Archive for the ‘Demoscene’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

“best not publish your work on the internet, someone might steal it”

Tuesday, August 14th, 2007

In 2005, record producer Timbaland found a piece of music by young Finnish musician Janne Suni on the internet, took it without permission to use in his own work, made a lot of money out of it, and shrugged it off with a sarcastic comment when confronted about it. This hasn’t been covered by BBC News yet.

In 2007, adult DVD producer TVX Films found a picture by young British photographer Lara Jade Coton on the internet, took it without permission to use as the cover of one of their DVDs, made a lot of money out of it, and shrugged it off with a sarcastic comment when confronted about it. This was covered on BBC News yesterday, in a report that concluded with the reporter saying something to the effect of “The case is still ongoing, but for now this underlines the dangers of posting pictures on the internet.”

No. It. Damn. Well. Doesn’t.

Clearly, when putting a photograph or any other personal information online people need to consider the possibility of it falling into the wrong hands and being spread further than intended, but “what if some thieving scum come along and illegally repurpose it in a way that I don’t approve of” should not have to be part of those considerations. Ms Coton did nothing irresponsible in posting that photo. It wasn’t pornographic in any way – it was an elegant, professionally made shot. Good enough to be put on the cover of a DVD, in fact. Definitely not something she should regret putting her name to on the internet.

So what does that BBC reporter think she should have done? Just stuck to taking photos of bunnies and flowers? Or better, just stayed in and watched MTV? This is what copyright law is for, guys. You use someone’s work without permission, and you get your ass handed to you in court – as I sincerely hope will happen in both these cases. Don’t try to paint it as if the original artist did anything wrong by publishing that work for free on the internet… the suggestion that they should curb their artistic expression, just because there are a bunch of law breakers freeloading off it, is just offensive.

Posted in Demoscene, Rants | 1 Comment »

Demozoo

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

I’m back from Assembly Summer 2007, where I launched my long-promised demoscene database site Demozoo to not very much fanfare at all. It’s been in development on and off for at least two years – I ambitiously chose it as my ‘hello world’ project to learn Ruby On Rails with, subsequently aborted and restarted it about seven times over as I learned more and more Right Ways To Do Things, and eventually reached the stage of hacking on Rails internals to make it do what I wanted (most significantly the Nested has_many_through patch/plugin, which lets you achieve simple and yet bizarrely normally-impossible relationships like ‘all productions made by members of this group’).

The initial reception of the site has been mixed; there have been excited noises from people who have immediately seen its potential, and it’s already been useful for filling in those ‘dammit, what group is he in again’ memory lapses at the pub (as well as a cunning way to startle Smash on AssemblyTV, by introducing him as “Smash of jecoute” rather than his rather more well-known role in Fairlight). It’s also attracted some (not entirely unfair) comments that it’s basically a very unfinished clone of Pouët, to which I have three replies:

  • Yes. Deadlines, party coding etc, mumble mumble, not enough time to add much data at all besides Pouët / add whizzy features other than the minimum necessary to make it work. *shuffles feet*
  • Yes. But the massively important and really subtle difference is that it can handle individual people’s nicknames properly, even where they’re duplicated all over the place. (And that’s what’s taken two years to get right, pretty much.) For example, there are at least three people on the scene who go by the name of Simon and at least two groups called CPU, but if you enter a production by “Simon / CPU” then it knows exactly who you mean. And once you’ve got individual authors in the database, you can start indexing graphics and music. And if you don’t have to pick authors from a dropdown every single time, it becomes viable to enter a whole heap of complete party results in one sitting. Which will happen, soon.
  • Yes. How about I stop trying to justify its existence right now, and work on it some more until it speaks for itself?

I like answer number 3 best.

Posted in Demoscene, Demozoo, Ruby | 4 Comments »

Will It Blend?

Friday, July 13th, 2007

A product of about one day of not very hard work (because why would you want to be stuck behind a laptop when there’s so much else going on at Shucon?), Will It Blend? is our tribute to everyone’s favourite iPhone destroyers, willitblend.com. It was put together in collaboration with Factor6 who did the music and additional graphics, with textual contributions from almost everybody. Which are largely unreadable, in more ways than one.

Posted in Demoscene, Spectrum | 4 Comments »

ZXpaintyONE

Friday, July 6th, 2007

So I wanted to enter the ZX81 Graphic Competition 2007. But I didn’t particularly want to type out block graphics character by character into a Basic program on an emulated ZX81 keyboard. So I wrote a ZX81 art package. In Javascript.

It does make sense – Javascript is one of the few languages you can write graphical applications in that’s truly cross-platform – as in ‘doesn’t require Windows users to install a massive runtime and a bundle of libraries’. Well, in this case we do require them to install Firefox, but come on, who’s going to object to that?

It’s dead easy to use (painting in three shades of grey is hardly rocket science after all) and it exports directly to ZX81 .P format courtesy of a neat Basic snippet from Russell Marks. So if you’re feeling artistic, give it a go – you don’t even need to download it. (But if you do, you get the additional perk of being able to supply an overlay image to trace around.)

Update (2008-07-12): Now features a handy clickable palette, as requested by Yerzmyey – so that people with less than three buttons on their mouse can use it. You’d think that a Mac user like me would have thought of that, really…

Posted in Demoscene, Javascript, Spectrum | 5 Comments »

Clangers on the dancefloor

Monday, February 12th, 2007

[Screenshot: Clangers on the dancefloor]
This was my 256-byte intro for raww.orgy 2007, and it’s a slightly lazy production, this one. Back in October I was pleasantly surprised to find that one of my core effects for Koopaville boiled down to a 64-byte routine plus 4K of tables, so I did the obvious thing and filed it under “things to crunch down to 256 bytes and recycle as an intro”.

The title. What can I say about the title? Well, it’s Snakes on a Plane but several billion times better, isn’t it.

Posted in Demoscene, Spectrum | 2 Comments »

Through Yeovil

Monday, February 12th, 2007

Is it really almost a year since I last entered a Speccy music competition? Coo. This one got third place at raww.orgy 2007, and there’s not much more to say about it – I knocked it off in a total of about 3 hours I guess. The title is a shameless attempt to ride on the success of previous years’ entries Through Poland and Through Russia, but unlike Factor6′s entry Through England I made no attempt to continue the theme musically. Like I said, shameless.

Download gasman_-_through_yeovil.mp3

Posted in Demoscene, Music, Spectrum | 4 Comments »

Oxford demoscene meetup, 20 January 2007! (Updated)

Sunday, December 17th, 2006

From 2pm, Far From The Madding Crowd, Friars Entry, Oxford
Following a number of “What the feck, you’re in Oxford too?”-type revelations at Sundown and subsequent conspiring, I’m proud to announce that Oxford is to host its first ever UK demoscene pub meet on Saturday 20th January 2007, at Far From The Madding Crowd (confirmed). Drop by for some fine beer, sparkling conversation and most likely showing off with shiny things running on laptops…

Things will be kicking off at around 2pm. Here’s how to find us (full map):

From Oxford train station: Go out of the main entrance and across the bus stops, then keep on heading in that direction past the big glass buildings on your left, over the bridge and continue down George Street (the one just to the left of the Opium Den sign. No, really) and past the coach station. At Old Orleans and the Cock And Camel pub, take the left turn. You’ll see the Gloucester Arms up ahead – take the footpath (Friars Entry) that runs past the entrance. Far From The Madding Crowd is on your right.

From the coach station (Gloucester Green): Go round the back of the concourse, and head for the far left corner of the market square, where you’ll see the Gloucester Arms pub. Take the footpath (Friars Entry) that runs past the entrance – Far From The Madding Crowd is on your right.

Drop me an email if you need crash space, can offer crash space, think you’re likely to get lost and could do with my mobile number, or anything else really.

Posted in Demoscene | 9 Comments »

Koopaville

Monday, October 16th, 2006

For the last demo party of the season, the UK’s very own Sundown, it was back to the Spectrum and another collaboration – with Equinox coming up with the goods on the graphical side. In the end only about half of our ideas actually came to fruition, but I’m pleased to report that the successful ones included the raster scene that I previously billed as “one of the cleverest effects I’ve ever done” but wound up abandoning to write Haluzkynation instead. The final cut received first place in the Oldskool Demo competition.

(more…)

Posted in Demoscene, Spectrum | 6 Comments »

Gallions Reach

Tuesday, August 8th, 2006

It’s been a good while since my last serious demoscene production, and it could have been even longer if I’d gone ahead with my plan to sit out this year’s Assembly competitions and take a break for once. But then along came Opera to sponsor the browser demo compo and assign it an “Open Web Standards” (read: anything but Flash) angle. How could a Javascript afficionado like me resist? And so, after a long coding slog, I give you: Gallions Reach.

(more…)

Posted in Demoscene, Javascript | 15 Comments »

Vodkemon

Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006

[Screenshot: Vodkemon]

After the stresses of getting something released at Breakpoint, I promised to myself that from now on I’d stop obsessing over party deadlines and work on stuff at my own pace, releasing when it was ready at whichever party happened to be coming up… unless there’s a really important party that demands to be supported (read: Sundown) or it’s a group project that needs more discipline. So it was rather fitting, then, that in the space of one week Mister Beep and Exin independently approached me with the suggestion of doing a collaboration for International Vodka Party.

Vodkemon on Demotopia | Vodkemon on Pouet | Vodkemon source code
(more…)

Posted in Demoscene, Spectrum | No Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »