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ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ n e t g e n e r  t i o n

                  Crash 97 Party Report from the POV of Vastator

Notes:
  - I do have some pictures of Crash, but I do *not* have a scanner :)
  - I could write so much more, but a) I'm tired, and b) I'm lazy.

The First 48 hours awake
ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ

  Well, to put it short, Crash kicked ass. My trip started on Friday, Aug. 22.
I left Belleville for the Toronto aeroport at 2:50 am, I flew Air Greyhound
to Winnipeg then to Calgary. On the plane to Winnipeg, two guys sat next to
me, an Asian, and a Caucasian. One of them says to the other "I wish I had
brought something to read". Me, anticipating a boring flight decided to be
friendly, and donate a copy of Scientific American to the two. I then asked,
"Are you returning or visiting Calgary?" The one next to me replied, "Visiting".
Well, that"s odd. Why would anyone visit Calgary so close to the beginning of
school? I asked them, "So, what are you doing in Calgary?", and then to my
surprise they replied, "Competing". It turned out the two were LakEEE and
Psychoman of Craw, and they too were going to Crash97, and I had the honour
of sitting next to the North American demoscene legends. Wow. I actually
was sitting next to Craw. And so I then proceeded to pester them for the rest
of the plane trip. I don't think they like me too much :)
  Upon arrival to the CIA (Calgary International Aeroport), I proceeded to
reclaim my baggage, and then accompanied LakEEE and Psychoman to the Meeting
Place where we were to wait for the Crash shuttle. Only it didn't arrive at
12 pm. So we waited a bit. Suddenly a kid came out of the doors. He was
wearing a backpack with a rubber ducky on it. Now wait a second... someone
on IRC mentioned that they'll be wearing a rubber duck. So I approached him
and interrogated him :) Sure enough, it was Sylphin. He had come with his dad
and smaller brother. We talked, etc., until again we got a bit bored.
So I decided to call Shawn(Seks) to see what was going on. He wasn't home, but
his fiance said she would get in contact with him. So back to the Meeting place.
We then see two Asian guys come out of the arrivals doors, and they look around
a bit, seeming a bit lost, or looking for someone. We ask them if they're
going to Crash, and they were. They belonged to a group called 10K or TenK.
I'm not sure of their aliases, but I knew their names were Jake and George.
Eventually the Crash shuttle arrived (at 2pm), and we were off to the party
place. Upon entry I met Max (Fysx), bought my ticket, a shirt and was off
to help set up. When I went down the stairs I thought to myself 'Holy shit'.
The party place was *HUGE* compared to NAID. I saw the sound system and
then imagined my ears bleeding during the democompo :). The first person
I looked for was Vector/Vertigo, as we were always keeping tabs on eachother
during demo development, and he's a really cool guy. During my search for
Vector, I met a few people, including Andude, C Ray C, and Dynabyte (who
unsuccessfully tried to break my hand upon shaking hands :)). I finally found
Vector, and then caught up on old times. (I pretty much asked him over and over
again if I could see his demo :)). I also saw the Matrox dude and his stand.
I figured that this was a great opportunity to test my demo on a supercool
machine (17 inch monitor, P200, fast Matrox video card). WOW! I have never
before seen my demo run in full framerate! It was fantastic, and best of
all, it did not crash. There I also met Breakpoint, whom I had hung around
with at NAID 96. I was sort of disappointed that Anix and Onyx could not have
shown up. Slowly as the hours passed on, people trickled in, and we ended up
with about 50 people by end of the night. Only then was the worry setting in.
The worry that Crash would be a 'flop', as in having only about 50-100 people
instead of the expected 500-1000.
  The first day of Crash really had no compos planned and so we just decided
to get to know each other a bit better, and with Crash, it was a bit easier
to remember everyone (as there were only 50 ppl to know). I met this guy
from Georgia, who was giving out stickers of Trissy, himself, and various
slogans. He spoke with a southern accent, and called himself Sp'ange. Now
this guy was cool :) I mean, he was a scener hillbilly (and proud of it :)).
He was working on this weird song called HiLlBiLlY TeChNo, and so far it was
sounding pretty cool (and original). Later that night he was even giving out
beer (and I got one too :)) I could go on forever talking about Sp'ange
(I really could), but I won't. But I hope from this brief summary you decide
that he is cool. :) Among other highlights that first day was the PornTro.
This was made by C_ray_c and someone else I think. Now this was hilarious.
It was 'All that she wants' by Ace of Base played at 'helium speed', with
a porno pic scrolling back and forth at an insane speed. Needless to say
we were all pissing our pants laughing.
  That night, at 12:00, the rave started. This was my first rave, and we got
a chance to test the projector out. Somehow I managed to be the VJ for the
rave, and so I spent 6 hours playing demos, and playing with Vector's laser
pointer. There were some freaky people, and some really nice chicks (among
them were some lesbians which had a tendency to make out constantly). During
the rave, some people even came up to me wanting to find out about demos,
what they were, how to get them, how to make them, etc. Some of the ravers
were even in the BBS scene. I mean these guys looked like they were last
people on Earth to sit infront of those evil boxes called computers. Overall
the rave was great fun, although only about 300 people showed up (blame it
on the location of the stadium, and on the fact that a bigger rave was taking
place the next day somewhere else). At around 4:00 am, people were getting
tired, and wanted those insane ravers to go away (especially Sp'ange, who kept
yelling at "That DJ bitch" to quit playing "this crap" and to let him track).
Eventually they did leave, and so life was peaceful again. At that point,
after spending 5 hours VJ'ing the rave, I had achieved the 1st stage of
zombification (restlessness, hyperactivity, and a tendency to spontaneously
collapse onto the ground at the weirdest of times).


Next 21 hours awake
ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ

  The next morning, people were scrambling to track their music compo tunes
before the deadline (including myself; I tracked my 4 channel tune at 5 am).
I then saw a man, dressed in a suit and glasses walk in (actually, I think
he arrived the night before, but I was sorta too out of it to notice). He was
polite, and energetic; he did not look like a scener :) He turned out to be
Bluemax, and he was entering a tune to the music compo. The music compo
started a bit late (as everyone slept through the deadline). The entries were
pretty good, but we were all left with our jaws on the floor when we heard
Eden 8 by Bluemax. He was a guy that I have never heard of, but his song was
the best piece of tracked music that I have ever heard (maybe the 16,000 watt
sound system helped out with that impression). It was an extremely complex
orchestral tune with a lot of variation in it. You should have seen the look
on his face when his tune won. 
  Among the other entries were 'GODDAMN.IT' by Sp'ange. It came 4th
place, but it wasn't a song. It was just him saying 'GODDDD DEEAAAaaAAaaAAMMN'
at many pitches with his Southern drawl. It beat our entry, so we were a bit
annoyed :). I guess you could figure out at this point that the compos were
100% public vote (as no self-respecting music judge would place that song at
4th place :)). Another tune that cought my ear my was umm.. <insert
complicated title here> (I'm senile) by Cthulu. This song was just cool.
It was using *ancient* samples, and it sounded very silly yet cool. Now, this
Cthulu guy was interesting. :) He showed up to Crash wearing a strange purple
hat, had some of his black beard in braids, and carried his belongings in a
fish shaped bag. Most interesting of all, he was carring a bag made of duct
tape containing duct tape and foam covered PVC pipes.
  After the compo, we had a bit of a break, had some food, and then proceeded
to have the 4 channel compo. This compo featured another tune of Sp'ange,
only this one came last. Oddly enough, this was a real tune. I think that it
was pretty good too, well at least the beginning of it. I'd upload it to
cdrom.com, only that it isn't mine, so I'll let him upload it. My entry came
3rd, and Nemesis, who tracked his tune in the washroom to avoid the rave noise
placed 1st. A large blank spot in my memory succeeds the 4 channel compo. Yep,
I had achieved the 2nd stage of zombification (random babbling, memory loss,
and blurred vision). My memory returned when I was looking for a place to
sleep. I then heard someone say that we have to now sleep in the bubble,
where it was VERY cold, and the air smelled like week old urine. Needless to
say, the managers of the soccer stadium were pricks. They first insisted
that they supplied the food, then they insisted that we were to sleep in the
f**king frozen urine stained bubble. They even woke some people up. We pretty
much ignored them (except for a few who later regretted it) and went to
sleep where ever we wanted. I think I passed out for an hour at this point of
time. 
  At the end of the second day, Max and Shawn gathered us in a corner of the
dome with a bit of news. I assumed that it was the worst. I'm paranoid, never
forget that. I pretty much expected that we had been reported to the police,
etc,etc,etc,etc, and we were gonna be executed by crazed neonazi police
officers on crack. Turned out that they offered us two choices. A) We could
stay at the stadium for another day, costing them $3000, putting them another
year in debt or so, or B) We could relocate to a conference room at some hotel.
Us being nice demosceners chose B, and in fact I look back and am glad that we
did.
  The conference room was actually really nice. It was considerably smaller
than the soccer stadium, but it had a perfect setup. There was ample room
for a decent sound system, the 12x12 foot screen, and a small wood floor circle
where the wild compo later took place. It was surrounded by tables and chairs,
used by the sceners to make their products, play Quake, etc. The booths on the
far side of the room were great places to sleep too. I think that this was
about the time that I decided to have a nice long nap. During my nap
preparations I decided to go out and have a 12 inch long Donair. I also had
a chat with Arhythmic who seemed to be cool as well. After about 30 min
I was starting to forget how to speak and so I set up my blanket and pillow.
Yes, after staying up for more than 69 hours, I succumbed to my favourite
passtime - sleeping.



Another 30 hours awake
ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ

  I woke up a whopping 7 hours later. I was just about to miss the graphics
compo deadline, and so I quickly rushed to hand my poorly drawn art in. Turns
out that I was about 20 min early, so I figured I'd try my hand at another
entry. It was gonna be a tripped out mushroom patch. Cthulu was right there
beside me criticizing it :) I gave up as I pushed the stupid windows button
instead of ALT and that crashed Deluxe Paint. Anyhow, the art compo, I really
do *not* remember. Well I remember that LakEEE won, and I got like last place (
I am REALLY not an artist, but I actually thought my pic was demented enough
not to get last :)).
  The REAL fun began when Shawn and Max announced the wild compo. Woah :)
Cthulu was the only entry, but it was so damn cool. Basically, those pipes
he brought were used for beating other people. It was some sort of sword
fighting, where a blow to a long would cause you to lose it, and two blows
to the torso would kill you. Well. Needless to say I was used for the example
match. Got my ass kicked by Cthulu, who was very big, and who had lots of
practice. I started out shitty against the rest, but once my heart started
to actually beat (after 3 days of nonactivity), I started to whoop ass :)
Oh yea, Nemesis/Cataclysms still kicked my ass (he's big and strong too), but
he couldn't beat Cthulu. I then started to get into the comedic mood. Cthulu
wanted to have an ANSI compo, so we all struggled to get get some ansis done.
Now me, not having a computer of my own did the only thing a desperate guy
could do. I hijacked the compo machine, loaded dos edit, and started to
make a realtime ANSI :) (yea, it was ansi because I asked for help on the
codes, and used debug to get the 0x1b ESC character :)). This was also the
time I got my 'vote for breakpoint' idea. As Breakpoint was sitting next to
me while I made the ANSI. Well.. people did vote for him, he did an ansi duck
and got 2nd :) As you could guess Cthulu won (or was it his girlfriend [yes,
we had some females at Crash]). The next compo we had was the raytrace compo
(or was the ansi compo after the raytrace compo), I did a quick shit in
10 min and tied for last with Arhythmic (who pulled a pov-ray sphere out of
his HD) :). I forget who won.. I think some hillside scene, or some Star Trek
type room which had 18,000 polygons and took forever to render (so long that
we delayed the compo for about 3 minutes). Lucky I brought 3ds4 with me on the
compo CD or else I would have *never* of entered anything to come last with :).
  The last compo before the demo compo, the goofiest and most fun of them all
was the batch file compo. Well.. perhaps I'm reporting this a bit skewed as
I won this compo :). I forget how we made a batch file compo... I think it was
when I did a:

 "@echo off
  :p
  echo VOTE FOR BREAKPOINT
  goto p"

that people decided to have a surprise 15 min batch compo. I'm lucky that
Max's PC when playing ^G's delayed for about 0.5 seconds. Perfect speed for
a choppy ascii animation. Basically it looked like this:

 "Vasta's Batch file compo entry
  Press any key to continue...
  Please Choose a Sound Card [0] PC speaker [1] PC speaker [2] PC speaker
  <insert comments about breakpoint, phong ball, and dancing ascii man here>"

Among the other entries were Fysx's 'how do you confuse a coder, press any
key to continue' endless loop, Seks's 'Werd' ascii spinner, Sp'ange's
'GODDAMN' ansi entry (it actually had ansi codes in it), and Hewitt,
who entered A.BAT which looked like this:

 "c:
  cd crash\entries\batch
  vasta.bat"

I was sorta worried that perhaps that batch file would beat mine :)
(Hey, I worked long and hard for that vasta.bat). Anyhow, that had to be one
of the best compos :) Among other surprise compos was the 'track the Andy
Griffith theme using sine waves compo'. I forget who won that :)
  Finally, the demo compo came. Unfortunately this same compo has been
raising quite a storm in the scene. The winning demo, Nature by Vertigo
was run on his PC under win95. Anyhow, we'll get back to that later.
The first demo shown was TenK's demo (I really can't remember the title, sorry
guys). Unfortunately, it wasn't timer synched, and so it went wayyyyy faster
(they optimized it for the wrong computer ;)), but it had some nice art,
a nice 3d engine, and decent music. It was damn good for their first demo,
and it placed 6th (kicked the living shit out of Potato Salad :)).
The next demo was a 'remote' entry called Black Moon by Dolphin. I know there
was some confusion to what a remote entry was, but with a remote entry, you
could not win prizes, but you could still compete. Dolphin's demo had some
really nice code, but I think people did not vote for it as much because of
the fact that it screwed up on both party machines (the projecter couldn't
handle the video mode), and so it had to be run on Vector's machine, and
audiences generally aren't too patient; the demo placed 5th. The next demo that
ran was 'Too Far' by Divine. Now I don't understand why this demo placed 4th,
I mean the 3d engine in this was fantastic. It was sooooo smooth and looked
great. Had nice rgb lighting, good texturemapping, good music, nice 2d art
and the end scene was *great*. I won't spoil it for you :). After Divine's
demo, was ours, 7 Deadly Sins by Net Generation. Well really, what can I say
without being biased. The demo ran, it didn't crash, and we placed 3rd. The
Y clipping was buggy (but fixed in final release), and it was somewhat funny.
After our demo was shown, Satire's demo was shown. This demo had some really
nice 3d scenes, although I was sort of getting tired of seeing 'Wipe Out'
over and over again in demos. The Bomberman scene in the demo was GREAT,
we were all laughing out loud. It came second. Have you noticed a pattern here?
It seems the first demo shown got last, and the last demo shown got first,
I'm blaming it on the short term memory of the audience (sleep deprivation
does that). By no means however am I implying that the standings were
inaccurate (well I still think we shoulda got 5th or so, because really,
Dolphin's and Divine's demos were great).
  The last demo shown on the screen was Nature by Vertigo, and wow, was it
*ever* good. Only drawback with some people was the fact that it was run
off of his machine and in win95. The demo supported software, 3dfx, and
Matrox rendering, but of course it was run in software rendering in the demo.
Everything about the demo was great (except for maybe the lack of 'obvious'
music synching (ie: to the bass drum or something)), and I don't care what
*anyone* says about it. Vector worked for 8 months on this, and he came all
the way from Guatemala to present it! That's dedication, and just because
it ran from the wrong OS (win95) doesn't mean it should be DQ'd. And in fact
he had a DOS version (but I think the timer was not working or something
dumb like that). Where will demo compos go? I mean you see some nice win95
demos, but should they remain separate from DOS demos? It's still the PC.
Either we can keep the PC demoscene using two OS's and having two compos,
or we could combine the PC demo compos into one compo. That would allow
people who code unix to enter their demos (provided the party machine can
run them), and then we would generally see a larger audience and greater
exposure to those sceners who are looking for jobs in the computer industry
(specifically games). Multi-platformness could be encouraged (ie; get extra
points if you support 2 or more OS's) as well. It's up to you, the audience
and the members of the demoscene to decide. Personally, I think this should
be the future trend.
  Anyhow, after the demo compo we all went our separate ways. Well except
for about 15 or so people who all went to Shawn's house for the night
(as our flights left the next day). Now this last night and day was just cool.
Plain and simply cool. We arrived there and Shawn's fiance cooked us some corn
and we also went out for Chinese food. We sat on the lawn talked about things
that sceners talk about (movies, cartoons, computers, food, lame things that
go on, etc) and we really had a great bloody time. We sat there for *hours*
talking and eating. Among the people who were there were: Nemesis, god,
Vector, Breakpoint, Jake and George (from TenK), Arhythmic, Seks403 and
Fysx, myself, Sp'ange, Incarnate, LakEEE, Psychoman, and Bluemax. If I forgot
one of you, don't hesitate to kick my ass as you were all cool. We then
did various things like watch movies (man was it fun to watch Hackers and
poke fun of it all way through), and we watched a Pink Panther movie too.
One demo which turned out be a great hit with us was Commander Culp 5 by
Grinders, which we showed on Shawn's WALL (using his tv projector). This
demo was basically an animation of a black shadow from outer space going on
a mass killing spree; great fun :). Other activities included playing Star
Control II (I demolished breakpoint :), but Seks whooped my ass). It seemed
to draw people who never played it before (Sp'ange and Vector, shun them
forever :)), again, it was great fun (only that Seks's GUS buzzed static when
no sounds were played so we quickly chose our ships). Only thing I didn't
like about the SC2 tournament was that when Seks whooped my butt he wouldn't
give me a re-match (like I'd win anyways :)). I really don't remember what
I did that night, but in the morning we were treated by Shawn to a really cool
breakfast (woah, a scener that can cook) consisting of scrambled eggs and
pancakes. That topped it off, this party was honestly the coolest place
I've visited in my life, and I was *really* sad to know that this was my final
few hours in Calgary. We also spent half the night trying to get a 2 computer
Quake network going (thanks to Jake/TenK for helping us out there). The whole
purpose of this Quake tourny was for Breakpoint to go against god/Cataclysm
in a deathmatch. What was funny was that we only got it working 30 min before
we had to leave for the aeroport :) After having some more fun with Vector's
laser, and a quick stop to the corner store, we (Breakpoint and I were leaving
at the same time) said our good-byes and we were off to reality again. At the
aeroport I said my good-byes to Breakpoint and Seks and was off in a zombie
like state to the plane bound for home.

Aftermath
ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ

  Now here's what pisses me off. I see people in #coders, #trax, etc. dissing
Crash, calling it and the organizers lame. Really, can you say that it's lame
after reading what I wrote above (which I tried as much as possible to leave
unbiased)? I mean, Shawn and Max spent so much time and money to make this
party happen, and it turned out to be the only party in North America this
year (well, Spring Break too). I think we should congratulate them, not
osctracise them. They tried to make this party a huge gathering of sceners
everywhere. Although we did not get many visitors, I think we made up for
that in quality of the people. We had people from the East Coast, the West
Coast, the South, the North, and Central America. We had no local 14 year old
gamer-lamers who just took up space and didn't know shit about demoscene, and
we had no eleetism going on. We got a chance to know everyone at the party,
and the demo entries imho were on par with the Europeans (Europe as in ALL
of Europe, not Finland alone, Finland roxx :)). So can you really call
Crash a failure? Crash was the core of the demoscene, it had spirit, it had
atmosphere, and it was fun. Isn't that what matters, not a $10,000 or so
demoprize? Shawn and Max went into a ~$16,000 debt for us, and we just
call them lame in response? Really, think before you talk. If you weren't
at Crash and are calling it lame, you have no right to, and if you actually
were at Crash and are calling it lame, you should be dragged into the
street and shot.
