Dialogos 2001 report
Day -1, 17:38 MET
After arriving back from a computer fair where I bought a cool network card, suddenly Topy44 from Switzerland called me and asked, whether we had some place left in our car so that wouldn't doesn't have to pay the expensive train to Jena. As we had one, I explained him how to get to my little home.
Day 1, 11:20 MET
Topy44 arrived at the local train station with his computer and other equipment. After packing things and having a snack we drove to ThUmB and then fetching up DasTier, our loyal fan-club leader, sometimes coder and Emulator scener. With a completely filled up car (it needed alot of rearranging the things so that all fitted :)) we started our travel to Jena.
Nothing really special on the motorway, this time only smaller jams, slowly but steadily they modernize the former eastern-block motorways.
At around 18:45 in the evening we arrived at the Holzmarktpassage. After I missed the entrance to the parking area I made a stylish turn in the middle of the street and drove back.
A lot of people already had arrived, but there was enough space for all of us including computers. This year we went to the other hall, where also the sleeping area was located. In the room of last years sleeping "hall" there now was a dealer for big and comfortable beds :) The funny thing was, that they also offered "free lying check" this weekend. Strangely the shop was closed throughout the rest of the event, how come? ;)
After checking that all our hardware was still alive I scanned the hall for people I knew and it was definitely no problem to find some. There we had N.E.V.E.R dudes, digisnap^matrix, unik/bypass people, Numb, some boys and girls (fashion) of Salva Mea, Adok of Hugi, some organizers from the Flag party and alot more. Later on also Farbrausch arrived and took their places near us.
At our table one MAC-coder had built up his stylish cube-MAC. There was only one problem: the power-switch was a soft-touch button located on the top right beside the system-fan. And as you know, most computer freaks have this reflex to feel, how the warm air comes out of the computer. It's easy to figure out, that many people unintentionally switched off the MAC :))
The opening ceremony was not held as usual, but later on Crest's demoshow again. He showed some very nice old demos from '93-'96. Although he had some problems with the sound in the beginning it was a success I think.
During the evening and night I coded from time to time on our 64 intro "television blue" to finalize it, as there were still 10k to fill.
I also kept a steady eye on other groups who had done intros too, like e.g. Unik or Bypass who were also working on it busily.
Day 2
After a lot of coding and small talks with several people I finally had some sleep at 5:00 in the morning. Right in time for the first competitions I stood up at 10:00. We went to the cinema (again this year, it's a really cool place for compos) to watch first the raytrace competition. We could see some pretty impressive renderings. I especially liked a pic of the well known "Abalone" game, which looked really damn realistic.
After this compo directly the wild demos started. This year it was a very good and funny compo, although of course some of the usual crap entries could be seen. Kolor & Park Studios released a cool animation, Haujobb made a very funny stop-motion movie called "Vegetable Wars". We also could see a movie about the C64, which was very cool in my eyes. Faque released an Amiga 64k intro as there are no Amiga compos at Dialogos.
The Graphics compo featured this year a lot of high-quality pictures. Some to name are from Acryl, Fashion, Critikill and Tomic. You should check them out!
During the midday I met Poti and Faxe of Black Maiden as well as the first Haujobbers. Droid and Melwyn even came to Dialogos from Finland !
Shortly before the music compos our intro was finished and I burned a security copy on CD. After that I could relaxed listen to the tunes. I was especially interested in Skyrunner's 4channel entry, as it was a sequel to his last year kick-ass track "Viva la Senora". Finally there were only three entries in the compo, all of very good quality.
Later that afternoon the mmul and MP3 compos followed. Both had some very cool tracks as well as average music. I'm not the man for music reviews, so go and leech em :))
Time moving on towards night I was coding a little bit on different things. From time to time I helped out the guys of "mein ram is zu gross" (that's "my RAM is too big" in english) or just watched the progress of their demo "verschrobene farben" ("screwed colors" or something similar). They had to port it to Windows as there was no support for MAC-demos in the compos.
Stoff64 of the same group also played some classical C64 demos on their completely freaked out Commodore machine, which was extended with electronical stuff of all kind.
Maybe I should mention, that my favourite soccer-club again lost this evening? Bad news for Poti and me :)
Towards midnight Crest held the 2nd part of his demoshow and afterwards they played old and new movies on oldskool equipment. They were played without speech but some dj's were making music fitting to the current action. That was really funny and I stayed for some 20 minutes. Watching Laurel and Hardy or "Asterix" with music is quite an alternative and interesting experience.
Day 3
Without any sleep the last day started. In order to stay awake I started leeching demos from the network and watching them. From time to time digisnap came around and I also watched a couple of demos with him. Unfortunately I couldn't get any real news from him concerning the Matrix comeback, let's hope they rock again :)
Shortly before 1:30 all people were slowly moving towards the cinema as well as also some local citizens who wanted to watch something cooler than plain cinema movies. With the usual delay at first the 4k intros were shown. The quality was about like last year. Some average ones ("c++ 4k" by delta9) and one kick-ass intro: "Trition Sirius Elysium" featured four seasons in 4k, with a tree, shadows, birds and even music, but the track was not that good :) Anyway, a cool intro from T$.
After that the funny part of the compo started. The video recorder, where the prerecordered demos and intros were played from, was blown and thus the compo had to be done live (like usually on parties). At first the sound was completely unbalanced and too high-pitched. So the music of the first intro was not really hearable anymore, but who cares, it was only our intro. It seems that we always have problems with our productions at Dialogos :) After the second intro they managed at least the sound, but now there were problems with loosy coded productions that crashed or did other nasty things. Anyways, there were very cool intros like "Discoranger doublemint" by Unik or "Synonym" by Skp.
Now there followed 16 (!) demos. But this year the average quality was not as good as last year. Too many fast-hacked demos or even only fun productions. One of them, the "Polkatro" (the only DOS-demo), was at least funny, but some were plain crap. Demos to mention are "Der Tempel des grossen Hallo" by Black Maiden, a demo in graffitti-style, "E-Strange" from haujobb as well as "la sculpture" from farbrausch. Kolor again set new standards in image quality with "De profundis" although I dare say that this demo becomes boring after watching it three times. Some people compared it to "Kasparov". It was very impressive on the bigscreen anyway.
Between the demos there were many funny breaks with blue-screens, error messages, missing files and what else can happen. KB did his very best to amuse the crowd during the breaks, and it seemed that everyone had a lot of fun. The non-scenish attenders watched the happenings very amused. After a very long compo-marathon I was dead tired and immmediately went sleeping after I had voted.
Right for the pricing ceremony I woke up and already started to pack some things. The results had no real suprises. In the graphics compo Acryl and Fashion made the top places, Skyrunner and Wayfinder dominated the music competitions. The wild compo was won by haujobb, a worthy winner indeed. The 4k compo of course was won by T$, the 64k by Unik. We made the 2nd place, which was a really nice surprise for us.
The results of the demo compo were also quite unspectacular: haujobb 3rd, Farbrausch 2nd and Kolor won.
The price-giving was this year done by XXX^haujobb who did it in a funny way, short and straighforward, but I liked it better this way. Maybe he should have told what entries made which places and not only the names of the artists, because usually people can remember better the productions than the groups. After that the usual chaos started out - people were preparing to leave. Like many dudes I was making the big tour around the partyplace to say goodbye to many people I had met. After that we carried our stuff back to our car. Sad but true, after only one weekend another great Dialogos party has ended. For us it was the best party we had ever attended. Well, I have not been to Mekka yet, so we'll see.
At first we needed some fuel to drive back, then we made us on the long way over german motorways again. After the usual traffic jams we arrived completely exhausted at home. Topy44 stayed a night at DasTier's home before driving back to Switzerland.
The first thing I did was to take a shower and then fall into my bed. One thing is sure: I have to be at Dialogos 2002! Meet you there!
The usual greetings fly out to all the cool people I met. They are too much now to name them, you know who you are. Special greetings fly again out to Poti ("hey, there's again the Finn from Cologne"), Faxe (Musikantenstadl really better than multichannel compo ??), hellfire, N.E.V.E.R (driving downstairs is a freaky idea), Stoff64 for being a really weird C64 dude and.... aaaahh, the rest :)
StyX/HeadcrasH
- I'm neither finnish nor from cologne
- comments: andi.schilling@gmx.de
Photos supplied by Adok