The war and the scene
It seems that after all this amount of time the war is over. It's surely a good thing, no one of us likes to see our home bombed by anyone. I'm not here to say if the bombing was a good thing to solve the Kosovo problem, but surely no one bombs a nation without serious reasons (or at least I hope so, our lives are always literally in the hand of these high-graded militars). So for months all the world has been pointing their TVs to Serbia, to Belgrad... not to mention the stupidity of some people here in Italy that went to the military base of Aviano just to see jets, stealths and bombers leaving to bomb Belgrad or Novi Sad. I guess they had nothing better to do. Or perhaps they where Amiga people, hoping to see a F117 falling down. Why? We all know that Motorola processors are military processors, so imagine how many 68060s you can get in a fallen F117! ;-) Back to be serious now. Jugoslavja has always had an intersting scene life, and even more, the Amiga scene is quite active there, even if they are even more underground than in other countries. How did the scene react to the war, there, in Jugoslavja, in Belgrad, in Novi Sad? In my opinion, the way the scene reacted could easily be shown in some daily news on the TV during the war. You know, television always shows the most attractive sequences, no they don't want to report the truth, they only want to get more watchers (and more money of course)... television jokes on the war's problem to gain audience. It applies also to newspapers of course, here in Italy a journal published a photo of an exploded falling MIG with the title "air battle".. but that photo was a 7-year-old one. So I really wonder why TV didn't show the demos who talked about war... perhaps they even don't have an Amiga to play it... probably! Imagine, you show "the activity of young groups of hackers that even without electric power have produced a video animation to show what they think of the war... see, here are the broken bridges... here are the dead lives of the people... see, here is a 'target' logo rotating with a 3D effect". To be short, they would say no more than shitty words. So I believe it's a luck that scene productions haven't been seen by the TV operators, neither in Serbja or the rest of the world. But how has the scene, the computer freaks really reacted to the war? I know that it's scary to have someone bombing you, even you they have the "intelligent" bombs that often are not so intelligent. So Belgrad guys show their point of view in the demos, in the software and so on. And in all the docs, you always read the same things: "it's hard to write demos when you don't have the electric power to turn on the computer", "if they rebuild our bridges", "stop NATO bombing" and so on. This does not only apply to demos. Probably many of you know HTTPresume, a very good software to resume interrupted downloads on the web. The author released an upgrade of this program during the war, with the message "Stop NATO bombs!" in the title bar of the windows and the WB bar. Ok, it's his point of view. After some days, a new version of HTTPResume appeared on Aminet, but not from the author, but an unknown person who removed the messages (probably poking a little with a file editor, such lamers don't even know how to modify directly the code) because he didn't like them. He uploaded it to Aminet. The worst thing is that he COULD do it, so it seems that everyone can fake a program and upload to Aminet instead of some other thing. What happened then? That a new little war has been started by this act. In the newsgroups two sides have been created, of whom one agrues "respect the author's thoughts!" and the other "the author can't influence the people who use his software with his phrases!". So, the result has been that also in computer environment that there has been a crack between people, just like if we didn't have enough of them. But let's go on. In these days a new MPEG player appeared on Aminet, its name is Prayer or something like it. The first thing I notice is that the author is claimed to be a Serbian girl. To be honest, I don't know if it's true or not, it seems much like a joke to me, the picture of this girl is really fine-looking, a little too fine-looking to be an Amiga programmer in 1999 in Serbia. It seems more to be a good way to get registration fees (note that in the address the name is the one of a boy, not of a girl...). More, in the docs you read the same thing (rebuild our bridges and so on), a poem against war (a poor one, I have to say). The player is really nice, but does all this stuff need to be in it? I really wonder if that girl in that nice photo is really the author of the software... I doubt it. This is to say that it's not always reliable to believe in what you see... more than scene or computer people, everyone is still a person, a human, with his thoughts and his mind, so no one is just just because he is a scener, if there is the possibility to get some money, all the reasons are good, this applies to the scene, to television, to arms manufacturers... to all. Sorry if it isn't really scene related.