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Demoscene Week: Link Buffet (Conclusion) —

I’ve been somewhat sparse with links for this week; mostly, I wanted to concentrate on the writing. Also, I’ve been very sparse with graphics; a lot of this is simply because once you scratch the surface of the Demoscene, graphics are absolutely everywhere, and I just wanted people to have the facts.

A number of sites are dedicated to aspects of the demoscene. Use these and you’ll get all you could ever want, more music and demos than you could ever watch for the rest of your life. These are not in order of importance; they’re all worth checking out.

A lot of the current “scene” stuff is being harbored at Scene.org, an absolutely fantastic collection of data related to the demoscene and related scenes. They track the parties, the productions, the groups, the files. You can find so much stuff on there, it’s amazing. And it has persisted over many years. On Scene, there used to be recommended files for people to get into the demoscene. This has morphed into the Scene Awards, a yearly awards ceremonies lauding the best in demos from the previous year, in many different categories. Browsing that winner list will suffice for blowing quite a few minds.

Pouet is the crazy melee to Scene.org’s library. It allows sceners to see all the new productions, comment on them, and recommend stuff to each other. It’s got all the usual dramas, triumphs and flamewars of any vibrant community, and if you go through their collections, you can get a real sense for how the pulse of the scene is beating on a given day. It’s quite a lot of energy in one place, and worth spending a few days at.

Slengpung collects 20 years of photos from demoparties, sorts them by party, person in photo, year, you name it. It’s like somebody took photos for years on end travelling the world and you get to browse their album. I can’t recommend it enough.

Trixter (who is speaking at Blockparty) put together this great page a number of years ago explaining the PC Demoscene; the page is archived here and I suspect he’ll be inspired to make a new one after attending Blockparty.

Since so much stuff I was collecting on textfiles.com ended up being not pure textfiles but graphics, artwork, music and programs related to either demoscene work or creative output, I created ARTSCENE.TEXTFILES.COM, which has a lot of different work from a lot of different places.

Notacon, the hosting event for Blockparty, is at notacon.org. They’ve got years of archives up, including speeches, photographs and schedules.

And finally, there’s always the blockparty site itself.


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