Preview
ASSEMBLY 2000 REPORTAGE
by Kure of RNO
On Our Way..
My trip to Assembly'2000 started at Thursday 3th of August at around 17-18:00
from Tampere with SHD/Mystic, Shape/DCS and Atn+Marq/Fit. It took a couple
of hours to drive to the party place which was located at Pasila, Helsinki.
We parked our car and started carrying stuff to the hall. We all had got
tickets to the old skool area of Assembly in advance except me, who had to
call to Tundrah/RNO to bring me one of the free tickets he had got. You see,
it was a benefit that the organizers got (free tickets I mean:) and Tundrah
was the organizer of old skool (Amiga) demo compo.
Tundrah came soon and I got the ticket. In the entrance every time you came
outside to inside the organizers checked your bags for booze and other
forbidden things. I suppose you don't see such a strict security checks
at any other parties. Anyway, I went to the old skool area and found the
rest of our posse quickly. I put my bag under the table where Marq had his
Linux PC. There was 3 public computers at the party and I went to one of
them to upload my and my group mates' contributions to compos: an old skool
module+picture, a multichannel tune and a flash "demo". After uploading them
I went searching a grocery store with Shape as I needed some ciders and
grapefruit lemonade to mix it with gin. The area wasn't familiar to us
so we had to ask the road to the nearest store from some local inhabitants.
Finally we got there 15 minutes before the closing time.
Assembly? Boozembly!!
A bit later we found ourselvers at the Boozembly, boozing of course. :) There
was lots of people - old legends like the Byterapers and some not that old
sceners. I met many foreign friends of mine there: Leia/Apathy, Xhale/DCS and
Sixpack/Haujobb from Norway, Dixan/SK from Italy, XXX+Hellfire+Noname+Cynic/
Haujobb from Germany and of course many Finns. Ganja/NVX for example showed
up later... I can't really remember what exactly happened later
that night except that we were boozing there... :) Sometime in the night I
went inside with Tundrah and Shape and went to sleep at some organizers'
room...
I woke up at 10AM or something and had a quite terrible hangover. Then I
wondered around, went to the old skool area, ate a little bit, went out
to take some photos of graffities and returned inside. Ganja came
back to the party (he had been sleeping at home) at noon and we decided to
go to IRC using Mystica's Amiga. We made a cruel joke by putting a topic "A
new killer demo from Nerve Axis at Asm2k!...?" at #amigascne. :) Of course a
lot of people started asking about it but we just were quiet about it.. Some
time later Leia came and checked her emails as she was supposed to get The
Tough Guys' demo from Norway. But she hadn't got it yet and asked me if I
could take care of it and upload it to the compo as she was leaving to
Koneisto festival at Turku pretty soon. Naturally I accepted the job and
later completed it.
Competition Time..
The afternoon and the evening were pretty quiet, nothing much happened. Lots
of people had left to the Koneisto festival (a festival for electronic
music, featuring artists like Luke Slater, Plastikman, and many more), so
Ganja and I just wondered around, mostly between Boozembly and Assembly, and
were on IRC. At 21:30 the old skool compos were supposed to start and after
5-10 minutes delay the music compo started. There was some good songs (my
song wasn't surprisingly played) and some average ones... Then was turn for
the graphics compo - half of the pictures were cool, the rest were crap, and
finally the demo compo. I think there was 4 C64 demos, 5 or 6 Amiga and the
rest were PC demos. A couple of them were good (Haujobb & Spaceballs) but
most were average or crappy.
Hakon/Whelpz had told to Ganja that we were supposed to get a 64k intro by
email but we hadn't got anything by the deadline (8pm). But at around 2AM we
got mail including the intro which we then right away copied to disk and
went to the organizers' info desk. We asked if one specific compo organizer
(Hieronymous or something) could come which he did and then we started
explaining why we were bringing the intro so late - 6 hours after the
deadline - he understood the reason and took the disk.
Of course we wanted to see the intro and went back to use Mystica's Amiga.
It didn't work even though we tried to run it without caches, with them
and so on... Then we took the intro to Ion's Amiga and it didn't work
properly on it either. At that time Ion told us that he had got an
Appendix's 64k intro but for some reason (forgot, lazyness..?) he hadn't
upload it to Zepo (the voting/production uploading system). As I and Ganja
are such a nice fellas we decided to deliver the intro to the organizers.
And so we went back to the info desk and gave the disk.
Meeting our Friends...
At Saturday afternoon was Ansi compo but I wasn't interested in seeing it so
the next compo I saw was the Flash. They showed 10 entries from which none
was anything spectacular. I and my friend Aava made a production called
"Pingpong" which got the 6th position.. :) So the next thing in the schedule
was to go buy more booze which I did with The Hooligan/DCS, Weirdo/Skid Row,
Leia and SHD. On the way to Boozembly it started raining so we had to stop
at the Pasila train station and started drinking there. Some time later we
continued our way and Repe/Style, Substance/DCS and 4T Thieves/ex.Alcatraz
joined our posse.
Naturally we had fun at the Boozembly by drinking, meeting friends, enjoying
the sunshine :) and some barbequeing. Later we were checking some compos
inside but no comments about them. In the evening Sixpack, Ganja, Leia, Shape,
Weirdo, The Hooligan and I started walking to Droidi/Haujobb's place to get
Leia's vodka from there (or something:). On the way we met Zados+Duncan/Damones
and The Hooligan and Weirdo stayed with them. When we were at our destination,
we boozed, some smoked weed, watched a couple of demos and so on.
The End Is Near..
When we returned to the Boozembly, it was so dark that you couldn't see much
so we just stayed at some bus stop and boozed and talked there the whole
night. At about 12 o'clock there was animation compo but the most of the
entries sucked and we were so tired that I can't remember much about them.
In one hour the most important competition was about to start - the demo
compo. Many of the entries were good, great or even very cool :) For example
the two shown Amiga demos were good (nice design on Mawi's "Metatag"), Lotto
by Doomsday, Art by Haujobb and some others were great and the winner demo
"Spot" by Exceed was just amazing!
After a couple of hours the prize giving ceremony was taking place. Thank
god there wasn't any ridiculous shows like there is at The Party with
fireworks and all that. Anyway, soon after the prizes were given my trip
back to home started...