x06 personal party report (By Jonatan "Macx" Forsberg )
X 2006 was a C64 copyparty that took place on October 13 - 15, 2006. Quoting from demoparty.net: "The X parties have gained their place in C64 history, the X partys are the oldest party to date and welcomes a steady number of visitors, or better put X residents. They are a mixture of sceners, from old farts to new school, from coders to crackers coming from all regions of the world. The X is not your average copy party but meant as a weekend with your friends with free drinks and free food. For more info, see:
http://www.scs-trc.net/x2006/info.php"
I did not have any internet account for almost a month. Here in Denmark it is a few chosen companies installing it, setting the standard for how long one has to wait. The X date was approaching and I was unable to follow what was going on and arrange anything about a carride down to the more rural districts of Gelderland. When I had the possibility at the uni I checked Eurolines and such, but going all the way in a coach is not the topnotch travel we all long for, is it?
Finally, when there wasn't much of September left, the internetprovider sent an installer to toil for a few minutes and I once again was stuck in the net. I pretty soon found out that Heavyhead was going, and when I called him up - talking to him for the first time since The Party 6 - he told me he had moved to a village not far from where I nowadays reside. He had seats left and a few others were to join.
Friday the 13th arrived and we took off around lunch. Already in the car was MdZ, whom had come down from Aarhus to join us in the car. We got out on the Danish highway and aimed for Jutland, where we were to pick up KBS in a sleepy town. At first he wasn't at home, and as he has a principle against cellphones we were uanble to reach him. After a very short wait though, he showed up from nowhere with his viking beard covering his face and we were gone for the autobahn with Goto80s album in the soundsystem.
When the GPS showed 586 kilometres left to go we spotted the first cows, assuring us we were heading right. Around the same time we figured Goto80 had been on way heavy stuff making some of those tunes. We were chatting away about the new house Heavyhead was buying and he was chatting with his lady about that on the cell. We textmessaged the Aussies and MdZ was really eager to find out what the promised surprise was to be about. It was a wonderful afternoon and a few minutes past two we passed into the nowadays German part of the Jutlandish peninsula.
Hacker's soundtrack was playing in the soundsystem and four c64 geeks were on the autobahn - a highway with no speedlimits. With such a fantastic high level of infrastructure we would reach X within hours. Marvellous! Pretty soon though, we were reminded of why there are no official speedlimits. The German phenomenon of STAU had struck us. For those of you not familiar with this it is a traffic congestion en masse. It is a jam of all the traffic trying to get from one place to another and it is something which is on the mind of every carriding German, as a stressful pain of the soul making people insecure, agonising through much of life. We had no way to go, the caravan of cars, buses and trailers in front of us and behind us were going in walking- to jogging-pace and on the radio they talked about 20 kilometres of stau for people heading towards the tunnel underneath the river Elbe in Hamburg. We figured we were not going to get no surprises and no evening meal either. The four geeks had turned into spoiled kids getting the wrong present at xmas.
After an hour or so we got to drive in a more normal pace for quite a while, until we, no longer awestruck by this country, got stuck again. This time we had become more hardened and after the "fuckin' Tyskland" bit, we got into the more joyful talk on the topic of Sprint, MCI and AT&T. And no, we do not dislike Germany for real, after all it is the land with PORR written with huge capital letters on office houses. And when we reached the tunnel it was like it had been covered with German lube, after that it was smooth as a .. well. When we reached Holland a bit before nine it was foggy. We all know the laws are different in this country, but that it shows so clear - on the highway - is always a neat surprise.
We reached the partyplace and hungry with low blood sugar as we were we immediately got our hands on some beers. Amongst other well known brands, the PITT brand stood out. This fantastic brew, with a wonderful name was, and will be, promoted by HCL and I. I pretty soon got really drunk why my memories from the first evening are not all clear. I remember that when I had been chatting with VIC and Jeff on the topics of Denmark, Camelot and German autobahn someone approached us saying that it was a hell of a strip show. Somehow we had managed to miss the suprise totally, being on the wrong floor. As the three of us however, in contrast to the rest of you, get laid every time we want to, we do not care. And from what I have heard she was smelling.
The evening turned into night. Leming and Booker had to combat me fiercly engaged against catholicism, Polish catholicism especially. Not that I have anything against catholicism more than most other religions, and not that any of them are particularly religious, but it was fun. We chatted about the city they live in and that I have lived in, and I liked the fact that Leming speaks with a clear British accent (well he should after eight years in London). With them fellow Onslaughters we watched bit of the Venlo video and it was fun to see Aslive get a glimpse of himself. Morpheus was a copyslave, copying some by that time yet unknown c64.com-product and giving it an official cover.
The first night I got two live comments for this party report, and here they go: AGod said "Fucking cool" and HCL said "There are unusually lots of catholics here".
x06 will be remembered as the biggest copy party in history. At least if one is to believe MdZ, and as he gives an honest and thorough impression I do. He even said "I have been part of breaking a world record". During the party, lead by the transfer coordinator CBA no less than 2632 real 5,25" disksides were transfered by the transfer team into .d64s that are getting into the massive database governed by the top secret search engine with artificial intelligence.
The next morning I woke up with THE frontal lobe hangover of this year, and I had to hide behind my sunglasses for quite some time. The whole place seemed lit up and many of the organizers had during the early morning gotten a very strong halo for some reason. I was later told that this was because I had mixed the different beers, and I learned that I should EITHER stick to Pitt, Grolsch or Heineken. Well, well, I still blame Jeff's drink, cause I want to be able to continue my drug mixing. On the bigscreen they showed the best of X demos and I got into a shower, changed clothes and brushed my teeth. After that, and after I had gotten a painkiller from Heavyhead, I felt like a new person.
Together with Weasel, Soundemon, Heavyhead and Dezert (as Leming was too busy composing) we went into the village of Hengelo. First to find some hotspots for surfing and then to get some grub. First we hung out in the intersection of Westerstraat and Zonnestraat, a quiet housing estate, for a while. Checking out the #c-64 and Weasel leeching some bits of hacked data. After a while we got disconnected though, and the owner came to park his car where we stood. We drove some metres, but realised this was not our kind of place, why we headed for the only open foodplace we could find (after not searching for too long). Almost everything was deep fried, and hardly anything vegetarian. But I still managed to get something to grub to keep me up until the very decent Italian evening meal at the party (which had some great veggie dishes by the way).
On the way back to the partyplace we saw some Dutch people. They are quite interesting with their small helicopters. It is nice to look at. Inside the farm the IK+ competition had started (or this could have been later) and I got into some brew-drinking again. JackAsser had a comment for the partyreport: "Fet fest i fredags, de flesta krasha. Awesome party!". Cruzer reported: "No comments - but they have good dairyproducts" and MacGyver told me to write: "Cosy and nice atmosphere. Make sure to get Jim Slim - the marvellous jump'n'roll - when it comes out!".
Later into the evening Jeroen Tel put up a great performance and a whole lot of men started to dance and obey the man. After a while I got picked up by CBA and was lead into the nasty male bonding of serious sid dancing. Lovely. Jeroen Tel has it in his blood and all c64 weirdos were in seventh heaven. Then came the compos and I smoked my cigars, and gave away some. I chatted with Linus and got a ep from his Mini Melodies-project.
At 5.30 next morning, after some hours of sleep, I was awakened by Heavyhead. We got into the car and drove all the way home without any stau hassle. I slept most of the time, secure when Heavyhead is behind the steering wheel. I remember that KBS was very happy about the german croissants though, they were far better than he had expected. Then we also called AT&T, and I asked for their toll free number in Sweden as it has changed since the mid 90s. It was nice to hear that beautiful voice again, she always thanked me so gently.
Jonatan "Macx" Forsberg