C00LeS WaReZ UNiON MeMOiRS: cHApTER #0x99

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0x99  -  Kuopio  -  dArK sTuFfEr  -  1998-12  -  269 lines
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The Skenery'98 party in July had a galvanizing effect on all CWU members -- even wArlord, who had chosen not to attend but subsequently regretted his decision.

For a year, we'd each been building our lives towards a separate direction, but after the Skenery party, it became clear we'd been looking for new foundations too far. Our purpose, it turned out, was C00LeS WaReZ UNiON. Everything else in our lives could change, but CWU would endure. Everything we ever did should be done in the name of CWU, the very thing that distinguishes us from all other people in the world. We should emphasize our CWU identity in every situation.

In August, I started my second year of high school. The difference from the first year was the influx of a large number of freshmen, to whom I'd naturally hold a position of authority simply by virtue of being a second-year student. This wasn't enough for me; I wanted to command more respect than my classmates. So, before school started, I dyed my hair black.

I'd always considered hair dye a redundant product, but reading literature on theatre recommended by the Temple of Set -- a splinter group from the Church of Satan -- convinced me that I should invest in my external appearance. In addition to dyeing my hair, I increased the amount of spikes and grotesque elements in my overall look. Inspired by this literature, I also experimented with various smoke effects in order to execute dramatic entrances at student parties, at Sokos mall entrances, and perhaps even in class.

The "satanic" transformation worked. I managed to plant the seeds of fear and respect in many of the freshmen from the first few days of school, and I noticed that many of the teachers also began to treat me with a degree of caution.

The school nurse became concerned about my mental health, so I spent several hours over the autumn explaining the fundamentals of my philosophy to her. After our conversations, she gave the principal a report stating that there was no cause for concern, especially given my excellent academic record.

I'm pleased that I've managed to instill the idea of demoscene as a kind of global occult secret society in the entire school staff and student body. Of course, most commoners consider an "occult secret society" synonymous with a "Satan-worshiping gang," but let them wallow in their delusions -- I have no obligation to correct them.

My image of being superhuman and omniscient has been reinforced by the fact that I've gathered increasingly detailed information about the school's students through network sniffing. Usage of IRC and lowly WWW-based chats has increased significantly among female students in particular, allowing me to compile a considerable amount of material for my manipulation project. It's been refreshing to manipulate women my own age, as I had previously focused on university students.

I've been calling Frontline BBS more frequently this autumn. wArlord has started initiating a lot of discussions about our shared years in Lietevesi. His tone is particularly wistful, and CWU seems to represent a kind of golden age for him, something that needs to be canonized lest we lose it entirely. He occasionally wanders onto IRC to reminisce about our shared years. However, mR.mEgAsTuFf and I strongly believe that CWU's activities shouldn't be left on nostalgia, but that its golden age is still ahead of us. mR.mEgAsTuFf, DiCKiNSTASiA, and I all agree.

mR.mEgAsTuFf wants to make CWU an even larger and more powerful group, and he's even registered a DNS hostname for it. The domain names cwu.com and cwu.org were already taken, but cwu.net was available. We built a purely text-based homepage behind this address, intended to demonstrate our technical and spiritual superiority to the entire world, and especially to Finnish Internet lamers.

To strengthen our legend, we decided to start working on a long series of memoirs. This was made easier by the fact that we had recorded some of CWU's first meetings on C cassettes. DaRK FuCKeR had transcribed them all into text during the summer of 1997. However, transcriptions alone would give a rather fragmented picture of our history, so we decided to write the entire history of our junior high school years in a similar dialogue style.

To ensure authenticity, we decided to compile the text as a chain letter: we'd circulate the zip file containing it from member to member, and each person would take turns correcting and supplementing its contents according to their own memories. In case of disputes, each person would mark their preferred version with their initials, and the version with the most votes would prevail. A file would be declared complete once it had made a full circuit without changes.

I would have liked to publish the files immediately after they were completed, but mR.mEgAsTuFf disagreed. He thought that not a single file should be released to the public until the entire story was complete, up to the events of July 12, 1997. Warlord agreed as well. We agreed to devote ourselves to writing and completing the story with at an exceptional pace so that we could finish it before the turn of the millennium.

DaRK FuCKeR used the money he earned from his summer job to buy a Pentium Pro motherboard and other decadent hardware upgrades. After that, he didn't IRC as much as he used to, as he was often at home playing new warez games (and some of his old favorites). Sometimes he even hauled his Pentium around in a wheelbarrow under a tarp to school, where he had access to a wired Internet connection. Even then, he wasn't IRCing, but playing mainstream Internet multiplayer games like Quake and Ultima Online. And because DaRK FuCKeR has occasionally skipped classes to play commercial games, I've been deeply concerned about his life.

Fortunately, there have also been Internet multiplayer games suitable for all of us, which are also excellent for provoking rage in lamers. One of these is TetriNET, whose first implementation was for Windows, but there are now a couple of different free Unix clients available for it.

When adding my own cheat features to the terminal-based TetriNET client, I discovered that its protocol was the most porous I'd ever encountered: any player can, for example, completely freely modify the content of their own field, and even the function of the "attack bricks" collected in the game is entirely at the discretion of the client. There are very few checks for cheats in the server programs either.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of TetriNET servers operating in the world. We've launched attacks on them as CWU, participating with my modified client. We've sent flickering CWU logos spinning around in other people's playfields, and flooded the in-game chat with ASCII images with CWU world domination themes. We often received hate, but sometimes also admiration. We didn't bask in the admiration, as weak-minded lamers would have done, but always left the arenas with as much flair as we'd arrived with, with ASCII logos and all that. Or, at least I did.

Many other environments favored by Windows lamers are now also usable by Unix users -- for example, there's a free text-terminal Unix client for ICQ. On the other hand, even FreeCiv, a free Civilization clone, isn't entirely kosher to me, despite its freedom, as there's still only a graphical client available for it. I will, however, implement a text-based FreeCiv client myself if no one else is interested in the project. But I won't even bother hoping for a hacker-kosher text terminal client to appear for Quake or Ultima Online.

In addition to games and chat environments, we've also become active on Usenet, where we grow our group's reputation by trolling. The explosive growth of lamers has made trolling them a kind of art form, and its masters are highly regarded. Respect from established users is earned from being able to make one's victims believe the most unbelievable things -- just as in the case of the best BBS lamecaptures.

We particularly admire Niilo Paasivirta among the Usenet trolls, and we strive to match his level of quality in our own trolling. The older Unix expert Jukka Korpela doesn't actually troll, but he sometimes says things to WWW lamers that are so scathing that most established Usenet users admire him for it unconditionally. Only the pathetic Windows and business lamers dare to argue with him.

CWU demoscene activity has declined recently, at least partially because we all favor different platforms. I haven't been inspired by the C64 at all this year compared to the MSX, because every technical and aesthetic detail of the MSX -- from the color palette to the vertical stripes in the TV image -- appeals to me so much more. mR.mEgAsTuFf thinks the MSX is crap, and demos on 8-bit systems should always be made for the C64. Neither DaRK FuCKeR nor DiCKiNSTASiA understand my MSX enthusiasm, and wArlord isn't really interested in demos at all, especially 8-bit ones. Only myXTer seems open to all possible platforms.

If 8-bit isn't an option, I'd prefer to make the demos for Unix with source code releases and then port them to MS-DOS for compos using DJGPP tools. But most of all, I'd like to get my own Unix workstation, completely free from PC contamination, that I could bring to parties to present the demos. PCs are becoming increasingly unpleasant to use for demos year after year. There were already four demos -- 300% more than the previous year -- at this year's Assembly Windows demo competitions, which has created a strong need for me to give up PCs and all PC activity as totally as possible.

Very few demos have been made for Unix-compatible operating systems yet; operating systems in general don't have very many demos yet. But if any type of operating system is at all suitable for demos, it's definitely Unix. Unix has always done everything Right<tm> from the start, and the academic foundations of this correctness are strong. For example, the guiding principles of Windows development are commercialism, tricking lamers out of their money, worshipping Intel's instruction set quirks, and a general lack of sophistication among non-academic programmers. Unix is therefore absolutely superior in every way. However, the virginity of Unix in demo usage does create its own difficulties, which I must face with the same pioneering spirit as the equivalent difficulties in the MSX world.

One of the problems to be solved is graphics rendering. True Unix platforms have a framebuffer device, through which drawing pixels on the screen is straightforward, but the PC Linux only supports the text mode by default. Framebuffer support needs to be separately compiled into the kernel and configured for each graphics card if one doesn't want to make demos in text mode or settle for inferior graphics interfaces. Fortunately, the Linux text console interface does allow one to change the font and palette, and with SVGAtextmode, one can also get larger text resolutions, but this kind of tweaking would only take the demos further away from the universal Unix spirit. The only graphics interface with universally guaranteed compatibility for Unix is X11, and using it directly with assembly without libraries is very long-winded, especially if one wants to support fullscreen and all possible color depths.

Another problem with Unix is that it lacks trackers -- especially ones that don't constantly crash. If Dosemu supported IRQs and DMAs properly, I wouldn't complain so much about this, as I would then be able to use M$-DOS trackers in the same way as I do on a genuine M$-DOS. Now, I have to constantly write in the music deaf, save the file, and listen to it with Mikmod or XMP, which considerably slows down and complicates the process.

Fortunately, in addition to my PC, I also have an Amiga 1200, and its trackers. I am, however, bothered by the fact that they are so mouse-driven, and the keyboard commands don't resemble the Scream Tracker keyboard commands at all.

I also favor the Amiga for pixel graphics work, as there isn't a proper Deluxe Paint-level pixel graphics program for Unix. I can, of course, run M$-DOS's version of DP2 using Dosemu, but the Amiga DP4 is better. Some people have occasionally praised a free image processing program called GIMP, which has been used for making the graphic themes of the Enlightenment window manager whose screenshots consistently make Windows users jealous, but I personally think GIMP feels excessively bloated, unintuitive, and un-scene-like.

In the November, there would have been another Zoo party in Pori, but I wasn't that interested it anymore. After all, at a C64 party, an MSX demo would only have a place in a wildcompo. I am therefore targetting my upcoming MSX demo for a party where the MSX has an equal position -- e.g. Alternative Party, which will hopefully be held again next year. And if case it won't, we'll release the demo at the CWU meeting -- even a private meeting is a valid party, after all!

The year 1998 is drawing to a close as I write this, and after that, there's only one year left of this millennium. Because I'm concerned about the doomsday scenarios associated with the year 2000, I'm going to prepare for their possibility. I'm going to find myself a hiding place in the Neulamäki forests, and equip it with a sufficient amount of canned food and weaponry. On the other hand, since Neulamäki is still quite close to a densely populated urban area, this place would need to be in the metsänpeitto dimension, so that the magically impotent commoners would not find it. I'd build a hut there, which I could also use as a meditation hut when not wanting to hear my roommates' noise.

If the world is not going to end after 1999, I will face my matriculation exams in the spring of 2000. In principle, I might be able to do the exam in the autumn of 1999, but since a matriculation diploma wouldn't be worth anything after the apocalypse, it would be quite unwise to use my time that way.