"It's been HOW long?!"

Location:- A hotel room in the centre of Gouda.

Time:- The night before STNICCC 25th Anniversary.

Soundtrack:- None, Dutch cable tele is rubbish! (I'll tell you just how rubbish at the end of the article!)

State of mind:- Uncertain, as to how this turns out...

Bear with me, this may ramble on and off in unexpected directions. I haven't really got much of a plan what to say here.

Just that I really need to ask just WHERE have the last fifteen years got to? It was at another Dutch Xmas themed celebration, back at the start of the new millennium, when I was putting the finishing touches to what was the final and tenth anniversary edition of a long staying publishing phenomenon. That was done and dusted for the final Maggie issue, as I saw it.

(Pause for a proper realtime interruption as the reception phone rings and Mike Mee, aka MUG UK makes himself known as another early arrival. Some beers and reminiscences follow, and it is 21.45hrs before the editorial resumes. Elsewhere on Facebook, it seems that Grazey and Cal are riding in on nocturnal luminous bikes to the party?)

Back on topic, yes, back to the narrative..

At the time the final 10th birthday Maggie was finished. There was a sense of finality, of a drifting away of most of the old team. To balance that, there were new projects, such as the Alive! diskmag, that kept me focused for another few years. After that, various other things, such as the 'Low Res' blogzine and other self-made things such as 'Mag' kept a turnover of news and lukewarm views going until now.

Rather sadly, I realised when the 20th anniversary was due to take place, but did not get around to doing anything about it. So a 25th anniversary issue is to partially make up for the lack of that one. The idea of a 25th anniversary Maggie was as fantastic and as distant as a 25th anniversary STNICCC. Then suddenly, it is staring at you from the middle of next week! At least with Maggie, the idea was uneasily lurking for some time before that. An actual start was made last February, with a steady stream of articles slowly topping up the pile from there.

The most recent efforts have been almost exclusively single handed efforts, apart from some contributions from Felice. I've been gratified for this time, that people from the old Maggie team have responded very nicely and positively when I hailed them. Some people even managed to spare some of their very limited and precious time for some new articles.

But it's been FIFTEEN YEARS. A decade and a half of being wrapped up in the minutiae of today, worrying about tomorrow, with hardly a second left to spare in considering the triumphs and friendships of the past times. From the positive reactions that I got from people, I am motivated to do some more Maggie at some point. I'm certainly not promising anything for next year, but I don't want to leave it for so long again! It's ridiculous. People will start quietly falling off their perches, whilst the rest of us are oblivious, slowly nodding in unison to the latest social media hype storm, if we're not careful.

Don't let that happen!

I'd better say something about the issue in an upbeat fashion. Well there's a nice spread of game and demo reviews. A decent chunk of party reports from past and present times, including the party that I'm attending tomorrow. There's also an appropriate pile of commemorative material, at least one really nice interview, a splattering of news and some other viewpoints, not to mention the "famous" Maggie sense of humour.

Then there's Poetry Corner. We're really really sorry about Poetry Corner.

Before I close down this text, I'd better mention the specific instance of rubbishness of the Dutch cable Tele network, referred to near the start of the article.

It was on something called 'NPO 1'. We're talking mid-evening, but not that late. The programme may have been some kind of soap. A beardy teacher was on top of an attractive female student in some kind of horizontal motion. She was making orgasm faces, but nothing below waist level was shown (they both kept their tops on.) They finished, exchanged some words in Dutch, then the bell for the end of classes rang.

I switched off at that point. Do any Dutch readers have any idea of what I just described? There is no prize for a correct answer.

Note:- The teacher did not look anything like Rich Karsmakers, who does not stick two fingers up at the 5th horseman of the apocalypse, Professional Misconduct, in such a blatant fashion.

At least as far as I'm aware?

And that is the end of my part of the editorial. I'm sure that Felice has some spare words of his own to tag on to the end of this text. So I'll hand over to him, but after leaving this textfile, enjoy this very special issue of Maggie, and see you again sometime later.

But not too much later next time, eh!

CiH - 17th December 2015, Gouda, The Netherlands.

"Editorial contribution by Felice."

Well, it has certainly been a number of years since we last saw an issue of Maggie hitting the streets. This special issue, intended for release shortly after the fabulous STNICCC demoparty that was held in the lovely city of Gouda in The Netherlands,is a departure for us, but we hope you enjoy reading. Hopefully we'll be back in the reasonably near future, but not on a regular issue release, due to life getting in the way quite a bit.

Life has certainly changed quite a lot though, since those heady days of 2000 or so. We've had the terrorist attacks on 9/11 in New York City, plus other equally nasty events that have occurred since then. Thankfully most if not all former contributors to Maggie are still on this earth ... despite everything.

We have had some good events that have happened too, more on a personal level than anything else. I got married in New York to my wife, Paula; CiH was invited to be my best man (and did a fantastic job) ... his good lady also did an excellent job of being our bridesmaid. Even though both of us are British, there were various family issues circulating that wouldn't have been easy to deal with, had we got married here in the UK. Besides, we had a day to remember; at the time of writing we just celebrated our eighth anniversary a few months ago.

I would like also to thank the following people for helping out, even if they were just 'being' there - that made the difference.

Havoc - great organizing over the years for Outline and you also coped fantastically well with running the classic compos at STNICCC 25. Alongside your work at Revision and other demoparties over the years, I certainly salute you here and I'm sure Chris does too :)

Earx, Bonus, Wingleader, Comp7, 505, No, ST-Survivor, Gunstick of ULM, Q-Funk, Setok, Marycloud, Partycle, Mr Pink, Sh3 (lately more involved with Reboot), Kev Davies, Mike Noyce alongside various others, please keep in touch and hopefully we can produce another issue again in the near future. It's much easier now to keep in touch too, via the old 'net compared to back in the day.

Franky & Metoikos - not people many Atari sceners will recognize (they are part of the main demoscene) - you guys have been very special to Paula and myself and we've always loved the invites to the Rewired party weekends alongside Gasman, Widdy, Fritske and others whose names I forget.

Samurai, Front 6, Tronic and Bod - it has been fantastic to meet up with you all at STNICCC and I hope one day soon we can do something similar again. Inter were always represented well when we used to run the classic Falcon demo, Obnoxious, at the Atari shows in the UK back in the nineties. Even though the loud music sometimes drove one or two stall-owners a bit potty (hey Karl Brandt / System Solutions) the punters certainly enjoyed seeing the effects on the screen and hearing the music. I guess for CiH the music became an earworm, well, that's true for me too.

It has also been good to see Tronic back with us and being part of the UK party who travels to the European mainland as often as he can. Still not too many UK people, whether involved with the Atari scene or not don't like, for some reason, to travel to Europe. European people are not the nasty people as portrayed by a politician by the name of Nigel Farage who runs the UK Independence Party - far from it. They are lovely people and are also human beings who realize when they have made mistakes and can put things right to suit everyone who needs to know.

Rich Karsmakers and his lovely wife, Ruth - it was lovely to see you guys once again and the idea is not to leave it too long next time before we see you again, even if the date when that happens doesn't coincide with a party. My wife certainly would like to visit the city of Gouda again.

Now, enjoy this special release ! - Felice

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