• an example of how to finish the ifparty04 invitation intro – I must recognize it’s the first time I see that “we are uploading your scores” screen :D
• silenci’s fast music compo at if06 – improvising some vocals for yellow rose of texas
• did you know that timescratchers released an animation at assembly 06? well now you know and it’s there: unknown media by timescratchers
  
• there’s also their bcnparty demo: psicoffice – I like those particles, it’s all very intriguing
• sundown2006′s invtro for spectrum by evilpaul – I don’t know if that’s a real application but it’s terribly WICKED! too bad they don’t greet xplsv.com… well, we’ll make them learn that name!

Actually there are lots more videos but most of them are just demo captures. Just search for “demoscene” and you’ll get them…

Yes, part of the reasons of why do we produce is competition. Take a look at Astharoth/TLOTB or RGBA. They may look arrogant (as some people say), but they keep releasing stuff just because they want to demonstrate they can do it and they can improve with each new production. (I am afraid this reason is the most typical in the case of coders.)

There are more reasons for producing. There’s the desire to create, to express yourself using a computer (call it your digital canvas, or your virtual musical instrument… whatever metaphor you prefer more). These are reasons which can be listened from the musicians and graphic artists, I think. I personally am more inclined to say that’s the cause of my demoscene works, and not the competition. Call it the art of demoscene, if you want.

Finally there’s also the will to have fun. The desire of enjoying the demoscene as a pure humourous hobby and have a very good time with it, even if you produce something which is a see-once-delete-immediately production that only you can understand (and laugh at).

A quick look at any spanish party results will reinforce my home-made theory: most of the sceners in Spain are coders which love to fuss around their favourite compiler during the year without any time or resource constraints and occasionally release some party coded entry because they feel that stress as part of the game. Otherwise they simply don’t get compelled to finish whatever they are doing during months and it never gets released.
(On the other hand, the few non-coders usually tend to release at least something on every party they attend, even if it’s not the most astonishing work they have ever produced)
I presume trace’s idea for the charts may encourage those happy coders to produce… until a certain degree, of course. Because there’s also another problem which affects every kind of scener and it is the lack of time, as Merlucin points quite accurately in the first comment to trace’s post. Let’s face it, the scene is getting adult. While some years ago we could spend a whole day doing stuff with Impulse Tracker, or leaving the homework for tomorrow, today we can’t do it anymore. SiN already wrote about this on one Becanne issue. You can’t simply ignore your employer for a day because you need to finish a demo for the upcoming party, and you also want to sleep and do what human nature asks you for…

So what is left? Is there any solution? YES! If there are a certain number of people which can’t produce more, but you want more productions, then just add more people to the mix! The scene needs fresh blood.

And it’s about where to recruit new people when trace and me disagree sometimes. We both have the same feeling of lack of support by big media, like for example when famous computer magazines in Spain used to publish demoscene specials which came accompanied by a CD containing all the releases from the party (back to the time when Internet was absolutely unknown to the general public). Then, while I think maybe it’s better to show the demoscene to more specialized audiences, like part of more projects like for example xplsv‘s or plexiq‘s ones, he thinks the best is to recruit new people in parties. Hence his support for this past ifparty.

I must recognize he’s right, but if the organizers don’t manage to get people into their party and show them the beauty of scene, they have lost the whole point. And I am afraid that’s happening terribly often here. Maybe the tomorrow’s generation of sceners can be today’s generation of gamers, if you want to call it like that. But you need to catch their attention, however it is needed.

It’s not enough with advertising your party in your favourite scene portal. Because if someone reads it they are already on the scene. It’s not new people! I strongly believe we need to get out of our shell and show the demoscene to more people. Get it published in printed media, generalist newspapers, even TV. Yes, humble yourselves, you are not the only ones which use computers in this world. You are not a privileged species de per se.

Of course, when showing demoscene to new people, you will find lots of detestable people which you will regret once and once again to yourself of having got in touch with them and even introduced them to your scene world. They are some of the most feared elements in the scene: the lamers. You will also find lots of ignorance and people which is not interested in your ideas at all. Luckily these ones disappear as quickly as they arrived.
But at the end, thanks to not being so egoistic and sharing the knowledge that for some reason you hold in your head, you maybe will be able to catch some new people which will enrich [y]our scene with their own points of view.

And I think that’s what really matters at the end.

Oh and the charts? We were talking about them I think… weren’t we? 8-| Yes please. I would love to be on top of some categories! It looks as if it will be funny. Let’s get the competition started!

Some nice stuff in there. Ps’s coop with that mysterious member of limp ninja for high quality compo was quite interesting. Lots of intros, just one demo, and a very little amount of entries in the other categories. Shame on all of us, lazy bastards!

Trace had already posted a bit about this weird bug. Not too much information though… but I’ll explain what happens. This year’s site has been completely built by trace. He changed the templating system with something he made, more simple and with which he was more comfortable. But with safari it’s impossible to go almost anywhere. With a pair of clicks, the page gets to a Safari error message and that’s all you can get:

Safari can’t open the page.
Too many redirects occurred trying to open “http://ifparty.scenesp.org/06/?section=register&language=ct?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register”. This might occur if you open a page that is redirected to open another page which then is redirected to open the original page.

I thought this may have something to do with the way the pages were served, lots of redirections and more specially… relative url’s for the redirections. I read once that it was tecnically wrong. That was not an standard: http redirections have to use absolute full formed url’s. Although usually browsers just ignore this for allowing thousands of pages to continue working. So that’s why I thought the reason could be on that.

Anyway, not having time to try to fix the code of the page and just inspired by a post in Surfin’ Safari blog (which is highly interesting, by the way) I decided to submit the bug to the Webkit team.

In fact, there are two bugs there. One, the problem with relative urls just formed with ?parameters and flash appending the new value to the existing url, instead of replacing the appropiate parameters. That one is already fixed! They were very fast and I can’t do less than thank them for that efficiency. Here’s the bug page, just in case you feel curious: Query string always appended to Flash URLs, instead of being replaced. The other bug has something to do with the redirection limit exceeded error and I don’t have any clue of why does it happen, nor do have the guys from webkit. Seems like it’s something outside their bounds and they suggested me to report the bug to Apple. Let’s hope Apple engineers are as efficient as webkit ones and we will be able to browse ifparty’s website in Safari quite soon! :)

And well… maybe trace has a hidden ability to work as betatester… he just raised two weird bugs with just one layout case :P

Meanwhile you can browse the site with Camino or Firefox from your mac (don’t even think about explorer, you know it sucks terribly, specially on mac, and even more with that old interface which looks like "You’ve Got Mail" interfaces), and don’t forget to register yourself in the party, as organizers are willing to prepare all but they need to know how many people is going to the party!

• most of the time more / international people means also a better party
• why and how to visit these parties? organizers, set up your party place and date as early as possible and advertise. check out how people from further away can travel there cheap

I don’t know why do we always fail miserably on the same points. It’s not the only one, but past if05 was announced with a considerable delay. if06 goes in the same way. And there are other parties which fell in the same horrible error, of course, but I’ll let you choose your favourite ones…

I hadn’t experienced much of that problem until I moved to London and started going to parties by plane. Then is when I noticed the big difference which makes buying the travel tickets one or three months in advance. The difference can be really astonishing: maybe £80 if you buy it on a decent early date, and £300 buying it one month before. There you depend on the party dates being fixed lots of months in advance, and the party credibility and reliability level.

And there are organizers which think that the party is going to be full of people just because there’s a party. For the sake of going there, and they will even bring productions with them. Excuse me, may I have a laugh? Ha-ha! That one was funny.

I could continue criticising the absurd desinformative websites of certain parties which force the visitor to go in circles and start wandering around until they find such simple details as how to arrive to the partyplace, but I really don’t care that much at this point. In fact, please allow me to be a bit rude… I don’t give a f***!