"TwatZ"
Ways in which the demoscene was crap,
the untold story!
Hiya demo dudes, after "FreakZ", the first written history of the demoscene, we're looking at an even bigger project, demanding even more resources and respect, that is the story which will be called "TwatZ". This is the very long and tedious tale of all those people who told us at length that the scene was not as good as it used to be, or at least managed to give us the impression that it wasn't!
This will be a mammoth undertaking, we expect a 26-volume set to barely cover the main points, but we have made a strong start already. Here's a preview of some of the more notable low-lights of the demoscene's otherwise glorious heritage!
Historically, the first complaints about insane hardware upgrade rat-race undermining the "True spirit of counting things" came very early on. Disgruntled abacus users complained in the early 1840's about the swanky new Pentium Babbage Differential Engine. Charles Babbage tersely responded that "Cogless lamers to stop dwelling in a mythical colour beaded golden age and disappear forthwith!" The controversy over this early spat on the merits of different hardware throws a future echo to the "Vacuum Tubes will never replace good old clockwork" row of 1917!
Will there be space to fit in Alan Turing's "Transistors are killing the spirit of decryption!" outburst from 1941? Of course there will!
We have to come quite a bit nearer to the present to record the first documented expression of proper scenic discontent! Putrid Hangnail of the International Sock Conspiracy complained that single channel blip-blop music on the very first ZX Spectrum cracktro was "killing the scene" back in 1987, (he may have had a point..) Although someone was rumoured to be a bit peeved with a ZX81-BASIC page-flipping routine and said so, a full five years earlier...
Early model 3.5 inch disks became available in the 1980's. The first "swapping disk", doomed to roam the vast wastes of worldwide post offices, like a plastic inert version of the Dutch Mariner, started its neverending voyage in 1986. At this stage, it only had picked up a couple of bad sectors. It is in a jiffy bag still recognisably made from jiffybag paper, rather than a ghost of the original structure, being held together by several years accretion of gaffer tape and disk labels.
The scene tended to act older than it really was in the early days. We will tell many tales, like when "Bitchkilla" of the notorious Amiga group "Rough Boys", suffered irreversible damage to his 'scene cred' when the true meaning of his scrolltext in the "Thugz" demo was hilariously revealed.. For example, the comment "Yaay, we're gonna be coding non-stop ALL night and drink 50,000 litres of coke!" became in reality, "Yaay, we're gonna be coding 'til mum tells me it's time for bed, and drink some orange juice out of my Timmy Bear mug!"
We will consider the role of disk magazines in promoting self-importance and bombast, with the not very fascinating story of whinge compression technology and the art of fitting more vacuous eqotistical pointless ranting onto a humble 3.5inch disk. When this came in, the trickle of people qutting, bored to the back teeth with never-ending circular arguments about nothing much, turned into a flood!
A whole chapter is to be devoted to the sad tale of "Amiga deluded", where some chronic cases thought that the Shadow of the Beast parallax scrolling still cut it as late as 1998! "We've got a copper." (Yes we know, yawn snore etc!)
We take a long hard look at the underground origins of the scene. Consider the tragic tale of the warez bbs "Dude Motherf*ck*r", that was so "7337", in trying to make an atmosphere of "cool and tough like south-central L.A.", it went too far and banned everyone from uploading to it! Or even from mentioning it in conversation. Yes you can be too 'leet', it seems.
Then there's the early demo party "Dyspepsia '96", which suffered a fatal power outage when the organisers mother mixed up the competition viewing machine's power socket, with that of his 'Wally the Whale Gentlyglo Dontbescaredofthedark' (tm) nightlight! Poor old Bitchkilla had only just got his scene-cred back, after that previous incident with the scrolltext and all!
We fearlessly probe the bitter and twisted relationship between the Finnish scene, and the incorrect and copious internal consumption of lighter fluid! Is there a link between the more alcoholic parts of the demoscene, and the mysterious explosive growth in the demand for adult "specialist" nappy-changing services?!
Stealing things played an important role in the demo scene. A small but significant class of these larcenous arseholes went from stealing code and ideas, all the way to helping themselves to valuable portable objects de scene "found" at demo coding parties! We interview some of the leading lowlifes. To get them to speak to us at all, their anonymity was preserved under the witless protection scheme!
And where might the scene be going? Maybe one day we will all be precalculating wicked 3-D spiky balls on huge white NASA-issue Hal-9000 space computers with flashing lights, like out of '2001, a Space Oddity'. Maybe we will see the first fluid and literate scrolly text in a demo? And maybe genetic engineering will pull off what was previously thought to be impossible, and clone the first non-arrogant Amiga 500 owner! But then again, I think we will see GM pigs literally flying before that happens!
Please lend your scenic support to "TwatZ", we feel that this will be the most worthwhile project ever done! Please send any old gossip, myths, and personally humiliating but extremely funny outright lies to the email address at the end of this article.
Your scene depends on you, go on!
Contact us!
desperatechancer@pagefiller.com