THE ARTS: ARTSCENE RADIO TALK SHOW EPISODE 04, MAY 27TH 2004 (transcript) ____ ____ ____ / //__ __ / //____ / //__ __ _) ___( (__) / (__) __/ (_ barium .---------------------/ \| / / _/ /--------------------. |_ /_ \ _/____/ _/__ _/ _| | \____________________\\_______\ //____\ \\______\____________________/ | | | | t h e A R T S | | . ___/ ___/ ___/ ___/ . | | : _____ ____/ // _ / //_ __________ / //__ _____ / //__ ____ : | | | ____\__ /__ / |_______ / __/_ / __/__ | | | |_ __\ ___ /__) ___ /______) ____/_______)____ /___ _| | | // \ | (_\ | / \ | \ | \\ | | // \| |/ \| \| \\ | | // \ / ' ' \\ | |// \ \ \\| |/ \______________\ \_________________| \| `-------------------------------\______________\------------------------------' The ARTS: The Artscene Radio Talk Show Hosted by RaD Man, Spinsane and Anthem Episode 04 - Air Date: May 27th, 2004 (Lead-in music plays followed by the ARTS show ID.) RAD MAN: Welcome to episode 4 of the ARTS, the Artscene Radio Talk Show. I'm your host, RaD Man. ANTHEM: And I'm Anthem, your co-host. RAD MAN: Today's date is May 27th, 2004. For those of you who are joining us for the first time, the ARTS is a variety talk show dedicated to the scene; including graphics, demos, tracking and all things in between. Filling in for this Episode is Anthem. Spinsane had scheduling conflicts for this show so he wasn't able to make it. I appreciate very much, Anthem, you being a part of this show. Hopefully Spinsane will be able to join us for future episodes. If not, we'll just continue to roll with things as they come. As we say in every episode, there is no set release schedule. So far we've been maintaining a semi bi-monthly release. The only real difficulty in putting together the ARTS show is scheduling and getting everybody involved together on the show at one time across different time zones. And so that's basically the biggest hurdle that we have. The content -- we could produce shows every day, there is enough content for that. ANTHEM: Definitely. RAD MAN: So here we are, episode four! ANTHEM: Yeah. Pretty good stuff man. RAD MAN: This episode we're going to be featuring two different interviews; we have an interview with Novus, the organizer of the MIC Compo, which is a Monthly Invitational Competition for musical trackers, which is a pre-recorded interview that we did last week. We'll also be speaking LIVE with artist Dipswitch at the Haujobb Demo Show in Cologne, Germany. We'll also be covering numerous other current events, but first we have emails... We have an email here from Unseen Fate of Moon Hazard. Unssi wrote in with some great suggestions for future episodes and also mentioned that INF, winners of the demo compo at The Gathering 2004, tend to include recipes in almost all of their demos as some sort of a trademark. He believes that Propaganda 2001 is one of their best demos to date and highly recommends it. ANTHEM: Have to check that out! RAD MAN: Yeah. If you're like to email us, we can be reached at radio@acid.org. We appreciate any feedback that we receive. When you do write us an email please specify how to properly pronounce your name or your alias in case we select your message for a future episode. ANTHEM: Damn right! So the ARTS mirrors... RAD MAN: Yeah, the ARTS mirrors. The ARTS generates a lot of network traffic, so we definitely would like to thank a few people out there who are providing us with the bandwidth necessary to help serve out this show. First and foremost is NXTEK.NET, our primary host. They're serving out dozens upon dozens of gigabytes just related to the ARTS show. ANTHEM: Damn they're some swell people over there. RAD MAN: We're also being mirrored at Dark Domain, Hacker Media, and TEXTFILES.COM. TEXTFILES.COM has a really extensive audio archive at AUDIO.TEXTFILES.COM. If you're into scene talk radio shows, definitely check out AUDIO.TEXTFILES.COM. And Hacker Media is also carrying several other shows as well. We've also just recently, we've been picked up by ARCHIVE.ORG, which is now storing high-fidelity, uncompressed versions of the show. ANTHEM: I -- I want to know where they're getting all their storage from. How -- How are they going to do that? RAD MAN: Actually, I'm glad you brought that up. It just so happens that I took a field trip to the Internet Archive two weeks ago. ANTHEM: So did you freak out when you saw their network storage center, was it huge? RAD MAN: I didn't actually get to go within their network operations center or anything like that. I visited the equivalent of their business office in the Presidio which is located in San Francisco. ANTHEM: Ahh! RAD MAN: We went down there, they have -- they have kind of an open table thing that you can attend on Fridays. Hack, who is a long time ACiD member, joined me and we went and took a field trip to the Internet Archive there and shared some Lebanese food with all the ARCHIVE.ORG folks there. ANTHEM: Damn, that sounds pretty good. RAD MAN: As far as storage goes, they have something to the tune of 700 terabytes of storage. ANTHEM: Ohhh. Oh my god. [Anthem has an orgasm over the phone.] RAD MAN: When we went there we got to see the very first build of the Petabox. Have you heard about that? ANTHEM: Yeah, it's basically a petabyte of storage in one big giant box, right? RAD MAN: Actually, it's a misnomer -- the Petabox is actually a hundred terabytes per unit. ANTHEM: So that makes it 10 petabytes right? RAD MAN: Yeah, 10 petaboxes would equate out to be an actual petabyte then. ANTHEM: Yeah. RAD MAN: So this was the very first build of that. The first box which is going to be -- I'm sure actually by now it's been shipped off to Amsterdam. They're planning on building twelve more by the end of this year. So three of them will stay here in San Francisco and the other nine are going to be going over to Amsterdam. I guess what they're going to be doing then is they're going to have a full petabyte in both locations so they'll be able to have mirrors of the data of the Internet Archive and all the other archives that they're branching off into, in two different geographic locations -- which is probably a wise idea considering -- ANTHEM: Yeah definitely. You don't want one person to hit up all the servers. RAD MAN: Yeah, if there was any sort of catastrophe or something to hit one spot you'd definitely want a backup of the other. They're planning on, of course, after they've accomplished that, they're planning on building more petaboxes and setting up other satellite locations around the world. So there will be multiple Internet Archives that you can visit. And from what I understood they're also in the process of developing some sort of a standard protocol to handle this voluminous amount of data. ANTHEM: Now This ARCHIVE.ORG, this reaches far beyond the scene, correct? This is just any sort of multimedia archive in one spot on the internet. RAD MAN: Oh yeah, I'm sorry -- If you've never heard of ARCHIVE.ORG, maybe you might have heard of it by way of the Wayback Machine. They host something that is called the Wayback Machine which basically takes snapshots of basically all the websites that are on the internet. ANTHEM: Oooh. RAD MAN: So they have -- for example, say you wanted to visit ACID.ORG five years ago? You could do that. ANTHEM: No shit! RAD MAN: So if there was any site that went down and it had some useful information, you could just go over to ARCHIVE.ORG and put that in and it'll have several instances, several different mirrors of those sites. It's somewhat limited in what it mirrors, it doesn't mirror binaries, obviously that would dry up the well pretty quickly -- ANTHEM: Yeah. RAD MAN: But as far as the web content goes, the HTML is pretty much almost always there and for a large part, you'll also find that most of the JPEGs are there as well. It's very extensive in what it covers and they're starting to branch out now, they're starting to archive other mediums, other than just the internet. Let's see, on that site they have -- they're starting to collect live concerts, such as the Grateful Dead, things like this -- ANTHEM: Now couldn't that be construed as illegal under DCMA? [sic] RAD MAN: Actually, they -- well they always make sure that things are cleared, they always go through some sort of a rights clearance check. They have a process for that. And they've also received certain exemptions under the DMCA, they've actually filed and received exemptions under the DMCA. There's a huge thing on their website that covers all of that. So yes, you could! But they're a non-profit organization which -- I mean the whole point of their existence is to preserve everything that's -- that's out there. They're archiving many different things; they have a lot of vintage video on their site as well that you can pull up. And the interesting thing is when I mention that they have the ARTS show in high fidelity, in an uncompressed version. ANTHEM: Yeah. RAD MAN: Not only do they have it in a WAV format, uncompressed, but they also have several different derivatives of that. They have a script so when you upload these files, they have what's called a "deriver" and it will go through and slice and dice into a multitude of other different formats such as FLAC; OGG; and MP3, a couple different flavors of MP3 as well as streaming formats. ANTHEM: Now the question -- So any old person can just go there and upload something they want to archive or do you have to have a special membership of sorts? RAD MAN: It does require registration. You wouldn't be able to go there and upload a Britney Spears song or something like that. ANTHEM: Yeah. RAD MAN: If it could be justified, I think that they would probably have an interest in it. It's -- I think it's handled on a case-by-case basis. That's kind of the reason why they have these Friday meetings like I attended two weeks ago -- ANTHEM: Yeah. RAD MAN: -- is for you to, if you have something that you wanted to store on the Internet Archive you would go down there and present yourself and give a presentation on the topic that you want to store there. ANTHEM: Well that sounds like a mighty fine creation RaD Man. Because you know what? This is by far the most bad ass talk show out there and it would suck if we lost it to time. RAD MAN: That's a good point man. ANTHEM: What's going on with the current events, I hear Demovibes 2 is coming up? RAD MAN: Yes. Demovibes 2 was released recently. Last episode, we spoke about the original Demovibes by Willbe. He's put out volume 2 which is the "Turbo Breakbeat Revenge". It features a bunch of different demo soundtracks released from late '96 to present day. There was a song on there that was released at the last Breakpoint. As the title of this particular volume implies, this one is much more hard core, much more hard hitting than the original. This volume is available as a mix in a single 100MB MP3 file with the optional CUE sheet so you can burn it to a CD-R, just like the first one. As a matter of fact, the song that you heard introducing this episode of the ARTS is from the demo "Tavor" by Kritix of Kolor and is featured on track 12 of Volume 2. So you can pick that up on Willbe's site, it's on Planet-D at WILLBE.PLANET-D.NET and from there you can navigate to Demovibes volume 2 and it looks like there's a third one on the way. If you enjoyed Demovibes 1 and 2, you might also want to check out Retrovibes by Franxis. This is a compilation of many of the popular oldschool soundtracks from the early '90s, also inspired by the recent work of Willbe. There's no CUE sheet for this one, but you can pick this up at the Spanish demoscene portal Escena WWW.ESCENA.ORG. OK, that's all I have for Demovibes and Demovibe takeoffs. We have a lot of competitions that are going on right now, as always. ANTHEM: Yeah! RAD MAN: For our 0-day listeners, we have the 4K Source Code compo. This is the second annual Open Source 4K Demo Compo which has just recently concluded. And now they're calling upon the public to download these real-time animations, some of which include sound, and vote for what we like best. ANTHEM: Well, now I know that on the sound on some of these things -- most of the sound is pretty bad. I mean -- It'll take you back to the days when you were making music with a printer. RAD MAN: You know, it's all synthesized basically. ANTHEM: Yeah. RAD MAN: But they're doing what they can within the confines of 4096 bytes of source code. ANTHEM: Yeah, I was really surprised at some of the quality of some of them. Like... What was it; "Spazmo-qore" by Skypher? That one just has a nice little 3D objects rotating. It even used the old synthesized sound, looked really nice, I really enjoyed that piece. RAD MAN: Yeah, there were two entries that for one reason or another really disliked my sound card, so they didn't get my vote! But some of them on the other hand were very very impressive. ANTHEM: Yeah. I really enjoyed -- It was just a great compo, lots of good people coming out. The greatest thing was, like you said, it was open source. You can go see exactly what people did to make this look good and to create something like this. It's really amazing what they're achieving in such small sizes. RAD MAN: Exactly. Not only did the coders only have 4K to play with for their source code, but they also had to use ANSI C or C++ and make it portable enough to compile on Windows-32 or GNU/Linux or a MacOS environment. It's really amazing what they've done with such little disk space. ANTHEM: Totally. I just remember the surprise you went through when you saw there were MacOSX builds on there yesterday and was like "what gives?" RAD MAN: Like we said, the voting deadline for this competition is tomorrow, Friday, May 28th. So if you want to get involved, check these out and make your voice heard. Go to their site, it's 4K.FROB.NL/2004/. You can download the pack of demos there. They have full source code vote packs as well as Windows-32 precompiled binaries for the Windows users. ANTHEM: Sounds good! Don't forget to vote guys. RAD MAN: On the music side of competitions there is Big Chip Compo #6. Nula is organizing a chip compo with six categories ranging from 100 kilobyte competition to a single kilobyte compo, or 1024 bytes. He also has an oldschool category for Commodore 64 SIDs, Gameboy and Atari SAP. The deadline for this, if you want to enter, is August 31st, 2004. To check that out go to BCOMPO6.WZ.CZ for more details. Last show we talked about the Monthly Invitational Competition. The results for the April competition are out. Vibe took a back-to-back 1st place win with his chiptune entry entitled "Digital Shadows"... (Brief clip from the song "Digital Shadows" by Vibe plays.) RAD MAN: Now, did you have an opportunity to vote in time for that, or did you only have a chance to get involved in the May entries? ANTHEM: I only had a chance to get involved with the May entries, but I did check out his chiptune entry called "Digital Shadows" and I really did enjoy it. RAD MAN: We have an interview with Novus which we taped earlier in the week. Spinsane was able to be with us for this particular taping so we're going to go ahead and play that for you now. (Phone rings...) RAD MAN: OK, we're speaking with Novus, the organizer of the Monthly Invitational Compo. NOVUS: Hey Spinsane! Hey RaD Man! RAD MAN: Alright, now, as I understand it, you've been running the Monthly Invitational Competition -- well first of all, for those of the listeners who aren't familiar with the Monthly Invitational Compo can you tell us a little bit about it? NOVUS: Oh sure, not a problem. Basically what I do is I screen through the new releases sections of a lot of the scene archives out there. I get most of the big ones, the only big one that I really leave out right now is the Mod Archive because their -- the way they handle their new releases is just so squirrelly, so it's hard to screen them and find all the new songs. But pretty much everybody else does a good job of isolating newer songs so you can them pretty easily. And a lot of what's on Mod Archive is on other sites anyway so I don't miss a whole lot there. I also hit a lot of personal sites, a lot of group websites, and I basically just burn all the songs to a CD and listen to them at work. I make notes on the best songs, and finally I just pare down the list to about 10 songs and I put those up every month for the voters to vote on. But the final pick of what the actual best song is is up to the voters. RAD MAN: So on any given month then, how many different songs do you find that you're listening to? NOVUS: That's a good question. It varies a lot month to month but it can easily be in the range of anywhere from 200 and 400. SPINSANE: How many hours do you estimate that this takes you every month? NOVUS: Well I have to cheat somewhat because if I listened to 400 songs straight through and then listen to them again and again if I needed to pare it down some it would obviously take a lot longer than a month to do that. So there is a lot of songs within about the first minute or so I can tell just listening to it; "this is not going to be one of the top 10", so I'll delete it and go onto the next one. So it probably takes me probably anywhere easily from 10 to 20 hours a month actually. RAD MAN: Say an artist wanted to get involved in this competition. In what way could an interested musician become involved with your competition? NOVUS: It's pretty simple. Number one all they would need to do is just release their song on any one of those archive sites that's out there; S3M.COM, Cute Trance Girls, MODPlug Central. Any of those big sites except for The MOD Archive. But if they just release their song I'm going to catch it and check it out. If they really want to make sure I hear it they can also email me or use the form on the site to go ahead and send me the link to the song and their contact information so I can get a hold of them. They can also just email me if they do a lot of releases on a regular basis and they want me to screen their website I can do that as well. Again, all they got to do is just use the form on the website or just email me and let me know what their web address is and I'll add them to my list to check every month. RAD MAN: Now I noticed you mentioned that you don't poll from The Mod Archive? NOVUS: That's correct. RAD MAN: What is the reasoning behind that? NOVUS: It's basically their -- their "new releases" page is not really new releases so much as it is unscreened songs. As a result, it tends to get completely emptied out at random every two or three weeks or so? RAD MAN: Right. NOVUS: Once it gets screened through and emptied out and put into the main archive, there is no indication anywhere of when that song was released. Basically, if I go on there one day late, one day after all the songs have been emptied out then I miss all those new releases. It's just too difficult to try to keep up with that particular site so I don't even try. RAD MAN: Now as I understand it, you've been running this competition for approximately what, two years now? NOVUS: About two and a half years. It started actually under a different name and a slightly different system in January of 2002. And before that it actually ran for about six months briefly in 1998 but I revived it in 2002 because there were a few people back then who thought that it was a good compo. In the original incarnation, you could only enter if you had voted on the previous month's songs. So it was a lot different, there were fewer songs involved in the competition; usually only five or six a month. Once I realized that enough people were voting anyway, without entering songs, so there were a lot of people just listening and voting? Once I realized that I had that sizeable of an audience I switched over to the current system; the Monthly Invitational Compo in January of 2004 so that I could include more songs and hopefully improve the quality of the entries. RAD MAN: So now, by being a part of the Monthly Invitational Compo I'm sure that this -- well, it kind of broadens the listenership for the artists, right? NOVUS: It certainly does. RAD MAN: Do you have any sort of statistics on how many listeners you have and how many people are actually downloading these tracks from your site to sample? I'm sure that there are a lot of people that are involved that might not necessarily be voting but they want to hear what you are picking or sampling as some of the top 10 best songs that are coming out on any given month. NOVUS: Oh certainly. There's plenty of people that will go through -- they may only download two or three songs. They may simply be looking for a song by their favorite artist that may happen to be in MIC that month. And they just download two or three songs. Or they may download all ten just to check 'em out and just don't feel like taking the time to vote, or they may go ahead and vote. Of course the more people who vote the more accurate the results will be so I appreciate it whenever anybody takes the time to go ahead and cast their ballot. But there is quite a few people every month who download without actually casting a vote. RAD MAN: Another thing that I've noticed is, the way that it's setup right now is you download every song individually. That might be possibly deterring some people from perhaps downloading all ten songs. In the future do you envision any sort of system where you might be able to package all ten songs for consideration into one single archive? NOVUS: I've thought about doing that and a lot of people have asked me to do that in the past. But there is -- there's two issues that would keep me from doing that; one is web space, because that would add up fast storing ten songs a month. And the other one would be bandwidth. I mean the first couple of days when I release the new entries; the number of visitors to the site is huge. Of course I advertise to all the other news sites in the tracking scene and that bandwidth on that first couple of days would be killer. So you've got dozens of people coming to download ten songs each; so between the web space and the bandwidth it would be pretty difficult for me to run all of that on one server? So basically I just link to the songs on other individual servers out there and kind of spread out the load. If need be if somebody has a slow server or it's spotty, I'll go ahead and I'll go ahead and I'll upload the song to my own server. I can handle that for one or two songs. SPINSANE: Well I was actually noticing on the April results that you said that "Digital Shadows" by Vibe was the first chip tune to win? NOVUS: That is, I think only the 5th chip tune in compo history to run actually. Under the original CMC, when it was only five or six songs a month, I rarely picked one. I only picked two chiptunes in two years. With the expansion to ten I've been getting exposed to a few chiptunes that are a little bit better and I have a little bit more freedom for picking songs that aren't necessarily my favorite but I think might be other people's favorite. So I've been experimenting with that and they've been holding their own. In April 2004 Vibe, who is a favorite of the voters anyway; in the past four months he has won twice and come in third place another time. And in April 2004 he won with a chiptune that weighs in at only 6K. But it really doesn't sound like a chiptune. I think that is part of the reason why it appealed so much to the voters. SPINSANE: What exactly is the differentiation between a chiptune and a non chiptune? NOVUS: It's kind of complicated. There's some people that say it has to sound a particular way as well as being below a certain size. Other people just say its size. I really think the size is what matters most, the overall size. If it's lower than 100K, odds are it's a chiptune, and especially if it's lower than 50K, it definitely is. If it's something like 6K, like "Digital Shadows" was, that's definitely a chiptune. That's tiny, I have textfiles that are bigger than that on my hard drive. RAD MAN: Right, 6K is like -- If you type half a word in Microsoft Word that's going to be larger than that. NOVUS: Yeah, and it's just -- it's incredible too that he can do such a great song with such a small amount of web space. It's stuff like that that continues to amaze me about what tracking is capable of. I noticed you guys were talking last week, wondering why I don't choose MP3s. I thought I'd go into that a little bit. Basically I allow any file like an IT, an XM, S3Ms, MODs. Recently I've also opened it up to Mad Tracker 2 and Skale. Basically it's anything that can play in the current version of XMplay. The reason I do that is because XMplay now supports a lot of the WinAmp plug-ins that allow you to play like for example MT2 and Skale files. So if you download XMplay and you install those plug-ins, you now have a player that can handle all of those formats. It's really an accurate player, I think their textfile says "Balls on accuracy". It's not quite that, but it seems to be better than MODPlug Player from what I've discovered over time. RAD MAN: Really. NOVUS: And I say this as somebody who has loved MODPlug Player for years too, so it took a little bit of time for me to adjust. But in terms of the formats it can cover, it's worth making that jump. You can download that complete packet right off the MIC website. If you want to get XMplay and also get those plug-ins all in one file. All you got to do is just download it and unzip it and there you go. But I really don't like picking MP3s because -- even if they say it was originally done as a tracker song -- because once you MP3 it you can do anything to that file. In terms of post production; you can add in reverb, filters, sound gates, things like that. And I think once you start doing that, once you start making changes to that sound, it's no longer just tracking. Now you're getting into more professional music production and I want MIC to be a tracking compo. And the only way you can be sure that it was tracked is if it's in one of those pure files. And plus I just like those formats. I mean you can -- you can do a song like -- a good example from the mid '90s [is] "Comic Outflow" by Falcon. That song is less than a meg in size. I think it's 700 or 800K. The first time I played that for my brother, he did not realize it was a tracker song, and he knew I was into tracking. He thought it was a professional song. And that was done in the mid '90s in Fast Tracker under a meg. If you know what you're doing with these tracking programs and you pick good samples and you throw your ALL into it, you can do songs that sound professional. You can do it for a meg as opposed to an MP3 that's four megs, and I mean that saves a lot of download time. I want to keep promoting those originals formats. I think that they are strong enough, they can hold their own against MP3s. Quite frankly -- I mean there are people who complain that "Oh well if I don't MP3 my song then I'm not going to be able to reverb and it's going to sound awful!" Listen, if your song sounds awful without reverb, it's really not going to sound much better with reverb. So you need to make it a good song to begin with, and that's one of the things that a tracking program forces you to do is make it a good song. RAD MAN: Right. NOVUS: And those are just some of the reasons why I keep it limited to the source formats. RAD MAN: Very good. So we have the May compo which is going to be coming to a close soon. For those who want to get involved and vote in that particular competition, what is the deadline for that? NOVUS: The deadline is -- let me make sure I get the deadline right -- it is Saturday, June 5th. I overlapped the actual end of the calendar month a little bit, so the May deadline is Saturday, June 5th at 11:59PM New York time. So you have all the way until the end of Saturday to vote. RAD MAN: OK. So for those that want to get involved, the website is: NOVUSMUSIC.ORG/mic/. NOVUS: That's correct. You want to spell that out? RAD MAN: No, we're done with that. NOVUS: (Laughs.) As you can tell, I listened last week. RAD MAN: Yeah, thank you. NOVUS: Not a problem. RAD MAN: Well thank you very much for being a guest on our show, we appreciate it. NOVUS: Hey not a problem, you guys do a great job, I hope you keep it up. (Novus is disconnected from the call.) RAD MAN: OK, so that was Novus giving us feedback on the MIC compo. We also have the results from the EXTREME ASCII Competition which we had spoke about last show. Congratulations to Dead Brain, Mayback and Molo who were the winners of the oldschool, newschool and block competitions, respectively. A complete results pack can be found at the Thuglife ASCII site at THUGLIFE.ORG if you want to check that out. OK, we're now going to go to an interview with Dipswitch. Dipswitch is an organizer for the upcoming demoparty Evoke which is going to be taking place this August in Cologne, Germany. He's also a admin for the scene photo archive Slengpung as well as a member of the European artgroup Black Maiden. So we'll go to that right now. (Sound of a phone dialing followed by international ring tones.) DIPSWITCH: Yes? Hello, RaD Man? RAD MAN: Hey, how's it going? DIPSWITCH: Yo, hi! Well, the demo show is over. It was quite a success. Well Faxe is also here as the network organizer of Evoke. And XXX from Haujobb is boozing somewhere in the basement, so well -- RAD MAN: So now you're a -- you're at some sort of a demo show which is taking place in Cologne, Germany, is that correct? DIPSWITCH: Yep. It's a demo show taking place in the rooms of the Cologne section of the CCC. And the CCC is a quite legendary hackers club, perhaps known Europe-wide and perhaps known in the USA, I don't know. Well they have their central in Hamburg, but they have sections in all bigger German cities and stuff. So we have cooperations with them running since like three years. They are sometimes helping us getting stuff for Evoke done and things like that. So the hacker-demo connection is running quite cool here. RAD MAN: Tell me about the demo show that's taking place there, how many people -- when we spoke earlier you mentioned that it was standing room only and you kind of hand to, to get a good seat, I guess you probably had to be there quite early. How many people wound up attending this event? DIPSWITCH: Well I would -- I not always can tell how many people there are when I see the crowd, but I guess it was around 50. And the room was quite small so it was quite crowded in there. Mostly -- mostly it was hacking and data security activists, and they were quite feeling it, they loved it. Definitely. RAD MAN: So this particular demo show that you provided at the CCC, is this a space that the CCC always holds? Or is this something -- is this a special event that you're giving the demo show at, or is the sole purpose of this the demo show itself. DIPSWITCH: Well, yeah. The sole purpose of the demo show was of course the demo show itself, but it's -- well it's an event in a series of events. They [the CCC] do events twice a month, but it's mostly about security and stuff like that. And well once a year since [the last] three years we are doing a demo show for the people here. RAD MAN: OK, very cool. So it's, I mean for those who aren't familiar with the CCC, I think the closest analogous equivalent that we have here in the United States is probably along the lines of 2600. DIPSWITCH: Yeah, yeah, of course. I heard quite a lot of them and I used to read quite many textfiles from them earlier. Yeah, that's comparable. Perhaps CCC is even bigger because they are quite often in the media and stuff and well if -- for example, if there is a, I don't know, some sort of data security scandal in Germany; the media always asks some CCC experts about it. They are quite an institution here in Germany. RAD MAN: You're the propaganda minister for Evoke which is an upcoming demo party. DIPSWITCH: Well "propaganda minister" sounds kind of martial, but yeah. I'm the guy who is supposed to tell sceners to get their ass up and get to our nice little demo party. And that's what I'm supposed to [be] doing right now. RAD MAN: Definitely do that. Now as I understand it, Evoke is going to be taking place what, in late August, is that correct? DIPSWITCH: Yup, late August 27th 'til 29th of August in Cologne, Germany. RAD MAN: Very cool. And I know that Evoke offers some sort of a combined party ticket with Buenzli. Are you going to be doing that again this year, and how does that work? DIPSWITCH: Yeah, definitely. But it will be -- well, last year, Buenzli was after Evoke. So at Evoke we sold combined tickets; you buy the ticket and you can go to both parties with it and it's cheaper than if you would buy a single ticket, tickets at both parties separately. This year Buenzli is one week before Evoke, so the Buenzli guys will sell the tickets this year. You can go to Buenzli, buy the tickets, stay in Switzerland for one week and then fly over to Cologne with a cheap airline. You can hear in the background by the way the music from I guess it's "Saturday Night Scener" by Conspiracy. So the demo show is kind of going on still. RAD MAN: OK, very cool. DIPSWITCH: Anyway, I would like to address another topic about Evoke and this radio show. People could ask themselves "Hey, why Evoke is presented on the ARTS?" There are several other demo parties. But -- the ARTS is well, a radio show that comes from the art scene. Interestingly, the same is actually with Evoke. It was -- first Evoke was held in 1997 and the main attenders were German ANSI scene people. As well as the organizers -- I mean, Black Maiden, who are the main group behind Evoke, well it's an old German ANSI group. Although it's 2004 we're sticking to the roots of Evoke which was actually PC art scene and as perhaps the last demo party in Germany, we still host ANSI and ASCII compos. RAD MAN: Oh, very cool. DIPSWITCH: And well, the most interesting thing for the listeners might be you can participate for these compos without being physically at the party. RAD MAN: Is that true for all the competitions or just specifically the textmode competition? DIPSWITCH: It's only for the textmode competition, like ANSI and ASCII. For the other compos you of course have to be at the party, but for the ANSI and ASCII compo we made an exception. And well, on WWW.EVOKE-NET.DE you can check the rules under Rules Graphics. There is rules for ANSI and ASCII and also the email where you are supposed to send your entries. I think the deadline is like 25th of August, but I might be wrong so better double check it. So all people who are active on textmode art; no matter if ANSI, or block, or dollar-style or Amiga or PC, they are welcome to participate. And last year and the year before we had quite a quality compo, so we hope to get a really quality textmode art compo this year and just show the rest of the parties and the rest of the scene that there are STILL people doing quality ANSI and ASCII art. RAD MAN: Absolutely. Something that I didn't realize until -- first of all, I heard that Black Maiden has recently relaunched their site. DIPSWITCH: Yup. Since a few days you can check out our new site at: WWW.BLACKMAIDEN.DE. And well, now we finally have a site which we don't need to be ashamed of. The earlier site was just a temporary solution and now we got real nice web presence where you can check out -- by the way you can check out all Black Maiden ANSI packs, also called Black Maiden books, online. You don't even have to load up ACiD View. Also, of course, we would like you to support ACiD and get ACiD View, but if you don't have it you can still browse the packs on line and watch ANSI and ASCII art nearly like it is supposed to look like. RAD MAN: I was checking out the site the other day, and something that I didn't realize [was] that Black Maiden has roots that run as far back as 20 years ago. DIPSWITCH: Well, it's quite nebulous roots. I don't know much about them, especially since I joined Black Maiden in 2000. But yeah, the founding members, Voice and Tex -- one or another guy might know them as ANSI artists too, but they were doing some cracking jobs on the Amstrad CPC as early as 1985. And so they -- these two guys founded Black Maiden in 1985 as a cracking group on Amstrad CPC. And they discovered the PC at some point and the wonderful world of textmode art and well the first Black Maiden pack -- artpack was released in December 1994, which makes Black Maiden PC actually 10 years old -- which is quite something for an ANSI group. RAD MAN: Yeah, absolutely. Is there anything else you would like to tell us about the Evoke demo party? DIPSWITCH: Well, there is quite a lot to tell about the Evoke demo party actually! I mean some of the listeners have perhaps been to Evoke 2003 which well -- was at -- in an old, some kind of castle here in Cologne. It was very crowded and there was definitely not enough space. Besides the location was really nice but it was just too crowded. For the people who experienced the sardine-can-feeling of last year, I can assure them this time we will have enough space. We have a new location, 650 square meters at the banks of the river Rhine. So it will be quite a nice summer experience. RAD MAN: So for those that are interested or would like more information on Evoke 2004 you can check that out at WWW.EVOKE-NET.DE and get all the information there. Dipswitch I'd just like to thank you very much for being a part of this episode. DIPSWITCH: Thank you very much for inviting me, it was very fun. RAD MAN: Alright, take care. (Dipswitch is disconnected from the call.) RAD MAN: OK. It looks like we had two star-studded interviews this episode. ANTHEM: We have put on a great show. RAD MAN: Hey, we try. ANTHEM: We do, we do -- RAD MAN: That's why we get paid the big bucks -- What's up? ANTHEM: My new car man. RAD MAN: You got a new car, today? ANTHEM: I got a new car not -- not today, a couple days back. RAD MAN: What'd you get? ANTHEM: I got a '98 Passat Volkswagen. It's going to break any day now, I can feel it. It's got like 100,000 miles on it, but I got it cheap, so who cares. RAD MAN: A Passat will last forever man. ANTHEM: Really. RAD MAN: Yeah. ANTHEM: I've heard different things man. I've heard different things. RAD MAN: That is a fine piece of German engineering right there. ANTHEM: Damn right. RAD MAN: So, you got a new car, how is that treating you? ANTHEM: I've got to get used to the 5-speed man. Got to get used to the 5-speed. After that I'll be alright. RAD MAN: Well what else is going on with you dude? You got the new car, I mean -- ANTHEM: I've just been working with school and I broke my Palm Pilot the other day, seriously. It was in my backpack and I threw my backpack on the floor and "crunch". RAD MAN: You did not break your Palm Pilot. ANTHEM: I did, my Palm Vx, down the drain. RAD MAN: Are you serious? ANTHEM: Yeah. RAD MAN: You're kidding, right? ANTHEM: No, no, I'm not kidding. RAD MAN: Because just recently I had to order a new Palm Pilot as well. ANTHEM: What happened to your old one? RAD MAN: That's why I say I'm not sure I believe you, but -- ANTHEM: No no, I'm serious 100% -- I will take a picture of the broken screen and send it to you and you can include it in whatever. RAD MAN: OK. Last week my girlfriend, I guess you could say she "laundered" my Palm Pilot Vx -- ANTHEM: OH, TOASTED. RAD MAN: -- accidentally. So for the last week or so I've been carrying around this notepad and pen and calling it my Palm Pilot. You know, that's been the joke for the last week. Just today actually I received my new Palm Tungsten C, which is very pimpin'. Downloaded a copy of NetChaser which is the PalmOS equivalent of MiniStumbler. It's pretty much one of the only programs of that ilk that are available for the Palm and it only supports the Tungsten C which is why I picked that model above all the other Sony Clies and other things that run on PalmOS out there. ANTHEM: You -- you seriously picked that based on the availability of one app? RAD MAN: Oh, I'm serious. I mean I could have had something that would play MP3s easily and -- the Tungsten C is the shit dude, what can I say? ANTHEM: I've seen 'em, I liked it. I liked my Palm Vx but it's like dead now. So I've either got to get a new Pocket PC or another Palm. RAD MAN: Yeah, you know, really... Pocket PCs, they're not for me. ANTHEM: Now how's the handwriting recognition on that? It wasn't too stellar on my Palm Vx, so -- RAD MAN: Actually I was very proficient with the original Graffiti. The Tungsten C has a number of different input options. The Tungsten C is one of the few handhelds out there -- one of the few Palm handhelds out there, I should say that has a full QWERTY keypad on it. ANTHEM: Really. RAD MAN: So I can just enter things in by thumb typing, which I'm fairly adept at doing but it introduces Graffiti 2 on this handheld. There are a lot of differences between Graffiti and Graffiti 2. Personally, because I've had so many years with the original Graffiti set, I guess I'm a little bit more used to it so I have that preference but I'm sure the test of time will definitely tell me which one I like better. But for right now I am kind of missing the original Graffiti. It's taking a while to get used to it. ANTHEM: Yeah. Well, you know. Change is alright. RAD MAN: Yeah. Change is good. Other than the whole Palm Pilot thing, I'm recovering from a spectacular sun burn that I received a few weeks ago after I visited the Internet Archive. Of course it seems like every radio show there is an obligatory race that I need to speak about -- so I did the Bay to Breakers which is a huge race. And I mean it's the largest foot race in the world. ANTHEM: No shit. RAD MAN: Yeah, anywhere between 70 [70,000] to 100,000 people attend. I believe their record has peaked above 100,000 people in attendance at this race. ANTHEM: So this is just racing to race or is it for a benefit or something? RAD MAN: Pretty much all of these community races are going -- they're contributing to some sort of a benefit or charity foundation out there. Bay to Breakers is very large so it actually benefits several -- ANTHEM: Well that's good to hear, you're giving back to the community. We love you dude. I mean, you make the world a better place. I'm like crying over here. RAD MAN: Your sincerity is overwhelming. ANTHEM: I know. If my tear ducts worked I would cry. RAD MAN: (Laughs.) So yeah, I got to do that. Man I'll tell you though, that was a winner sun burn. You should have seen it. ANTHEM: Yeah, see I hate it when you're just chilling out side -- you know, you're just having a friendly time with the sun. Then all the sudden, he's like "YOU WANNA FIGHT?" and he sends these UV rays after you, man. And you are just toast! There is no fighting it! RAD MAN: Check this out. Like two days after the sun burn. Have you ever had this happen? I took a shower, got out of the shower, toweled myself off. Looking in the mirror, getting ready to shave and what have you. ANTHEM: Mmmhmm. RAD MAN: And I look at my shoulders, and there are still like beads of water on my shoulders after I've just dried off. ANTHEM: (Laughs.) RAD MAN: And I'm like "What the hell?" So I dried off again, I toweled myself off again, and still there! And, I mean these look like perfect dew drops just resting upon my shoulder as if they were dew drops on a 7Up can in some airbrushed photo ad or something like that. It turned out that they weren't -- it wasn't water from the shower, these were like miniature like perfect little blisters from the heat. ANTHEM: Oh my God! RAD MAN: Yeah it was great! ANTHEM: That's pretty bad dude. I bet you use SPF 30 next time, huh? RAD MAN: (Laughs.) We're going way off topic here, but I just want to say that people travel from all over the world to go to this race, the Bay to Breakers. ANTHEM: Yeah. RAD MAN: I mean literally they travel from all over the world and I'm not just referring to the Kenyans. This is like a huge party. So basically everybody after the 5,000th person crosses the start line -- ANTHEM: Mmmhmm. RAD MAN: And it takes several minutes to an hour before you even do that. Pretty much everybody behind that is just doing it for fun. There are people who are actually pushing shopping carts with kegs in them, and there is actual caravans with full bars and -- ANTHEM: Oh God that's terrible. RAD MAN: People are dressed up in various types of costumes, there's a lot of streakers that run it, it's crazy man. ANTHEM: Sounds fun dude! RAD MAN: That's all I have for current events. In the future -- future episodes there's a couple things for people to look forward to. We're going to be featuring an episode with a Rad Man from a different world. ANTHEM: No shit. There's another one out there? RAD MAN: Well there's, I mean -- with the advent of the internet and AOL, there are a ton of "Rad Man"s out there, I'm sure. ANTHEM: But you are the raddest. RAD MAN: There is another Rad Man out there that got his name some time in the '80s. The particular Rad Man that we're going to be interviewing is the Rad Man of the American Commodore64 group TSM or The Shaolin Monastery, which was a well known import group throughout the late '80s. ANTHEM: See, that's way before my time. I was only born in '87. So I have nothing to say about that. RAD MAN: Yeah I mean that's -- that's pretty fucking oldschool, what can I say. ANTHEM: Yeah that is old, that's back when you had your one hundred pound IBM, huh. RAD MAN: Yeah that was back when I had the portable -- I see you've been reading. ANTHEM: I've been reading! RAD MAN: Yeah that was back in the way when I had my old IBM portable so-called -- well, it wasn't a laptop. ANTHEM: It's a "LAP TOP"? RAD MAN: Yeah, I don't know what you want to call it dude. It was a desktop with a handle. Let's see, also in future episodes we're going to be doing a behind the scenes on the ARTS; we'll be discussing how we produce the show. And of course we'll be featuring more interviews. ANTHEM: Yeah! RAD MAN: So Anthem, thank you very much for subbing in Spinsane this episode and being a part of the show. You did a great job, I really do appreciate it. ANTHEM: Yeah, sorry about the little timing issue by the way. RAD MAN: Oh, don't worry about it. RAD MAN: Taking us out of this program, our closing music is "Italiano" by Little Bitchard of MFX... Thanks for listening everybody. ANTHEM: Thanks for listening guys, PEACE! (Lead out music plays followed by the abbreviated ARTS station ID.) Speech transcribed to ASCII by Ghost Rider (a!p) on May 27th, 2004