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               report from                    "the computer crossroads" (tcc)                   in gothenburg                                 ---                    by pr..."

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<pre>
report from
"the computer crossroads" (tcc)
in gothenburg
---
by pri/tia/oxyron.

contents: 1.the party and its events
2.competition results
3.a list of the groups present
4.a personal comment
in this report i will restrict only to
c64 matters as there certainly will be
quite a bit of reports on the other sys-
tems as well.

the party took place in the swedish ex-
hibition centre in gothenburg from sa-
turday 29 to monday 31 of may, 1993. it
was organized by light, horizon (c64),
digital illusions/silents, phenomena (a-
miga), cascada, the code blasters (pc),
electra, and omega (atari).
one very large hall of the exhibition
centre was used - not even to its very
limit, from which you can deduce that it
must have been really very large, to
hold all the users which were, judging
by the eye, about 1500 (or even more)
people, at one time.
as usual on a party, there was a big
screen as well as some sound equipment
on top of the hall, which was also whe-
re the information and a selling stand
for all kinds of computer stuff were lo-
cated. at the very back of the hall,
protected from the party noise by some
walls,there was a snack bar to be found,
and, divided from there by another wall,
the sleeping section.
when the screen was not used for any
of the competitions,mostly mtv was shown
on it - except for a swedish cartoon be-
fore the prize ceremony, a swedish news
programme (more about that later), and,
now and then, some information.
similar to aars last year, there was
a video demonstration by kyd/balle at
saturday midnight. sunday was all about
the competitions, whereas on monday the
only highlight was the prize ceremony.
as to be deduced from the party invi-
tation, every single competition was
suppused to last up to one hour (e.g.
the maximum amount of tunes for the c64
musiccompo was 20, and the maximum time
allowed for each tune was 3 minutes), so
it was to be supposed that this had all
been organized very properly. practical-
ly, however, almost every competition
was delayed for at least a quarter of an
hour - mostly not even for an explicable
heason; at least there was none given -
and, e.g. in the c64 musiccompo, there
were even more than twenty contribu-
tions.
as always on the first day of a party,
people made a lot of noise (techno non
stop) which decreased while the second
day when many of them had got tired and
were sleeping. curiously enough, unlike
on all the scandinavian parties before,
only very few people had brought their
video equipment, and none of them showed
a porno or the like - in aars last year
you had been able to see dicks and pus-
sies on every corner.
there were almost only cool people in
the place, except for some swedish right
extremists - partly skinheads - who had
swedish flags hanging all around their
tables and went through the hall, shou-
ting nazi paroles and annoying people.
luckily, they were only very few, so
they were not able to get on people's
nerves all the time.
a nice thing was that the organizers
had invited a tv-reporter team which
went all around in the hall, recording
on audio and video and also doing small
interviews. a summary of it was to be
shown in the swedish evening news.

in case of receiving more than twenty
contributions per competition there was
supposed to be a jury, curiously enough
consisting of people who also took part
in the compo themselves (e.g. danko, de-
coder, zyron and me in the music jury).
however, these idea was not realized; in
the musiccompo all 21 tunes were allowed
to compete (what would have been the use
anyway - one tune more or less).
the show for the musiccompetition was
first. the competitors were: ody/east-
gang, zakk, decoder/noice, twoflower/
twilight, thor/extend, matrix/nordic
beat, sandman/megaunit, mr.giga+agemixer
/astral, quan+evony/nordic beat, fozzie/
gothic design, chock/maniax, danko/cen-
sor, syndrom/tia/crest, creeper/antic,
ed/wrath designs, joe/antic, me (pri/tia
/oxyron), tmt/wrath designs, argon/ex-
tend and zyron/antic.
the starting time had been set to 17
hours, but as it was delayed for 15 mi-
nutes, it could not be finished by 18
hours, which was the time when the swe-
dish evening news - on which the tv-re-
port of the party was supposed to be -
started. so what did the organizers do ?
when the 17th tune was over at about
17.57, they did not make a break but e-
ven started to play the next one - which
was mine (pri's) - and stopped playing
right in the middle of it ! as it was
only 2:38 long, there would still have
been enough time if they had played it
fully, but instead they preferred to ma-
ke a two minute's break before they
switched on the news. finally, at the
news' very end (at about 18.10) came the
tv-report, and after that they continued
the music compo show, starting off with
my tune again which they now played in
full length.
a striking thing was that some people
who normally are graphicians (creeper/
antic, ed/wrath, joe/antic, tmt/wrath)
had also taken part in the music compo,
namely with fully digitalized stuff
which had not been forbidden by the or-
ganizers (see my comment).

the graphics compo show luckily went
without any disturbing incidents. here
the competitors were: black samurai/ca-
melot, tmt/wrath, dane/twilight, elec-
tric/extend, avatar, dragon/censor, ja-
son, ogami/fairlight, mehlhirn/ultimate,
death/topaz, creeper/antic, hiccup, biz
kid/oxyron, joe/antic, rrr/oxyron, luka/
trance, stasi/noice, tgi, and private
soldier/eastgang.
of course already indicated by the na-
me, the picture by mehlhirn (in english:
"flour brain") was a fake. in intentio-
nally ugly designed letters it said
"west bam sucks". well, no comment on
this childish action...

in the biggest event for c64, the demo
competition, it were 7 groups who took
part: censor design, noice, antic, booze
designs, illusion, topaz and oxyron. ca-
melot and twilight had not been able to
finish their demos in time, which went
also for fairlight, who therefore "con-
tributed" only with a picture not really
to be taken seriously. the illusion de-
mo consisted of only one part with some
very old efects. the part which got the
most applause was a part in the censor
demo which contained a very nice and
colourful invention - it is hard to de-
scribe, get the demo and see yourself !
booze designs - who by the way consist
of only two people - also impressed the
audience with some nice routines - to be
especially mentioned here are an all-
border picture mover (x and y axis) and
some ultra fast vectors and shadebobs.
however, many of the graphics and musics
were ripped, but this did not seem to
have any effect on the result (see be-
low). antic also had some nice routines,
e.g. a fractal ball and a bitmap vector,
however, not in realtime. our (oxy) demo
contained a bitmap vector, too, a bit
slower, but in realtime. the noice demo
was not bad either, containing some cool
vector objects (clock, bycicle...) and
a nice "ozone layer"-part. the topaz de-
mo featured some nice jumping "rubber
circles". i dare to say that our demo
was quite good as well, however, a fur-
ther evaluation i leave to others.

before i come to the results let me
lose a few words about the voting and
registration system which really was one
of the well organized things at the par-
ty: at your arrival you were given a
small sheet on which you had to give
your personal data. these data then were
registered in the organizers' computers.
this worked much better than in aars
where you had to give your data orally
and thus often spelling mistakes occu-
red, especially concerning people's han-
dles. everytime a competition show was
over, three pc's stood ready to be voted
on. you had to give your name and the
numbers of your thre favourite contri-
butions of which also a list was dis-
played. in aars you had had to memorize
the numbers by yourself and to put your
votes on a disk which was to be read out
by the organizers' computers, - this had
been quite fussy.

at 13 hours on the last day of the
party there was to be the prize ceremo-
ny. as usual, it was delayed, but not
the usual 15 minutes - no, 15 minutes
and one whole hour ! and not one bit of
an explanation was given. meanwhile a
swedish cartoon film was shown. regret-
tably non-swedes were not able to under-
stand a word, but you were able to fol-
low the action by the pictures. however,
i will not go on and give a detailed a-
nalysis of the film as you surely are
waiting for the results, just like we
were when watching the film ! well, here
they are:
demo
-----
1. censor design
2. booze designs
3. antic
graphics musics
--------- -------
1. joe/antic 1. ed/wrath designs
2. creeper/antic 2. ratpoison/noice
3. electric/extend 3. fozzie/gothic

as the party was sponsored by coca cola,
every winner received t-shirts, sweat-
shirts and similar stuff from them. win-
ners on the other cumputer systems part-
ly also received letters from the german
software company "neon" which contained
offers to produce for them (on c64, big
commercial game production of course has
no future anymore, it is the demo scene
that keeps it alive!). the prize money
was not fixed, but the winners received
a specially calculated amount of money
according to the percentage of the votes
they had got. so if you were on second
place but had received almost as many
votes as the winner, you also got almost
the same amount of money.
something which should have surprised
many people, and especially me, happened
when ed/wrath who had won the music com-
po came to the stage: he said that as
his contribution was a digi he had done
just for fun, he would not deserve the
first place because the digitized stuff
was not his own work. and - guess what -
he furthermore said that i (pri) deser-
ved to be the winner ! i have to explain
here that i had not known him before the
party, and also many other people i tal-
ked to on the party said that my tune
was the best, so this statement by ed
certainly was no kind of "sympathy vo-
te". ed even wanted to give me his prize
money ! well, you can imagine i felt ex-
tremely honoured by his noble and also
courageous gesture, but of course i did
not accept this offer. anyway, i'd like
to take the opportunity to send a big
hello to ed here !

before i go on to express my personal
opinion about this party, i will try and
give a list of the groups which were
present. if i overlooked anyone, please
don't kill me, for nobody's perfect !

groups present at tcc'93 in gothenburg:

antic, astral, booze, bronx, camelot,
censor, crest, deicide, eastgang, ex-
tend, fairlight, genesis, gothic, hori-
zon, illusion, legend, light, maniax,
megaunit, noice, nordic beat, oxyron,
paralyze, sunrise, tia, topaz, trance,
triad, twilight, vision, wrath.

well, now for some general evaluation
of the party. in the invitation it said
it was going to be the "greatest and
most well organized party ever held".
there also were to be two high quality
big screens and "superb" sound equip-
ment, furthermore a restaurant open 24
hours a day. well, first of all let me
say it definitely was not the most well
organized party at all. it seems all the
things claimed in the invitation were
only halfway true: the snack bar closed
at night - perhaps there was a restau-
rant open 24 hours some blocks away, but
not at the party place -, there was only
one screen which was of not too good
quality as it was not very sharp and you
were not even able to recognize an in-
terlaced picture by any flickering. at
the beginning - the c64 music compo -
the sound did not come across very well.
i don't know if it was only because of
the equipment itself or because of the
organizers' inability to handle the e-
qualizer and proportion the sound: du-
ring the first half of the tunes the
basses were way too fat; then an organi-
zer came to the front of the stage and
tried to fix it by fidging about and gi-
ving signs to the ones at the back. the
result was that now the basses were much
too thin... luckily, the sound later ca-
me across quite acceptably during the
democompo show, however, not comparable
to aars !
there, the organizers also had been
much friendlier. here, you were given
short and partly not very friendly ans-
wers if you wanted to know anything
(this went especially for bappalander).
there also were some girls at the infor-
mation who probably only sat there for
decoration, for they did not seem to ha-
ve an idea of anything at all. if you
asked anything they mostly had to con-
sult a male organizer themselves; some
didn't even understand english: i once
asked something about the compo, and
what did the chick say ? "speak english
please!" - argh...
another thing i missed at the informa-
tion was a detailed time table of the
events. only some data about this had
been given in the invitation, the rest,
it said there, should be a "party sur-
price" (note the spelling mistake there,
it has to be "surprise", analphabets).
well, it really was a surprise, but a
bad one, because the rest of the data
was shown on the big screen on the first
day for only a short time. i once went
to the information stand and asked bap-
palander/light for the starting times of
the c64 competitions. in a matter-of-
fact tone i also criticized the general
lack of information. but guess what -
bappalander felt personally offended and
said (quote): "why don't you just go a-
round the party twice and then come back
and ask in a more polite way ?" - now
isn't that ridiculous...
another thing which i did not under-
stand was that almost every compo show
- especially the prize ceremony - was
delayed for quite some time - without
any explanation from the organizers. but
the biggest impudence was that they
stopped my tune right in the middle. if
they are not able to start the compo
show in time it is not my fault if they
cannot finish by 18 hours. they perhaps
could have if they wouldn't have played
some shorter tunes twice or even three
times without noticing their restarts.
but so they just faded out the tune e-
ven three minutes before the news star-
ted and only said they made a short
break - don't you think they apologized
to me in any way... i mean, they could
have thought to themselves the tv-report
about the party wouldn't be first on in
the news. but if they obviously are not
able to switch the screen display from
computer to tv within three minutes, i
shall consider this very poor. taking my
tune up again after the news was the
least they could have done.
don't think me fussy, i'm just talking
about this so detailedly because playing
my tune twice (or to be exact, one and a
half times) in contrast to all the other
tunes obviously had an effect on the vo-
ters. quite a bit of people i spoke to
liked my tune best, and i really would
have had a chance to get into the top
three which was lost now because of this
incident - and because of the full digi-
talized tunes which were allowed to take
part.
i think you will agree with me that it
is a higher stage of art if you do a mu-
sic all on your own than if you digitize
something by someone elso from cd or ta-
pe. here you only have to use a digi
program and an appropriate interface;
the only "creative" thing is to remix
the data, and the only difficulty to ma-
ke thl digi run smooth and in the measu-
re. but it takes a good deal more than
that to do good music yourself. you have
to have ideas, invent melodies, soli,
rhythm, structures, do instruments and
know how to combine all this to a tune
- to put it in a nutshell, you have to
have musical feeling. even people who
have no idea of doing music at all can
do a digi which sounds relatively good
- and as full digis were allowed to take
part in the competition, this influenced
the result to the bad. partly because
quite a bit of c64 guys like techno and
obviously didn't seem to care wether the
tune was done by the participant himself
or not, partly because the amiga users
thought it cool that on even a so
"small" computer like the 64 somebody
was able to do a good digi (i'm really
not saying it was a bad one). however,
an amiga user who has never owned a c64
- and there are quite many amiga users
of that kind - has no idea after which
criteria to judge music on c64. vice
versa it is just the same - if i see an
effect on the amiga i only see if it is
nice or not, but i don't know how hard
it is to code it.
so what i'm saying is - for a competi-
tion on a special system, let only the
users of the same system vote, otherwi-
se this will distort the result.

alright, but enough criticized here.
all in all the party was an event you
absolutely shouldn't have missed. except
for the swedish right extremists there
were only cool people there, and many
quality productions got released. the
atmosphere was good and you could really
have fun. even though i have put a lot
of criticism on the organizers, i have
to thank them for organizing the party
at all and giving the summer an event
one could look forward to - and certain-
ly doesn't regret having been to !

and if you say all this criticism is
unjustified because i couldn't have done
better - i don't know if i could have,
but i surely wouldn't have made promises
of which i hadn't known if i would be
able to fulfill them.

in that sense...
see you all in aars'93!

yours,
pri/tia/oxyron
</pre>

Addybook 13 TCC'93 Report - Revision history

Xiii: Created page with "
report from "the computer crossroads" (tcc) in gothenburg --- by pr..."