Scene on the Internet (By Adok/Hugi)
These days, there are so many places on the Internet where you can find PC sceners and stuff by PC sceners that there is definitely not a single PC scener in the world who knows all of them. This document is supposed to be a guide in this maze; it is supposed to list some of the most important Net resources related to the demoscene: websites, newsgroups and IRC channels. It is far from being complete, and I would like to ask you to send me URLs of other sites worth including here.
This is interesting for newbies as well as for some of the most experienced sceners and even veterans. It might show you some new aspect of that huge community called scene.
Websites: International sites of general interest
www.ojuice.net - Orange Juice, the world's most important resource for scene news and party dates. It also includes a database of sceners (more than 3000 people are listed) with their birthdates and other personal information. Occasionally articles and images appear as well, and the one-liners are sometimes quite entertaining.
www.scene.org - Scene.org hosts the largest archive of PC scene stuff and runs a news server (more on that below).
www.pouet.net - This innovative site has developed to one of the most frequented and most useful Internet resources of the demo scene. It is an archive without an FTP server of its own; it contains only links. However, it's possible to add comments on every production, which has led to many long discussions. There's also a separate discussion board for general scene-related topics.
www.slengpung.com - Photos of sceners, mostly from demo parties.
www.totalkaos.de - An online BBS that also runs a discussion board.
www.bitfellas.org - A new online board, still in its beta testing phase, invitation-only.
www.asciiscene.org - Another online BBS that runs a discussion board. Its official name is "boondockS!".
www.diskmag.de - A portal site maintained by well-known diskmag editor Ghandy. It belongs to the Scene News Network and therefore shares news together with Scenia and CHScene. In addition, there are collections of sceners' contact addresses as well as articles and interviews from various diskmags and a lot of links.
www.scenet.de - Scenia, nowadays maintained by Dire alone. Originally Ghandy contributed to this site, until the two of them decided to get separated. Nevertheless Scenia and Diskmag.de still share news because both of them belong to the Scene News Network.
www.cfxweb.net - CFXweb, a portal about both game and demo development, created by Civax. Once quite popular both among game developers and demo sceners, it's now officially closed. There also used to be a file archive and online editions of some issues of the Hugi Magazine.
www.scenespot.org - SceneSpot by Coplan. It's also a portal site, and at the same time it's the home of the newsletter Static Line, which used to be edited by Coplan.
www.trebel.org - Another portal site. It was originally intended to become an archive site like the late Hornet, but with far improved functionality. However, history has chosen Scene.org to become the successor to Hornet.
www.demoscene.info - A new portal by Digitale Kultur e.V. from Germany, primarily designed for newcomers.
www.scenesight.org - A portal maintained by Frank Michlick aka Anonym of Padua that deals with outreach, i.e. how the demoscene has been received in "ordinary" media.
www.scene.org/dog - Demoscene Outreach Group homepage. This one also deals with presenting the demoscene to the world, including exhibitions at SIGGRAPH.
exotica.fix.no/info/scenery - Scenery is a virtual history book about the scene. It contains very detailed information.
ths.demoscene.org - Two-Headed Squirrel is a review site that has already been around for several years.
www.demoscene.org - This used to be a kind of scene news blog by Jeroen, a Dutch scener. Nowadays it's inactive, and its only purpose seems to be hosting the Two-Headed Squirrel.
www.scene-central.com - This website used to host Network, an online magazine by Comic Pirates. This was a very innovative and sophisticated site back in 1998. It allowed people to add their own articles. The magazine dealt with many systems, not only PC, Amiga and C64. It was actually a sequel to a C64 diskmag with the same name. One day the Comic Pirates abandoned the project and passed the domain over to Padua. Padua promise that they will reactivate the magazine, but nothing has happened for a couple of years, except that they keep changing the information about the year in which the magazine will be back alive. (Maybe they don't even do that manually but use a script?)
demoo.calodox.org - Demoo! by Calodox is exactly what I'd call an extremelyminimalistic demo review site... or something like that.
www.256b.com - A pouet-style archive of tiny intros with a size of 256 bytes or even less. It's for true freaks only! :)
www.intro-inferno.com - A rather new scene portal site.
www.linuxdemos.org - A Linux demo scene related portal, maintained by paniq of Farbrausch.
Websites: National sites of general interest
www.scene.pl - Polish Scene portal.
www.amiscena.org - Polish Scene portal for non-PC platforms. According to Venire/DMA, "it's mostly a big forum for the Polish oldschool". (Thanks for the links, Venire!)
www.demology.org - A portal site about the demoscene with special focuses on Bulgaria and Vietnam. (Weird combination!)
www.scene.at - Austrian scene portal.
www.demoscene.ru - Russian scene portal. It has both a Russian and an English section. The two sections do not have the same contents.
www.scene.ru - Another Russian scene portal. Russian language only.
scene.org.ru - There is a proverb in German that says: "Aller guten Dinge sind drei." (Rough translation: If something is good, then there are three of it.) Perhaps this proverb also exists in the Russian language. Maybe it even exists in the English language, but this language isn't used on that site. (German isn't used there, either.)
www.chscene.ch - Swiss scene portal, including an archive and an interesting special section about international diskmags. It also includes news from the Scene News Network.
www.codersger.de - German scene portal. It hasn't been updated for quite a while.
www.escena.org - Spanish scene portal.
www.demoscene.no - Norwegian scene portal.
Websites: Graphics-related
www.gfxzone.org - Apparently it's the only graphics-related portal of the demoscene.
www.deviantart.com - This is not a scene site, but a lot of artists affiliated with the demo scene have some of their artworks there.
Websites: Music-related
www.scenemusic.net - Nectarine online radio, broadcasting music non-stop. There are also a lot of news about scene music.
www.modulez.org - Another scene music site, maintained by Yero.
www.chiptune.com - One of the largest chiptune archives in the world, maintained by Rez.
chiptunes.back2roots.org - Another chiptune archive. It used to be maintained by melcom.
amp.dascene.net - Amiga Music Preservation, hosted by crown of cryptoburners.
http://www.lmp.d2g.com/ - "CGM UKScene Radio" was a 24/7 DemoScene radio station, featuring UK artists with songs created on various platforms. ("Dial up" connections supported.) It has recently been closed.
Websites: International Magazines
www.hugi.scene.org - Website of Hugi, the magazine you're currently reading (indeed).
www.ellesdee.org - Grapevine.net, an online magazine.
www.spinningkids.org/umine - Underground Mine is a kind of online magazine published by Spinning Kids. It mainly focuses on coding. There are also some articles in Italian language.
www.pixelate.co.za - Pixelate is an online magazine about game programming. Obviously Hugi was a source of inspiration for its editors. In some of their older issues, their "Legal Stuff" section even contained the word "Hugi". :)
www.pain.scene.org - It's pain in your eyes (not in your ass).
www.jurassicpack.de.vu - Jurassic Pack, for Amiga; there are a lot of PC-related articles inside. The website also contains some online issues.
shine.scene.org - Shine issues are available here.
scenial.scene.org - Home of Scenial diskmag.
amber.planet-d.net - Download Amber issues 1 and 2 here.
demojournal.planet-d.net - Demojournal newsletter archive.
www.scenespot.org/staticline - Direct link to the Static Line newsletter at SceneSpot.
www.blackmaiden.de/releases/type/mag - Diskmags by Black Maiden: Crescent and Beam.
sunray.planet-d.net - Sunray was the demoscene's annal. Only one issue was released (from 1999).
amnesia-dist.future.easyspace.com - Although only one issue of Amnesia has ever been released, the website still exists.
www.sceen.org - The website of a paper mag about the demo scene, machinima, VJ'ing and other branches of multimedia art.
Websites: National Magazines
www.centolos.com - Centolos is the group that used to release the Ceibe diskmag, in Spanish language. Now they release Becanne.
www.becanne.net - Becanne is the first scene magazine released as a PDF document. It's in Spanish language.
www.scene.ru - I've already mentioned this portal. They host websites for the following Russian-language diskmags: 7Zone, Armor of Gods, CooleR, Evil, Hacker, HaRM, LMD, RRR, Scene, Tsifra and X-Ray.
www.wildmag.de - Website of WildMag, a diskmag in German language. Its contents have been radically reduced lately.
www.image-zine.de - Image is another inactive German diskmag.
www.tap-home.de - Here you can find TAP.MAG, which was also a German diskmag.
www.infusion.com.ar/vinyl - Vinyl or Vinilo, a diskmag from Argentina. Only one issue as well.
Newsgroups
comp.sys.ibm.pc.demos - The oldest and most popular scene-related newsgroup.
scene.* - A lot of country-related newsgroups as well as groups of general scene interest. They are only located at news.scene.org. You can access them via the World Wide Web from www.scene.org.
alt.trebel.* - Scene-related newsgroups installed by the people behind Trebel. There isn't quite a lot of activity.
Internet Relay Chat: International Channels
All of the following channels are located on IRCnet, not on EFnet.
#coders - This is primarily for programmers. Most of the time, however, people just talk crap. ;)
#trax - Musicians' talk. By the way: Both in #coders and in #trax you won't meet demosceners only - even though most of the people there do know what the demoscene.
#pixel - Definitely not only for graphicians. This used to be one of the main channels for debate about general scene-related issues. Nowadays there is some competition. Read on...
#pouet.net - Quite a popular channel for all sceners, established in 2002/2003.
#breakpoint - This one is also popular. There are many channels named after parties; some of them are only frequented during the event, while others display activity in the whole year.
#haujobb - There are also channels about particular groups. I have no idea how many there are, but I guess there are a lot. While some of them are intended to be for group-internal communication only and are therefore invite-only, some others are in principle open for everybody. However, keep in mind that if you disturb group-internal communication in some way, it's easy for the channel operators to make them invite-only and ban non-members.
#thescene - International scene channel founded by Surfing of RamJam and his friends. It's not only for PC - you'll also find Amiga and C64 sceners there, and maybe people from other platforms, too.
#amigascne - International Amiga demoscene channel.
Internet Relay Chat: National Channels
#szene.at - Austrian scene talk. There are usually not many people, but the ones who do visit it seem to do so on a regular basis.
#scene.cs - For both the Czech and the Slovak scenes.
#dk-scene - Danish scene channel.
#suomiscene - Finnish scene channel. There are usually a lot of people around. There seems to be little tolerance with foreigners trying to start a discussion in a language other than Finnish.
#altparty - The channel of the Alternative party is probably the second largest Finnish demoscene channel after #suomiscene.
!assembly - The channel named after the world-renowned Assembly party is mostly frequented by Finnish people, and they primarily use the Finnish language for communication there.
#demofr - Main French scene channel. They use some kind of altered French, which especially differentiates from the main language in the way they spell some words.
#codefr - There is also a French channel for coders, and probably for other "specializations" as well.
#coders.ger - German scene channel, not only for coders.
#szene.ger - Another German scene channel. Most of the German sceners visit both #coders.ger and #szene.ger. A little number visits only one of the two.
#kotraum - A third German scene channel. This one is more or less reserved for the "elite". However, it's not invite-only.
#ilcoders - Israeli coders.
#demo-ita - Italian scene channel.
#demoscene - Despite its international name, this channel is Hungarian.
#scene - The same as for #demoscene: It's Hungarian. By the way, rumour has it that #pixel originally was a Hungarian channel as well.
#SceneChat - Another Hungarian channel.
#coders.hu - Hungarian coders.
#nlcoders - Dutch coders.
#daskmig - Norway. It's named after a popular Norwegian diskmag which was published in English language.
#scene.no - It's also Norwegian.
#polishscene - As the same says it, it's for people from Poland.
#scene.pl - Same as the one we've just had.
#scene.si - Slovenian scene channel.
#scene.se - Swedish scene channel.
#swedescene - Another Swedish scene channel.
#chscene - Swiss scene channel. They mostly talk using the English language. Sometimes German is used as well.
#scene.tr - Turkish scene channel.
#ukscene - Scene channel for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
If you have any comments and suggestions, contact me at cdvolko@gmx.net.
Adok/Hugi