Sillyventure 2011 - A Party Report..

Editor note:- Let's play a little game, let's see how much trouble we can get Grey into with his wife! Ah, here's just the picture to do that! Enjoy! (Bwahahaha!)

19.15hrs - Thursday the 10th of November 2011, in sunny/misty Gdansk, deepest Poland.

Resolution to self - Stop cocking around with Hatari!

It's not a real Atari Falcon, and all your attempts to push the envelope run into fatal errors sooner or later. Look, there's even a literal 'booby trap' as yet unsprung in the form of the desk accessory toy 'Shake it!' An eighties-haired woman called Candi or Bobbi dances without the benefit of clothing on a real Atari, but she's got standards and gets sniffy about associating with low life scum like me using Hatari, the version before the current one.

Not to mention the screaming noises that ensue, when trying to run anything with the words 'Nvdi' or 'Magic' in them coming from this Dell Laptop's speakers.

Anyway, for the purposes of this party text, I'm keeping in close proximity to the reassuring bulk of the tried and trusted twin brothers Stephen Simple and Kevin Stupid. So it's that handy little text editor Everest and a frantic word-plunge for me from now on!

(After party note:- Yes this text was (almost) entirely constructed within an emulated Atari environment. Mostly Hatari in the incomplete Falcon mode. This gave rise to some interesting 'issues' which crop up later in the text.)

I'm still going to need access to a real machine to sort out issues arising from suspect key-mapping as certain much-loved members of the Atari character set have declined to appear for this weekend and have put some poorly paid substitute characters in their place instead.

It is Thursday the 10th November, this roadshow is reporting live from Gdansk in Poland and there are still three more days of this madness to go!

Fades and dissolves effects going back in time.....

To go back to the genesis of my sitting here and cranking out pages of quality text on this ageing laptop, we have to go back to last year. No, let's set up a proper timeline and go all the way back to the first year of the new millennium and a fateful road trip one Easter.

In the year 2000, there was one car and five idiots. Two of the idiots have attended this current party in some twisted act of remembrance, namely myself and Felice. The other three have pleaded time off for more sensible projects. John Hayward going as far as moving to the Middle East for some much needed peace and quiet!

Random memories from that time assail my tired brain, in a strangely logical chronological order for some reason.

Our arrival in the Netherlands and a bemused customs officer wondering if five people and a skip-load of computer equipment bursting out of the seams of a single car can get out of the Hoek van Holland without breaking down...

Meeting the looming Netherlander giant Havoc for the first time and using our ninja origami skills to fold him into our already overladen car...

The endless autobahns...

The East German versions of same which had not been resurfaced since a certain Mr A.Hitler had forcibly removed himself from this earth...

The long and winding Polish roads, complete with ancient and justified Eastern Bloc motoring hardware...

The fantastically cheap motel with added breakfast on the Polish border...

John Hayward's 286 Toshiba PeeCee proto laptop with the blue mono LCD screen and next to zero battery life, used for the realtime article on the journey and at the party. Which was already old hardware even by the standards of back then...

Getting sort of lost in Gdansk and the relief when Grey had managed to work out where to find us from our lousy locational descriptions...

The fantastic Spring weather which was more like early summer...

Walking my feet to a blistered mess on several occasions...

The party venue protecting itself with a cloaking device as a party of us managed to get lost coming back at night and we could not find the place...

Polish retailer panic whenever we turned up with large denomination Zloty notes...

The massively delayed competitions...

The NoCrew naked swimming swedes braving the Baltic freeze!

The journey back, starting with a fantastic feast at Grey's parents...

With Felice at the controls for the first stage of the journey back, skimming through a probable police speed trap at Mach 3 and not stopping, with the rest of us winding him up with speculation of what might happen to him at the border crossing... (Nothing actually did.)

The prolonged border crossing and the stinky sulphur coal-scented Ruhr- generated fog at the latter end of the journey back (by which time I was driving.

We were all very tired at the end, arrived back at Enschede, found no-one at home so fell asleep in the car park at Jekerstraat, only for Havoc to reappear seemingly thirty seconds later.

Looking back when we got back, realising we'd successfully completed an epic road trip without any major mishaps whatsoever and had a fantastic time on the way.

So that nicely clarifies what makes this party special to me, even with a lot of successful and enjoyable events following later on. To follow up, there was a small scale revival of the Siliventure a few years ago, and then something more substantial for last year.

Quite a few people managed to attend. Unfortunately, due to the timing of the event in December and the relatively short notice given, we had to decline. Fortunately, with reports of a successful party still ringing in his ears, Grey announced that a follow up would be held next year. This really left us with no excuses, so here we are now!

And Felice has mentioned there is a competing realtime article running, so time to check that out. I am also getting a numbed rear from the hard school issue chairs but that is another story I will get back to you on later.

20.25hrs

Caffeine and Chocolate fix, yummy!

And a sane keyboard which does what I ask of it in an adult and responsible fashion and nothing at all like the broken Spanish nightmare with a German key-map underneath, which is what is maintaining the party realtime text.

Anyway, we're still staggering along the winding road that has placed me in a two-thirds scale model of a real chair in the sequestered gymnasium of a Polish primary school.

I'm feeling a bit partied out, what with Outline earlier in the year, followed by the Sundown replacement party Sunrise, followed by the Soviet themed Alternative Party, followed closely by the Replay retro gaming and arcade event in Blackpool, with one or two other happenings on the way. However, I have managed to keep a little secret stash of enthusiasm and warmth in anticipation for this party. It is clear that everyone is really pleased to be here, and I certainly don't wish to stand out by being different.

Long and winding road, still digressing and diverting, I know!

The week before.

Lots of work getting in the way, stuff which demands your actual attention, input and effort, which can't be covered by a pretence of activity, with a long road trip to Blackpool as the tarmac flavoured cherry on that cake for the immediate weekend before.

The night before.

We have to get up early for this one, really early, so what are the chances of getting to sleep, to sleep the abbreviated sleep of anxious sceners not wishing to miss their flight. Yup, that's right, not a lot!

Well I managed to get an hour or so, and would have quite happily carried on forever, apart from the clear and piercing tones of the text message from Felice to tell me that he was on his way to me.

The part of the trip to Luton airport, hosted by me, is almost straightforward, dodging those lorry drivers in their high performance 'Sports Lorries' who lunged into my path on the motorway. Funny thing about these 'Sports Lorries', they don't seem to go any faster than the regular lorries for some reason? There was a further concentration sharpener in the form of a thick grey fog blanket which covered the darkened country roads leading to my airport parking and the airport itself. Having felt my way there with the help of Felice perched on the car bonnet with a white stick to feel the way, we parked up and caught the super crammed airport transit bus.

Luton airport is a classic case of a revamp keeping the essential ugliness at bay only by a layer of skin-thickness. You walk into a huge barn like building full of checking in desks to do the getting on your flight thing. Security, never a fun sport at the best of times feels even more than usual like a cattle procession to the slaughtering place, with strident uniformed security people barking orders at the stupefied and stupid at far too early a time for harsh lights and loud noises.

You have to really strongly resist the temptation to take the spirit of the thing too literally and shout back "Mooo!" as protesting cattle might do. As far as I could tell, branding with a hot iron wasn't part of their processing, but you can never tell?

Then you finally get into the main part of the terminal building, a disordered ant-heap built to forcibly commemorate the arrival of the seven billionth human being in a celebration of over stretching. This is in a month which is out of the holiday season. How bad does it get when all the package holiday flights are going out in the summer? I've used Luton on a couple of occasions before and nothing went flawlessly back then either. I recall something about a little niggling hour's wait for the baggage on an early morning return flight due to an 'issue' in getting the cargo doors on the aircraft open. And did anyone bother to let us know what was going on? That question almost answers itself!

The airport cafe did manage to stretch to a decent full English breakfast though to balance things back a bit.

Our flight is eventually called and we are sampling something completely new in the aviation world. This is the Hungarian budget airliner 'WizzAir'. The passenger mix is interesting as well. Apart from the pilot who sounded like he was auditioning for a job with a major airline when he spoke, I think Felice and I were the only Brits on board! We are trusted with priority boarding and extra legroom seats and told not to try to open the emergency exits over the wings, unless the situation really demanded it!

I spent a large part of the flight in a somnolent stupor, which was probably for the best. Anyway, this did not feel like an overlong time, which is always a good sign. The pilot glides gratefully into Gdansk airport, attracting a round of applause from his passengers. He's just doing his job dammit! Anyway, any landing from which you walk away with all limbs intact is a good one!

So one to repeat if the opportunity arises.

Gdansk airport is very small, but the right and nice kind of smallness, where you get to take ten paces off the aircraft landing steps into the terminal building, breeze through the immigration checks and wait a few short minutes for the baggage to be unloaded and returned to you. After the super drugs detecting Polski politzi Labrador has given it a sniffly once-over.

An eagerly waiting Michal 'Grey' Mikalowski greets us. Time, marriage and children seem to have treated him kindly. Can it really be a whole ten years since we last saw him at the second Error in Line party at Dresden? A lot of drink and silliness ensued back then. Will this repeat itself over the next few days?

We are fitting in carefully into an already heavily loaded car. There is a beer dispensing machine on the back seat next to me. Much driving related mayhem ensues. Grey is busy with a hundred and one organisational tasks and trying to deal with three issues at once, only one of them being keeping his car on the road. We arrive at the Hostel Bursztynek, which will be our off site sleeping room replacement for the next three nights. They are not quite ready yet, so we drop the luggage off and head off to the party place itself. At this time I find that the beer dispensing machine in the car next to me had a leaky life all of its own, possibly leading to curious stares from passers by at my newly acquired 'pissed in own trousers' look! (Sarcastic sartorial note:- This is not generally a good look to have!)

The party place is still sort of running in its daytime job as a school. There gymnasium area has been allocated as the main hall. It is very quiet. Some of the other international visitors had arrived earlier and taken off in the direction of Gdansk city centre. We decide to follow suit. The fresh air would be helpful in drying me out from the beer incident inconvenience described a moment ago.

The centre is as I remembered it from the previous visit in 2000. Today it is chilly and misty, but we enjoy the relative quietness to wonder around the old town. Today there is a mission to check out the various forms of amber jewellery and other precious objects. This is fairly successful, with at least one Xmas present sorted out in my case and Felice making a purchase too.

As breakfast chez Luton was a fond but fading memory, we look for a dynamically lunch-based food solution, as your boss would insist on describing it. We find an intensely atmospheric downscale small cafe which offers a taste of coding party pizza for Felice and misleading hamburger and fries for me.

When I say misleading, this was "in a good way" misleading. Expectations of a McDonalds sparseness are blasted aside by the huge plate of chips (fries) on the left side of the table and the multilayered monster of a burger in a bowling ballshaped bread roll on the other side! Does this food challenge break me? Of course not!

The food related shenanigans culminates in Felice's jalapeno pizza. To avoid sizzled taste buds, Felice carefully digs out most of the vicious little green sods. Suitably fed and watered, we stagger back in the direction of our sleeping accommodation. The distance to the hostel runs out just before our feet and digestion are destroyed, so we book in to our room and enjoy a blissful hour or so of very much needed downtime before re-entering the party fray.

Which we do around 17.00hrs. And I will leave this text for a while and catch up to date shortly.

22.55hrs

The party.

This is not yet the official and fully opened party. That ritual will take place tomorrow evening when all the potential attendees will have converted to actual attendees. This evening is a precursor to that, with various forms of relaxation being attempted.

When we arrived back, the quietness had been dispelled with some early arrivals setting up their hardware. Several flavours of Atari and some 'other shit' such as a couple of Amstrad CPC128's were running. We were able to grab hold of a desk and set up our 'other shit' in the form of Felice's newly previewed at the Alt Party MacBook Pro and the faithful Dell Laptop in my case. Long agonised pauses followed to record the previous paragraphs in this report.

There are several international visitors, including Zerkman and Chuck from La Belle France, Also PeP is here with his coding dreadlocks fixed on top of his head and another Swedish dude who attended the original SV2000 event and whose name I will recall presently. More recently, we have had 505 from the large country to the west of here arrive at this gathering.

There was a pause in proceedings between 18.00 and 19.00 hours with the previously advertised food service delivering their input. It seems that we are going to be eating in a suspiciously healthy manner as nourishing soups and healthy hot meals with vegetables feature strongly. The cost of things is refreshingly cheap still, with this two course treat coming in at around 25 ZL, which is around five UKP, which would still be cheaper than the majority of pizzas. For a two course meal dammit!

There hasn't been a lot of focused activity. Those people like Chuck who are coding for the party are concentrating on that activity. Quite a lot of people with heavy duty sound systems are exposing us to their oldschool demo and soundchip collections. Currently the chap with the Amstrad is giving it the beans with a lot of Atari ST and C64 chip music conversions. When he isn't showing the 'Batman Forever' demo which seems to have single- handedly revived the Amstrad CPC demoscene.

Of course, the bar has been open for some time for a lot of people. Felice has been acting as a viniculture advisor to the Polish government or something, and brought in a box of something red (Arniston Bay, 13.5 percent abv. So I check it out. Yeah, seems to be working!)

As for minor negligible things such as competition entries, Grey gave us the lowdown on what had already materialised before the party had opened its doors. There were three ST/STe demo entries, a couple of Atari 8-bit entries were being discussed and no less than three Atari VCS entries, apparently including one which breaks the 4 and 8 kilobyte cartridge limit nicely. At that time there wasn't a lot of activity with the Atari Falcon. However, there are several of those machines already at the party, including at least a couple of CT60 high end machines, so surely something has got to emerge from there?

Hopes are high of more 'stuff' appearing. Any updates will appear in this test as and when I get them.

In fact, I've been reviewing my archive pile for any likely candidates for a wild competition entry. The rainy day role might just be filled by the Outline 09 movie that I made a year ago. The Sundown 2010 movie might just have pipped it to the post for general awesomeness, but that one has been released already and can't be admitted as such.

Okay, enough for now, off to see how the sickly flower of the other realtime article is doing.

00.32

It is Friday - Day 2

A lot of people aren't sure where to stop day 1 right now. There is a general theme of blurriness. PeP has retired. He is staying in the same hostel as we are, so is 505. We will probably be contemplating the sleepiness shortly.

Lights have been switched out so things are nicely dark, little bits of movement take place at the edges of awareness.

See you in the morning babes.

09.50

The party is in a sparse and bleary eyed state. The majority of the people connected with this party are still waking up and going "Bleurrrgh!" The narrator is not quite one of those, having managed to snatch some sleep from the jaws of insomnia. Yet another strange bed to get the hang of. I think we'll manage better tonight.

The morning outside is a perfect antidote to bleariness, being bright, crisp and cold, my favourite sort of winter morning. In fact the sort of weather which hasn't been much in evidence back home just yet.

We passed by a collection of Polish cub scouts gathered in the school entrance. Did no-one tell them it was a holiday? Ah, maybe they did.

(After-party note:- There were a lot of these scouts around, albeit they took over a different part of the school building from us. There was this shrine immediately outside the front entrance of the school and a similar area in the school. Subsequent research finds out that this is for the Polish equivalent of the Boy Scout founder Robert Baden-Powell, a man called Alf Liczmanski. His life did not end well after the Nazi invasion of Poland, he was one of the high-profile Polish intelligentsia who were targeted to be killed off early on. So the scout cluster this weekend should not have been such a surprise.)

We were given a provisional breakfast time of 10.00hrs. As of this time, that remains extremely in doubt as none of the main people connected with the party of food are in the building. I have opted for an interim breakfast of potato foam animal shapes (best way to describe them) and a slightly shrunken Snickers bar with a cup of hot instant coffee purchased from the small tuck shop area near the school entrance hall. The last item is probably going to do the most to singlehandedly revive the flaggingly knackered CiH psyche.

Krupkaj, Mikro and the Swedish dude with a CT60 and Mega ST have arrived in the hall.

In other news, the beer kegs and leaky-on-car-seating pump dispenser were declared operational as of last night. Not that yesterday evening really needed it?

10.38

The party is getting a bit more 'official' as Grey has gone around taking everyone's 50 zl subscription fees. Name badges and t-shirts have been provided in return. The name badge arrival means I get to learn that the Swedish guy sitting next to us is called Delta99, which is cool.

10.58

We have been putting the finishing touches (a readme file) to my wild compo entry. This is the never seen outside of a darkened cellar 'Random Noises of Outline '09' as predicted yesterday. Felice also has something of his own to contribute. There are strong rumours attaching themselves to breakfast and a good job too, as the interim breakfast is rapidly wearing off.

I discovered an interesting bug or flaw in Hatari 1.4, or more probably how it co-operates with my compromised Windoze XP Laptop. If you attempt to size up the window after shrinking down, the whole system locks up with the mouse cursor shuddering and crying in the top left corner of the screen. The CPU meter shows one hundred percent and stays locked down as if a throttle cable had snapped. Order can only be restored by killing off Hatari from the Task Manager. Fortunately, I save my work frequently, so I've not lost any of this yet.

I also found out that Candi/Bobbi mentioned at the start of this text struts her nearly naked stuff quite effectively on the ST High res setting, so it's not so fussy about emulation after all as first feared.

11.36

Breakfast has been, yum!

The same team behind last night's dinner has been and fed the starving party multitudes in a satisfactory fashion. So right now we're at a point where noting too elaborate is happening. Time to log off for a bit and do something else. Breakfast was something for all tastes, with a mixed platter of hot items such as scrambled egg and frankfurters and cold meats and cheeses. There were tomatoes and onion pieces(!) as well.

13.50ish

We've been away for a while as the party has been essentially directionless but is slowly gathering more visitors.

Chuck and Zerkman re-emerged lately, the deadly duo managed to get their demo to a party finished state by 07.00hrs this morning. This is at the cost of some severe depletion of the free beer reserves and Chuck's braincells by the time sunlight shyly peeked through the gym windows this morning.

Felice, Chuck and Zerkman..

Seen and heard a C64 SID chip board for the Atari 8-bitters, with a music player. I've been away from this work station leaving one or two things with this emulator in STe mode, and it has been rather better behaved than earlier on. Felice managed a return visit to the old town for more amber-based shopping experiences.

I really ought to be doing something else, we've hit another lull or possibly a lolling around spot. There's still a fair bit of the Chosneck article mountain to clear. But that sounds like work!

17.28

We've been away for some time and a number of things happened.

Firstly the party population has exploded with new arrivals, a Finnish contingent appeared and made themselves known to us (Hi Visy!) A Paranoid gentleman called Olli from the large western land next door appeared as well with his significant otherness. There has been a general influx of people and the formerly spacious school gym of yesterday has almost filled with tables and computers of all descriptions. An encouraging number of these are Atari badged. If you wish to judge solely by physical devotion to living hardware, then our scene isn't anywhere near dead at all.

We got involved in a minor way with the production of the upcoming Dune demo as well. Chuck was looking for a small font to go in a screen, and wondered if we had such a thing. After some thought, we turned to the old executable Deskfont programs and selected a suitable looking font. Chuck asked for a breakdown of this in a format compatible with Neochrome Master. With a dearth of tools on my laptop, this bit was going to be more difficult.

In fact it was a case of finding that we had the right tools to hand after all. It was just a case of locating where they were, how to use them, and to avoid incorrect diversions.

Anyway,the tool chain goes something like Deskfont.prg via a 1st Word texfile through several stages ending up on Chucks UltraSatan drive with a final bit of Neochrome Master bending into shape. What could have possibly gone wrong?!

I also managed to twiddle the format on some of my completed articles for an Atari friendly text displayer, so at least we have something to work with whenever we get the chance.

And the other realtime article has not only survived, but it has grown a bit too.

So yeah, we have been vaguely productive this afternoon!

20.02

Onward and, erm, onward.

We've had our evening meal service in the easy and pleasant company of PeP and Delta 99. There were a lot more people crowding into the dining area tonight to reflect the increased numbers. We had a question and answer session from a famous Atari-using musician, unfortunately in Polish. The party area as a whole has got louder and packed. It will also get drunker as time goes on.

With the vast selection of older hardware and the loud enthusiasm of a lot of people, this party feels very oldschool in a number of ways. It seems like a party that was uprooted from fifteen years ago and plonked in the year 2011. I don't mean that in a bad way. If only part of this enthusiasm translates to interesting entries, then it will have been more than worth it.

The party feels 'oldschool' in other respects too. There is little centralised direction, no notices of impending events or competitions or any mention of a schedule. Things that are programmed to happen, such as mealtimes, do operate within an hour or so of their suggested arrival. What there isn't is the whiteboarded or PowerPoint themed recent party culture where everyone is told what is going on and told their place within that party. There are several fragmentary micro-parties breaking off from the central core, some of them increasingly alcohol fuelled. This is fine up to a point, but certainly by tomorrow, when events are planned, we will need to be watching the clock a bit more intently.

As well as the never ending beer machine, our bar area has also reopened! Well if you can't beat them into sobriety, join the maniacs of drink!

21.00

Hello darkness my old typing friend!

It looks like there are going to be some live performance type things tonight. Suddenly, we're feeling a little bit newschool again.

Another fact which has sort of drifted past in the day's detritus. The unspecified holiday which this text may or may not have referred to, is in fact Polish independence day. They have had considerable practice in being independent and also at the unhappy states before then. So I'll have to look up which treaty and historical event that today refers to later on. Oh if only there was an internet connection, with instant access to brain replacement utilities such as Google and Wikipedia. After party research indicates this was for the Second Republic, established on November 11th 1918. A date famous for all sorts of other reasons closer to home too.

21.37

Pin your ears back and hear this, how about this one for almost the best way to dispel tiredness.

A faux lesbian vampire floorshow, followed by a bowl of hot nourishing meaty soup! Well it worked for me! I hope someone else got some better pictures than I did.

Needless to say, both of these events were very popular and closely attended by the audience!

Suddenly, everyone is massively hugely wide awake.

It started with three girls who looked and acted like the significant others of more committed scener partners. The transformation came at the front of the hall in the de-facto stage area, when they transformed into a modelling show for the gothic lingerie front. Much suggestive acting followed to everyone's approval.

Well almost everyone, as PeP complains that he was led to expect tits! Missing mammary content aside, I enjoyed the show.

And why 'almost the best' method to stay awake? Well you can improve on matters to arrange it so that you are the not too unwilling "victim" of these dark ladies of the night! The soup then being optional.

The food was another of those things which suddenly loomed up as if from out of nowhere as well. There was a free element with several platters of open sandwiches and the soup was available if you cared to risk a spare 5 ZL. A lot of people did. It was a hot and tasty soup with lots of meat and beans filling the gaps between the liquid. If we get this again for a mealtime before the end of the party, I will not be too unhappy.

I'm still missing some kind of schedule and advance warning which is a common feature of other parties. There is some good stuff, apart from the main competitions happening tomorrow, but no real idea when. I guess you have to be close to hand when they happen, otherwise you could miss out? Also it would be nice to know about things like deadlines for handing in entries and if there is a team taking care of this. All I can see is Grey trying to cover several places at once, which can't be good from his point of view?

Apart from that, a massively atmospheric party which is rapidly heading on its way to be as special as the original event, back in Easter 2000.

11.10

Blummin' heck, this laptop was still on Helsinki time until now!

Not that I was using the clock on there for my time stamps, luckily.

We have shared vodka with Zerkman and Krupkaj and it was good! So I'm a happy bunny in a happy place right now. So are lots of other people including a table load nearby who are taking the 'party' part of the demo party remit to the maximum level.

11.29

Note for self when I look back over this text to fix obvious mistakes and mishaps later on.

Something in my brain a few days ago suggested it might be a nice idea to write an article about 'I Robot', the arcade game, from Atari, naturally.

I re-encountered this game at the Replay event at Blackpool, the weekend before coming out here. This was a game which had been converted for easy playing by disabled people. Going back a lot further, I remember in the mid-eighties when this game originally came out. Some considered it state of the art 3D back then. Some considered it too demanding to convert to home computers of the era. By the time the computing power had caught up, the flat shaded polygons had dated badly against the textures of Doom, so it only lives on as a ROM in the M.A.M.E arcade.

That would be a shame, as it was a damn fine playable game back then, and only took me a matter of minutes to pick up and find my arcade playing muscle memory from 1984 once again.

Anyway, when I get back home, to proper internet access so I can do silly inconsequential things like 'research', then I can write up that article properly.

In other news, it looks like Chuck has managed to do something with the font that I ripped clumsily for him earlier.

00.05 - SATURDAY!

We're here, day 3 already.

People are busy, getting drunk. In some cases, people are even doing productive things with screens and determinedly blocking out the drunken noises.

I spent an interval in the cold clear air and got into rambling conversations with several people. None of these will be remembered in the morning.

It looks like Felice has gone into a recursive drunken mode. At some point in the next hour, it might be an idea to quit the party for tonight. I think this might be the last update before daylight resumes.

Night night kiddies!

10.38.

Top of the morning to you all!

We're back for another day's demo party themed madness. A lot of questions will be answered today. Will the demo competitions run on time, or anything like it? Where's breakfast? What is happening about handing in stuff for the competitions? Can Hatari and WinThing actually co-operate better today and not lock up like a petulant bastard whenever I click to grow Hatari back to the front of the main desktop? Does the realtime text on an authentic but somewhat tired Mega STe get a keyboard upgrade? And finally, where's breakfast?

You asked that twice CiH! - I know!

Real world headline from yesterday that made me blink. Twice.

"Giza Pyramid closed by Egyptian government amid rumours of 11.11.11 ritual"

The world is in a worse state than I thought, if some of the people living on it are actually running their reality from a poorly drafted Dan Brown novel!

Never mind, I'm sure a combination of popular literary heroes such as Richard Sharpe, Dirk Pitt, Harry Potter and Hercule Poirot will come to our rescue.

We slept the sleep of people who were heavily overdue a good night's sleep. The bed was not inclined to argue, so didn't. The usual 'Young God' power shower treatment, as lovingly described by Moondog all those years ago did the trick in washing away the remaining brain cobwebs, so here we are again.

13.28.

The question for today is whether Grants Whisky and Redbull energy drink cancel each other out? The answers I've been getting back from people outside of the party have been a discouraging "Naaah!"

One of the party sponsors sent around a couple of their angels of drink mercy this morning with free samples of their boosting brew. When asked the price, they simply replied "A smile for you." Blurry out of focus photographic evidence exists and may yet appear here.

Delta 99 suggested a welcome addition to the mixture, which was a healthy splodge of Grants scotch whisky, as found in a Polish supermarket plastic bottle. So yes, a nice post-breakfast refreshment.

Progress is being made with handing in our wild compo entries. After trying and failing to overcome the language barrier at the competition entries desk, we've combined our handing in with 505's USB stick. Hopefully he can manage where we failed earlier?

Apart from that, I have been amusing myself running painfully slow Kronos benchmarks on this emulated Falcy. A 32 mhz 68040 coming up as a 16 mhz 68020 for some reason.

15.32

It has been a quiet interlude with one or two diversions.

People have been heading offsite to check out the many and diverse retain possibilities of the local area and the Gdansk area in general. On a recommendation, I managed to track down a local supermarket just a short walk in the other direction from the school, relative to our hostel.

This has a range of stuff common to most supermarkets including a better than average selection of snacks and chocolate stuff. So I stock up a bit.

On the way back, the late afternoon imposes a quiet and reflective atmosphere on the area. Looking at some of the older buildings in the lowering sunlight, their condition of neglect and non-repair is glaringly obvious. Looking a bit more closely appears to reveal something else?

A lot of the old stone walls are pockmarked, as if by a mad power driller making countless abortive attempts to put a hole through these walls, or something more sinister? I recall this was the place where the Second World War started. I also remember this city was not too lightly handled in the process of liberation either?

I took a few pictures to illustrate my point. If things work out with reference to putting image files in the text, here you go.

Probable battle-scars on a Gdansk wall..

The next planned event is either a 'crazy competition' or the city trip in a stretched Hummer limousine, depending on who you speak to.

19.19

The hummer wins. And no, I'm not talking about any of Felice's endless farting references either. We've been in a real stretch Hollywood Humvee, with Brad and Angelina and Kirsten and Shakira and... Who am I kidding, it was just a bunch of demoscene guys from the party after all.

We were serenaded in a bumpy fashion all the way to the old town by one of 505's debut efforts on the Atari 8-bit POKEY sound chip. We were left in a car park close to the old town and forewarned of an expected return time. A group of us, including the Swedes arrive at a promising location called the 'Cafe Absinthe'. This had a variety of drinks on offer, apart from the green demon, so I opt to try and fit in with the locals by ordering a shot glass filled with something called Slivowicz. More research will need to be done post-party, but this briefly registered a sensation on my taste buds before the facial nerves were deadened by the heavy alcohol content.

Others were inspired to follow my example, PeP remaining behind a while longer and having two more, which explains his random puppet-like twitching movements and random unconnected laughter at nothing at all right now. It was the first vaguely expensive thing I've found here, at 13 ZL a shot, but they were big shots and three of these will cripple you, Probably for life!

After party note:- Slivovicz is a general term for plum brandy in Eastern Europe. The stuff we were drinking tasted very high proof. At least until the lip-numbing effect kicked in!

Zerkman was joined to Chuck but got separated when Chuck had to go to the toilet. He has not reappeared since. Search parties have been sent out and the grave diggers have been informed. Oh wait, here he is..

Meanwhile we got back in time for dinner, mustn't miss dinner, which was taken in the company of 505 and AdamK. Meatballs and stuff, thanks. This has been the first demo party taken entirely without pizza, ever!

From AdamK's lips, the final score for competition entries appears to be three demos for the ST series, a couple of 4k intros, but no demos for the Falcon. However there are some music entries, and intriguingly, AdamK said there was a game for the bird as well?

Okay, it seems that people are imbibing and waiting for the next steps in this unique and amazing party.

I too will fix something drinky to keep me inspired. A mixture of vodka and random fruit juice comes to hand from the earlier supermarket trip.

20.00

Just grabbed a picture of a rare model of the Atari 65XE. Apart from looking like a shrunken ST, it has Arabic characters on the keyboard. So it appears someone successfully created the Atari Jihadi computer!

And AdamK thrills the waiting crowd (me) with red hot news. We are now up to five demo entries for the Atari ST, including one from Paradox and the other from someone unknown. Good old Olli and people at Paradox for making the effort, I say!

20.43

Random precursor to main event type things happening at the front of the hall. The 'crazy competition' turned out to be an invitation for people to inhale helium and show off their temporarily tightened vocal chords. Felice was denied permission to sing Lady Gaga's 'Bad Romance', presumably on copyright and performance grounds, or else me exaggerating the situation for comedic effect and failing, again.

Sunday 03.20!!

Holy crap! Holy crap!! HOLY CRAP!! WTF!!!

We've been away for an epically long time because of the epically long competitions!

However, the extended time away has been more than worth it.

Words are failing me right now for the apocalyptic transformation of what we can expect from ST demos right now. There is at least one entry that could make most Falcon 030 productions redundant! I'm still not sure if I dreamt what I saw??

Paranoid has the unenviable situation of entering a demo competition with a pretty good entry, only to come up against some of the best work ever released.

It is not an exaggeration to say that this party was the most significant for releases, ST-wise, since the Error in Line series.

And it is very late, so I'm going to have to leave this until the morning, and probably later than that to realise the full implications?

09.46

I'm still not sure if last night was rooted in reality or was a strange fever dream?

In amongst the ST main demo eulogising, I completely overlooked Defjam's cool and smokey 4ktro, which showed a lot going on in such a small space and with some pretty decent tunage as well. Time was, back then, when a single bump map screen without music was considered as a state of the art.

There were also some pretty nice Atari XL demos, including one production which I fell in love with, and a selection of Atari VCS stuffs which pushed the envelope until the folded back gluey bits squealed.

The graphics competitions on both the computer formats showed a large selection of high quality and superior work, mostly from artists not familiar to me.

One unusual feature from last nights competition viewings was that the individual artistes were not pre-named prior to their entries being shown. This particularly would have had an impact in the graphics and music compo's.

Anonymity may well have prevented name voting and enhanced judgement of the entry purely on its merits. For the demo competitions of course, the producers would cheerfully announce themselves very early on in their work.

A cheering thought from my exposure to these competitions is that a lot of the people on the ST aren't that well known or have been away for a while. This leads me to hope for more from a revival of the Polish Atari scene in general. (A subsequent closer look reveals the 'new' demos were mostly from previously dead French scene people, but with one of the entries by Mystic Bytes to balance things up.)

This is not to downplay Dune (Who we knew about before the party) or Paradox (who may well have risen to the occasion with another in-party production?) As EVERYONE who entered on the Atari ST managed a minimum standard of excellent. It is just that some people went higher than that!

Another unusual feature, but I sort of remember it as a carry-over from the original 2000 party, was that all the competitions were shown on the single nights viewing, where standard practice now is to split off the graphics and music compo's to the night before. This helps to avoid massive (over)running times.

10.05

Felice camcordered the entries, so we have hard copy evidence that last night wasn't a dream after all. We're watching what should be the outright winner, the fourth entry, which went apeshit with highcolor effects on the ST with a colourful and shocking graffiti theme. And I still don't know who these people are.

We slept the sleep of people who haven't quite had enough sleep, reluctantly unpeeled ourselves from the hostel bedroom and trudged through the cold morning air back to the party place once more.

There are quite a number of people around, I've not seen any of the other international visitors yet, but Grey has reappeared on the scene. It seems we were unplugged at some point earlier, but we've stolen another power connection from someone else who isn't here, and won't miss their ugly transformer block not being plugged in (he he!) Breakfast has been mentioned, and a good job as well.

In fact, a great job was done by the catering team for SV211K. This is one of the success stories of the party and a major reason for not having had pizza at any point during this weekend. And only the single encounter so far with anything that could be called junk food.

A further uneasy brain fart recalls that we actually managed to get our wild compo entries shown at the end. Felice's appeared to lose a lot with the sound system and went on a tad longer than the stated "Three or four minutes" running time.

Krupkaj has reappeared and so has Visy.

And so has Chuck, along with Zerkman and a bleary 505.

- End of the Party note -

And that is where the realtime element of the report ends. The remainder of this party report is culled from imperfect memories tainted by equal measures of jubilation and tiredness.

There is a prize giving ceremony set against the backdrop of a slow dissolution of the party. In a very closely counted race, Dune manage to win the Atari ST demo competition, JAC! wins the VCS2600 competition with their rather well designed demo 'iso' and the entry 'C-drug' wins the Atari XL competition. Checkpoint comfortably wins the 4k category, competing with, erm, themselves!

Interestingly, the brilliantly grafitti-themed truecolor demo only managed third. But it was a close vote and one of those rare competitions where ranking does not really matter,

As the Swedes disappear, so does our tenuous connection to the mains power supply. Not seeking to rely on my uncertain laptop battery, I close down the session there. The realtime article, to my disappointment, seems to have been spirited away and out of sight, manky Spanish keyboard and all. We have already checked out of the hostel, Felice's big wheeled case remaining there until we're properly ready to leave. Laptops and party debris are packed away.

The proper farewells are said to different people as they leave. Soon only a small party consisting of the clean-up gang with Grey, ourselves and Paranoid and partner remain. As we both still have some hours to kill before needing to return to Gdansk airport, we opt to go into the centre to do the tourist thing once again.

We are quite passable as tourists and not looking like people who have just attended a demo party in a primary school gymnasium. The day is grey as it was on our arrival, some more pictures are added to the historical record. Paranoid and I speculate over a disabled access ramp which appears to be aimed at the medieval port crane building and whether a suitably over-clocked electric wheelchair could be 'fired' to embed in the side of said port crane building (with or without terrified screaming passenger.) But we're kinda sicko that way!

A suggestion of lunch crystallises into a reasonably upmarket eatery that balances the appeal with a budget that isn't too heartbreaking. Then we wander back slowly to the closed down party place.

A period of waiting around follows, whilst Grey uses his family connections to carry out a swift bit of taxi-wrangling to get us to the Gdansk Lech Walesa Airport. The taxi takes us for a last look at the centre of Gdansk. Somehow the price agreed before the start of the journey isn't the price paid at the other end, but that is only a small blip and the scene is set for some more airport-based waiting around.

Eventually, Olli and his significant other make their way to a Lufthansa flight, whilst Felice and I resume waiting around for our WizzAir return journey to Luton. This wait is extended by a further delay as our flight has suffered some kind of Luton airport based turnaround pause, which retrospectively and in the light of what happened later, does not surprise me one little bit.

At least the flight home is sufficiently efficient when it does get going. We arrive at Luton, significantly there is no applause on landing this time.

There is also no applause when confronting the blocked milling mass of people waiting to clear immigration. Whilst we shuffle forward in a slow-mo zombie death march, overhead screens patronise endlessly on a short loop about the need for 'enhanced security precautions'. It only needed to add words such as "inclusive", "partnership" and possibly "Community Outreach" to make me terminally regret coming back to the UK by sticking the pointy end of a (non-existent) ball pen into my throat.

Or better still, how about "Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia!"

The knee-amputating transit bus back to the car park seems even more harmful to lower limbs than I recalled from the journey out. Still the madness finally stops when I regain possession of my set of four wheels for the journey back to Northampton. At a not-too-unreasonable hour in the darkness of Cedar Road, I hand Felice his car keys for the rest of his trip back to Cambridge and that is the end.

We have time for some summing up and final thoughts, yes we do!

A return to the scene of the millennium crime. Sillyventure 2012 adds to my store of fond memories of Gdansk, useful for consolation and confused recall when CiH is dribblngly senile in his later years. (What! Waddya mean that's me right now!?)

The party somewhat exceeded expectations for a normal demo party. It could accurately be described as an event, with several standout moments, from the Hummer ride, to the burlesque floor show, culminating in those epic final night competitions.

I can't say enough about the compo's, especially the ST demos. Well, I'll try anyway. The last time I was this blown away with a transformation of the possible, was at the second Error in Line party with the Falcon demo competition, especially the 'Hmmm demo'. These sort of moments are very infrequent and occur less and less as limits on old fixed platforms are (seemingly) reached. Don't get me wrong, the standard for the Atari scene has been extremely high and polished over the past decade or so, just that actual genuine howling in disbelief and falling off the chair in amazement competition entries just don't happen anymore and aren't expected to.

Typical of the current expected high standards is the classic and beautiful 'Antiques'demo by Dune and Sector One. This clearly showed all the years and months of hard work, experience, professionalism and craftsmanship seeping through to every sector on the disks. It is what the Atariscener is conditioned to expect nowadays.

It turned out that Antiques was a warm-up to the wild and fantastical productions that followed. 'Electro Illuminations' expressed itself loudly on the big screen. A powerful fast-flowing demo that flogged the ST called 'Base Case' was initially mistaken for a DHS STE demo by myself.

Paradox came up with a neat intro too, but the climax came with the demo that could be called "Who put an Amiga A1200 in my STFM?" - This was the properly mind-blowing 'Street Art' demo by resurrected French sceners Blabla. Jaws dropped in disbelief and remained dropped for the rest of the night. We really had to pinch ourselves that the art of the impossible had put on a virtuoso performance for a 2011 audience.

It is completely reasonable to state, as I did at the time, for the ground- breaking nature of the demo competitions, that Sillyventure can take its place on the distinguished lineage of classic demo parties, such as the Fried Bits and Error in Line parties.

I realise that I am not giving much emphasis to the other competitions, which were busy and well-populated with high quality entries, especially the Atari 8-bit platform, and a lively VCS 2600 scene too. The only under -representation was for the Atari Falcon, a situation which should be hopefully rectified for 2012.

In many other respects, Sillyventure took us back in time to an earlier era of parties. The sheer amount of old hardware recalls the more recent experience of general Retro Computing Museum (RCM) gatherings, whereas most other demo parties, even the Atari flagged events, tend to be dominated by laptops and similar hardware using emulated replacements for the older, too precious to risk on hazardous travel, hardware.

A typical scene - Lots of old hardware on show..

The amenities levels are still somewhat higher than for those parties in the golden age. Sleeping rooms (classrooms) separated from the main hall (school gym) were there, for those people who wished to commemorate the memories of their 1990's selves. On the other hand, alternative accommodation such as the Hostel Bursztynek provided a resting place away from the hubbub, just a few minutes walk away, at a very reasonable price. We even managed to eat decently with a catering team providing a full breakfast and evening meals for a good price too.

Covering other topics briefly, Gdansk is a very user-friendly city, as we had some time to explore at the beginning and end of our time in Poland. People re-meeting went to plan, with our first sighting of Grey since the second Error in Line party in 2001. Also encountered, were people like the Suomi VCS 2600 fanatic, Visy, a visiting party of Paradox, including 'Paranoid' and his partner. We also re-met PeP with his spaghetti wired 'Franken-Falcon' and another Swede, Delta99, who certainly knew how to party! The Frenchies, Zerkman and the incomparable Chuck donated their time to the party, as well as a fine entry to the demo competition. Not forgetting Krupkaj and AdamK, but realising a lot of people are going to be missed off here!

So, Sillyventure 2011, would we do it again? Sure we would!

CiH for Mag! Various in 2011/2012.

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