pouët.net

PDT = USA Pacific Daylight Time, not Australian. :)

I wish I had counted posts first. Repeat so people don't have to flip back:

Hello everyone!

This is still going on, and if you were on the fence about participating, this is your 10 day notice. The exchange will close at the end of November 11th, US PDT ('cause I live there).

I will do my best to get assignments posted by or on November 13th, so please check back with the site on that day. If you signed up to be notified by email, and everything works as it did in testing, you'll get a single notification letting you know to check back.

Thanks again everyone for participating. :)

(and apologies for the "double" post)

Also I do plan to put some demoscene or Nectarine stickers in the cards I send. :) It'll be kinda random and probably some of the small batch test ones I made.

That somehow changes the perspective for me, so .. just checking, a christmas card for real world people is actually a folded card inside an envelope? Not just a plain postcard? (I am from germany and i only know the standard 148x105mm plain cardboard onepage thing, enlighten me!)

Ouh, just checked back with my Gf, there is a difference between a Christmas Card and a Christmas Postcard. Wow, didn't know that. Christmas Card comes in an envelope. Poor me either never had those or just took the money out and ignored the kitschy wrapper :-D

Ah totally FNORD that :



A four-page design would ofcourse be a whole other level.

Yes I allow either so people can send what they like. :) This also hopefully enables it to be lower cost for some.

I've even sent things for past exchanges that you could very loosely call a "card." (About size A6 3mm plywood with the cover image engraved on one side, and my text on the other.)

As long as your recipients get a "card" (presumably in an envelope) or postcard, you're good. :)

I've seen people make their cards/postcards or put extra things inside the envelopes, but everyone seems happy to get something with some nice text in it addressed to them so I wouldn't worry about whether you're spending enough time or effort. It'll all work out.

I've gotten some really nice Russian city postcards in the past, and some God Jul cards from Norway, iirc. They were quite fun.

I know I send out laser engraved cards and such, but that's just what I do. I'm don't want anyone to feel bad. I'm always happy with what I've gotten. :)

The above is also why I let people choose how many they want to send. I don't want to be all "You have to send 5." If you want to send one? That's great! :)

Ideas just came like an eruption over here so whatever format, there are so many interesting possibilities. I am actually really excited about this :-D

Well don't forget to actually sign up with the website if you haven't already. :)

https://demoscene.exchanges.cards

That's where people can later view their assignments and where I'll get the master list of participants.

Signed up :-) Working together with Hedning to come up with a true collectible now.

In case anyone was wondering I've gotten 36 sign-ups to date, with over 80% in geographic Europe.

I'll post the results soon, the matching is done just need to get it into the site which should happen before Friday.

Average number of cards requested: ~7-8

Most often requested card count: 3 (followed by 10, then 5)

Total participants: 45

Most were in geographic Europe but there were people who joined from UK, Ireland, US, Canada, and Australia. :) (Not many from the latter countries, but I'm still happy.)

Hey, we´re demosceners! "10" is most likely a binary number :D
"3" is the highest number to be stored within 2 bits, and also the SID voice count.
"5" makes no sense, though... :?

Just in case the email thing tomorrow morning (my time) doesn't work right or ends up in spam folders (it shouldn't, I hope):

Assignments have been posted. :)

If you forgot your ID you can contact me privately but I'd hope you remembered to bookmark the URL. Otherwise just wait for the email and it will remind you.

5=3+2 !

Oh I got a nice selection of awesome people, I'm happy :)
Now I'm only a slight bit stressed out to deliver something awesome ^^

5 is an Atari number because:
4pokey+1gtia sound channels of Atari XE
3ym+2dma sound channels of Atari STe
:)

ok time to start stressing, as mog said :D

one question, mostly out of curiosity: do the people I have to mail send me a mail back (i.e. are all the assignments reciprocal), or not?

The matching is asymmetric so you might have some pairs, but it's more likely you are sending to people who don't also have you. Of course the more cards requested, the greater the chance of a pair.

If you think that's something worth calling out I can see about tagging that on the site, but I think a bit of mystery is also fun. :)

I too grasp now, that a true everybody-sends-to-everybody can quickly spiral out of the budget of a cozy little fun project. :-D

I suppose, but also if you do paired assignments and an odd number of people join up it might be impossible to create fair balanced assignments. :)

I'm pretty proud of myself this year. Those who asked for more cards may not have gotten all the requested, but they did get more than those who requested less. I only had to make I think about five additional manual assignments (not bad considering 45 people participating) and nobody is sending more cards than they're receiving* or vice versa.

* I see this as a bad thing, so I'd have reworked assignments to avoid that in any case. That's not fair.

I keep tweaking the matching code every year in hopes I get better output and don't have to touch anything, but I'm not quite there. Some day, maybe.

If the current numbers are anything to go by, the first card exchange I participated in did had over 200 people in it perhaps and did all the matching by hand. I don't envy that.

but I'm a programmer. I can waste hours writing code to solve a 5 minute task, so of course I jumped into the rabbit hole to have code try to do it for me. :D

First, thanks Starchaser for this wonderful initiative, and for the efforts you're putting to create more links between demosceners. I'm surprised to read there's a heuristic, and imagined matching was pure random. So what's best? Matching people with other people that share common points (e.g. Amiga demomaking), which helps sharing common passions but increases the chances they already know each other IRL (which happened to me with 1 of my 4 assignments), or allow people to discover new fields, taking also the risk of a lack of interest. That being said, I believe that people getting involved in this initiative are open minded by definition and find interest in demoscene globally. Finding a proper algorithm must have been a total headache!