¡Disfruten de un nuevo nivel en correo basura, déjense llevar por las ensoñaciones que provoca la descripción de este maravilloso producto conocido como Tragamonedas Exóticas, mejoren su estado de ánimo y ganen pasta rápidamente!

Hola, Acabo de descubrir un excelente sitio que me gustaría que conocieras. Si te gustan los lugares exóticos y emocionantes – ¡tienes que probar las nuevas Tragamonedas Exóticas! Yo las probé hace una semana y es lo mejor que he visto – ¡hay abundantes juegos, son hermosos y la atmósfera me puso de muy buen humor! Tienen una excelente oferta de bonos de 1000$… y cuando fui, gané $2000 y vi el dinero rápidamente. Sólo presiona aquí y verás por qué tuve que contarles a todos sobre esto.

(El link me lo quedo yo para enriquecerme vilmente y darles envidia a todos ustedes cual Tío Gilito nadando en la piscina de monedas)

Since posting simple 4:3 pictures is so 90’s I’ve decided to post my videos and one panorama :-D

Part of the party place, with the famous rotating lights

Side screens

There were several of them in each side of the Areena. Good thing is that they were connected, so the letters appeared on the next screen when they disappeared from the one you were looking at.

And I’m not sure if somebody noticed, but there were different animations.

A funny detail, nevertheless :-)

Conga like

While we were waiting for the demo compo to begin, some people decided to dance around the place… and it was a good amount of people, just take a look at the video. They were going in and out the ground floor, going up the stairs and then appearing again from an unpredictable door far away.

All of that while singing an strange child song. At the end they even convinced someone to put the lyrics on the screen and everybody sang and clapped. Crazy!

Sokuseki

The screen looks minuscule from here! But the idea was to gather the ambience i.e. people reaction to the demo.

Trace has done a video version, with more details than the party version one. See Sokuseki at xplsv.tv

Party panorama

Since I discovered that my new camera had a panorama-made-easy function, I can’t stop trying to get the Best Panorama Ever. Unfortunately that’s not the case of this one, but at least allows you to get a grasp of the feeling in the party place.

There’s an extra image to the right which I haven’t been able to merge with the others. For some reason I took it excessively separated from the rest and it’s impossible to get it to work. So that’s why there’s more detail to the left than to the right.

Also it is terribly skewed. I’ll have to get a tripod or something one day if I want to do the Best Panorama Ever!

It’s interesting to note how they place people in the stands, whereas that’s very odd in Spanish parties. I just saw that once (at Euskal party 10) and I think they just added some extra seatings at the bottom of the stands as an emergency solution because they got fully booked or something.

Click the image for a bigger version, but not the biggest version… the original one is something like 7398×2000 pixels, ask me if you really want it :-)

Blimey!! Page 1 of 6, in the Assembly survey. What do they think, that I have the whole day for filling in forms? Like if this was some kind of psychological test or something. I think I’ll post here what I think instead.

Bad Points:

Too much Eau d’underarm

In addition to showing those slides which read Sleep! The party is more fun like that! the organisers should show also another slide which reads Have a shower! The party is more fun like that!. Specially on Saturday night – the whole place stank.

Outdated slides

Talking about slides, it would be cool if they showed always current information, i.e. outdated slides were removed. At one point they were announcing the party t-shirts and later on saying they had all been sold out.

Too many home stereos and rotating lights.

I think they should really either ban all the stereos or just kick out the attendants which insist on letting everybody know how bad their musical preferences are. At certain moments it was necessary to use earplugs to be able to listen to my thoughts. It’s fine if they want to play music, I can bear with that. Abusing it is a completely different concept.

Same goes for the useless rotating lights, I understand modding lovers like to create their own environment and that includes the light surrounding them etc, but at certain moments it was quite annoying to have all those lights flashing around yourself and everywhere where you looked at.

And what’s the purpose of bringing those lights to a party? Pinpointing yourself in a map? Saying Look mum!! I’m where the third rotating light is!!! just in case she sees the special tv1 program about Assembly?

Stand up comedy

It’s pretty much hopeless to make jokes in English when it’s not your native tongue and/or you’re not fluent in it. I have experience in that, so trust me in this one. Most of the times I didn’t even notice it was supposed to be a joke, and so I kept listening to the presenter, my facial expression completely unmoved.

At the end it just makes presentations tedious.

Messages and announcements in Finnish only

They should really take notes from Breakpoint in this one. All the public announcements in Breakpoint are in english, so that everybody in the public gets informed. I thought that was the point of public announcements.

Lots of announcements, instead, were in Finnish. Leaving us in a very confused state of mind.

Prizegiving ceremonies

There’s something more cumbersome than forced jokes. It is somebody reading numbers and enumerating the points differences between each competitor. And there’s a solution for that: Prizegiving ceremonies software! Featuring amazing and exciting growing bars which can show the rank and the total amount of points, while playing nice music which induces the crowd to clap altogether and gives a very old-school finishing touch to the party.

Website and PMS

The website needs serious information reorganising. It was hard to find elemental things such as the compo deadlines, and then there were lots of sections dedicated to rules rules rules rules rules and more rules. Did I say rules? RULES!

PMS (Party Management System?) needs little things to be more explanative. For example, when I tried to upload an entry, I was asked for The ticket. What was the ticket? In fact, they wanted to say the paper stripe with a long string of numbers and letters which you got when you paid for the tickets. It would have been enough with showing an example, such as: Hint! the ticket looks like AS2007JSD78FSDFHKSDJHFWU4YGSDJF¹. Luckily there was Gargaj around to help!

Oldschool area name

It’s quite misleading. It feels a bit out of place to be there with a shiny mac. I suggest it to be renamed to the more simple and obvious name of demoscene area. That would prevent people from expecting living computing dinosaurs sitting in that area and punching cards. Ah no, that’s too ancient – let’s just leave it in using a floppy disk.

Sound system was crap

Enough said.

Good points:

Good demoscene exposure to non sceners.

The Scenebooth was a very good idea. People which was in the booth said there had been lots of people coming there and asking questions, so with some luck some of them will get into the scene.

I’m not too sure about the location of the Oldskool area… if you move them away they look like if they are laboratory rats and nobody will want to touch them, but at least they do not have to put up with the crazy Finnish and their person-sized home stereos and freak music.

And if they are inside it’s better because in theory a curious non-scener could go to one of the scene places and ask them about the demoscene and all that. If only half of the people sitting in the oldskool area weren’t playing games all day long. Oldskool games like Bubble Bobble and Prince of Persia, actually. I saw it with my own eyes o_o!!

I think every generalist party should have a delegation of Scenebooth. With subwoofer.

Respect

In contrast to other parties (I’m looking at you, Euskal!) where gamers are just waiting for the smallest chance to create a revolution or ruin the scene events, here they turn off (most) of the equipment and pay attention to the scene compos.

Also, sceners are not moaning constantly about how evil gamers are. Given that I had done my homework, I even considered joining some game compo – if only I wasn’t so untrained :-)

I’m not sure if it’s just a convenient way of getting along or the difference between north and south Europe. But anyway it’s nice. It should be imitated.

Happy attitude

Don’t have the slightest idea of what the name of that children song was, but the moment when so many people began to dance/run/sing forming a long column around the party was very funny. Same for the final of that dancing game (wasn’t it Dance Revolution or something like that?), these guys are so amazing. How can they move their legs so fast!!

AssemblyTV

Every party should do that too. I’m not asking for the Assembly Demos in High Definition thing but a nice stream would be very cool. Euskal! I’m looking at you again!

Alive

It was a good idea since generally technorati does not work very well with these massive but not that massive events. A pity so few people used it.

Lives (raves)

Although I was just a bit in Lackluster’s live. But it’s cool to have lives, nevertheless.

Wireless connection

Even if it was a bit crappy due to the party location itself it was great to have some connectivity at every place I tried to connect. Also it seems that the wired network ran always properly so it’s something very remarkable too.

The rocks

It was funny until the police came! :-D

The weather

Sun for the first time in 1 month. In Helsinki – 60º10’N. Oh well! That’s what happens when you live in The Big Smoke, I suppose.

Conclusion

So will I go back to Assembly²? I’m not too sure. If I lived nearly maybe yes. But faced with the decision I would choose Breakpoint rather than Assembly. Bingen feels a bit claustrophobic after having gone there twice but they have currywurst. And a massive screen with also massive speakers.

Anyway, I checked another item on my list – I have been to Assembly!!

Next one… bcnparty!

¹ And why did they have to use such a long code? I felt the urge to copy and paste it – even if I just had a piece of paper to copy from. Even youtube id codes are shorter.

² And release the same song

I just arrived home safe and tired. We’ve had delays for boarding, delays for landing and 15 minutes flying in circles over a completely uninteresting area of London, while we got some way for our plane…

… and I’m too tired to write anything very deep and/or meaningful.

But before going to sleep at what was 1am in Helsinki but is now 11pm in London, I’ll just say it seems that anything with a colour scheme consisting only in 4 colours is pretty much hopeless in certain places, even if it looks neater and has a better direction that some of the arse-looking (literally) stuff which was released.

I loved it anyway! Here is my moral winner

And what else did I say you?

I anticipated our song was going to be disqualified for not reaching a minimum standard¹ (whatever the standards were, some songs sounded awful for my tastes). Well, it turns out that it wasn’t disqualified but it actually didn’t qualify, which is pretty much a limbo-like status. Like this: … you’re not in but you’re not out either, since I couldn’t make up my mind in a clear way… mmm let me think… oh well… anyway… try again next year!

Although even if it wasn’t played, it has been distributed. Not that I care too much about that, if somebody downloads the song and likes it, great! At the end, it can be a good exposure. But for god’s sake, MAKE UP YOUR MINDS!

You know, the thing with the qualify/disqualify duality is that they are like binary states. Something is “on” or “off” but it’s not in both status at the same time. Either that, or the device it’s just malfunctioning².

So I have decided that if I ever come back to Assembly, I’ll release the same song. And I’ll do an instrumental uberremix of the same song. And release a demo with the same song. Until they come to a decision.

Torturing? That’s so 90’s!!

This is called insistence!

Good night.

¹ You know that standard itself is a very funny term. Even if it’s supposed to be something commonly accepted, it’s not generally the case, and that’s why there are several standards, depending on who created (and obviously agreed to) them.

² I hope you’re not saying our song is malfunctioning!

I finally went for a walk in Helsinki. Funnily, I have been asked for directions three times. The three times I obviously had to explain that I didn’t speak Finnish.

I haven’t seen all the city, I have left half of it unseen for having a look tomorrow, also just in case trace and blackpawn want to have a look, so that I still have something to see hehe.

I didn’t try to follow any special direction, just went towards whatever looked interesting or photogenic.

This is a very hard city, or at least the area I have managed to see; there’s concrete everywhere, specially in that kind of industrial buildings meant for people to live inside but which do not look like a place where one would like to live. Maybe it is not brutal enough for being described as Brutalist architecture but I think it’s not too far from there.

When entering the party I was again spoken in Finnish and the same in the Kioski¹, I’ll end up with an identity crisis, looking at myself in the mirror and wondering where do they find the finnish traits in my face :-)

I had a look at the Scene Booth but there wasn’t anybody known there, so I went and took some pictures and videos of the party place. But I’m connected on wireless because I forgot about the network cable so I’m not uploading any videos or I’ll die waiting for it to finish.

Speaking about finishing, trace and blackpawn are working hard on their strange looking demo. I am idling here as you can see, waiting for my feet to recover from the city walk…

Socializing comes when feet do not hurt.

¹ I love that brand name, sounds very funny if you know that there’s a word in Spanish, kiosko, that we use for categorising that type of stores. It sounds like a diminutive name for kiosko.