pouët.net

things seem pretty dead in the diskmag front of any platforms in 2009.

i know we were planning a revamp of pain engine to do something fresh again, but this was like over a year ago by now or something. and everyone kind of drifted apart to their own personal projects, so i guess a new issue aint happening any time soon unless major kick ass occurs asap to get contributions rolling. and no, this post isnt it.

there was an issue of zine in the pipeline which never seemed to get finished.

and what about all those c64 diskmags, just poofed from existance?

anyone gives a shit?

anyone working on anything that needs a push in the right direction to get things finished?

or are we (in the scene) following the death of the news media?

and pretty please keep the hugi spamming / flaming out of this thread if you can.

the part where 'this isn't it' is actually a problem, see: Despite having some articles for PAIN I don't have anything from you or the other editors, including myself really.

But no, it isn't we don't give a shit.

You know as well as I do why we can't get one out right now - the entire staff has no time. And, well, in _my_ case, it's FAR more important that Accession continue to work on productions the way we have the past week than to work on a Diskmag.

I'll avoid going on for a lot longer because apparently I have to get out of the apartment before freaking 8 am, like at 7, for them to work on it and for CRYING THE F OUT LOUD I DO NOT FUNCTION AT THIS HOUR

stop doing regular disk mags. i'd rather read a well written demo-blog these days.

An actionbutton.net for demos would be nice.

we could start "the three headed squirrel" read/write some elaborated demo-reviews again. :)

_________________________________^to

Macaw I'm afraid a demo blog wouldn't have the same diversity of topics, which for me is one of the highlights of traditional diskmags. A move to the web does make sense, but a blog just isn't the right format in my opinion.

Breadth of topics combined with the web seems like a winner to me.

Some people tried the demoscene blog thing. They either updated once every 6 months with a fake interview or some random "hey, I really like this demo [link to pouet]" or they stopped posting after a month or two. And then, there are a dozen Optimus blogs.

Also, noone really needs "reviews" of demos. If you want to see what people think (often it amounts to nothing but "what preacher said","boring","should have won","their old stuff was better"), that's what pouet is for. THS worked because of his unique writing style, even if it was borderline pretentious and shifter-esque at times.

tomaes' post could have been better. It's ok for a first post though.

From now on, I will just type "what preacher said" when commenting prods. Definitely makes it easier :D

ps: it seems so hard for most of us to find time to work on demos anymore - perhaps diskmags is a push too far? as we both know all too well, diskmags take a serious bucketload of work. (and then a fair chunk of the audience'll moan it isnt a webpage anyway)

preacher: Like looking up recursion on goggle. :)

actually, during lx++ we were discussing about demoblogs (actually jeenio and breakneck were, i was just listening and wondering if they were actually right about it or not)

the argument was that there is a lack of outside attention to the scene because there are no proper review sites (and we all agreed pouet.net wasnt one), and that reviews were important because they would outreach an audience in a continuous way, even if their opinions were to be subjective or controverse, people outside the demoscene afficionados would have a thread to follow and be educated by.

and well, thats what they were saying, and i concluded its been tried before and that it died out because anyone who could do those kind of jobs would need to either be an experienced scener (which lacks time for such things) or the usual not that active as a scener guy (that likes writting about the scene but everyone in the scene points at him with ocasional scorn for not being productive) which would render the venture frustrating and useless (maybe not for a paying position in 4sceners.de it seems)

that being said i really like what the escena.org people did out of their portal, with their demo of the month feature which is always a lengthy article explaining the importance of the demo. the spanish scene might look quite dead demoparty wise but their portals and outreach efforts have always been stellar.

which makes me wonder: why the fuck are we bothering spending time doing outreach when whenever it gets done properly people still arent really getting sucked in, neither as active members (its too much hardcore for these days kids) nor as regular viewers (yeh, great demo in 4k, these guys rock but im not gonna start following them regularly). in the end i guess the demoscene truly is something that is meant to be kept underground and very closed to their whatever the fuck who is inside dictates grass roots. and a self-regulating semi-anarch system at that. which is part of the charm in a way (belonging to something special) and also part of what has been driving me away from this whole shabang (belonging to something that forces you to comit social suicide whenever trying to even slightly change any pre-established dogma). but i digress and wasnt meaning to pull this into a scene is dead debate.

im really just probing who is moving ass to see where i can inject some small dosages of assistance when i get those fucked up ideas for cool articles bridging outside the usual scene crap.

i really like the type of reviews from the zero punctuation guy whose name i cant recall right now and am too lazy to look it up. they are mostly insulting and demeeing to the game, but made in a somewhat informative manner to the true essence (and very subjectively biased personal opinion) of the games. even when you never played or had any intention of playing the bloody game, it is still heavily entertaining to watch. which in the end makes the whole ordeal of writting the review worth it: its making people who wouldnt usually consume the thing want to check it out, its educating them to who is doing what, and its doing it while entertaining them rather then offering them a large pile of more text. there is already too much text on the internet, people lose patience to read it whole up.

that being said about reviews: i miss proper coding articles (you know, actual, interesting for demosceners, like the ones at iq's homepage, im sure there are plenty others scattered about, why arent they centralized curated by someone who knows what he's doing?!), i miss lengthy in depth research articles (about new techniques, about the evolution of things, about development tricks for obscure platforms, about new datavis stuff outside the demoscene, about external visions on the scene), i miss properly done interviews, i miss the things that used to make me launch a diskmag. i wouldnt mind having them on a webpage but the only scene site aiming at it is bitfellas and it aint covering it as it probably should be by now. probably by lacking proper curators poking people for really worth reading content. and no, im not stepping up to that plate, im too busy with other stuff, but it would sure be nice to go back and read something about the demoscene properly written. instead of yet another half knowdlegable "omg they did this in 4k" outreach article at some whatever news tech site, however famous they might be, their reporters are always clueless on the true aspects of the scene, and that blows.

sorry for long text, written with sleep deprivation, take it with a large dose of salt wherever i might have been overly blunt with my writting. :S

I'm for diskmags to keep being released. I must admit that demo reviews are completely useless. I won't talk about advices on how to get laid.
You guys should just consider that interviewing all the time (or almost?) the same people is pretty boring.
You should as well consider that there are plenty of people around who for sure would be interested in making articles and maybe interviews or don't know what more, and would do it only. Look at how much Hugi shits diskmags. They've got people dedicated to that. Maybe get someone to do that *only*.
And make a mailing list for people to suscribe to when getting on the PAIN site. Send news from time to time. Involve them. Ask advices. You'd for sure get a community which would make you go faster on producing.
I'd be glad to help, as we already talked at Evoke '05 or '06.

And no. My above post ain't a reply to ps's one. Took me one hour with <insert random shitload of things to do here> in the meantime to write it.

It's all about motivation and momentum. More releases = more momentum too. Chicken vs. egg.

An online format could work pretty well, I reckon. Make it a smart webapp that can auto-hassle registered writers once a month or so.

Articles would turn up online as they're written. Once a critical number of articles is reached, package 'em all up into an offline executable diskmag with the obligatory pretty gfx and background music. Plus an extra feature or two.

Diskmag engines are already using some kind of markup internally, right?

Maybe with a release every 6 months, more momentum would come - it would help keep the mag in the collective consciousness. And when the apocalypse comes, there'll be more copies for posterity.

I'd be happy to write a monthly/bi-monthly article as long as it can be about what I want ... and as long as I'm reminded to ;)

So what's the status of Zine?

I personally enjoyed the podcasts from "ZINE - The Radio Show" even more than the zine diskmag. Dont know if it is a good replacement or if it is less work to make, but i think it has some future.

actually ps I'm interested in building a web mag with very similar ideas

nicolas: building any webpage of any sort isnt a problem, its finding people to maintain it actively thats a bitch.

yeti: those kind of shows (already happened with the arts) all die out once the initial interest is gone and they've mostly covered the current trends. i guess its lack of free time. im quite amazed to see other initiatives parallel to the demoscene with much higher degree of tech complexity (like fmacg show) survive much longer, and striving their show with their enthusiasm and new blood, rather then shribble out of phase like all demoscene media'esque projects seem to.

ript: in PAiN we had our own markup scheme yes. it was very similar to html, but i think we still hadnt finished the parser/converter, which is why so little of the articles from PAiN are available online.

I was talking about writing, not any menial (and useless) coding of a page

Having seen multiple demoblogs fail, I think we all know the reason there aren't more: They don't work.

Podcast type thing: Well, I have my shows on scenesat after parties, talking about them and playing the music from them. I suppose that's a form of something. And, well, I've had a number of folks respond to that, far more than any demoblog ever did. So maybe I'll just do that for a while until enough of us on the PAIN staff can afford a bit of time to do the next issue.

I also don't consider diskmags outreach. I consider them productions which contain more text which represent a particular moment in time. Blogs can't do that, as they don't ever represent a particular moment in time, but are a 'constant flow.' (Except of course when they are stillborn, which pretty much describes demoblogs.)

I'm a fan of diskmags (as my time devoted to PAiN certainly shows). When I saw this thread I immediately thought "bad timing" because I'd like to write something clever in here but hardly can find the time to do so now that we're in the final organizing steps for Buenzli. I hope I can come back to the topic again after Buenzli. Just a few fast typed comments. Ript writes he would type down articles "and as long as I'm reminded to" - and that pretty much sums up what makes PAiN being delayed by some years now: Doing PAiN turned more and more into a "trying to make people to write something". Sometimes, a lot of ideas and motivation don't match the effort required. So, at this very moment, I can't tell when this will change to the better again - PAiN doesn't have the highest priority in my personal list (and that's where I go with Smash).
But that doesn't turn down my fascination on diskmags and here I completely agree: What's with all the other diskmags?

Oh and as for PAiN articles being online: It would require some effort on the finalizing and properly layouting of the texts. There's a working parser/converter and at least for all issues I have done, the raw text is around, too.

unlock: i actually been working on an html+javascript html editor for a project for work, which could easily get reworked into a wysiwyg editor for articles using any type of markup language. well, not remodelled that easily, would probably take a couple weeks or a month of part time work, but it's doable and would really help doing the article only once (by the writer, not necessarily the mag editor) and having it available in both pain markup and true html straight away.