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Critikill of Brainstorm said to me one evening in late January 2008 that I should write some sort of diary for ZINE, with my thoughts about the Demoscene as they come up. He expected this to be quite interesting, as we come across many people, groups and topics. Now, I don't know if it will indeed be interesting, but I thought it might be nice to write down some thoughts on some issues. And since I hate blogs, an article appears to be a much better option for me. Because if there's one thing certain, then it's that the world doesn't need another blog. So, here you'll be reading random thoughts from me about both the Demoscene and ZINE.
February 7, 2008
We're one day behind our first internal deadline, where we originally wanted to have all content written, edited, proofread, and laid out. We're currently expecting to have 30 articles in ZINE 13. The reason we've set the deadline is that we have a set release date, due to the Scene.org Awards Nominees. We can't really delay the issue, and the Scene.org team wants to officially unveil the nominees on March 1, meaning we have to be ahead of that date if we want this story to have any impact. My first thought, when I thought about a release date around February 27 was: panic. We had so many articles unfinished or not even started, and a lot needed following up, research and so on. Another big question mark was the layout.
Critikill made some impressive design guidelines about how articles should look, but we still needed someone dedicated (a key word often missing in the scene) who could take care of making the layout of each article. Since Alecs couldn't help us this time, Prm took the job. Until today, we didn't make much progress, which didn't really bode well. But it seems that now Prm has gotten the hang of it, and we're progressing very quickly now.
So we seem to be on track. Compared to ZINE 12, each article is in much better shape even before we put them into the mag. ZINE 12 was pure chaos in that regard, and I'm happy that we're at least trying to make things better this time. So far, so good.
Keito has also just sent in the final, mastered version of his track. All songs are complete now.
February 18, 2008
The ZINE #13 Headlines production has been released, so now there's no holding back. We must get this done, and have approximately 10 days left. There are still some major articles missing, but it looks like we can make it, if no massive bugs pop up.
I start to notice how February seems to have become a month without any big releases, even though I can't remember this being the case last year. And then I found out why: Icons 2007. The party is missing on the calendar in February this year since it was postponed to June. Last year this was a party with a big surprise: "fr-055: 828" by Farbrausch. I still find it to be a demo that is hard to grasp: eerie, captivating, claustrophobic, atmospheric, and both hard to like and equally hard to dislike. So here's hoping that another party will fill that space in February of 2009, so the post-Christmas hole won't be this big again.
In totally unrelated news, I'm extremely excited about the NVIDIA NVISION event in San Jose. Just to give a bit of an idea why this will indeed turn out to be interesting: I spoke to a friend of mine, Miguel Lopez. He's a games journalist and a regular contributor to ZINE. I mentioned the NVISION show to him and that the Demoscene will be part of it with NVScene. And guess what: He loved the news and said it fits nicely into the schedule, with San Jose being a regular host of the Game Developers Conference. So it's a familiar place for any games journalist, meaning it could be that games media will actually cover the event in some form, and this can only be good. Maybe the one or the other demoscene production will sneak into the coverage. I could also imagine that NVIDIA will proactively push for coverage via press releases.
"I could also imagine that NVIDIA will
proactively push for coverage via press releases"
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February 21, 2008
We've reached crunch-mode with ZINE 13 and therefore I'll bail out of this diary now, since Prm is waiting for this article to appear on his desk, so he can finalize the layout of the remaining articles. Next time, I'll be writing this diary over a longer period of time, so it hopefully will become more interesting to read how the scene develops over the months. I still have to wrap up one of the larger articles (the one about d-vision in Austria), and since it proves to be a bit of a mosaic, with many snippets of information and quotes from Gina, I have to dedicate enough time to it not to screw it up.
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