pouët.net

not a demoparty but pretty close: a local amiga dude threw a garden party for amiga sceners (+ me and a few friends). the garden was not lit at all and his house was just partially done, so he had a large, open septic tank (a hole dug out from the ground, some pipes dumping stuff in). you can imagine the rest. we stopped counting victims after 5. the same guy fell in several times was counted as 1.

trap #2 was an other empty, rectangle-shaped hole, about 1.5 meters deep, just off from the main path between the garden and the house. at the beginning of the party its circumference was marked with small candles which whe wind blew out during the night. it was not filled with poop but damn it Hurt to fall in. a guy who fell in was pulled out by his gf. the guy trying to impress, tried to make this jumping stand-up, while kicking her already shocked gf in the head, full force. i think they were the same couple who entered homemade artistic S/M porn at wild compos.

when i woke up home i had 2 street signs because.... reasons? (not road signs, but signs with the street name from around that behind-god's-back area)

I was on a demoparty. I was trying to get back home. I went near the small park with a hill, there were people lying on the grass and chilling. When I passed the park, the big cane field appeared, I had to go thru it to get to the city. I started to run field and I seen the wild animals, birds, going around me. It wasn't very long, I found myself near river, not in the city. There were some Harley riders taking bath and having fun with a hose. I asked them how to get to the city and they told me I need to go back where I was in the opposite direction. So I had to go thru the cane field again, I did.

I was organizing the demoparty and it was near my home, I found some unnecessary items in my bag and dunno how they were there I decided to leave party place and go back home. Meantime I heard info that some three sceners left the party place for a walk and two of them drown in the river.

Yes if you consider these stories unreal - right. two stories were in my dreams, but I liked them so I share them. I quite often dream about demoparties while sleeping. I had not yet any wild stories on demoparties, to be told about, at least I don't consider them wild. I was told few stories about sceners. From the ones I was told about I liked the one with missing scener who decided to get back home very long way by taxi.

It must have been Chaos Constructions 2014 - after a really great party the afterparty was in a club in St Petersburg called Cluutch, which in essential was a club for nerds, with Game-Consoles, separate room which could be used for concerts or Seminars and even Club-Mate.
The Russian sceners were as always very welcoming and we drank a lot - more than I could handle.
Suddenly blackout - I wake up in the back of a car - the driver is on the phone while driving, speaking a language I don't understand, but definitely not Russian. I check my phone where we are going, and we're constantly going to the east, while I knew that my hotel was on the north.
After some time going in the wrong direction, not knowing how I got in the car and where we were going I started to panic. On the next crossing I opened the door and fell out of the car. The driver got out and shouted at me in broken English: "You mad?? I bring you hotel! Get in the car. Crazy man!" Or sth like that. He indeed brought me to the hotel, after a very awkward 30min more of a ride, including a lot of apologies from my side and a very pissed off driver.
It turned out that the car was an unofficial taxi, which draugven and dfox have put me in to get me home safely. And that the driver had to go east first, because in St Petersburg there is a big island in the middle, which is connected via bridges which are opened in the night for the ships to pass. So he had to go all around that island to get to the north.

taxi stories after demoparties are always fun. like when i tried to tell the taxi driver - drunk out of my mind - that 'demoscene parties are like american car owner gatherings, where people destroy amigas.... no wait....'

Gargaj or Immortal Rat may actually have some feasible memory of it.

I basically tried to re-tell the story Tomcat told us back then, when he took a cab to an amiga party. the driver was curious about what it is, he just said "it's a gathering of old computer enthusiasts. the pinnacle of the party is that these amiga dudes smash a live, running PC" and the driver said "it's like the american muscle car gatherings where they collectively smash a cheap japanese car into dust"

the wildest thing for me was to eat pizza at assembly 2009. one of the best experiences in my life, if Something can not be dreamed before, it is really eating a good pizza...

story time!

My first party ever, somewhere in holland '95.

Meeting walt of melon design , smoking tons of weed with him and some PMC guys from italy in a car. mind u melon design where my heroes back then and it was like meeting god to me. Because we sat so long in a car smoking weed my leg suddenly cramps up, i get out rolling on the ground with a bizarre leg spasm and walt starts massaging my leg until it was gone. (it could have been one of the PMC guys too - i was verrrry stoned) very surreal.

we all laughed and got even more high and shit i will remember this for the rest of my life.

then we submitted our "demo" from our group to the compo, that group being the fun/joke group SMELLON DESIGN. (the tranquiliser - its pure shit. :D )

anyways party goes on, pricegiving ceremony is on, Melon wins SIH with Planet M.

Walt gets on stage and is very angry looking, yelling in the microphone "WHO THE FUCK IS SMELLON DESIGN!!" takes his award and later on we catch him running thru the hall asking everyone who the fuck smellon design is... even asking us.. (my bud Celtic was a good mailswap buddy with him :D ) and were like ... OK TIME TO GO HOME BYE WALT, NICE MEETING U.

so yeah walt, if u read this. Sorry !!

On the way home from Ambience 2001 in Venlo, NL with a friend we were low on fuel. We left the Autobahn, nervously looking for a gas station in the sunset, only to finally run out of gas on some hinterland country road in the dark. So we walked around, found a house, woke up the resident, and were lucky he had a spare canister full of gas we could trade for some cash.

On the way back to the Autobahn we discovered a gas station right at the ramp, but somewhat hidden by lots of trees when viewed from the Autobahn … well done.

What bugs me most about that detour is that I fail to understand how I managed to lose my phone pouch (must have fallen out of the door's pocket in the dark) but not my phone. At least it wasn't the other way round.

Other than the usual drunken antics, it was pretty "wild" when a scener who shall remain unnamed fell asleep at the wheel on the way home from Mainframe 2003. I was in the passenger seat - dead tired as well - and noticed how not only did the driver suddenly fall silent, but the car was also starting to swerve quite worryingly.

Gave the guy a light poke and he pulled over for a few minutes of shut-eye on a parking lot in the middle of nowhere. A bit of a bad adrenaline rush, but nobody was harmed and the rest of the trip went smoothly.

I once lost an extension cord. I'm still going to therapy becuse of it.

I don't know about you guys, but the wildest thing ever happened to me at a demoparty was a segfault in my demotool. Man, better don't dereference those NULL-pointers.

The faces of Finnish sceners when you ate a Hesburger at Assembly and actually liked it #justhamburgthings

Finnish demoparties were always known to be a bit on the "wild" side; while the numerous Alternative Party events certainly followed that trend, where the actual "wild" stuff started was at the afterparty saunas.

Those of us who were visiting from overseas were invited to join Setok and the organizing team to the sauna afterparty that they would normally put on. Whilst in the early years of Alternative Party, the saunas themselves appeared, as it happened, to be largely single-sex, ie, men only, towards the later years this changed quite a bit, to become mixed-sex sauna events. In the beginning of these, while the ladies were present for the eating and drinking (but didn't go into the sauna) this changed in 2008 when Setok's fiancee, alongside Osyn and one or two other female sceners, braved the sauna with us all.

I remember Nystep, one scener who was, erm, shall we say, slightly aroused by the sight of Setok's fiancee getting undressed - even though nothing at all happened further to that, she was flattered when told about it a little while later. I think Nystep was quite embarrassed though, even though what happened was amusing.

At a different Altparty sauna event, I certainly remember Osyn being rather amusing. See, she had a bit of a habit of getting dressed again, rather than wandering around in a towel for too long between sauna sessions. Fair enough, you might say. Although when we started mentioning about and then going back into the sauna, it was almost as though she had been sharked - her lower clothing fell down to her feet straight away as soon as the magic word 'sauna' was mentioned.

But seriously, despite all of this, nothing naughty or otherwise happened to the ladies who joined us in the mixed sauna events. It was great that they felt confident enough to join us all there - and that paid off too.

Mind you, I have my own slightly wild tale in relation to the Alternative Party 2008 sauna - and remember, this was after we had seen Front 242 play at this historic party. I got very drunk - and a lot of people were told that at the time, by yours truly. Though I think I was a happy drunk, my head was a bit sore the following day as a result :) CiH may have more to add on this, but that's largely all I remember right now :)

AFAIK in Finland it's pretty normal, isn't it?

yes.

I thought mixed saunas in Finland happened only within family groups, rarely within groups of even trusted friends ... ?

+1 for kb's Hesburger anecdote!

yes.

i am mindblown

oh here's an embarrassing one:

due to Tomcat2 organizing it, Flag parties were strictly anti-gamer parties. 2 guys played quake on lan, so it was announced that someone should volunteer to go there and hit their reset button. One guy actually did it. Later on, the entire party had a blackout and only these 2 gamers had their PCs running (laptops weren't a thing back then), because they were hooked on an other power circuit. Unintentional revenge i guess? :)

It's hard to gauge how Finns feel about mixed saunas. I'd say there's no real national consensus and it's rather an issue of how different social bubbles feel about the issue. For what it's worth, mixed saunas seem to be the default in demoscene circles.

MFX+Kewlers party took place in Vihti (or, more accurately, in the middle of nowhere, close to Vihti) at the end of July 2004. Karmarock, a one day rock festival in Harjavalta, about 160 kilometres away, took place on the same weekend. I decided to go to both. To solve the issue of the party place not being within a walking distance from the bus stop and no one being sober enough to give me a ride when I get back on Saturday, I decided to bring my bicycle along.

I'd tell you why I thought this was a good idea, but honestly, I can't remember.

So, I came back from the festival to Vihti. I don’t remember the time, but this was the end of July and it was already getting dark, so it was late as hell whatever it was. I got on my bike and started cycling towards the party place. I was on the side of some country road, going downhill fast, with no lights (remember, I was being an idiot here), and the situation was already scary enough. Then suddenly, the chain fells off. What’s more, the bike had no working hand brakes.

Once the downhill ended, I managed to stop my bike and realize that I’m not going to die. I assessed my options. Just putting the chain back on the gear wasn’t really an option as I had no tools with me and no way to tighten the chain so it would probably just fall off again. The only thing I could do was walk my bike the rest of the way. I believe the party place was something like 5-10 kilometres away at this point.

I finally arrived back at the party place with my bike and found out that pretty much everyone has gone to sleep already. Well worth the effort of getting there!

Of course, later I had to somehow get my bicycle back from the party place to Pori. That’s a whole another story.

That's what people keep telling, but pretty much at any kind of party (as in not just demoparties) with sauna involved it's mixed sauna. I can't even remember last time I've seen non-mixed sauna arrangement outside public ones.

I love mixed sauna! Of course I make sure to order it every single time I go to Finland. In Holland you cannot get it so easy, but you can find a good alternative in most Turkish restaurants: a plate with döner, köfte, chicken filet and beef steak, with a small coban salad and some fries on the side. It's almost the same as the original, I think :)

mixed fauna!

Verflixte Downer!