ANOTHER REPORT BY
STS
Error In Line 2 ended almost a week ago and damm what a nice party that
was ! Let's bore you with some story telling including some Frenchies.
I had planned to go there with Exocet, so he reached my place on Thursday
late afternoon. I was really happy to meet him at last, tho I had bad news for
him : actually some hours earlier, I had a stupid accident which ended up with
my rear windshield smashed to pieces :( Damm and we were supposed to go to EIL2
with my car... Grrrr... Fortunately we were to pick up Frost nearby Starsbourg
and he kindly offered to use his brand new 206 what was a great idea esp as
going there with Exocet's old car already took us some time.
Here we were, riding smoothly on German highroads ! I was happily surprised
to notice that roads were in much better shape than 2 years ago :) Our trip was
pretty cool except for the unexpected snowstorms (yep in mid April!!) as we got
closer to our destination. Tho our speed got really close to snailpace we kept
going and reached Dresden safely. We found the party place at the very same
moment as the Ukers, ie Felice, CiH and John.
Our beloved basement, tho repainted, was still here and we found out that
we had a cool room reserved where we met Paranoid and his fellow Marcstar. The
other Frenchies arrived later and we very happy to meet St Ghost, Kerman and
Kor once again. Many guys, tho less numerous than two years ago, were already
settled and we recognized guys from DHS, Wildfire, Mind Design, tSCc, Escape,
Maggie Team, Reservoir Gods and many others. The first day passed by cooly
assembling our stuff, checking the current state of Alive while the guys of
Sector One were desperately trying to fix some bugs. They wanted ODD STUFF to
work on all ATARI machines from the ST to the Mega ST and that was pure
nightmare for ST Ghost (you were really brave Denis !!!).
I bought quite a lot of beers, we ordered a huge pizza and then I wandered
around checking known faces. Grey was there too and later that night we shared
vodka with him, CiH and others. After a - too long ? - beer/vodka/red wine
session I got my brains really blown up :) I spent my first night on my air
mattress, unfortunately mysteriously flatened, in other words I tried to sleep
on a cold concrete floor while I have back problems... No need to say how
broken I was on the next morning.
Btw here comes a funny story about that fucking mattress. I pumped it up
on the first day, then found it flattened. On the second day I decided to pump
up my second air mattres which had stayed unused on the floor of our room.
Oddly this second mattress played the same funny game so I slept on the
concrete floor once again. More surpringly, Exocet pumped up my first mattress
(still following ?) and it worked fine with him ! On the last night, I got
resolved to sleep on that now usual cold floor, not even trying to understand
that air mattress mystery...
On the second day, I wandered around again and that was cool since that's
what the party was about. I talked with guys here and there, always cool pals.
The guys from Holland were there and it was nice to meet Big Pete again ! Too
bad the guys of Teenage and Earx couldn't make it. Also missing was Defjam so
that the presence of another Checkpoint demo was getting very doubtful. Modmate
showed me an ass kicking screen and told me that he had tried to contact Defjam
all day long.... unsuccessfully... Unfortunately and in spite of many phone
calls, we had no news from Defjam. I hope he's ok and will kick asses again
very soon !
Back to our room where St Ghost was still tearing his hair off, fixing one
bug and finding out another had suddenly popped in. I spent the rest of the day
walking around and talking, spending some time with Moondog who announced me he
was going to release another issue of UCM : great ! As I read through the whole
mag my disappointment grew up, thinking that Moondog's UCM was about the same
good old things : 95 % Moondog only written stuff, too many slashings and an
article about "the latest UCM and the worst of them" which really saddened me.
Erm... more to follow in the UCM 21 review but let's get back to the party.
Soon, msx and gfx compos were held but I ran off as the first tunes were
presented. No need to sit in a room to listen to music ! Besides all tunes
sounded very poorly inspired, or at least that's the way I remember it. The gfx
compo didn't get me more interested esp since I had had the occasion to enjoy
three of the four gfx before :) No need to spend more time on the savage WHIP
pong compo, which found me hiding away from the screaming freaks :)
In the Frenchies room, some stupid video was playing on a PC (or what is an
Amiga ?). We enjoyed a French series called "Bricole girls" which is kind of a
DIY (do it yourself) tutorial with incredibely sexy and hot chicks ! Of course
it was planned to be a mixture of humour and sensuality and painting a wall
suddenly turned me on !
What happened next ? Well the usual beer drinking, aimless wandering and
everybody talking. Nice stuff I believe :) the second night was tougher since I
wasn't drunk this time. Hopefully I was tired enough to fall asleep after a
while in spite of some unhuman snoring (you know what I mean Oliver :).
The third day started the usual way. btw I forgot to mention that these nice
organizers offered us a real breakfast with fresh and warm bread, butter,
cheese and ham of several kinds. Yummy !! We also ordered another party size
pizza, good for the all of us (6 Frenchies) while I heard that Evil and Baggio
ate similar pizza all alone :) Ah Swedes ! Now I understand what Peylow means
when he says "in Sweden if you are under 100 Kg you're not called a man :)".
actually Swedes are not necessarily fat but they seem to be cut off wood... Or
maybe i'm just small, anyway.
Finally the great moment happened with the demo competition ! There were
very few ST entries and the best of them was of course ODD STUFF but it was no
surprise to me since I had a "no-swapping" preview for almost two weeks :) But
really that wonderul demo deserved a big show on a big (tho of poor quality)
screen ! Next was the Falcon demo, the part we were all waiting for : the TOYS
demo really kicked ass, tho it required a lot of ram to work (12 Mb I think).
It looked greatly designed and I wished I had some ram expansion at hand. Of
course the DHS demo was neat and tidy with cool fx and transitions. Evil gave
up his beloved tunnels to astonish us with 3D envmapped objects ! Really cool
but was the compo entry shown on an accelerated Falcon ? I'd like to see it run
on a 10 Mb Falcon + Fpu. Anyway it's always hard to have an accurate view of a
demo on such screen.
Paranoia also entered a nice Falcon demo which showed Paranoia's latest
coding progress. There was also a nice gfa demo (yep still on Falcon). Last but
not least was the real climax of the demo compo with the unexpected / shocking
entry of Escape ! "HMMM" as it was called really took the standard Falcon to a
new level of perfection with brilliant and various envmapped objects, stunning
synchronization with the great tunes by 505 and a really mystical feeling !
Damm I love that demo and - believe it or not - waiting for the release of
this demo, about 4 days after the party, was real HELL !!
So the night was over and my head was filled with nice pictures and sounds,
enough to spend something of an honourable night of sleep on my loved concrete
floor :)
The next day was mainly about packing, saying goodbye and wasting too many
hours stuck into traffic jams (and I still think German drviers suck). We left
Dresden at about 1pm but we only reached Frost's place at midnight (it's only
650 kms far !). Two hours later Exocet and I were safely home... The story ends
here.
The party was really cool, even better than two years ago even tho there
were not as many people. The first EIL was a great rehearsal so that we already
knew the place and people and I have to add that the organizers made wonders so
that everyone would be happy to be there. The bar services were great too and
we never starved (the breakfast thing was another great idea !). Well then my
last words should be : hi to everyone I met at eil2 (no names it would take too
much time) and huge thanks to the organizers of such a great event. As we say
and will hopefully repeat : stay cool, stay ATARI !
-------------------------------------------------------------------- STS -----
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