Revision 2015

visited by Felice & Rainbowchazer

After our trip in January to California in the USA for a well-earned holiday from work, we realized, shortly after coming home that within a couple of months or so, we'd be due to make the car journey over to the city of Saarbrucken in Germany, for the long-awaited Easter trip there. This was something we'd started to make as of Easter 2013 - after having watched the livestream from the party via Scenesat Radio for the previous couple of years or so, a successful trip was made that included CiH. We repeated the same trip again in 2014; this time with CiH and his good lady, Nicky - but for 2015 the travel journey consisted of my wife and myself.

We had decided to break up the actual travel journey by staying in a hotel close to Calais, at the small place nearby called Coquelles. Coquelles itself is where the mega-mighty shopping mall, Cite Europe, is based, alongside other decent stores such as C&A, who of course departed UK shores back at the time of the millenium.

So on the Tuesday before Easter we set out from our home in Cambridge, heading towards the Eurotunnel. We'd got a noon departure booked and left home a little after 9am, reaching the UK Eurotunnel departure zone sometime after 11am. Swiftly, we were able to board our train (with our car) and traveled on the 30-35 minute journey across to the French side. Once over in France, we turned off the A16 motorway at the first exit for Cite Europe; we filled up with diesel as that's a lot cheaper than in UK - then we located our hotel and got checked in, to relax for some hours.

We ate our supper at a restaurant that is well recommended by the both of us at Cite Europe - one called 'La Cappucino' which is at the opposite end to the Carrefour supermarket. The following morning, once we had eaten breakfast and departed the hotel; we traveled back over to Carrefour again to pick up a box of wine and other bits to enjoy at the Revision party as of a couple of days time.

The journey to Saarbrucken was fairly unremarkable; we noticed a few familiar buildings and other icons along the way that we had seen before. The journey from the Luxembourg border into Germany itself was rather fun, that was the start of the autobahn area and, as we all should know by now, this is where the infamous roads are where there is, quite literally, no speed limit. Anyhow, we cleared this section of road fairly well and found the signage for Lusenbrucke, which was our turning - we took this turning and found the Ibis hotel - where we'd stayed before, fairly quickly afterwards. We parked the car in the Ibis's car park and got checked into the hotel for some rest and relaxation.

After a few hours and some glasses of wine later, that evening we decided to toddle over to our favourite restaurant within Saarbrucken, known as Die Kartoffel. It wasn't too busy when we arrived, so we were able to get a table for 2 fairly easily and place our order. Naturally enough, we both ordered something involving kartoffel, as we don't get that so much here in the UK; also bearing in mind we were in Germany at that point, there's nothing at all wrong with eating the local food !

It was quite cold out on the street when we walked back through the city centre back to the hotel. This didn't take long and we had some more wine back in the hotel room before getting some sleep.

Maundy Thursday, in Saarbrucken, dawned bright and clear. This was our major shopping day within the city centre, so we visited a number of stores including the Lego store and also Deichmann, where Paula (my wife) bought at least one pair of shoes. Even though we have a store of theirs here in Cambridge the prices in euros are a bit cheaper in Germany, so she decided to shop there instead.

We also visited the C&A store within the city, where Paula / Rainbowchazer managed to get a couple of tops and possibly also some trousers. She finds it so hard to get clothes that fit her correctly here in UK, but the German clothing market does not just make clothes fit for pr0nstars only, which helps a lot - ie, they also make and sell clothes which fit ordinary women of this world.

The stores closed around 5.30pm or so but by this time we had already made it back to the hotel for a rest. We popped out once again to Die Kartoffel for another of their delicious meals a bit later on, before getting some sleep in readiness for getting over to the E-Werk late morning on Good Friday.

And so it was that we found ourselves waiting in the small-ish (to begin with) queue of sceners waiting for the doors to open. Quite a lot of us had pre-bought our tickets, using the excellent ticketing site designed (I think) by the guys of Tristar / Red Sector Inc (TRSI)

The doors opened a little after 12pm and we got in, found our seating pretty easily enough; followed by a few more journeys on foot to get all of our stuff in. This largely consisted of mine and my wife's laptops, plus my STe and the small screen, alongside our amplifier setup that had worked so well at Revision 2014. Alongside this, we also had our Christmas themed polar bear lit up and our lava lamp, which enabled the locating of our table area a bit better as it was quite dark within the E-Werk itself.

The amplifier was brought into use pretty much straight away, as I played a track from a local group called The British IBM. The self-titled track is based on the goings-on between Sir Clive Sinclair and Sir Chris Curry, who of course, worked together at Sinclair Radionics / Research before Sir Chris joined forces with Hermann Hauser to form Acorn and win the contract that would lead to the BBC Microcomputer, which was popular within the education / school environment in the UK for a number of years.

The amplifier itself was quite loud, so would do a good job at a big party such as Revision. We also played various pop / rock tunes that appealed to quite a lot of people at the party, alongside some videos, which included a showing at one point of 'From Bedrooms to Billions' - a new documentary that talks about the life of developing games from the early 80s and beyond.

But I'm digressing a bit here, so focussing back on Revision 2015, it was good to see a large amount of sceners there, quite a few of whom I knew; but it was also good to meet with one or two new sceners (to me) who were introduced to me by Truck. One in particular is a lady who goes by the nickname of Metoikos (and she's spoken for via Franky) who was originally from the US but is now living in Germany.

The music and graphics compos were amongst the first to be shown; whilst I don't recall too much about the graphics compos, the music entries were entertaining. One that stood out to me was from the 'Alan Sugar Trash Orchestra' featuring a battle between the Amstrad and Commodore Amiga, that was rather amusing.

One of the entries from the graphics competition stood out; this was a tribute to the actor, Leonard Nimoy, who of course we all know that played the character of Spock in the original Star Trek series.

Various DJs were playing their sets at Revision 2015 as well, with the final stand-off being between three top scener DJs, h0ffman, Lug00ber and Ronny (Farbrausch). This set was their best yet. You may well have seen some of the footage I filmed at the party, which was released via the official Revision website :)

Those sceners I met at the party included Ziphoid, Truck, TMC/Role (Arthur Van Dam); also Okkie, Havoc, Britelite (RNO), Maali and his lovely lady, Nekomono, Metoikos (who I mentioned earlier), Subi and his lady, Mary alongside others I forget.

Cheers,

Felice.

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