) panic/earthquake
34. ( 0) yoga/wow
+--------------> music <---------------+
place points artist
-----------------------------------
1. (1000) RED DEVIL/FAIRLIGHT
2. ( 488) BLUES/LIGHT
3. ( 384) ZYRON/ANTIC
4. ( 320) ody/eastgang
5. ( 308) amadeus/meka design
6. ( 176) doh/cryptoburners
7. ( 160) erik af ekhage/indy
8. ( 152) licket/noice
9. ( 148) echo/comic pirates
10. ( 140) m.harestad/moz(ic)art
11. ( 124) emax/trsi
12. ( 100) yoko/fiction
13. ( 92) shark/regina
14. ( 80) tango/triad
15. ( 56) trident&dane/triad
( 56) danko/censor design
17. ( 20) syndrom/tia/crest
18. ( 16) morbid/shazam
19. ( 12) thor/extend
( 12) b.i.o./creatures
21. ( 0) pri/tia/oxyron
( 0) herr tie/mtv
( 0) the alien/b.c.d.
+-----+
now for a (probably incomplete) list of
the groups present at the party:
alpha flight, amnesia, antic, atlantis,
black code,bronx, bsab, camelot, censor,
chromance,comic pirates,crest,creatures,
crossline, dual crew,eastgang, equinoxe,
excess,extend, fairlight, fiction,focus,
genesis, jam, light, lore of arts, meka,
noice, oxyron, padua, paralyze, reflex,
regina, silicon, smash, spirit, success,
tia, topaz, trc, triad, trsi, wow.
well, now i will come over to the last
part of this report: the personal com-
ment!
first off- in my opinion, on the whole
this party was the most well organized
one so far, except for one important as-
pect: the competitions, that is, the mu-
sic show, the confusing mode of counting
and announcing the winners, and of cour-
se the results.
while in camelot's file-invitation the
time limit for each tune had been set to
5 minutes, it had been reduced to 4 when
the paper-invitation came out. but none
of the tunes was actually played longer
than two or even only one and a half mi-
nutes! a lot of people -including myself
- were quite pissed about this. many
composers had done tunes which were a-
bout three or four minutes long and
which they had spent quite a bit of work
in. it seems many people do not realize
that it is very important to listen to
the whole tune, not only to its first
one or two minutes. when you look at a
picture, you don't only watch the lower
or the upper part, either - you look at
the whole one! and that's what it should
be like concerning music. some tunes
need a longer time to build up, others
have major changes only after some minu-
tes, and so on. so if you don't listen
long enough, you might estimate the tu-
ne's character and quality wrongly! so
to all future party organizers: make su-
re to play all tunes fully, and if this
is not possible, form a jury to select
the best ones. better disadvantage only
some competitors than all of them!
over to the next point - the counting
of the votes. while at aars'92 the pro-
mised "live counting" had not taken pla-
ce, it was realized this time, but in a
quite confusing way. without any intro-
duction, they started to display info-
screens containing data about the parti-
cipants and their current positions in
each competition. regrettably these
screens were flipped quite fast, and so
it wasn't really possible to gain much
information from them, which lead to
confusion among people. finally, when
all votes had been counted and the win-
ners were to be announced,the organizers
did not even seem to be able to stop the
required display for each competition as
it kept switching over all the time.
furthermore there didn't seem to be a-
ny monitor or not even any written form
which told the organizers the results,
so they always had to twist their heads
to read from the big screen, in which
one of the amiga organizers even failed
as he wasn't able to read the names! ri-
diculous really...
now some words on the disk-voting sys-
tem, which in my opinion perhaps is easy
to handle by the organizers, but defina-
tely inconvenient for the voters: as on-
ly the competitor's number, but not his
name is counted, it is hard to memorize
all numbers you want to vote for, espe-
cially if there is a greater amount of
competitors and if you perhaps change
your mind during a compo show. to help
the people out who had forgotten the
numbers, only one or two small lists
were laid out at the information coun-
ter, however, the 64 demo-compo was left
out there! the voting system at tcc had
been much better - you had all the names
and numbers displayed on one screen and
could enter your votes directly into the
computer. i do hope people stick to this
system in the future!
but now let me finally lose some words
about the competition results. what fol-
lows now does not only represent my per-
sonal opinion, but also those of my
groupmates, furthermore those of many
other people i spoke to at the party.
if you take a closer look at the re-
sults, you surely will agree with my
claim that there has been some VOTE-
CHEATING going on, or the results have
been FAKED, or even both.
look at the demo-results. camelot at
#1 is absolutely justified, censor at #2
is ok, too. but focus at #3, in front of
fairlight and oxyron? very strange. dual
crew and silicon in front of spirit and
antic? weird. (already when the coders'
jury selected the 10 best demoes, e.g.
ours was ranked top 3 or higher, so... )
there also was a rumour circulating,
saying fairlight-members were supposed
to have delivered a lot of disks contai-
ning votes for themselves. this would
explain why on both music and graphics
compo there are fairlight-members at #1.
another fact which adds to this supposi-
tion is red devil getting the exact a-
munt of 1000 points, while the differen-
ce to #2 is over 500 points. now if this
is not cheated you can call me moskva-
tv! not to mention my own place at #21
with 0 (in words: zero) points. absolu-
tely ridiculous... without any arrogance
- i was one of the most well-known com-
posers there, and i dare to say my tune
wasn't bad either, furthermore there we-
re quite some people who told me they
had voted me top 5 or higher, so don't
try to tell me anything...
there are some more curiosities to be
found in both the music and graphics re-
sults, e.g hein holt only at #17, even
lower than the FAKE picture "crossfire
sucks" at #16, and so on... furthermore
the rather doubtful excuse that "some a-
miga guy" was supposed to have "fucked
up the system" when the organizers did
the announcement of the 64 graphics win-
ners, which was absolutely incongruent
to the display on the big screen.
to put it in a nutshell - i do not ha-
ve any proofs for my claim, but it all
seems very suspicious, doesn't it? so in
my and also many other people's opinion
either the organizers must have had
their hands in there somewhere, or there
must have been some voters who cheated,
or even both.
anyway, as the whole party was as much
fun it is really a pity that these inci-
dents occured at the end, so the great
atmosphere suddenly was destroyed. but
i still think on the whole it was a
great event and a milestone in the his-
tory of parties. - now my wish for the
next party is: general organization like
herning, voting system like tcc, fair
competitions and decent results like tcc
or aars! let's see if it comes true...
+-----+
at last i would like to make clear
that my comment is ment to be taken as
serious matter-of-fact criticism, but
definately not as any personal offence.
so i hope there won't occure any hostile
feelings!
if anybody would like to comment on this
feel free to contact me under:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
i'm off the keys...
yours,
PRI/TIA/OXYRON
+--------------+
ps. this chapter was also brought in the
now dead 'addybook!' but i think and i
belive that it's so important (and maybe
no so spread) that it ofcoz should be
brought in this mag.
so enjoy! and if you think pri is wrong
then contact him!! (BIZ KID)
