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Text File | 2003-01-26 | 13.2 KB | 226 lines

<head> <title="...forever..."> <font=monaco10.fnt> <font=newy36.fnt> <font=time24.fnt> <image=back.raw w=256 h=256 t=-1> <buf=3300> <bgcolor=-1> <background=0> <link_color=253> <module=console.mod> <pal=back.pal> colors: 251 - black </head> <body> <frame x=0 y=0 w=640 h=3300 b=-1 c=-1> ----- - - - ------------- ---------------------------------------------- <f1><c000> alt party reached 4th edition! <f0> --------------------------------------------------- - -- -- ------------ As I write this article, we are sitting inside, but very close to a sauna-area. It's the time of the after Alt Party party, that may well sound rather convoluted but that is basically what is happening. A fair amount of guys are here from Alt Party itself, such as Nosfe, CiH, Setok, Ravel and Msk. There are also one or two ladies here as well, sexist we certainly are not ! Directly in front of us we have another laptop, an Amiga and a PC showing off various demos. But, for the party report itself we have to go back in time, back to Thursday 9th January ... a time when Finland's cold weather really hit us .... 3.00pm, Birmingham International Airport. We are flying out from here to Helsinki via Amsterdam Schiphol airport, where we are also meeting up with John Hayward (Asteroid) who is flying out from Heathrow, a nightmare airport if there ever was one. Still, we meet up in good time at Schiphol and, after a toddle around the shopping areas of the airport (not looking at any pr0n mind) we made it to our gate for the flight from Schiphol to Helsinki. Our flight is there, we board and take off a few minutes afterwards. Landing at Helsinki is uneventful, it being a clear night sky we seemed to recognise flying or indeed descending as we flew over the city of Turku, famous for the first ever Alternative Party. Landing was also straightforward and we disembarked, making sure we have everything with us. Our phones also start working in a short time and, after picking up the baggage (a story in itself, as John's bag turned out unbeknown to us to have arrived on the flight before us. After a while, remembering what happened with Q- Funk's bags a few years ago and hoping that this nightmare was not happening again we picked up John's bag from the unclaimed baggage area. Finally, getting everything all together, we toddled out of the baggage reclaim hall and met Q-Funk and Paavo, otherwise known as Pahartik, in the arrivals hall. As Paavo hadn't eaten we went up to one of the cafes upstairs that was still open and sat down awhile to let him buy a piece of cake and a drink. This done, we marched back downstairs again and organised a taxi to take us to Niittykumpu, which is the name of the area where Q-Funk lives. The taxi journey was strange, with Q-Funk having an argument with the taxi driver over numbers. This caused the driver to pull over suddenly, but he calms down and continues the journey. We arrive at Q-Funk's place in a few minutes and get through the snow, embracing the warmth of the flat with a lot of relief. We also, on arriving, meet up with Q-Funk's flatmate, Marc, who greets us cheerily. His behaviour so far has been quite good, a big improvement on last year which is a good help. As it is late when we arrive, we set up some of our computer stuff, including this laptop, onto Q-Funk's internal network and server, and do a bit of surfing and general farting around till it is time to go to bed a couple of hours or so later on. Friday comes along and we rise at around 10am or so, get the stuff packed and make our way to the now familiar surroundings of Gloria, the nightclub where Alt Party is being held. We enter and manage, after a slight bit of persuasion from Q-Funk, to take the left hand side of the upstairs section. The right hand section is quickly taken up by Baggio and the other Swedish guys, who made an appearance shortly after we appeared. In the middle of the upstairs part was the organisers desk area. This turned out to be one of the best decisions we made as it proved to be warm enough to sleep comfortably in the booths where we sat. As a few of us had blow-up mattresses with us, this meant that sleep was comfortable and possible. Later on that afternoon, people started to arrive, some of whom we recognised from previous Alt parties. Viznut was there, for those of you who have not heard of him this is the guy who does some seriously excellent coding of demos on the Vic20. He was there with his new demo entry that we got to see during the competitions, more on those a bit later on in this article. Nosfe and other guys also turned up, along with the Byterapers and other people. Jeff Minter, as I mentioned before, was also there - and it has been seriously great to talk to him. Hopefully he will come to EIL #3 as well - he sounds up for that. We got introduced to a new (to us) female scener, by the name of Diamondie. She proved to be very interesting to speak to, and we spent a fair amount of time chatting on IRC with her when the Internet router network link was up. She's also quite cute too - being an 18 year old blonde girl. Still quite shy, but nice nevertheless, it was nice to see her there. Most people arrived at the party itself on the Friday evening, and around 7pm the live music acts started. These ranged from being pretty good to quite bad, not quite as bad as Girls Aloud or One True Voice thankfully. Unlike those two so-called bands, these groups all had a fair amount of talent. Some of the music itself was quite experimental in nature but not too bad. Two other people made an appearance for the whole of the party, they being DBug and Twilighte, stalwart supporters of the Oric computer scene. They also had an entry in the compos called Barbitoric, which is TBH one of the best 8bit entries I have seen. Twilighte hails from Luton which is a shame but D-Bug hails from Lyon in France. After the live music, the non & disqualified demo compo was held. There were some very amusing entries here, one in particular from a group called 'Milk' was hilarious, Jeff Minter falling off his chair at least 4 or 5 times during this ! The compo itself finished at around 3 am or so and people wandered around for a bit then gradually settled down to get some sleep wherever they could. The sound of snoring could be heard in most areas for a few hours, as people gradually got bedded down for the night, and this went on till fairly late morning. CiH interlude from the after-party: What's the worst that could happen (with Dr Pepper) You can put some vodka in it! Saturday morning, well, make that around noon or so, everyone was up and about again. Diamond was complaining about feeling rather cold, personally I reckon she should have joined us upstairs as she was right, it was quite cold where she was sitting. The afternoon passed gently along with a lot of talk and socialising, followed by the early part of the evening when a group of us, including myself, CiH, Asteroid, Q-Funk, Terminus and D-Bug went to a Malaysian restaurant nearby to Gloria itself for a meal. This proved to be very interesting, a lot of merry conversation was had here, including a topic at one stage on English swearwords. The meal itself passed off well and we left a tip, being impressed with the service in general. On getting back to Gloria, the main compos were in progress, so we got to see and hear a lot of the music stuff. A very cool mp3 entry from the multi-talented Teque of Aggression was one of the first that we heard, another excellent tune. It's one to download for sure or even to hear on Nectarine. The music finished about an hour or more later and other compos followed, most of which were in the category of 'weird but ok'. The talk on the IRC channel #altparty, mainly frequented by people at the party itself, was about the fact that some food had been stolen, mainly from Diamond and also from one of the other guys as well. On hearing this, Paavo and I elected to make sure she had replacements, mainly from me a couple or so chocolate bars, which (I think) I hope she enjoyed. A few British made chocolate bars are available here in Finland, but Penguin is one that is certainly not around here, so that would be something entirely different :) Some of the more memorable releases at the compos were in the b&w video compo. Here, our very own Diamond had an entry featuring her young sister, very tasteful and nicely done. Another of the weird entries in one of the other compos consisted of a film along with a catchy tune along the lines of 'vaty vaty vaty vaty vaty vaty'. This was really hilarious - definitely something to look out for on a late-night Channel 4 or Channel 5 show - for the weird zone anyways. This tune ended up going round and round inside my head for the whole day and night after the party itself ended. We finally managed to get some more sleep again, starting from around 4am or so, when things quietened down a bit in Gloria. Around 10am, we were woken by Paavo, who told us that he'd received a phone call from Q-Funk, and we were to get our gear packed up and returned to his place before the award ceremony took place. This we duly did, returning to Q-Funk's place by taxi, then getting a combination of buses back into the centre of town once again. A trip to McDonalds - one of a few this time - was made to get some much needed food to take away to the ceremony itself. Shortly after arriving back at Gloria we ate our food, partly in semi-darkness then back into the light of the downstairs cafe. The award ceremony went well, with a fair amount being handed out. D-Bug won the award for the most obscure computer. He was rather overawed with the prizes that he got - part of a dismantled Cray supercomputer, books and other bits and pieces. He, along with Twilighte, also got second prize for the demo competition as well, with their combined entry called Barbitoric, the first (so far) ever Oric demo to be shown at a party ! The Oric itself, for those of you who are not aware of it's history, was produced in France and England during the heyday of the Sinclair Spectrum. Unfortunately the three dominant formats, most notably Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64, meant that the Oric failed in the UK. I have no idea how things went for the company in France, unfortunately. Nosfe, Diamond and a number of other people and crews also won awards at the party. The 'vati vati vati' demo also won a prize too. All the winners were then entitled to some rare Atari memorabilia stuff from Jeff Minter, mainly consisting of mugs and beer mats. It was very good though. Alt Party 4 itself was very enjoyable for a number of reasons. It was good to make acquaintances again with the regular guys that we knew from previous Alternative parties, also it was nice to spend some shortened time with Q-Funk, as he had to go away with Terminus and the other Estonian guy to Tallinn for a week-long meeting. It was also interesting to meet up with some of the regular Assembly party attendees, of this group that included Diamond. Felice - -- --- ---- ---------------------------------------------------- CHOSNECK team contact us: growin' up with atari community greymsb@poczta.fm ---------------------------------------------------- -- - --- ---- </frame> </body>