__________Icing 98__
Icing.net wanted party reports, and as I only happend to be busy as 
hell for the moment, I thought I had the time to write one.


__________Preface;
My own first party happened to be Icing 97. Being close by and not that
expencive, I went there with a friend of mine, only a day after managing to 
be dumped by my girlfriend. Even after experiencing that, I have to say
that Icing was a nice experience. Now, a year later, time had come for
another visit. I had been too lazy/drunk to visit Pool Position, so I 
had the feeling that I sort of had to visit Icing.


__________The day before;
I had a short day in school and spent the afternoon writing email to a
person, a member in my group, who was supposed to have joined me to Icing,
but unfortunately had gotten very sick, just a week before. Sad indeed.


__________The day;
I got up at 6 am in order to get my stuff together. Three computers with
monitors - Quite boring stuff to get together. After moving the computers I
noticed evil piles of dust under them that I knew my mother was going to
get very upset at... Well, no worries were to disturb my Icing visit! I
left home only half an hour before the opening, but got there quite in time.

   One of the floormen, a friend of mine, helped me with my equipment,
placing them by the Khrome table, which meant that getting in was a breeze.
As I said, he place the computer by the Khrome table, which probably was a
bit sad. More on that later...

   It took quite a while to get in to Icing! If Liket had seven computers,
why on earth couldn't he had used a few of the voting machines at the
entrance? After all, it would only had been necessary for the first day.
Strange factors like people learning to type while standing at the entrance
did not really speed things up. I even overheard a conversation where a kid
asked another kid what they should call their group... Maybe a little late
to think about that by then, heh.

   When I came, there was no power at my table yet, I was told. I got
connected through the rest of the Khrome table, which was connected to some
other power source. 

   If I do not remember totally wrong, the Icing crew turned off the lights
quite early, making it very difficult to set things up. Maybe waiting an
hour would had made things a bit less messed up... There were piles with
cables in the middle of the Khrome computer and my own - Tricky!

   Maybe an hour passed before the power went out at the Khrome table. The
technicians said there had been a short circuit and worriedly I looked
through my own computers for any lose cables... 

   During the first day, I believe the power went out four times at the
Khrome table, and later on the technicians changed their minds about the
short circuit and said that there was an overload in the power system.
Something was broken, so that the Icing hall could not supply enough power
for all the computers. 

   I would say that Icing 98 started out quite bad for me at least, with all
these power failures alone. But of course there was more to it (Isn't there
always?). When I finally got my network card working and found a cable for
it, the table was out of hub connections! Didn't the homepage say "network
for all"?, I thought and then I had to go and borrow a hub from the Icing
network crew, and set it up by myself.

I slept on the floor in the sleeping hall, too lazy to inflate the green
thing I had brought to have under my sleeping bag. Just as the last year,
the sleeping hall worked nicely and it was lovingly quiet. A bit light
maybe... Was it already morning?


__________The second day;
Seemed like the Zin and tZ chaps had gone home cause they were missing
power. Ooops. I had tZ's network cable...

   The power seemed to be working by now, and the party was running. IRC
servers were up and hidden in the network at rare strange IP addresses. And
there were FTP servers too, with the same problem. You practically had to
guess the IP number. Maybe an http server with an updated Icing information
page would had been a good idea. It could had hosted all necessary
addresses. Well, I won't complain too much. After all I had twice as much
uploads as downloads ty my own FTP server. ;) Filled my harddrive up quite
quickly.


   There were some movies like Star Wars and Hackers, I think. The Icing crew
ran old classical demos, and I realised how different the scene had been by
the time those were made. Today the scene either is in death design or 
not
serious. There are never any other types of designs... Or is there?

   There was a surprise compo to create an anti Quake intro, which I didn't
like cause I couldn't think of any ideas at all. And I had been hopeing to
be able to contribute in one of the surprise compos, or the fast intro.
The fast intro theme, power shortage, was very good, but my graphician was
home in fever...

___________The third day and the fourth/last day;
Already saturday. There were movies running here and there, surprise compos
were up and running and things were starting to get fun. I was worrying
that there would be no Titanic movie, as it hadn't been played at the time
that was originally stated. The movie did show up at Saturday night 
though.
Horray. 

   I have to say to all of You people complaining; I thought Titanic was a
great movie! On the Icing IRC people were complaining that there was no
action nor blood... Comeon guys, it's people like you that are giving males
a bad reputation! :)

   Somebody miss-spelled surprise on the big screen.

   ;)

   A lot of music got disqualified, as it had been released earlier... People
just trying to make money on the parties - Sad. The 1 kb surprise compo was
impressive! I think it was Basic Boys that even managed to include some
text. But the winner beat that hands down with his 1 kb tunnel effect.

   Clinton.mp3 was played; Bill Clinton explaining that America should let
millions of innocent tax payers die early so that America could create
nuclear and biological weapons to give to their terrorists. ;) Sadly, not
many persons listened.

   The demos were very well designed indeed! Some interesting ideas came up,
and even that most of the effects were not too new, the way they were
displayed made it all feel new. And I think I saw a retarded texture mapped
cube... Cool idea!

   Well, the party died out quite quickly when the Sunday was starting to
show up. I also started to get my things together, and suddenly realised
what an awful mistake it had been to sit by the Khrome table... My clothes,
my pillow, my bad, my _computers_ all smelled 'snus'!! YUCK!

'/ Alexander, ZAngle of Lattice Time