pouët.net

Hi there.
I was wondering at what place did you find demoscene reference (or even a demo/prod playing) where you wouldn't have suspected it at all?

The most unusual place i came across was in 2001 when our physics class visited Airbus/EADS. They wanted to show us a presentation about the company (the whole point for EADS was basically to make them attractive as a cool employer) but before the show started we had free catering in the lobby.
As I was more interested in the VGA Projector they had in the conference room (hey, such things were BADASS back in 2001) as in the bread-rolls and candy in the lobby i decided to take a little "de-tour" to the conference room up early.
What i found was the guy running our presentation with somebody else testing the projector-setup... with fr-08 :).
As i had only recently found out about fr-08 (and pouet along with it) I asked if i could stay to watch it and they even turned down the lights!
I felt like in a movie-show which was held just for me and ever since that moment i wanted my own projector for this kind of stuff (nowadays the problem is more about finding a flat with a suitable room/wall, tho).
So my first "demo on bigscreen" experience had nothing to do with a demoparty at all (that came only 9 yrs later ;).

Oh and i cant recall much of the following presentation. I guess it wasnt so interesting after all ;). When I heard later that EADS develops a lot of air based weapon systems i lost interest in the company alltogether. But I will always remember this conference room =).

Well I wonder if you guys had similiar (or even more obscure) experiences?

Yeah. In cornwall (can't remember the town, maybe Looe?) back in 2000. In an art shop of all places. They had a picture in there that I recognised instantly as being from a demo! It was printed on canvas, then painted over with varnish to look like an oil painting, but it was clearly digitally painted (there were demo-style black scanlines in part of the picture).

Unfortunately we were in a rush to get somewhere, and I had no camera. I can't remember what the pic was or who the artist was, but it was a pic I liked back then. I always wondered what that was, if somebody was ripping a scener's work and selling it, or if the scene artist was selling his work there, or if maybe some scene fan had asked the shop to get the picture made for his house (it was on the floor by the sales counter, so maybe it wasn't for sale).

on an ati card
(sorry)

I was sitting in a class called "Algorithms, Data structures, Objects" and at this one time, a whole different teacher was in. He was surprisingly enthusiastic (compared to the previous one anyway), and at one point he goes:

"Various programming languages offer varying levels of abstractions. This, for example, is what we call low-level programming".

...and sure enough there's a screenshot of some assembly code. Slightly bored I keep looking at it, trying to figure out what it does... Hold on a second... "move.w (a0)+, d0".... This isn't x86, this is 68k ASM! I'm looking at Amiga assembly in a university class!

So, eyebrows raised I keep thinking about that until a few minutes later he goes:

"Now let me show you a great example of abstraction."



WTF! How the... what the... Okay, I have to talk to this guy.

So after class I catch up with him.

"Excuse me, but um... that Assembly code you showed... that was Amiga, right?"
"Yeah, it's some old CD-player thingy I wrote back then. I used to code a lot on the Amiga."
"And Heaven 7? How did that come along?"
"Oh, I used to teach Shaman when he was here. Plus I always pay attention to 64k stuff, there's some really good things out there from Farbrausch."

At this point I did what anyone else would've done.

"...and Conspiracy?"
"Oh yes! Their stuff is amazing too!"

Grin. "Hi. I'm Gargaj / Conspiracy."
He looks at me. "Oh, hi. Alan / United Force."

The rest of the conversation, well, you can imagine. (...and an hour later I'm calling Sly Spy about how the FUCK did he forget to mention this.)

Best moment for me was when I was "working" as a PC technician (unemployed) and a guy called me up after have watched my demo and offered me a job. That was strange.. and he wasn't a demoscener :-)

Awesome story, Gargaj!!!!

i was waking up on a sunday morning, after a night of medium substance abuse, casually flipped on dutch national tv, where a rerun of some art show was shown.. too lame/hungover to zap into something less boring, i stuck with the channel for a few minutes, until ersatz by limp ninja was played \o/

gargaj: both universities i attended taught 68k.. but anyway, cool anecdote :)

and then you finally zapped away? :p

when i studied in kraków i went to a small regular dnb/jungle party (forgot the name of the place) and the vj used screenshots from demos for his set - i got to talk with him about that and later landed up at an afterhour at one dj's place, where i found out that those guys were friends with some of the people who used to be in the same tracking group i was (bohema rec.).

I have quite the opposite story:

a girl at assembly was playing a computer game that I worked on. I told her "hey I did those graphics" but she half believed me... (it was quite late at night though).

I was at Assembly too, after the democompo was shown in 2005 and we'd participated with "Don't Stop". A girl was sitting with the voting-page loaded on her computer and I (slightly drunk) said "Eyh, you have to vote for us!". The girl responded "Which one is yours?" - "Don't Stop - Portal Process" I replied. She just looked at me and said.. "No.. I don't.. I don't think think so", and turned away slowly.

ha ha ha...

i once encountered a little ten years old boy at the supermarket who grasped me form my breakpoint tshirt asking if i was a scener. i told him my handle and he recognized me. scarily, i never hear of him again.

I mean, sure, she doesn't have to like it (or vote for it) but jesus.. what a bitch thing to say :)

parapete's PC! There's never any demos on there!

navis: that is why you ALWAYS code backdoors to be able to prove yourself in those situations :-)

(easter eggs that is)

seen some parts of ASD - lifeforce on some Stureplan bigscreen commercial

this one time i saw all the tv's at an appliance store showing the popular demo.

I called Dell to buy a server, and suddenly the sales guy stopped and went... “erm... were you the guy who binary patched our demo last week?”

We got a pretty good deal.

maschinenfest 2002 or 2003. one of the vjs was actually downloading various demos stuff from scene.org and ran them right.

right away, that is. :) maybe it was also a filler between the acts.

back in the days there was some awful games review show on the telly (Veronica channel, with that Cindy Pielstrom lady, in case the Dutch remember) anyway, one day they were showing some new cool gadgets at some random game congress smth.. and there was some silly 3d-goggles showing Elitegroup - Kasparov! and i wuz like wtf, that looks familiar!

When I was at the greek army, I went to the army kiosk (called KAPSIMI) to buy another chocolate croissant and there was a new guy at the kiosk. He looked at me and said "I know you from somewhere". I joked and I said "maybe you have seen my photo in the internet?" and then he said, "Yes, there was a greek guy at Breakpoint04 at Slengpung!"

He is not a scener, he was into coding, wanted to be involved in demos and told me he visited one Breakpoint (maybe 03). Then I spent a lot of time in the kiosk showing him demos on my GP32 while eating more croissants. I asked for his phone or email so that we may meet later after the army, but he said "don't worry, we may meet again in a demoparty". Maybe he is reading Pouet now :)

account created on 2008-06-14
[the unknown soldier]