SHIT =
OLDSCHOOL?!
Nah, may you say, not that dumb discussions again. But hey,
since the 20 Years of ST Megademo, the description "oldschool"
is in all peoples mouth again. In fact, that dumb
newschool/oldschool thing is quite rode to death now, but here
and then some question signs popping up again, when a "new"
production is called oldschool...
I really think it's time to ask, what the hell means -oldschool-
esp. nowadays! In fact I think, the description -oldschool- is
misused for any -shit- screen without any originality. Sure,
they might look like screens from the early days of the Atari
demoscene, but remember, already at those times we got fucking
shitty demos and screens, that melted away our eyes, burned down
our ears and deleted our brains. Not all that is or looks old is
an antiquity! And this seems to be some cancer nowadays, just in
the way "Hum, I can't code, I can't paint, I can't do sound, I
can't code, yeah baby, let's call it oldschool!" But fabulous
demos like "Ooh Crickey..." are oldschool too (seen in the
context the description -oldschool- is used mostly today) and
far, far away from being the same boring stuff we got hold under
the label -oldschool- today.
But in the past few years, the description -oldschool- was more
and more misused in this way, if you used a black background, it
wasn't shit, nope it was oldschool. If you just kicked out some
beeps and bleeps of the YM, it wasn't shit, it was called
oldschool! If you just released a screen with scrolly and
raster, it wasn't -nothing-, nope, it was an oldschool-demo...
and so on and so on...
What the heck?! What the hell means -oldschool-?! It really is
no description for shit, so to say!
For me, -oldschool- covers also a bit the vibe of the early
days... Do you remember this thing? To get squeezed out any
possible coding bit of your humble ST! To break frontiers en
masse! To show, that this tiny machine can reach heights, no one
of it's constructors ever dreamed of! -Oldschool- somehow means,
to search those frontiers, just to kill'em. -Oldschool- isn't a
thing to hide behind if you aren't able to do anything! And, in
fact, even the later demos on the ST are some kind of -
oldschool-, dentros like the brilliant works of Holocaust, are -
oldschool- too, as they still feature this special Atari ST
vibe, to push the machine far behind their technical frontiers!
Seen in this context, all the so-called "oldschool-screens" are
worthless and canīt be named oldschool at all. It seems -
oldschool- was only used to have a label for a bad release, and
if you called it that way, you always had some way to defend the
lack of design, originality or anything else, as it was
oldschool and oldschool is old looking stuff and ok that way...
But you are so wrong on this. It won't work out that way since
oldschool is just more than and old fashioned demo screen. It
just expresses a vibe, a feeling, a mood, many people today that
are firming under and releasing stuff as -oldschool- already
have lost.
In this way, just think about it, if you're sitting there, not
knowing what to do and hack another dumb screen together that
you will call oldschool because of its lack of originality...
moondog of .tSCc. for Alive, December 2oo5
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