Lobotomia '02 report
I stayed awake way too late the night before Lobotomia drawing my gfx entry. The morning I woke up too early but soon it was time to leave for to pick up ld0d at his place. I went there by bus and rang the doorbell, but no one came to open the door. I stood there for over an hour, in the rain that was almost pouring. Then I decided that what the heck, his loss if he can't keep what he agrees to and took a bus to a railway station in hopes of catching a train that had just left from the main railway station of Helsinki. I took a train from Malmi to Tikkurila but missed the train to Lahti (which was a "cheap" one) and had to wait an hour for another one (which was an expensive one, of course).
I had decided to walk through the train to see if ld0d was there or some other sceners I knew, but the train turned out to be a two-floored one (I had never been to one of those before) so it was quite big and I just walked through maybe 1/3 of it and then sat down on my place and resumed drawing ANSI on my laptop. The train trip took an hour but I had to stop fiddling with Aciddraw when I realized my mind was forming ANSI blocks of the fields and forests when I looked out of the window.
When I got out of the train I had the feeling I would never find my way to the partyplace. The map was on my computer and I had given it some glances on the train, but I couldn't remember any meaningful details about it. Fortunately I hit a group of sceners who turned out to be yessa, delffu, Geel, ccr and some other people I can't recall. They had to call and ask for help at some point, but eventually we found Kasisali. Time was about 17.45 then, the party had begun 16.00. There were some but not many people. I bought a computer place for 15 euros, got the wristband from ajj who recognised me and walked in. There I noticed zeroic and drii-mi. I left my laptop and most of my stuff on the computer place besides zeroic's (whose place wasn't retangular but a small round table).
We were out for grocery shopping (well, some of us also booze shopping). I had never really been in Lahti so it was quite interesting to see what the city was about. I and yessa shared the same diet, buying bananas, tortilla chips and baby foods. Back in the party place I tried to get my laptop online but failed. The PCMCIA network adapter had been broken for quite a while, but it had always worked after trying long enough. I did get the led to blink a couple of times but never to receive even one packet.
Ld0d arrived soon, bearing no explanation about breaking our agreement whatsoever. I don't really remember what we did on the Friday evening. Probably watched some demos, met people we hadn't seen before and spent quite a lot time out in the "boozing area" (not drinking alcohol though). I usually don't like talking to drunken people but this time I found it quite amusing. Some people's behaviour got way out of hand though. Many were expressing the concept of sceneboylove (tm) by (french)kissing each other. Astu tried to lick almost every male who was there. Some people were also wrestling etc. Loop went mental with his digicam and took 307 pictures that night. MFX and people were barbequing something. There were some people I knew and several people recognised me, probably from the Finnish IRC gallery site. Many of those didn't talk very coherently, for some reason. Loop did my hair in pigtails and I thought I was going bald when I removed them.
Inside the party hall people were using Deluxe Paint to create magnificent pieces of art. Some of those actually presented something, some were only randomly placed pixels (or so it seemed). I finished my ANSI pic, converted it to bmp with a handy utility my friend had coded for me and submitted it to the FTP server, knowing that it'd probably rank last or second last. I also spent some time on IRC on the public machine that was meant for submitting compo entries. There was a sign that forbade IRC and dinosaurs on that computer but many people had been ircing there so I figured that it wouldn't be a cardinal sin. At 22.00 or something it was time for the Wild Compo. At small parties wild compos are always about crappy home videos and this was no exception. MFX had done two weird video clips and Pyrmiö group presented a wild named "Akkuporakonemurhaajalesboapplepornomuo- vailuvahaanimaatiowildi", which showed us drills, lesbians, Apple Macintosh, porn etc made out of Play-Doh. There was also one live performance where some guy rapped. There were many demos shown on the screen at night, many good ones such as State of Mind and En haluaisi olla.
I had bought 1.5l of Classic cola, because I'm not used to really sleeping at parties. This time someone stole my cola bottle. I was also quite bored and ld0d wanted to sleep so I decided to get some rest too. First I lied besides him and the floor was really cold, it made me shiver (well, because of chronical fever I shiver really easily, but everyone knows it's icky to sleep on cold platform). Then he decided not to sleep after all and I went for a quick IRC session, during which he disappeared and I decided to get some more sleep. Aware of the freezing cold floor, I built myself a "bed" out of three chairs. It was quite uncomfortable since the chairs weren't all flat and some people didn't notice me and tried to sit on the chairs. I had some really weird dreams about C-64. (I was sleeping in front of several Amigas, a VIC-20 and at least one C-64.) We also watched Akira on teel's computer at night, but I couldn't really concentrate since I was so tired that I kept falling asleep, only to be woken up by the feeling of my head "dropping". I can remember that there was a lot of blood shedding and that the subtitles were really amusing, besides the replics they had also stuff like "(tires screeching)" and "(angry voices)".
It was something like 6 in the morning when we woke up and I have no idea what we did then. I dropped on IRC only to be reminded that people don't go there on such crazy times of the day. I think I and some people watched demos (mostly Ephidrena and Haujobb) on the Amiga besides my computer place. We also saw rjv who had puked all over himself quite badly and drii-mi who had finally slept somewhat, but not enough to make her really tolerable. ;-) Early on Saturday (I think) she bought a rose for stonda, who had birthday. After that she bought about 20-30 additional roses and gave them to all people she considered nice. It brought some happy atmosphere to the otherwise tired partyplace. People attached roses to their hair, clothing etc but the problem was that the roses were quite "bad quality". Soon the floor of the entrance room was full of rose leaves (yep, leaves, not petals).
The deadline for all compos was at 12.00 but most people had submitted their entries way before that, except for loop and astu and some other guys who had drawn some dinosaurs (some of which were really perverted) on one of the Amigas. Two hours after the deadline they figured out that the easiest way to transfer the masterpiece to the submission machine was to take a picture of it, transfer it to my computer - they had been using my laptop as a storage place for all the picture material because no one else admitted having an USB bus - and then put that photo on a floppy and submit it. That's what they also did, but their art was disqualified and we weren't sure if it was because that it was late or because dinosaurs weren't allowed in the compo. One explanation was that it would have won the compo had it been shown.
On Saturday afternoon zeroic, ajj, ld0d and I walked into a kebab restaurant maybe 1.5km from the partyplace. That damn place didn't have any sensible vegetarian meals, though I think I wouldn't have eaten anyway. It was something like 3 in the afternoon but I felt like it was already 8, since the day felt so long because I had woken up so early. After that ld0d downloaded a C-64 emulator and three games (Wizball, Paradroid and something else) and brought them on a floppy to my laptop. He spent several hours playing them (probably just wanted to show off and pretend being really oldskool ;-) During the gaming ld0d's school friend SkiZo whom I also somewhat knew arrived. I didn't even know he was coming.
At some point of Saturday jobe and rjv decided to compose some music with Buzz. For those who don't know jobe's music, it's usually noisy, chaotic, nonmelodic, but I really like it. When he had fiddled for some time with the machines and patterns, there was an interesting mixture of very weird noises. He kept flinging some of the switches and the result sounded exactly like a confused elephant or mammoth fleeing from a group of some primitive hunters, who were trampling like hell. Somehow it was ear-damaging, but somehow it was also good.
Shops close at 18.00 on Saturdays in Finland. It was maybe 17.50 when the guys realized they didn't have enough coke and food, even though we had been grocery shopping once already that day. We walked to the nearby market and bought some bread and stuff. Everyone of us was thinking that the gfx compo was held 19.00 but when we returned to the party place they were already showing entry #8. Some of the pictures were good, some mediocre, some quite bad but at least trying to be funny. I missed my own entry, crap. But fortunately they did a reshow.
Then I found out the organizers had screwed up my prod's name. For some reason they had found the name of the creator in the file_id.diz, but not the name of the prod which was "Isoäiti, miksi sinulla on niin suuret silmät?" ("Grandma, why are your eyes so big?"). So my caricature of an anime girl was shown as "Isoäiti" which pretty much spoiled the "great" idea behind that picture. I ended up getting five points. Ccr's C-64 picture "Täti sanoo" won the compo and second was "the incredible micxaman & the heartbreak kid: protoman ja hercule poirot kertomassa rintamamieskaskuja 1900-luvun alkupuolella" (the creators were delffu and zeroic of wAMMA, zeroic also had one other entry which was a serious one). Visualice's Donald duck ended up in the third place. The winner had 56 points, the second comer 54 and the third one 51 so there was some competition.
After the compo we went back outside where there was still some heavy boozing. There were both a camp fire and real bbq's. Geel had bought about a kilo of champignons and I had hoped to get some, but they had eaten them all with drii-mi. Some MFX guys (nosfe?) made wok food, which I heard was very good. The camp fire was pretty wicked, there were aspen leaves thrown to it so it made a lot of smoke and people also threw there an empty beer can. Some even placed their mobile phones on the wooden sticks which were in fire, but I think none managed to damage theirs badly. Loop was again a mad cameraman and also performed some hot and heavy kissing with a guy named Hot. I talked with SkiZo about Amigas and C-64's.
Some people climbed on a cement fence that surrounded a huge oil tank, but it didn't look that dangerous since it was only a couple of meters in height. Drii-mi, who's a little girl after all, had drunk a lot of cider and the home made beverages astu and maybe some other people had brought and kept telling everyone she loved them, though she did it also the previous night. She also stood there on the cement thing and shouted some things about suomiscene and bukkake.
The previous night Loop had been wearing a cyan tank top which was drii-mi's but intended for BriteLite, who wore it for some time. Now Loop had completely lost his shirt and some people had drawn some explicit pictures on his skin and there were also related texts. Jobe scribbled "FAKC YUO" in the dust with his feet. Several people asked if they could kiss me but I politely refused. I was also offered some kilju, which stank incredibly bad.
All the compos were early in the Saturday night and some of the things happened between, some after the compos. At 20 I think was the music compo. There were 11 tunes. A couple of them were really weird, but one was so generic I can't even remember anything about it, except that it was something I had heard a million times on the module front. Paavi's "I rebooted my A500 fiilings" turned out to be the winner of the compo, I voted it as #2. I also voted for apemon's The Recapture and Inama by maccoiba / arfos. Synteesi / MFX took the second place in that compo and third was SounDemoN's Crazy Horse (which was the only SID tune competing). After the music compo it was time for the 64k intros which were quite a disappointment since there were only four entries of which one was good. It was viznut's VIC-20 intro. Jumalauta's minimalistic prod crashed I think and one intro had nothing else but one effect and text "the end".
The last of the compos was of course the demo compo, which had a stunning number of entries shown: 17. Among them were demos for Windows, Java, Amiga, C-64 and I think for DOS too. The compo was in time even and without any real delays which was surprising, especially since there were so many platforms. Jumalauta and wAMMA had both worked hard and released three entries (tehtävä 81 by haamujengi was also wAMMA's).
I most liked Unique's Sub-standard, which ended up on place 5. Zenon's Amiga prod The way was also nice and so were MFX's A fire upon the deep, even though they've done a lot better prods. The winner of the compo, flo's eskapismi was really chaotic and quite nice, but I was surprised that it won (44 points, compared to MFX's 41 points). Dekadence had a photo slideshow with sgeneboetry and booze humor. There were also two demos whose main point was "funny animation" created by cutting photos in pieces and moving them (a bad explanation, but I don't know how to say it better). A funny thing was that such legends as The Silents, Scoopex and Hoodlum had done a demo to advertise the new World Charts website, but it didn't get a single vote! It wasn't bad, but since it wasn't extremely good nor funny, I guess it just didn't stand out.
After the democompo I went out for some time, but then decided to go back in. I think we watched some Amiga demos and then I and ld0d went to sleep on an empty table. My sleep was quite distracted though because of music played out loud. After we woke up we found drii-mi, who said she had lost some of her clothes (hmm...) but nothing vital it seemed since she still had her trousers and top. I stared at Jw0's game of Monkey Island for hours. There wasn't much action on the partyplace. Bigscreen was blank. Some people were casting their votes on the public non-dinosaur machine. Voting was allowed until 12 o'clock I think. The price "ceremony" was scheduled for 14 or 15 o'clock, but many people were already packing up their stuff so ld0d, SkiZo and I decided to leave on the 12.20 train. The rest of the story is quite uneventless, the guys wanted to go to Maccy D's because Rolls wasn't open yet and they got their burgers and fries and we went to the train station and bought tickets and got to the train, which took us home.
All in all, Lobotomia was a very nice party with a friendly scene atmosphere. No gamers (I didn't see anyone playing Guage or anything), no lamers, no big problems. I'll definitely be there next year if it's arranged.
For results and downloads
The official site
For links to photos