Hi! This is Paulie, and Cheeze and Demos is just this little party that I run during the summer. Running since 2003, it's a fun, easily accessible party for people who like a more structured party where there's things always going on, or just those who enjoy socializing or merely like cheeze a whole lot.

Archives:

[ Cheeze and Demos 2011 ]

[ Cheeze and Demos 2010 ]

[ Cheeze and Demos 2009 ]

[ Cheeze and Demos 2008 ]

[ Cheeze and Demos 2007 ]

[ cheeze and demos 2006 ]

[ Cheeze and Demos 2003-2005 summary ]

and a few questions for the curious.

Q: If I wanted to bring a cheeze, how does that usually work?
A: Generally, the plan is to sign up on the board at the PsiU house (a signup area is put up at the beginning of summer semester) so there's some notion of what others are bringing so there's not too much overlap. The plan is usually to get one pound or twenty dollars worth of cheeze, whichever costs less (and some cheeze costs way over $20/lb) and have it at psiu between 1 and 2 hours before the start of the party. I usually make several runs to cheeze shops from the psiu house during the day of the party if anyone wants to buy cheeze fresh from good sources.

Q: What is a 'Demo'
A: Generally, a realtime computer generated audiovisual display, coded and constructed by amateurs, usually high school or college kids in Europe. The demoscene is the community that supports this activity by websites, forums, and throwing demopartys where there's prizes for the best products produced. for more information about what a demo is you can check:

http://www.scene.org/demoscene.php

or to waste your life you can go straight to the sources

http://www.scene.org (the archive of doom)

http://www.pouet.net (Demo reviews and forums. Warning: not for the faint of heart)

Q: What hardware is this all on?
A: Running it all on a PC with a newish graphics card. But there usually are a few platforms represented through videos and emulation, including Commodore Amiga, Commodore 64, and pretty much any new or old platform that can have code written for it, just so people can show off what they can do with old/weird hardware. This includes any old computer ever (IBM AT, Vic 20, Spectrum ZX), cell phones, any console or handheld videogaming system, various microcontrollers and controllable devices, and more. Sometimes there's also videos made by the same people (often part of the anything goes category referred to as 'Wild Demos'), but it's not the main focus.

Q: Are all of these Demos like a tiny amount of code? 28 bytes or something?
A: There are different types of limits placed in demo competitions , and size limits are one of these. The primary demo competitions are not really size limited (they vary from a few hundred kilobytes to as many megabytes as they can get away with), but they have to be realtime generated graphics, not videos (with the exception of 'Wild demos'). Size limited competitions are common, and the most common size limited competitions are 64 kbyte and 4 kbyte demos, thought there tend to only be a few really good ones in any given year. Smaller size limitations exist (1k, 256 byte, etc), but are notoriously limited and don't play well for a party generally, though they are shown occasionally.

Q: What is the history of this party?
A: In 2003 after Paulie completed his undergrad, he found this really cool cheeze shop near Georgia Tech, and it sparked an interest in hosting a cheeze tasting. Somewhere around this time, due to excess spare time resulting from not getting a job after graduation (don't ask why) and viewing Maui Threv's copy of the recently released [ Mindcandy DVD Demo Collection ] it rekindled a dormant interest in the demoscene and it's productions. So when summer semester rolled around, it had been decided that particular year that both house and brother's meetings would be held on every other wednesday for the summer, and Strick was looking for events to host on the open wednesday nights at the house, so Paulie gathered a bunch of new productions and got a couple of friends to kick in for cheezes and put together a cheeze tasting party and demo viewing. So far it seems to work pretty well - and here we are.

Q: You know "Cheeze" is actually spelled "Cheese", right?
A: Yes. Initially I just felt like using the other spelling to be silly. The joke is pretty old after all these years, but I'd have to go back and fix all the webpages and mailings, so instead I just stick with the silly spelling out of consistency.