So here’s the deal with the Hops! inside joke.

As Phoenix reported, Necros, Phoenix, The Finn, and Inspired Chaos drank beer and chilled for a few hours, after which it seemed like a good idea at the time to create a beertro. They came back to the Block Party lounge and started to work on it. The high point of this was Inspired Chaos screaming “Water! Yeast! Sugar! Hops!” into a microphone as samples for the tune. All standard practice, I’m sure, except that at one point he wasn’t happy with his rendition of “Hops!” and decided to record multiple renditions of it. After 30 seconds of “Hops. Hops! Hops? Hops!! HOPS!!” etc. the entire room started to crack up, and it cracked up again when Necros started adding reverb/echo to it (“HOPS Hops hops…”).

They didn’t finish, but Necros made the mistake of giving the unfinished tune to Phoenix, who made it presentable and submitted it to the music compo where it amazingly didn’t come in last place :)

Just a quick post to direct you to Phoenix’s party report.

I agree with most of what Phoenix writes. I disagree with the part about 3 minute song length; if we extended it to four minutes, then we’d have to do jury pre-selection to toss stuff out to limit the length of the compo, and that has its own set of pros and cons.

I wholeheartedly agree with $15 per speaker DVD… $10 is a little more reasonable. Since mine in particular is nearly complete garbage because of the power loss and poor recording, I feel mine shouldn’t have been sold at all. (Yes, I’m still working on editing together a watchable version of mine.)

These days, a wild compo usually means “animation”, and “real wild” means “any demo on any hardware”.  I miss the true real wild compos, where you could get up and sing, rap,

Well, the True Real Wild compo surfaced at Block Party and it was great.  We had a demos, sure, like a great TI-85 calculator demo, but other wild compo entries included:

• Someone playing through the first level of Gradius without being able to see his player or missle sprites
• The mention of a tool to help compose music for 4K intros
• Home-brewed beer (!)

…etc.  That’s what I like to see.  Since the first inspirations of nerdcore came from true wild compos, I’d like to see them back in major competitions.  Oh well, yet another thing Block Party hit a home run on :-)