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[assembly '99]


Day 1:

At about 5.10 o' clock in the morning, ThUmB, Ctulhu and Ramon, a friend of us, arrived at my home. Ramons father then drove us to the Stuttgart airport where we took our luggage. We gave up our bags, sat down and took our laptops to play around with them a bit. (Yeah, posing !!! ;) As airports only exist to make demoparty trips difficult for democoders, soon the problems began. The security dudes saw, that we had laptops with us and wanted us to switch them on, so that they could see, that those really were _real_ laptops. What do they think ? Do we look like youth criminals which plan to smuggle out drugs to Finland in laptops ? As the switch on-off procedure was soon over for us, Ctulhu had some more problems: his laptop had a damaged battery and he always needs an electricity plug to start his laptop. So he had to come with one of the security guys to check it. After that, they checked our passports. And what did they see ? Ctulhu's one only was valid until the 7th of August...so we hoped, that we wouldn't get any problems with coming out of Finland again. The flight wasn't too bad and we had a stop at Copenhagen. Here you can see a picture of us at the airport:



as you can see, we were in a good mood. thanx also to ramon, who made the picture. to the left, that's me (StyX) then Ctulhu in the middle and on the right side we have ThUmB.
Day 2:

Today was our last day before ASM. When we stood up, you can't guess, who again was the last person: right, Ramon ;)
At first we decided to walk to the Hartwall Areena (without Ramon...;), to see how far it is away from the hostel. When we arrived there, we saw that it would be too far to go there by foot. When you don't know, that there's Assembly in the hall, you won't see that: no banners, no signs, simply a hall.
We went home, took Ramon with us and walked into the town to find something for eat. All except me again chose the Mc Donald's, I later bought something else.

View on Helsinki

This is a picture I made in a park near the youth hostel. What you can't see is, that the baloon is a Sonera-baloon. Sonera was a sponsor of ASM and this baloon was the first thing in Helsinki, which reminded us about ASM ;)

Ctulhu then had the idea, to walk to the sea. But it took us quite long to get there, because we always had to wait for Ramon.
At the sea, Ctulhu then had the stupid idea, to check the water and on the way there he nearly fell into the sea because of the wet stones.
On the way back, we just bought some necessary things and in the hostel we packed our luggage.


Day 3, 1st day of Assembly:

After the breakfast, we took our luggage and went to the next tram station. Of course it was raining heavily (which it did _not_ on all the other days) and it also didn't stop, when we were standing in front of the door. As if the rain was not annoying enough, the doors openened not at 10 o' clock but 3/4 hours later.
After we had got to our places, we installed our computers and started working on DoalI. We had to fix some little bugs and to draw some new textures. ThUmB was tracking on his song.



HeadcrasH at the party - as it looks, ThUmB is tracking right now and Ctulhu...well, he just seems to be happy about beeing at the ASM ;)

The time was absolutely enough and so we didn't come into stress with DoalI.
After that we released DoalI and two music trax: "Deasm" by N.r.t.H. and "Life is just a game" by ThUmB.
Soon we realized our situation: we were nearly completely surrounded by gamerlamers which were playing Quake and other crap the whole time. Only in front of us were some real democoders from sweden. Their group is called Yodel. The guys were really nice and later they won the Java compo.



Here you can see some guys of the swedish demogroup Yodel. They were really nice and I talked alot with them.

The party hall itself was absoluteley cool. Just imagine a dark hall with thousands of computers in it, which represent the only lightsources.



This is my favorite shot of the party hall - cool view, eh ? Now just think about some noise and you are nearly there ;)

Umm, O.K., some of the lamers thought, that flaslights are cool, and so about 15 of those flased around.
Sometime at night then I got to know some democoders from spain (Incognita), which had made a cool demo I looked at. Unfortunately it was disqualified later because of incompatibilities.
After that, the C64 compos began. They were all really cool, especially the C64 music compo.
Around midnight ThUmB and Ramon went away and didn't come back...hmm...I had a look into the sleeping hall and what do I see ? The two dudes sleeping. Yeah. Also Ctulhu and me were _really_ tired but couldn't sleep, because we had to take care of the laptops.


Day 4, 2nd day of Assembly:

In order to stay awake I had a nice burger for breakfast and around 4 o' clock, it was possible for Ctulhu and me to have some sleep. As the sleeping hall was stinky and awfully hot, we chose the seats of the hall, which were quite good for sleeping. Also as the noice in the hall was good, it was no problem to sleep there.
The next time I spent coding on some little things and walking around.



Yes, and here you can see me coding. You also can see, that I'm wearing my legendary "FC Cologne" scarf, which is my brand. So if you are looking out for me on some demoparty, look for this red scarf ;)

It was really disappointing to see so many lamers, and I'm sure that there were more lamers than sceners.
Later we were waiting for the Multichannel compo, as N.r.t.H. had made a track for it which had good chances to make the bigscreen. Finally it missed it just because of one fucking place and took place 11/129 which is still cool.
The 4k intro compos had some cool entries just as the 64k compos. Beside this, nothing special happened that day.



Cables, cables, cables. It was really difficult at the end of the party to find your own ones =)


Day 5, 3rd day of Assembly:

Now it was demo time. Early in the morning, the PC non-accelerated demo compo started. After the first demos we realized some things:
1) DoalI will surely NOT make the bigscreen
2) The demos were _boring_
Among the demos only 2 were quite nice, all the others looked mainly the same.
The Animation compo had some nice entries and it was fun to watch them.
The accelerated demo compo wasn't much better than the non-acc. beside some entries. The cool demo by Incognita unfortunately was disqualified as I said before. It had creative parts and a metal soundtrack, which brought them many applause. (They showed the demo although it has been disqualified)
The rest of the day I spent (as most of the time...) coding and voting on the compos.



ThUmB and Ramon seem to have serious problems with something...don't remember what it was, but I guess it was Ramon's DOS-prompt ;)

The organizers again showed "2nd Reality" which was about the 3rd time then...urgh.
In the afternoon Abyss started the pricing ceremony. He was really tired and often made errors presenting the winners ;) But it was a nice show and it was nice to hear for us, that Yodel won the Java competetion.
Soon after the pricing ceremony we packed our things, said goodbye to Abyss and went back to the youth hostel.



Here you can see us after the party in front of the hall. Again we are in the same order as in Copenhagen: StyX, Ctulhu, ThUmB. (Hu, what's this ? I'm so small...)

Although we hadn't slept much the last days, we weren't too tired and so went to the center to buy some food & drinks. But soon in the evening we went to bed.

This is the end of our Assembly report. The next day we went to the Airport and took our flight back home. In Munich an officer made some trouble because of Ctulhu's invalid passport, but beside that nothing happened that day.