pouët.net

There are lovely people in the demo scene who did the very well executed job of getting the scene recognized by the UNESCO, and we should be grateful for that.

But I can not fail to notice that within the last years, most websites, articles, seminar recordings and transcripts, party videos, party report websites, and all the other stuff of the demoscene that happened between the start in ~1983 (?) until ~2015ish(?) have mostly vanished from digital and human memory. People in lthis thread are mentioning 20 year old parties where 10 years ago people would have posted a 100 times of links of party report texts (party report writers used to be a relevant sub-sub-subculture!) , Commercial TV reports, Non-Profit TV Reports (demoscene.tv etc), and lots and lots of picture collections. But some people who could post links are no longer there (death is a trending reason in the scene these days), or the links they could post are dead.

This is because nobody made a copy, or helped at the right time to convert something to a static archive to preserve, may it be via “The Internet Archive” aka archive.org, or other means.

By the way:

I have not even received an invitation card to the funeral of the Bitfellas website. I learned about the sudden death due to the news feed on the pouet starting page suddenly haven gone missing.

As of a matter of fact: Should in 1,000 years aliens come visit the deserted planet earth, boot up some computer found and ask the LLM/”AI” to please explain the demoscene, the AI might tell you sadly it had not been trained on the relevant data. This is because content from ancient systems like “World Wide Web”, BBSses, Usnet, FidoNet, IRC, Diskmags and the like over time got mostly deleted between the years 2010 and 2030. Whenever sceners quit, switched platforms, lost source code disks, died or simply did not pay server hosting bills for any reason, stuff was lost. So it does not know much. It does know that the demo scene must have been in some way important, because humans regarded it as world heritage.

And then the LLM/”AI” will present to the aliens the best memory it can re-construct: A 12 second long TikTok video of a japanese poodle dancing to a track that once got stolen/ripped by some bot on YouTube. TikTok shows a copyright claim by someone named “Happy Cyber Danceboy27%HeartEmojy”. But the AI also tells them that there had been a comment attached to it which says “Whose’ fucking bot has stolen this track, which was once composed by demoscene legend Purple Motion / FC?”.

And the Aliens will say “Oh OK, the humans world heritage appears to have been about dancing animals. That’s… not so interesting. Let’s not dig here.”, shut down the computer and leave.


*) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ldfc68bxlB8

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**) Due to lthis thread I just went to YouTube and found an retard-LLM AI shit bot that has scraped a video about Breakpoint 2008 from the German regional TV station "SWR3". Absolutely logically the bot gave itself a picture of me that it extracted from something like 64x64 pixels out of a mpeg2 video frame, and then pushed through a fisheye filter (why?!?!), and named itself "breakpointSW3" (why is the letter R missing here?!?!).

I will not live-link to it, but proof: https:::://wwwwwwwwwwww.youtube.cumon/watch?v=MPVR7U6hSDQ

"Mum, Mum, look, AI says I am on telly!"

Is there something you would like to say or is this just a rant about "we will all die and nothing will last"?

I've never met you but from the pouet.net BBS I got the impression you are more for the "underground" demoscene then a mainstream. And now it is bad there are no videos/reports/whatever from old parties.

Which websites are there still online after 20 years? 25 years? Doesn't matter the topic, which ones?

I am asking this as someone who was around of a beginning of a demoparty that started 25 years ago and there are no videos, the only report I am aware of is offline and none give a fuck because there was so many great demos/intros/musics/graphics and the damn great memories which will die one day, but the releases will stay. Next generation won't live your memories, they will make their own. Releases are what matters.

Make a demo about it, not a pouet.net BBS.

Party name? I might have stuff in the archive.

Also, I think it is not THAT hard to find the hidden agenda somewhere in the world salad:

Could please some of those in the scene who

a) are not dead
b) can spare some time
c) want their kids to be able to show to your grandkids what the demo scene was

please

1.) Organize themselves to archive stuff
2.) For platforms that still exist check if the admin is ok (see check list a-c)
3.) Depending on the answer check if it's about time to take over or archive stuff

The "narcistic motivation" is:

A) I have been part of a lot of that history, demo party organizing and have been active on every platform and protocol mentioned above.
B) Due to a brain defect/diversity I do not have any long-term memory, unless strangely triggered by hearing music from some moment in that past where I was feeling emotions.
C) And due to this I would like to in 2035 be able to re-discover stuff, making me able to "feel my past"

And the "lazy-ass selfish sysadmin" motivation is:

I am old. If I get run over by a public transit bus that has been AI-trained to ride over old farts, nobody will take care about hosting the untergrund.net servers anymore. Half a year ago a bunch of people offered their help in archiving it, but nothing ever happened, and we have just carried a 15 years old 2HE HP server with fucking SCSI hard drives and versions of the Linux kernel, apache, the PHP server, a privacy-protection PHP kernel module to ANOTHER data center because it was standing in a data center that was old so old that they now needed to TEAR DOWN that DC high-rise building in Frankfurt, which means that potentially the untergrund.net server has lived longer than that damn building.

In OTHER, shorter words: Someone either needs to help archive the shit I have run and hosted and organized for the last 30 years, or help porting it so it runs on a year2000-compliant computer with recent Linux kernel and kernel security/isolation features, or at a certain point the plug WILL be pulled by someone.

And if the plug is pulled, the servers that host over 150 websites from demoscene groups from over a span of over 20 years, including content from people who can not move their stuff to another hoster due to being dead, will be gone. Forever. Most stuff is legacy, but from I understand (or not understand, because I do not speak their language) the russian/ukrainian/easter-european zx80(?) demoscene is still actively using it and releasing their ... weird stuff there, and the last time I posted here that I would love to make the system read-only or have it go away suddenly people where popping up everywhere that they would like to keep it.

So, in case it is still not clear: I would like demoscene meta content preserved. Others would like demoscene meta content preserved.

But that bus that was AI-trained to run over me will come one day. If someone wants to do something about untergrund.net or a LONG LIST OF OTHER SITES, do it before the bus comes.

Also, as an example I want to rewatch the tons of demoscene.tv party report videos from all around the world back then, because (not meant in a racist way) their frenchglish accent in the interviews was just so lovely and cute, making everyone smile.

Website down, googled my ass off, nowhere.

Does anyone have a backup?

Hello scamp, you living in capitalism. With a decent amount of money you will find a lot of people that will start to preserve the stuff mentioned.

My ftp.untergrund.net mirror is still running, to the best of my knowledge.

This is what the Internet Archive exists for. Have you verified that they are crawling your sites?

I swear, if demoscene.tv had a party reports on any mid 90s parties, or I guess retrospectives, and they are currently lost... Or bitfellas too, that'd be bad too.

I guess that would be SVHS-tape land, then. (Well, there had been TV reporters at ambience once, I believe, and at TP for sure.)

sesse: Actually I haven't - keep in mind that those are individual user sites with each having their own robots.exe, but indeed, I will have a look.

IA ignores robots.txt, so that doesn't matter much. (I wish they didn't, but they do.)

@scamp

The point of losing all, we had build, created, coded, painted, pixeled...yes even celebrated does not feel right. I see also this big problem, not only within the demoscene and its digital heritage. It´s generell problem. There is no known higher organisation or a government, offering something like a digital archive, where you can store your "digital story" for good.

It´s a lack of logic. On the one side, there are archives, preserving things from the past on microfilms etc. but on the other hand, there seems no comprehension to preserve the digital heritage. It´s ashamed.

There are projects like archive.org, which, at least allow to upload archive.org - upload (axx needed) but there is nothing really official to preserve stuff we can almost 100% sure, it will persist and won´t get lost.

As with ongoing age, i also have those thoughts, it might check out "archive.org" but it would really feel good, if a government would say, we offer every human being space or projects space to store their things...

And yes, archive.org is amazing, but we already had trump threatening to defund it IIRC.

Should some idiot one day send a link to a site archived there to Musk or Trump, with the archived website saying "Musk and Trump like each other because when summed together, they have a somewhat useful penis size", then Musk will send his retardoarmy, and it will be gone.

And right now the content mafia is trying to make it shut down, because archived material could include copyrighted stuff.

So - great.

Past cultures in different centuries therefore built own libraries and passed them on to the next generations.

I think that all expectations of "someone surely will make care this is properly archived unmodified" are illusions.

At least that is what that "I_am_scamp_and_a_demo_party_and_two_third_of_a_public_TV_station_really_trust_me_it_makes_sense" AI user on YouTube told me. He should know.

Let me keep text-walling my points by saying:

The very early techno subculture has a decentralized archive called "records". Due to these having financial value and being physically, 35 years later they are still in active de-central circulation and therefore can be recovered.

In a lot of cases people trying something similar using Torrents. But in reality, for a lot of stuff I have found this way when I was trying to search something from sub-cultures from the last century, the last seeder had gone offline a couple of years ago.

Maybe in a lot of countries (and therefore distributed against censorship) there should be state-funded organizations that don't do anything than seeing all existing torrents that do not violate local laws.

As an example regarding the music industry: There are tons of countries connected to the Internet that could see, where US/EU copyright laws and patents etc do not apply. Let them seed what we can't. Let us seed stuff that they are not allowed to seed.

Whatever. As the subject line says: Random ramblings. It is what it is. 90% of the humanity including those who know better right now is in "yeah, no thank you, can't be bothered to rescue the culture/system/region/country/democracy/planet/whatever, too much work, all leaders are insane, and I want to play a round of Fortnite now, kthxbye".

:)

in finland the national archives do keep some websites etc archived, and have collected some demoscene material

I see several reasons why such a preservation project isn't going to happen, and none are very cheerful.

First, there is hardly anybody who would find it important. For all intents and purposes, we are hardly anybody. The demoscene, if we account for everybody who has ever been in, around or near it, is maybe a hundred thousand people. The vast majority of them are around or over 50. Their lives changed, and their priorities too. Maybe if you met them and asked if they remembered this or that demo, they would say "Ah yes... I remember that." Then they would go on after their business. But many wouldn't even remember that much. Maybe they would remember the word "demo", from their childhood years, when they were fooling around with that old computer they have long forgotten. You would be hard pressed to find a thousand or so people who are still excited about the scene. There are newcomers of course, but there aren't that many to begin with, and for many of them, the old C-64/Amiga times is largely just retro, interesting tech history.

Second is the brittleness of technology. A floppy disk, but even a CD or a DVD would not be easy to read today, simply because nobody has anything to read it with, retro collectors exempted. But reading them is just the first step. How are you going to run what you read? Do you have an original Amiga? Yes, I know many of us do - but we are the exceptions.

Third, and it goes back to the first point, who would be interested? Sure, there are some nice graphics, pixel art and whatnot, but other than that, it's just some primitive video effects from old and obsolete computers.

The demoscene is a unique phenomenon in history, with no precedent and no successor. This is also its demise. Anything old and cool, like movies, music, machines, etc. can be fairly easily preserved because people understand their purpose. "This is like something we have now, but 50 years ago it was like this." The demoscene is too complicated, too diverse and too esoteric to survive. If anything, it's going to be a footnote in art history books, never fully understood.

Let it go. Nothing lasts but nothing is lost. The world changes, life is an ongoing process of change. Higher state of consciouness? Accept it. You can't preserve it physically but your memories will last forever. Instead living in the past, enjoy the future, ride the wave instead lying around the beach and start to count every grain of sand... carpe diem!

^ what prabhu said

all true. but the bunch of innovators that enabled the transition to the industrial age also were part of a really small scene, but are in school books today. guess it was not so hard to recover a light bulb, a wheel. and yes, in a couple of generations historians might confuse Mr. Musk with Mr. Tesla at some point.

but if you look at who enabled the transition to the information age, and the demo scene together with our sisters sub-cultures HPAVC etc. had been a huge part of enabling this, I guess this will not be properly recorded.

I wonder what the average consumer of these things would guess where the following things originated from, for example:

- Realtime 3D Games
- Social Media
- Data compression
- Techno
- Digital Music Distribution
- "E-Sports"

I guess in future generations, should those exist, a shitload of stuff will be mis-credited.

I know that these days this no longer the focus of the demoscene for a multitude of reasons, but: the scene has DEMOed that a community of kids world-wide has done far more than what is nowadays attributed to capitalist companies, and for multiple decades again and again showed that industry who really is dominating the technologies.

prab huh? just a pouet.net moron that hates reading bs of acidheads that still can't handle reality after overdozing. And now get back to work.:p

it's about time to find a hidden cave and carve in some rasterbars, mod tracker music notation and stuff into some stones, I guess, just to set the record straight.

They already fucking have.

What´s wrong with scene.org ?

True, pioneers are always a small group, by definition. But we weren't really pioneers, or only in a very marginal way, in a social sense. We were pretty much just first adapters of a new technology (the home computer) at a ripe young age, as we were at the right place and the right time. It required a perfect combination of the era, the place and the people. By era, I don't solely mean the era of technology: it's also a social era.

There could've easily been a turn of events which led to videogames never being made. In the 1960s, 1970s, future home computers were envisioned as automation devices to help with household chores. Today we would call it the intelligent home. Remote access databases to access news and whatnot, or video conferences, even smartphones were also "invented" far before they became a reality. But games? There is no mention of videogames in, say, classic science fiction. The closest you get is the sci-fi trope of a robot playing chess with its master. Even then, they're usually playing on a physical chessboard. Realtime computer art, let alone underground art is similarly absent from these futuristic images. The only exception I can remember is from Isaac Asimov's novel 'The Naked Sun', where Gladia Fastolfe shows Elijah Bailey a computer to create visual arts. But even this isn't about programmed effects. The device described there is similar to a theremin, which controls a planetarium-like projector instead of sound waves.

Videogames are the reason the scene exists. Without videogames there would've never been a warez/cracker scene, and then no demoscene. Perhaps some form of computer art would still appear at some point, but certainly not as an underground movement. This is obvious for everyone here, but... have you considered the social factors?

The entire cracker-warez-hacker scene is a result of socio-economical conditions in the 1970s, 1980s. It stems from American libertarianism, with a pinch of modern leftism. But then, how did it primarily blossom in Europe? The answer is the European punk movement. This was, again, a result of many factors: post-war economical conditions, redefinition of intergenerational relationships, the shifting of families' priorities from surviving to prosperity, losing faith in pre-war social values, and so and forth. A very important part of this process was the liberation of children. West European parents, perhaps also not without American influence, began to see their children as, well, children, and not a copy of themselves who must be put to work as soon as they can walk. They encouraged them to be themselves, discover and build, and equipped them with the perfect tool for that, never seen before in human history: the home computer. More accurately: the *simple* home computer which was easy enough to be fun, even without deep understanding.

But this era ended. The reasons are multifold: 9/11 and its aftermath, the rise of the internet, the devaluation of normality, modern social issues, in short, millennial world. Hardly any of the factors that dominated Europe in the 1980s or 1990s are present any more. This also means the demoscene cannot exist as it did. It's a beautiful animal, but its breeding grounds have been burnt down to give room for a new server farm. You can still see its dead skin being worn by those who remember it, but also by some who don't.

And since this culture is intangible - it's going to bust. Just like the early 2000s internet culture did. Its heritage is with us, but it's merely an echo. The scene also has its own distant echo in everyday digital culture. But that's all there is.

tomcat: I fully agree.

However, the scene would be able to make sure that for a while, that echo sounds more clear, and is less distorted. That may be important to some still living today, and unimportant to others.

Humans typically try to preserve the echo of their existence by breeding, so that one day someone maybe says something positive about their grand-grand-grand-pa/ma.

I still today can research how much romans did innovate water toilet design. I think the contributions of our group of sub-cultures did innovations just as relevant, but will have far less echos.