Q: Please tell me a story. One involving a unicorn and a talking ham sandwich if it isn’t too much trouble.
A: Sure. Story time.

Ham

Alex didn’t immediately realize something was a little bit off with the world. In retrospect, the talking ham sandwich he had for breakfast should have been a dead giveaway, but, it being a Saturday morning, he attributed that to his lack of sleep and the drugs, and went on about his business as if nothing had happened.

His business kept him occupied and glued to his computer screen most of the time - even today, on a stormy 1st of may - traditionally a federal holiday where he lived. Alex, you see, worked as a “Senior Systems Analyst and Administrator” for the european divison of HardNet incorporated, or, as he liked to put it, he was in the business of pumping out tens of thousands of gigabytes of hardcore bondage pornography at three hundred fucking megabit per second, fuck yeah, baby. Not that any of that mattered much anymore, though, now that he was dead.

Most people had always thought that the apocalypse would come in form of some man- or god-made earth shattering kaboom. When the apocalypse came, later that morning, about 2 hours after Alex had put half of the now-quiet sandwich back into the fridge, it came in the form of unicorns. The first people to spot the unicorns were scientists at NASAs near-earth-object observatory with their telescopes, detecting them hurling for the earth at awesome speeds, accelerating as they neared the blue planet. Upon reporting their findings to the US government officials responsible for such things, they were promptly told that ha ha ha ha yeeeeeah, right, why don’t you shoot our care bear beams at them?

When the unicorns became visible to the naked eye a few minutes later, the lead researcher managed to at least get a “told you so” in before the world ended. It wasn’t so much the kaboom everyone had expected than a sudden complete loss of molecular integrity of everything that got in the way of the swarm of unicorns as they blazed past. The earth, now closely resembling a piece of swiss cheese, collapsed into a ball of rocks and molten iron within minutes, eventually losing orbit and dropping into the sun. After barely half an hour, it was as if nothing had ever been where the earth used to be, the only indication of there ever having been a planet between Venus and Mars except the now slightly irregular orbits of the surrounding planets.

Alex, though, hadn’t been there to wittness any of this. His house had happened to be in the trajectory of one of the rainbow-spewing harbingers of the end, which had made him one of the first people to go.

He didn’t have any time to figure out that he had just died. Having lost all faith in god due to his strict religious upbringing, he imagined death to be a much less interactive thing. After he had been disintegrated by a magical creature traversing space at 98.7% the speed of light, he had suddenly found himself in what appeared to be a semi-transparent room somewhere towards the top of a multi-story building in the middle of a bright yellow-white plain that extended to the horizon in all directions. Next to him, two strangely feature-less people were busy defenestrating white boxes, which, on closer inspection, turned out to be refridgerators. When Alex asked them whatever the hell they were doing and why there were doing whatever the hell they were doing, he was informed that the two people, who introduced themselves as A4153 and A4155, were doing important work furthering the unicorn cause in the great ham war. Then, he was promptly thrown out the window.

As he flew down towards the ground, thoughts raced his mind, and he remembered the sandwich’s words, and something clicked, and the days events suddenly made perfect sense to him. Sadly, though, he hit the ground and splattered into several thousand tiny pieces - severely impairing his functioning as a human being in a way his death earlier had not - before he had the chance to do as much as shout “Eureka!”, and that is the end of that story.

So, over the easter weekend, I went to Breakpoint, a demo party in the wonderful “Bingen am Rhein”. Since I like the invitation to that a lot, have a video of it to start off this post:

It was awesome, as always; Demos were released and enjoyed on the bigscreen, beer was consumed, people were drunkenly hugged, and a great time was had by all, as evidenced by my own pictures at flickr, and some more pictures over at slengpung.

Speaking of releases, here’s two: First, our [SVatGs] release for the 4 kilobyte intro competition, which placed 9th out of 18! (Upper half! Yeeeeeeeeeeah!) 4k intros are demos that have a size of only four kilobytes. For comparison, this tiny image, which I randomly picked out of my misc folder, is 10k big - more than twice that! [5dpl on pouet]

And then, there’s my favourite entry from the demo compo, because I like things what are colourful and blink a lot: United Force / Digital Dynamite - Wir sind Einstein. [on pouet]

Overally, it was a great weekend, and it’s impossible to thank the BP orga team enough for making it possible. I hope that some people will get together and pull off a party as awesome as this next easter, now that breakpoint is over with~

Until then, let’s remember the most important (most important possible) announcement, and see you at the next demoparty. :3