pouët.net

*effort

i dont mind people keeping data for themselfes or a limited audience, that is and will always be the case. i dont think its suitable for a public award, tho.

*scene award even.
to clarify: a scene "release" means something, at least it does for me. it means the data is "released" and publically available.

except in this case, the award is not awarding the data/release itself but rather the gimmick of the limited distribution as an artform in itself. so you're basically implying that 'if you cannot have it, it's not noteworthy as art' ... you have a lot of museums to burgle then!

thats pretty much exactly not what i was wanting to say nor imply.
if you want to add a category "most oldschool way of distribution" to the awards this would totally own it ;p

and again, if people think its cool and fun to make a demo that is only available by mail swapping - let them do it. i wont die because i am too lazy to write a fucking letter, id even have a disk left somewhere. i just dont think artificially limiting the audience makes the data itself more worthy. especially not more worthy of an "best oldschool demo" award (which this would probably apply to). maybe its the best amigaaaa demo that has been done in years but how should we know about that if we cannot see it by todays standards? maybe send disks out to the jury so they can judge by themselfes and hand out a trophy only a fraction of people can relate to? that feels utterly wrong.
and yes, the cool nature of digital data is that you can copy it in various ways without degrading it. thats a great thing and brought us to where we are now - scenewise and otherwise. we should worship this more and be less elite about what we have and others do not.

but thats just my 2 cents and we can completely agree to disagree here and i will stop spamming the meteoriks thread with it now.

On the other hand one could argue that a reasonable jury-team should try to watch the demos they are judging on actual hardware and not on youtube or emulators.
So I'm sure they got hold a physical disk already.

And if the creators want their demo to be watched on real hardware, what's a more convinient way to send out bootable disks to everyone how's interested?

is that the demoscene equivalent of a screener?

With the oldschool / low-end category containing everything and the kitchen sink that'd make it quite challenging to find suitable jurors (or to handle the logistics of shipping containers of exotic hardware to all of them) :)

Totally valid point, Slummy. That's why it says "should try to".

My personal(!) two cents and not necessarily what the Meteoriks team as a whole will settle on:

To me it's mostly a simple matter of accessibility: Just hypothetically, imagine the Meteoriks actually ended up awarding the Best Low-End Production statue to Hologon. It should be possible for Joe Scener to easily grab a copy and give it a watch, emphasis on "easily". Otherwise we'd be depriving most of the scene of the pleasure of watching The Best Low-End Prod Of 2020, like "wow this is the best thing since sliced bread but you can't watch it SUCKS TO BE YOU I GUESS".

Also I think that a public award requires the possibility of equally public scrutiny - otherwise for all people know Hologon could just be an .avi player playing Saulin Penis in a loop. Personally(!) I don't think that necessarily means YouTube - a publicly accessible ADF would be cool with me. But public it must be.

And don't get me wrong, I actually applaud the idea of going back to old-school spreading methods in the age of 5G, but IMO sticking with pure mail spreading would be at odds with the public nature of the Meteoriks.

People seem to be overlooking the fact that the idea to spread demos on floppies via mail is far from unique or new. No I am not talking about the 80s/90s, rather about the stack of demo disks I received in the mail in the last 10/15 years. And that's just Atari scene stuff...

I'll leave you with the observation that people who actually own a copy of the demo suggest to nominate it for the method of spreading and not for the contents of the demo itself.

That's something you have to discuss with the authors in case you consider the demo for a nomination.

So yeah, the jury sees things the same way, so it's the law now:

For a prod to be considered for nomination for the Meteoriks awards, there must be a publicly downloadable binary* available.

The fine points:

*exe, ADF image, zip, lha, whatever - any format containing the prod in its entirety that is sufficiently common on the target platform that folks will know how to run it.

Since we can't tell people in advance "hey, we're going to nominate you, how about releasing your prod?" it's up to the creators to release their prod and the release can't be made conditional on a nomination.

We do not require a video, but as Slummy already pointed out it's very helpful for the juries, especially on low-end platforms. They have to wade through literally hundreds of prods so the margin for "reasonable effort" to get any individual prod to run is not very large.

Unless the prod itself is a video, just a video without binary is no bueno. (*cough*barbie suicide*cough*)

We're going to contact TEK and let them know about this.

I nominated Hologon Superspreader for the Scene Spirit award before I saw this discussion. It's the announce/swaptro, hence no spirit-lifting mailing of floppies would've taken place without it.

I'd just like to note that I'm delighted to see the Executable Graphics scene getting some love this year <3

Yeah, I think exe gfx are really enjoyable (to write and consume), good thing there is competition and shiney trophies :D

After the torrent of sweet sweet entries last year that was pretty much a no-brainer :)

For the next time, please re-consider your choice of category names, re: "low-end" vs "high-end".

Alternatives could be "classic" and "current" or simply 8-bit, 16-bit, unlimited-bit.

retro vs modern

It's not retro if you never stopped doing it.

(And "retro" is just a tiny step above "multimedia" or "cyber"-anything, really.)

Krill is right. "Low-End" sounds like shit.

What's wrong with "Oldskool"/"Oldschool"?

cue for

Bruno Valero... problem with that picture is... all 3 are equally old now :D (and most Amiga authors a lot younger than the whitebeard pictured ;)) (Although I must say, when we all yearn for freedom, the pensioner seems like the most fun guy to be around! :))

Anyway. These are the rules I see as objectively defensible:

1. No Demoscene release should have to be shared online to be considered released. The Demoscene started before the Internet, or even modems, this we know. It's like saying, if you didn't upload it with your modem to a BBS, it's not released yet. Instead, we see an initiative that makes fools of us, forgetting our roots. I ashamedly realized it late, too.

2. No Demoscene release should be allowed to compete in more than one demoscene competition. (Violated a couple times, not since Meteoriks though I believe.)

Hologon doesn't break these rules - and if more rules are added it may break some future release that deserves recognition, which I think the awards are for.

Revision hands out the awards, and there's also a jury to convince before that happens (this is not a given just from allowing elegibility). I just think it would just be unfortunate to set a bad precedent here. "You spread it on disk? How dare you, infidel!" just sounds weird. And uploading to Pouet on e.g. Dec 31 to save it smells of desperation.

How about author didn't care about the award and the prod is still great? He'd still have to beat votes for competing prods, and there are more PC users on Pouet than other platforms.