I haven’t watched many modern demos in the last 10 years; I usually watch maybe 1 or 2 a year.  My demoscene friends are always shocked when I tell them that, given my past involvement with all things sceneish.  In fact, they’re always shocked, no matter how many times it comes up.  I’m going to try to explain why, briefly, and then hopefully either I will change, or it will never come up again.

In a nutshell, I feel shame and self-loathing when I watch modern Windows demos.   Before that completely confuses you, I’ll hurriedly explain that I always regretted not having the time, skill, intelligence (my math has always been poor), and inclination to create Windows demos.  So when I watch one, I am reminded of how I have failed at that particular aspiration.  I have succeeded at others, but watching a 64K from Fairlight or Farbrausch just gets me depressed.  Yes, I’m screwed up.  The better and more impressive the demo/intro/4k is, the worse I feel.  I know it’s not rational.

So now you know.  This also conveniently explains why I have actually gone backwards in my democoding (I started out on 386+SB+VGA and my latest efforts are geared toward an 8088+PC speaker+CGA) instead of most people, who go forwards.  For example, I’m writing a small utility as a favor to a friend, but it needs to support long filenames in Windows XP and memory over 640K.  Regardless, I’m writing it in DOS, on the XT, because I feel safe and comfortable doing so.  Once it runs within the restrictions of DOS, I’m going to port the code over to WinXP and compile it with a WinXP compiler.

Related topic change: We’ve started talking about MindCandy volume 3.