The Retro Journey a travelling story by doj / cubic
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day 1
The Assembly was announced to open its portals on friday 10 'o clock. But the officials decided to let the crowd wait another hour and so we stayed together with about 100 other (mainly finnish) sceeners and want-to-be sceeners in front of the entrance and got more and more bored.
Of course we had not reserved any table as assembly had always offered plenty of space. This year it turned out that just every table was occupied by somebody, but we managed to get some meters of table and installed our flag a second time. The demo competition deadline was later that day at 22.00 so there were 11 hours to fix the code. As the demo was consuming all our time I have no idea what has happened on friday. The picture gives you the view from our place towards the big screen. As there was nothing on the big screen then it is hard to spot. Directly in front of us were some amiga fans. One of them tried to sell amiga games and various cds. These formed the two towers you can see in the picture. To the right a real hard core freak was seated. He always used his old commodore monitor in interlaced mode and to make the flickering even more tough he installed a stroboscope flashlight to flash directly into his face. Regularily I went to him and begged to turn off the flashlight, cause my nerves were flashed to hell. But this is real party feeling -> there is always some lamer next to you who tries to get cool by buying big loud speakers or flashlights etc.
Later that day (it was at 21.00) Wok / orange came to our place and asked if we would like to see his new demo. We told him that we were now not interested in his demo at all, because our demo was not running yet. In fact we had big problems, because the 3D engine always changed some coordinates x<>y and we were heavily searching the bug. Finally we found it and our world was not upside left anymore. Some minutes before the deadline we handed in our contribution and went to the local taxi place, because we did not eat anything till then. So we told the taxi driver to get us anywhere we could find something to eat. Although it was 11.30 by now he drove us to a kind of mexican place with disco built in, but this did not please us. So we went to the all present McDonald's and had a nice burger.
On our way back to the fair center we missed a road, went to a totally wrong part of the town and arrived at 02.30 in the night. As every year we slept outside the party hall in the grass. I always wonder why we are the only one sleeping outside. I mean it is really warm in helsinki in summer and grass is much more softer than floors inside buildings.

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