C00LeS WaReZ UNiON MeMOiRS: cHApTER #0x97

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0x97  -  Kuopio  -  dArK sTuFfEr  -  1998-04  -  229 lines
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My emotional and sexual life having returned to an optimal balance in December, there was once again room in my life for elevated technological endeavors, entirely unrelated to the mundane lamer world. At that time, I heard about The Alternative Party, a demoscene event to be held in Turku next spring. The competitions at "AltParty" allowed participation on any hardware except PCs or Amigas with processors more powerful than an 80286 or 68000, so I decided to seize the opportunity and create a demo for my first computer, the Sony HiTBiT HB-75P MSX.

The HB-75P is a machine deeply intertwined with my personality, mental development, and inner imaginary landscape, also carrying with it immense, unprocessed stigmas and traumas. Back in elementary school, mR.mEgAsTuFf had categorized me into a lower caste because of this machine, and at times I even believed in this classification myself. And because my father, Taisto, had acquired the computer despite my having specifically requested a Commodore 64 for Yule gift, I also experienced a sense of profound unfairness, mixed with envy and vengefulness. The most important reason why I started making the MSX demo was to get rid of these feelings and transform my MSX usage into a positive aspect of myself.

As I had suspected, mR.mEgAsTuFf opposed the idea of a "shit-computer demo" from the outset, as well as the party in general. It was impossible to even discuss the matter on #cwu when mR.mEgAsTuFf was present, so I decided to release the demo under a completely different group name than CWU. DiCKiNSTASiA suggested the name FU!ROR for the group, and we also established an IRC channel, #fu!ror.

Essentially, all the IRC users on the #fu!ror channel participated in the demo's creation: DiCKiNSTASiA, myXTer, and Tugga, who joined the project through discussions on #babylon5.fi. However, I didn't need much help from them, as I created both the code and the music for the demo myself. Since the demo would be loaded from cassette into memory at once, there wouldn't be much room for graphics, but DiCKiNSTASiA and Tugga did draw a few textures and the FU!ROR logo. DaRK FuCKeR didn't participate in the project, trusting mR.mEgAsTuFf's assessment of the project's lameness. wArlord, on the other hand, has never been particularly interested in 8-bit demos.

My work was quite intense. Often, after school, I would cycle straight to my student apartment to work on the demo, without even stopping at my high school's computer lab or the university's terminal. I often spent weekends exclusively on the demo project from waking up to going to sleep. I noticed this had a positive effect on my focus and determination, and I was even able to reach deeper jhana states during my meditation sessions and experience more lucid dreams.

In the early stages of the project, I wired a cable between the MSX's cassette interface and a PC's sound card, allowing me to use the PC to work on the demo. I also had a null modem cable, but I ended up using it only for occasional debug prints. I programmed my own Z80 assembler in C so that I would be completely familiar with its syntax and could easily expand it as needed. When programming the assembler, I also internalized the properties of the Z80 instruction set.

The most appealing graphics mode for the demo seemed to be mode number 3, which offers a 64x48 pixel resolution with a completely free 15-color palette (there are 16 possible color codes, but the "transparent" color is essentially the same as black, unless an external video signal is fed to the video chip). Mode 3 would be particularly well suited for PC-style chunky effects, such as texture tunnels, raycast engines, and voxel landscapes. The Z80 would also have some computational advantage over the 6502, so I would also have a slight edge over the C64.

Unfortunately, writing to video memory is significantly slower and more cumbersome on the MSX than on the C64, so I couldn't achieve a very high framerate, even if I could calculate all the screen pixels quickly. I still believe that someday a technique will be found to manipulate video memory much faster. Since, to the best of my knowledge, very few demos have been made for the MSX to date, it may contain completely unexplored secrets that could amplify its potential tenfold or even hundredfold. FLI was invented by ASP/Blackmail only after hundreds of C64 demos had been made over the years. If we imagine an alternate reality where the MSX had become the standard demo machine instead of the C64, the C64 might very well have a reputation for being a limited, rudimentary machine in comparison.

On those evenings when I wasn't working on the MSX demo, I made an effort to maintain my friendship with mR.mEgAsTuFf. mR.mEgAsTuFf had gotten a job at what I considered a most deplorable WWW design company, so he was particularly interested in punishing WWW lamers for their shameless arrogance and other lameness. Realizing how hole-riddled CGI-based WWW pages are, I got the idea for my own WWW browser, specifically designed to find and exploit these holes.

My browser, tentatively named BattleLynx, would be built on Lynx, in the same way that IRC warriors favor BitchX, which is built on EPIC, an IRCII-based client. BattleLynx would need to include the ability to modify hidden fields and to freely edit header information sent to the server, as well as to use several different types of proxies. The browser should also ideally have its own internal scripting language and proper support for colored character graphics. I could then advertise CWU's upcoming homepage, stating that it's "Best viewed with BattleLynx," and cause those arrogant WWW lamers to experience cosmic levels of despair due to their ignorance.

But before initiating the BattleLynx project, I had to finish the FU!ROR MSX demo and take it to the party.

The Alternative Party was held in Turku in April. The main organizers were the Atari group Encroachment, whose member Noletz I already knew from the 1996 Juhla and Abduction parties. Since The Gathering was being held in Norway at the same time as AltParty in Finland, most of the key figures from the Finnish PC and Amiga demoscenes were in Norway instead. I suspect this was a deliberate decision by Encroachment, intended to keep the decay typical to the mainstream PC/Amiga demoscene as far away as possible from the new and virgin event.

Most of the AltParty attendees were unfamiliar to me. No other CWU members showed up, but there was Tugga, who had created the graphics for FU!ROR's demo, so I met him for the first time. He also brought his own SVI-738 X'Press, which our demo ran perfectly on, so we decided to use it as the presentation machine. After all, it did have a floppy drive, unlike my HiTBiT.

FU!ROR placed as high as fourth in the demo competition, despite having only two effects: a texture tunnel and a Wolfenstein engine. However, these did receive some applause, and I think the code was genuinely better than most of the party productions, the main purpose of which seemed to be showcasing unusual hardware. This is perhaps natural for hardware that hasn't seen much use before. Perhaps in ten years, the situation will be different, when each of these virgin machines will have dozens or hundreds of demos. Then they would undoubtedly match the quality of the demos of the "holy trinity": the C64, Amiga, and PC.

There were a total of four MSX demos, including the FU!ROR demo, and as many as five Atari ST/Falcon demos. I think this is particularly noteworthy. Apparently, the aforementioned "holy trinity" had previously pushed other machines to such a marginal role that they had virtually no room at most parties, even if there had been an interest in releasing new demos for them.

The AltParty visit was quite a transformative experience for me. I got rid of the MSX shame I previously mentioned and replaced it with MSX pride, and I also became convinced of the mainstream demoscene's unsuitability for esoteric self-development and apotheosis.

It is, of course, possible to evolve into a superhuman direction through increasingly superhuman coding achievements within the mainstream scene, but this doesn't always happen. Often, the scene's internal value system leads towards a direction entirely different from apotheosis.

A significant portion of the so-called elite lack the prerequisites to understand true esoteric achievements, as evidenced by the fact that MFX's technologically revolutionary real-time raytracing intro was beaten by CYRBiON's dime-a-dozen production at the Juhla 1996 party. Amiga users are also often blind to the most astonishing achievements of Atari coders due to their emotional platform-war traumas. In addition, there are groups like H0RiG0 within the scene, who have achieved a respected position simply by having been involved in mail trading and party revelry around the turn of the nineties. I have yet to find a decent H0RiG0 demo, so I classify them as lamers despite their reputation.

The same social-dynamic putrefaction applies to many other "scenes." Some IRC warriors have managed to achieve elite status by exploiting new security vulnerabilities, but on average, exceptional technical skill has little value in these circles. Most IRC warring involves the fastest possible adoption of other people's exploits and scripts, which makes the mainstream IRC warrior scene almost as contemptible as the mainstream warez scene.

In MUD-type games, it's possible to evolve into a respected wizard who creates new code within the game world, but nothing really encourages the wizard to develop superhuman code. Furthermore, nowadays there are graphical "MUDs" like Ultima Online, where the entire concept of wizardry has been abandoned, and players cannot in any way rise from the status of a low-level consumer to that of a "god." This feature makes UO contemptible in my opinion, even though it is Ultima, and its commercialism and Windows-only status further add to this contemptibility. I might consider trying UO if it were to have a Unix-compatible, anti-commercial, underground client that would allow for warfare based on esoteric programming skills, in the same way that IRC, WWW, and BBSs allow.

The actual occult scene isn't much better. Essentially, anyone can learn spells that violate known laws of physics but remain completely blind to more advanced magic. This is why esotericism easily degenerates into "academic esotericism" resembling theology and scholasticism, where literacy is more important than practical skill or the creation of falsifiable theories. Even the PUA scene adheres better to the principle of falsifiability.

Based on these observations, I have now made the following principled decision: I do not value any scene as a path to occultism, if success there is possible through chance, social connections, or any other frivolous nonsense. This doesn't mean I can no longer participate within these scenes, I just won't let any of their questionably selected "elites" influence my path or opinions. I stick only to what I intuitively know to be right, and everyone else can just go kiss my ass, to use a common expression.

In order to value the opinions of any scene, I would have to value them at least as much as my own intuition, which means their rules must be ruthless, strict, and immutable, like in mathematics, Chess, or Go. Within the demoscene sphere, computer platforms essentially form this kind of a strict and immutable foundation, but the way of evaluating demo quality is usually soft, subjective fluff based on emotions and aesthetic preferences. What's needed instead is a strict assessment method based on rules, as far as possible from what the contemporary over-aestheticized mainstream scene represents, and which limits true mastery to only true superhumans.

The lamest scenes, such as WWW, the global market economy, or the crowd at the Kuopio Sokos gateway at Friday nights, are useful primarily because they are full of useful idiots. When manipulating these idiots, it must always be remembered that their feelings or other reactions have no significance to the elite. No matter how much a lamer deifies, fears, or despises a scener, he must always treat him with the same cold rationality, as a soulless raw material. Only through this principle can an elite scener evolve into a genuine, absolutely human-independent divinity.