Icecube 03 report
By DiamonDie/foobug^Numedia Cyclops^Hugi
I left home at 1.25pm on Friday in a great hurry. It was really hot and the bustrip to MegaMies's place was sweaty. I was dreading the 130km car trip to Elim? in that weather, but fortunately the car had excellent air conditioning. MegaMies's dad drove and there were four of us sceners in the car, MegaMies, dairos, hyDro and I. The trip only took us like 1h15min, even though half of the roads were under repair and speed limits ranged from 50km to 80km in those places. We arrived at 3.25 or so, the doors had opened at 2.
The school was quite easy to find. We unpacked and got in, where we were given blue wristbands, the same color as Lobotomia wristbands had been. The place was a school gymnastics hall full of tables and small wooden chairs. I had reserved computer places for myself and iood in advance. The table was mostly empty, no gamers yet. We went grocery shopping with MegaMies, dairos and hyDro, though they were just booze shopping and reserved the nearby hill for that activity. I went back in. It took over an hour for me to get the network working as the DHCP server refused to give me any IP's and the problem needed severe troubleshooting. The organizers were extremely nice and helpful.
Unssi appeared and wanted to see the almost final version of my compo picture. He stuck there talking for a while but then joined the boozers. Iood came a bit after 6pm. He had trouble setting up his pc, because his power cord was somehow incompatible with the socket. But no problem, the organizers supplied him an extension cord. Very convenient. He resumed coding our Numedia Cyclops & Gluterol textmode demo. I hadn't seen it before, but it was much nicer than I expected.
Nosfe, reed and some other sceners came in. Unssi returned some time later. He was very drunk and very annoying. He kept pinching people's cheeks and making remarks about them. He also wanted me to visit all kinds of gfx and pixeling sites and made really stupid comments on IRC on mine, iood's and jzu's computers, things like "I'm gay" and "I'm lesbian". Reed also wrote some things using my nick but nothing bad.
Viznut arrived with his VIC-20 and fizzie's bus stopped in Elim? at 11. He took a seat besides iood since it was free and started writing scheme. Ananasmurska guys appeared soon after and it turned out they had the seats besides me. They were doing a textmode demo too, but not particularly spectacular one, and showed pWp and MFX demos on Blueflame's computer. The gamers had got more quiet and it felt like we were at a real demoparty.
The organizers weren't very fond of scene activities though and didn't allow drinking inside. They even told people outside to extinguish the fire. Nosfe was pissed to say the least. When astu and his girlfriend arrived, astu and unssi greeted each other by yelling "iSO!" and an organizer told them to be more quiet. Astu and jzu weren't exactly thrown out, but they were instructed to leave. Astu was in usual condition, headed a lot of hassle and trashed his entry cd.
During the night we mostly chatted. Various people wanted to use my computer. Fizzie was bored and said he'd take the first bus to Helsinki, but I woke up from my short nap just as the bus was about to leave and he was still present. I crawled from under the table, nosfe and reed were sitting on my computer. Iood, fizzie and I went grocery shopping. We also visited K-kauppa but it was much smaller than S-market. They started showing demos on the screen, including pWp's VIC-20 prods.
Deadline was at 12 but it was postponed until 12.30. At 11.55 we managed to convince lostchild to send a track of his to the music compo. But fate wasn't on our side: the ftp attempts failed, dcc failed even to non-firewalled accounts and he couldn't send an attachment bigger than 2MB. It came down to that he had to leave and we still hadn't figured anything out.
Counterstrike compo was cancelled due to lack of contestants. What a loss. There was a participation fee, maybe that was the cause. I made a wreath out of dandelions and decided to submit it to the wild compo - the rules allowed all analogue and digital media. A photo was taken to accompany the submission. I also took some cute photos of fizzie and iood wearing the dandelions behind their ears. As Gratseffs hadn't even left from home yet, PinZa was given the task of submitting something like ten prods, both Unique and Jumalauta stuff. Not nice to fill out that many entry sheets.
In the afternoon compo schedules were finally announced, at least the ASCII compo that was supposed to start at 4. We went out, there were some people sitting on the grass but none were boozing. MegaMies's ghettoblaster provided music. Reed appeared with a carton of blueberry soup, matching his shirt. Trossi arrived with his Sega Jaguar. We returned inside in time for the compo, but they announced on screen it was delayed for 15 minutes.
People were actually made to shut down their monitors and audio, some even closed ther computers. There were some technical glitches, entry names and prods were shown for too long. ASCIIs were shown in DOS and scrolled when appropriate. The first prod was called tit and had a pair of quite ugly tits. 1st step was actually an ASCII colly by Annie, not exactly my cup of tea and it was way too long for such a compo. My tiger "Mahtava misu" was shown as third. People seemed to like it. Though they also liked MegaMies's Amiga 1200 with the text "Atari sucks", Nosfe's Figlet-like text "Elim? sucks" and unssi's ugly dick picture.
The start of voting was also delayed, because the voting system wasn't up yet. It didn't take too long though. An organizer came to us and said that LUKE's compotune was missing. Iood realized he had forgot to burn it on the entry cd, but fortunately the lapsus could still be fixed by FTP upload. Iood and fizzie were also inspired by my party report and started scribbling their own, quite an obscure one, reminded me of jaffa's reports.
Tiny music compo had seven entries, all were quite nice though nosfe's entry was ..."interesting". GFX compo was on at 7.15. It had 14 entries though nosfe's ass photo was disqualified after the compo. The quality definitely surprised me. Several good pictures in both 2d and 3d and a couple of joke entries. Felor had rendered a nice picture of penguins called Let's rob the bank, Luigi and ebr had a picture about a frustrated gamer trashing his table. No dragons or spaceships, only a chick or two. Definitely not easy to predict the winner.
Music compo had 15 entries. The most popular genre was melodic trance, "kiksu" as we say in Finland, some good ones and some crappy wannabe ones. Maskuliininen transsitanssi did it PVD style with high-pitched woman vocals and Liberation was good too. Y-strings was really lame. Dead Sun Lotion struck out from the crowd with a darker style. Injury 2 only lasted for a couple of seconds but received huge applause. Ei el??as an experimental "song" with a lot of microphone noise.
The grill/kiosk was selling large pizza slices for 4 euros, but they also had a leftover cream cake and you could buy as big a slice as you wanted for only one euro. We bought one collectively for Numedia Cyclops, it ended up eaten mostly by MegaMies and me. Fizzie and iood were all sucked up on coding their new game Unsteroids. There was a chat on the bigscreen, you could participate in realtime on the intranet page.
Ringtone compo was weird. Only six entries, even though participating wouldn't have required much work and the first prize was supposed to be good. My entry was played first but for some reason the name was shuffled from "Hittipoppis" to "Pala Ronald pala". The best entries were called "Posio Beats" and "Help, a fly is chasing my walkie talkie". There also was an entry with ambulance-like sound. Reed played his entry live in the microphone.
Wild compo was the most interesting I've ever seen. My prod was shown first and it was the only one that wasn't severely disturbing. Jumalauta presented us two sucky videos, both produced by Unssi. Nosfe had four entries, two of them were noise prods, one was a music video and one was the real Pala, Ronald pala, where he burned a McDonalds toy, accompanied by chanting. It didn't burn too well even with burning liquid. Windi had a video about the party fire being extinguished. The gamers had made a video that showed us real life Counter-Strike.
Just before the intro compo Jttl informed iood that our demo bugged. Yikes. Fortunately the problem turned out to be that they hadn't set the console size to 50 lines. Right after that astu was yet again thrown out. The intro compo began with MegaMies's Basic prod. It crashed in the end. Applause. Then it was time for Scene is dead. It refused to start and instead started Oksennus. Applause. XP was booted. Twice. Applause. Scene is dead finally worked but the projector didn't like it in fullscreen and had to be run in a window. Applause. Someone accidentally opened IRC-galleria. Applause. Moonhazard prod started. The music was really good in the first part and it made up for the less imressive visuals. When it ended it booted the computer. Applause. When WinXP booted up, the screen was all fucked up. More applause. Soon even more applause when the projector still refused to work. XP made a lot of "bling" sounds.
They skipped fourth and went straight to fifth, Summer lameness. It was viznut's VIC-20 prod. It was hyperkewl megarulez. Satan, Mikko Alatalo, guage, children raping and nice music. Then they retried fourth one, which happened to be astu's. We were told it doesn't work and we should download it from the party net. Soon after the organizers realized that they had just messed up with two different versions of the prod.
Before the democompo the organizers announced that they were searching one crew, because they had misplaced their prod. Oops. They had already lost Kuake's intro earlier, messed up another intro and misnamed my ringtone. Then they told iood to "configure" his demo again. They showed astu's compo entry, or what was supposed to be it. Actually they showed his Simulaatio intro without sound and it hung up quite soon.
The democompo went relatively smoothly. First came I took (All the other pills), quite good but could have used some polishing. Unique's demo was nice but not as good as I expected, I didn't like the ending. Rv1991 had a Replay parody demo with a picture of a horse head that didn't seem to fit there. Unssi had hinted about there being a prod with horses. Windi's demo was for GP32 handheld game console and it was filmed with his dv camera. Too bad it looked quite low on contrast and the screen was quite dark already so we didn't see much besides a scroller and some sprites, but we heard the nice music by reed and PinZa. Our demo was showed last and with a green tint (it was black and white).
After the demos we cyclops headed outside. Almost as soon as I got out of the door my hair was sprayed with an orange color that had a nasty, pungent smell. Many others had been sprayed too, fizzie got a nice patch on his forehead. We went to the campfire/barbeque that was practically in a forest. It was only a tiny fire held in a bowl, but big enough for people to bbq sausages on. We had some demotalk and general scenetalk. The sun was already rising, but the mosquitoes were annoying.
I went inside at 4 am. Iood and fizzie were still coding their game. I slept some hours in iood's sleeping bag, which contained no iood though. When I woke up, some gamers were singing karaoke. It was bloody annoying. Fortunately they couldn't bother for very long. We watched some more demos on Blueflame's computer. Fizzie took the 10.10 bus and most of the gamers left early too. The lights were turned on at 12.45.
Prizegiving started 1.15pm. Jttl announced the winners and their names were also shown on the bigscreen. First was the ASCII compo, the first compo I've ever won and with almost double the votes of the runner-up and was given 10 euros for that. Nosfe was second and MegaMies third, they just won concept papers. Delilah / Skin won the GFX compo (with a crappy picture IMO), the difference of one point to Felor made her the proud owner of a new monitor, except that she lives in Italy.
PinZa won both the music compo and ring tone compo. Reed won tinymusic with only two points more than Little Bitchard. Reed also came third in ringtone compo. Nosfe got two prizes from the wild compo. I guess no one was surprised that Pala, Ronald pala won. Second prize went to Xerse, lame. Intro compo results were a surprise. Third place went to Kuake with only 42 points, but Moonhazard won the compo, 95 points versus pWp's 91. I guess the gamers voting made the difference. We came third in the demo compo, which was of course very cool. Unique was second and FLO won with their pills.
The prize ceremony ended 1.40 or so. Our ride was supposed to arrive at 3 and iood's at 2.30 so we had plenty of time to waste. Organizers were cleaning up and we went outside for a while. It had got really hot, over 20 degrees. It was a nice trip home, from a nice party. It was supposed to be the Final Cube, but later the organizers promised we might have Icecube: Reloaded and Icecube: The Gathering in the near future.