The Function demoparty, my tradition for over three years, sadly died out and hopefully went into a hopefully temporary sleep state ever since the main organiser Maugli got too fatigued to continue it further and because handling the infrastructure became more and more difficult. As it was a popular gathering hub for my group, Aberration Creations, the krew needed another one to designate as a general meeting spot, and so, it was decided that, as many of the group members are Polish natives, that the relatively recently-established Xenium demoparty in Poland would be more than a suitable replacement.
And wouldn’t you know, my mates from the krew were all too happy not to leave members behind and they extended help to me by covering my travel expenses. The truth is I am just not doing financially very well and am burdened with a strong depression this and the past year, but now especially amplified by a really poor health state. My blood iron levels dropped, and so it was hard to go around feeling anaemic and half-way dead, and just generally like you’re living a meaningless existance. So what they have given to me I do not take lightly, and it turns out it was the kind of event that truly brought back cheer and energy into my life – right now at least.
Hint: Find the lass with the Scottish cap to the right, far back row.
Originally I really hadn’t intended to write a party report, it just sort of happened after I realised I managed to capture a lot of footage material on my phone and because I thought it was gonna be quick and easy. But as always, my plans is to make stuff specifically to share with the famous game journalism channel, the successors to the former legendary “GameTrailers“, the cast known as “Easy Allies“. Every month I have a habit of sharing with them tales from the demoscene in their specially curated fanmail segment, and to them it is a delight since despite being tech and computer-media adjacent, they have little in touch with it and so everything I show to them seems fantastic to them. And so I was compelled to make an all-encompassing vlog about my time there, but with the unfortunate circumstances that I had less than 24 hours to assemble this footage together and I was feeling low and sleepy, and so I decided to hack the voiceover in, with no script, and just improvising some talks over a microphone I didn’t even position right because I was grasping it in my hands like a 1940s crooner and fidgeting with it, always forgetting you were supposed to speak into the microphone, not just around it. As a result, the voiceover is the most unprofessional I’ve ever done in any video and it’s a blemish for my channel, but having a video for that time was still better than not having any.
So here it is, my video report. At least you have the captions!
The unscripted format might be enjoyable to a lot of people in the end, so I’m not too hung up about it. It does an alright job in covering my impressions and feelings from the spot.
One thing this vlog doesn’t really do a good job is to demonstrate just how precarious my time spent here was(or really, any demoparty), since as I was in the middle of an ulceritive colitis flare-up, I had to be especially vigilant of what I was eating. I did such a much better job than I would have anticipated and it’s all thanks to Citrus, musk(not THAT Musk) and SleepyFox being so good to go on out and get me some snacks: I say “snacks”, but really they are my whole meals, since I had to thrive off of nothing but fruit, nuts, aged cheese, yogurt and whatever barbeque meat I can scavenge and beg for. The shitty(pun intended) thing about colitis is that a powerful way to prevent it is to abstain from ingesting starches, which I’ve already outlined in one of my previous blog posts.
Everybody else got rooms in a truly fancy student dorm in Lodz, called “Basecamp” at Rewolucji street. Absolutely the meaning of what any student dorm’s gotta have, with individual community kitchens on each separate floor – and yeah – rooms! With beds, tiny indoor stoves of their own, bathrooms and free towels to give the elementary feeling of a hotel stay. But I didn’t want a room since they cost extra and I just opted to use my ol’ sleeping bag. I really don’t think it’s an authentic demoscene experience to go without a sleeping bag anymore, and as I’ve mentioned in the video, I think the occasional period of high stress and some discomfort(in small amounts) is good for the body, since I wanna be in shape and stay on my toes. All too often I hear stories of middle-aged people not having the patience to surround themselves with bad furnishings and so they always try to book cushiony hotels. Myself, I wish to be as adventurous as I can help it, just for the long-term health of my body, and so I hope to still be spry and fit in my 60s. I also do workouts(really tough now after a big blood loss!), which I think is crucial for long-term health. So I don’t mind the discomfort. I know I will return to my honestly-too-cushiony bed back home very quickly.
I came with nothing, and so yet again I had to make up my submission on the spot, after asking politely my plug in the orga, Argasek, to let me in after the compo deadlines were out, who was brandishing this really awesome Romanian folk dress. I had to make another oldskool C64 graphic, “Sly as an Einsteinium“.
Looks like math and art skills aren’t the only things that grew.
It’s a marked progression from my previous C64 art, but it’s also a really personal work: Over here on the blackboard are real mathematical formulas for calculating the curl in a vector field. What happened in the last two months is I got really into advanced mathematics: I’ve always been ignorant of late high-school and college-level math and I hated that I didn’t know calculus like my peers did, so I decided, at 32, to try to self-learn mathematics and pick up the knowledge I feel like I had been missing since the end of high school. Thus I looked for various online sources to help me and my most favourite out of them so far has been the Youtube channel Professor Dave Explains, who had a whole course covering math from grade 1 arithmetic in primary school, all the way to college stuff such as divergence theorems. It’s fantastic, and the kind of free and public learning channel(not just on math!) that I’ve always wanted to see surface on the Internet. I probably won’t have use for all this new math that I’ve learned but I’m happy I got to nontheless. I want to learn new things to keep my brain sharp. Math would be terrific for it. I prove therefore that your brain doesn’t stop learning new things once you enter your thirties.
My pic ranked 8th out of a total of 11 works. And honestly I think it should have ranked 10th since the two below me(both awesome pics for the ZX Spectrum) were way better than mine. I’m not sad I placed this low anyway since this year’s oldskool compo had a pretty unusually great level of quality, and they absolutely wiped the floor with me. This only gives me more opportunity to learn from the masters. Although I lament that Slayer’s terrific “Return to Gaza” didn’t win the #1 spot(falling down to #5 I think is too disgraceful for it), the two usual household names, Critikill and Facet, made their respective Amiga works, with Facet securing an easy #1 again. There is something to be said for the overwhelming bias the Amiga has in graphics compos, since automatically most of the votes always favour even a mediocre Amiga art over a masterful C64 one. This is really evident in the Speccy pics that fell low, and they deserved a lot more recognition than they got. This doesn’t bode well for me as a C64 artist either, and I really should consider transitioning to the Amiga already.
Worth saying that I’m not the only one to make a video report on Xenium. Here’s Easy Rider‘s compilation!
I would’ve done so much more if I had the time. I would’ve loved to enter the freestyle graphics and music tracker compos(labeled MSX, which I misunderstood as being from the MSX line of computers, but no, all kinds of musics are good here! Somebody should have shown me the memo). YamiFive covered for Aberration Creations instead by having a still life painting which earned a respectable #2 spot. But my future focus really needs to be to study out Critikill and Facet’s (and The Sarge’s) methods and learn how to colour more like them.
The Commodore 64 had so much to offer on this party with my absolute favourite demo of the entire party: “3SIRA” by Arise.
The overtly cyberpunk graphics and the sick IDM in it win the most stylish category for my part. It landed #2 to another respectable C64 demo, the wonderful “Cepelia“, by the Polish group Elysium.
Besides enjoying the demos and the tension of seeing the releases and the award ceremonies, this was a nice party for plain and simple meeting and bonding. Facet I was happy to meet for the third time in my life and he’s as bright and cheerful as always. Having his Dutch spirit must be great. I caught him deeply immersed in After Effects, as he was sketching out the finishing touches for his newest Amiga demo, “Naomi“, worked alongside another old friend of mine, Bonefish. I hadn’t had the time to really get to talks with him – I felt shy and needy and bothersome the whole party. But I will delight in the three of us going to a nearby Žabka to buy some snacks and yogurt. It’s a special memory I’ll keep to myself. Facet also devised the whole graphic design of the 2024 Function, with its prominent cockerel theme, which many demo coders used as an opportunity to make prods relating to chickens or just farm life.
The courtyard at night time is always a busy place of activity. Lots of beer and hard swig circles about and you can always smell weed in the air. One thing I miss from Function is that there was no free food like you can always expect to show up there, but there was a communal barbeque and you can always grill meat you can bring yourself. For the gang at Xenium, this means grilling big fat sausages, which is apparently a favoured Polish passtime. I couldn’t help but delight in some with melted gauda cheese, which were deviously decadent. Watching over the fire was a Polish fellow called Sim, which I was very pleased to find out he was in Scoopex. I hold Scoopex in extremely high regard just for “Mental Hangover” alone, although Sim joined in some time after it was released. We would share all kinds of life stories, before noting that we both had a tough upbringing with abusive families, and grandparents in camps in WW2, and that meant to me. You can tell he’s a pretty tough person. I especially liked the boast that he got a sentence once for spraying graffiti as a teenager, but right now he’s having a successful career and peaceful family life in France, telling me that you absolutely can achieve what you want to and find tranquility as long as you respect and love yourself, and don’t let insults and damage bother you. It’s comforting stuff to hear.
The party closed ceremoniously on 1 September. The night before then as I was lying on the hard floor in the secluded study room trying to sleep, you could hear what I assumed to be a cavalcade of drunk Poles and probably several Germans next hallway over singing what I guess to be WW2-era German songs. If I take it correctly, I’d assume it was Poles taking the piss on Germans, since that date and especially in 2024 marks exactly 85 years since the German invasion of Poland. I had the fortune of going to Warsaw couple of years ago and I can say Poles are quite a tenacious people. They’re aware of their history and they aren’t afraid to wear their politics on their sleeves, and so even in a party display as this, it takes a strong character to be able to laugh at and mock even such an evil as nazi Germany.
I was happy to meet Teo and the UK DJ h0ffman, who did an outstanding sesh with just two Amigas and a mixer console. Both of them I really wanted to meet since I’m on the lookout for tracker musicians for a future Q&A I wish to do for my next big demoscene history video about trackers. The BrCr crew drove us all back to Bratislava, from where we originally carpooled, talking about old and iconic PC strategy games along the way, and how it’s a shame no one made a worthy successor to “Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri” yet. I said my goodbyes and booked a bus ride to Belgrade.
It’s obvious Xenium left a real impression on me, and Lodz itself is a town I gotta give a real honest shot. I’ll fondly remember one time I bummed into a pub at midnight just trying to find some scran(and then locking myself out of the dorm, which was funky). I heard Lodz is apparently reknown for being the seat of Polish film, since guys like Kieslowski and Polanski went there. God willing, I’ll get there with some real cash and better prods next time.
Lastly, it was great going there while knowing full well Oasis have reformed and that “Definitely Maybe” got its 30th anniversary. Those guys give me power like no other.