i'm back from spain and euskal 14!

this was my first trip to europe and i expected the travel to kill me but it turned out to be cake.  i passed the flight time there with untold legends, family guy, and gta 3 on the psp.  the only hitch was at the paris airport which didn't display the connection info for my flight getting me quite lost.  it wasn't so bad though because i got to talk to many cute french girls to find my way.  :)

the demo trace, neurokin, and i worked on came out quite nice.  it was difficult because the week before the party trace was at his parent's place with no internet connection then i was at my hotel and it took me a few days before i had access to the internet.  so we finally spent a lot of time together at the party place with little sleep trying to finish it up.  after the deadline and display of the productions on the big screens it was nice to relax and spend time with some sceners there.  jeenio was hilarious singing with ps and playing music on his guitar.  their renditions of famous songs from demos cracked me up.  i also loved a song sung countless times at the party "amiga for you, amiga for you, amiga forever, amiga for you" (sung to the tune of happy birthday).   
at one point that night XPLSV was written out on the ground with some lighter fluid and set on fire prompting the authorities to stop by with their opinion on the realtime effect.  :)

the final day was the award ceremony which had many funny antics and a rather amusing display of disinterest from the gamers and those there apparently just to download things.  it was funny when the results for the open demo competition were tabulated with the stravaganza vote counter and, because only the group names were displayed, two histogram bars for XPLSV duked it out for first place (a demo from shine + wizard and one from trace + neurokin + me). the first place was awarded to our demo tokyo, second to shine and wizard's wonderful envolvente and third to merlucin, amb, and madgoblin's die anderung 2.

i was hoping to do a little sight seeing afterwards and check out the guggenheim museum but after many days of little sleep i just crashed and slept until my flight home.  on the way back i ran into more trouble with the paris airport - getting lost again, having my connection delayed so long i almost missed next flight back to usa, and ... they lost my luggage!! those wacky french did eventually find my bag but i'm not getting it back for a couple days still.  :(

all in all it was an awesome trip and so great to finally meet trace and sole and all the other sceners at the party.  i'm certainly going to miss having hotel staff clean my room each day, money with holograms, free coca cola burn, and having people around me that actually know what in the world demos are.

okay you can download and watch the party version of tokyo from pouet and expect a final version soon!