teadrinker looked like a quite mysterious character to me.
In the demoscene, we started hearing of him in relatively recent times (2023).
He usually produces demos as a one-man-group, but each one of his prods leaves a mark in one way or another.
Let's try to solve part of the mystery with 10 questions.


1. How long have you been involved in the scene? Your first productions date back to 2023, but seem to be more mature than newcomer stuff.

In the 90s in Sweden, demos were copied around on floppies and I often enjoyed them with my friends.
I did not know any actual sceners, and I would have been too shy to attend demo parties alone anyway. But I became a big fan of the scene and I had ambitions of doing demos early on Amiga and PC. While I managed to do some mods (OctaMED/FT2), images (DP/3ds) and simpler effects (Amos/DOS), I failed to combine them into anything larger. My focus then shifted to game dev and work, but every now and then I'd check out the latest scene releases with great excitement. Sort of randomly, I joined the online-only Lovebyte in 2023, and after that I thought that I should really attend a party IRL...

2. I know pronouncing the acronym "LLM" could cause telluric waves in the demoscene, but you seem a lot less extreme than many people about this topic. Why do you say “the ethical choice in regards to LLMs is probably to limit your usage”? Do you refer to the datacenter impact or intellectual property or anything else?
What’s your feeling about this technology, including “having a less deeper state of flow” when programming and “less authorship” versus the code you produce, as you say?

LLMs are the biggest thing to happen to software in my lifetime, and I'm too curious to just ignore them.
It's all very overwhelming, it feels like a large part of the skills I acquired over the years might no longer be relevant, but I still value them. I grieve what has been lost, but I'm also excited about new possibilities.

Part of what I tried to express is that I don't know how unethical it is, but that I deem excessive resource use unethical by itself. I know this is a sensitive topic and that is why I tried to document the project and release the source of both the demo and the tool.

I see this new technology as an amalgam of compute and human culture. A technology based on the commons, that should belong to all of us. That is, under democratic control.

The reason AI is being shoved so forcefully into our throats is that the investor class has too much power in society. The pricing mechanism (which makes markets useful for resource allocation) is distorted because investors hope that they will be allowed to own another future monopoly.

When I read the Pro-Human AI Declaration statements like "AI monopolies that concentrate power, stifle innovation, and imperil entrepreneurship must be avoided," or "the benefits and economic prosperity created by AI should be shared broadly" I think, sure, but let's not limit this to AI. Unless the US and EU can come together and double down on democratic values and actually tax and regulate the investor class, I don't see this ending well.

3. I love your demo "PRINT". How was its idea born?

It rarely starts with a big idea for me, instead a few threads are separately spinning. I already had the font, the geometric tiles and a basic renderer when making Daydreamer (the very last thing I tried to add, and failed). I had also explored halftoning with different shapes and separately experimented with subtractive color mixing years earlier. So once I had the idea that the font would probably look quite nice with a print simulation, it seemed appropriate/clean to build the soundtrack from printer sounds. It's more like smaller ideas/pieces falling into place.

4. What's the technology/technique behind the "motion capture" on some of your productions ("This is Internet", "Human kaleidoscope", and so on)?

It's a Unity based implementation which makes use of Kinect / Femto Bolt depth cameras to record and playback stylized depth material. It does not use the Kinect body tracking, but instead the raw depth and infrared buffers. The infrared images are used to (optionally) influence the stroke width of the lines/dots.

It's designed so you can preview the stylization (Decimation levels, rendering tweaks etc) in real-time. After recording you can export to a custom compressed format (RLE, using 11 bits for depth and 5 for size)

It was open sourced as a part of another project if anyone is interested in trying it out or know more about the details. I really feel it needs a proper UI though, and I never got to that part...

5. In your opinion, how should a demo like "What time is it?" (for which btw you also created your own font) be experienced? On the real hardware, like while doing a queue at the supermarket or anything else?

The ideal for watching it on the watch is a very quiet outdoor/nature environment with sunlight. (similar to what you see at the start of the video)

The video is kind of its own production and works better for a party or casual viewing.

6. You developed specific tools (Mad Tea Lab/Synth) for prototyping. You even made a font (!). For example, you say your demo “What time is it?” was made with the tool. How do you use these tools in your workflow? Did you ever consider using already available tools like Notch or Cables, or you like more the demoscenic tradition of doing it all by yourself?

I've tried many of the available tools. I went a bit deeper into TiXL than the others, and I started modifying it before I even had a finished scene. I like the tradition of DIY, but I don't really feel I'm practicing it (many of my demos use a framework I built on top of Unity, I access Kinect through a MIT Licensed library by Rumen Filkov, and I'm happy to use iq's sdf-primitives most of the time).

But some things draw me towards making tools:

• I'm a big fan of tight sync, and part of my quest to build custom tools is to bring music creation and demo creation closer together, ideally into a single composition workflow.
• The tools you use will color your work. So tool creation can make your work more personal. I feel it both gives a kind of expanded creative freedom, and at the same time very hard limitations (as the WIP-tools are often quite bad in many ways).
• I like to work visually, but I still think code is often more efficient at expressing detailed intent than nodes. So ideally, I want the code to be bidirectional/two-way - if I make a visual adjustment, the change should be able to flow back into the code. I've not managed to pull this off yet for any real production...

([NdFriol]:Teadrinker says that we will soon have an high quality version of the soundtrack of "What time is it?")
7. What's exactly your relationship with tea? Are you capable of appreciating the infinite varieties of tea and/or you have a giant set of equipment to prepare and serve a cup of tea?

I appreciate a pure Keemun black tea or Longjing, but I'm also fine with an Earl Grey tea bag and milk. I also like Lapsang, Jasmine, or Assam Chai boiled with whole spices and ginger.

8. What was your initial idea for “The musicians”? I mean, you were looking at a classic painting and you imagined: “what if we make a demo about it” or such? 🙂

I really love these paintings of musicians with expressive faces, but I think a stronger influence is a prior project. Me and a friend did a VR-experience where you can go inside famous paintings, and after years of trying to be authentic and serious reproducing classical paintings, I kind of longed to do something very silly instead.

9. I know it’s hard, but what if you had to choose four milestone demos, even not the most known, one for each “era” of the demoscene (the 90s/software rendering, 2000-2010/hardware acceleration, 2010-2020/the sdf era, after 2020) basing on your taste. Which ones would you choose and why?

Very hard indeed, and I know I have probably missed many great demos during the years. I will give a timeline of some favorite hits: State of the Art, Stars: Wonders of the World, Intrinsic Gravity, Eon and The Legend of Sisyphus.
But then I want to highlight:

• Transformer 3 - Limp Ninja: An amazing audiovisual journey with impeccable timing and finish. Manages to feel both otherworldly and familiar, timeless and retro.
• Litterae Finis - Trauma: When it comes to textmode rendering, this is my nr.1. Mesmerizing! Features a wonderful soundtrack by !Cube and sparse but well executed sync.
• Then and Before - Altair: Fantastic mood for 4k. Very cinematic and high polish in regards to both sound and visuals.
• Wrecklamation - Logicoma: A great track as well as a great encapsulation of the demoscene, abusing the module playback to turn the tracked music compo into a demo compo.

10. I have to ask this: what do you think will happen in the scene 20, 30 years from now? Will there still be C64 or Amiga productions? Will a scene still exist?

I think there will definitely be a scene with C64 and Amiga prods! Maybe not like today, but I think new generations will always watch the classics, and some will be curious enough to explore these platforms for themselves.

posted by friol at 10/17/2026 08:53:00 PM - under: demo, demoscene, hacking, interviews - comments? here (0)

Modern sceners don't have time.

They are quickly grown-up sons of the 80s, that now work for the same banks they hacked or for the same game companies which users they called "gamers".

Moderns sceners don't have time for a 10-12 minutes long demo.

How can we cope with this in modern life? Hey, we've found the solution. And, surprisingly, the solution is not to impose a 15-second production limit in demoparties. The solution is called: demo .GIFs (yes, it's the first name we came up with, I know).

Want to watch "2nd reality" again (for the 279585th time) but don't have time for that black-screen infinite introduction? Skip directly to the "Star Wars" part:


You always thought that "paper" starts too slowly? No problem:


And that's it.
The demo .GIFs almost say it all. Everybody knows that the "oooooh-moment" in "paper" is that scene. No need to watch the full thing.

Maybe you always wanted to know what's so subliminal in "Stash". It's presto-chango (whatever that means):


The GIF's natural looping nature lets us admire parts of well known demos that slip away too fast, instead:


And it loops nicely, too.
The only limit is your need to scroll this web page. Phew.

It's although nice to see how a 3 second long GIF summarizes perfectly "State of Mind", the breakthrough demo of 1998:


Yes, life really is consume-die. Maybe 'work' and 'buy' too.

Missed that end-of-the-century Haujobb intro? This one sums it up nicely:


Want more "oooooh-moments"?


And you're all set, as they would say in America.
We all love toruses, after all.

Enough said.
In 1990 you downloaded the full thing with 56k modems.
In the 2000s you watched the demo on Youtube.
In the 2010s you finally have the demo .GIFs, what else.



'Bjoooooooo ooo ooooo oer'.
Please post more demo .GIFs in the comments.
Thank-you.

posted by friol at 2/24/2016 07:54:00 PM - under: 90s, demo, demoscene, gif - comments? here (0)

Let's face it: modern demoscene sucks.

Too many hexagonal lens flares, too many trilinear filtered polygons.
Too many satori demos and too few TBL DOS intros.

But, you know, as the title says, there is still hope in the past: maybe there's something to discover again in that beautiful period of our lives called "the nineties", when we listened to 2Unlimited and Snap, lens flares were just circular and to run some DOS intro you had to cross your fingers and hope that you had free enough of those 640k that should be enough for everyone. Or maybe those demos I'll speak about just suck, so you can just stop reading here and leave an angry, sarcastic message in the comments.
I don't care.

Modern demoscene is too involute.
Back in the nineties, you could have shown a torus (or the inside of a torus) and just ruled by doing that.
Today, you have to show 9 raytraced meta-toruses merging into each other, and you barely suck.
Yeah, your 12-part 4k with music isn't that bad for a firstie.

So, let's go back to the 90s and see some jewelry hidden in there.

Jive 2/Sublogic (1998)

That jazzy music (a mythical lo-fi .xm by lone wolf called "the funky corner"). Some spinning clouds in blue and purple. Some raytraced spheres and cylinders. The effects change every 4 patterns, and it's never the same effect. And music follows the intro's flow perfectly.
And then, the music stops, and, what's that? An image. Not a crappy, B/W pixelated image, but a full colour image.

This is Jive 2, aka charlie chong.
This is "the second part in the famous 'Jive' intro series".
Oh, how much I love that nonsense feeling demoscene had in the 90s? Modern demoscene takes things too seriously. And it sucks.

Fyvush/Jamm (1994)

Who does remember Jamm? What are the Jamm members doing today? Maybe they are just old farted house-men, growing up children that just want to chat on Whatsapp and don't know what IRC is. I'm talking about an intro that squeezed each clock cycle out of your dusty 16Mhz 386sx. Come on, who does that today? Just Trixter, that, as everybody knows, is an old farted house-man of the 90s.

Ok, OK, Fyvush has some strange coder/psychedelic colours, makes more than one effect with palette cycling (THAT is so nineties), but, damn, which modern intro has upside down characters at the end? None. And NOT because no one makes DOS intros anymore.

Fyvush made a FAST rotozoomer years before all that cache shit by Pascal.

An please, PLEASE, watch that spinning hellraiser cube move smooth on a 386. Just buy a 386 to watch it, dude. It's cheap.

Overtone/Suburban (1999)

Fast forward to the end of the nineties.
I bet nobody remembers Suburban anymore. I do. They were the last defenders of Pmode/W, the wizards of bilinear filtering, the masters of DOS-era and 320x240 design. I have seen this intro live at The Trip 1999 and it rules. No that's not for nostalgic reasons. This post is not nostalgic. Shut up.
Overtone has everything you'd love in a DOS intro: 3d with overlayed wireframe lines, free directional tunnels and that lightray effect you'll drool on.

And music by pete e, one of the best (and forgotten) musicians of all time.

Now go hear all his modules. And then go watch all of Suburban productions.
Then return here and continue reading this.

Mother lode/fudge (1997)

Ready to have a bilinear filtered orgasm?
Yeah, probably someone still remembers fudge, but maybe for their "the clone" series. Nah, that's too mainstream.
Fudge invented the "super bon bon" effect (that's a trademark). The Fudge guys are soo cool that they decided to name a demo "planet groove" (what's more 90s than that?).

Mother lode features an aggressive music from croakr/TPOLM, and as said all effects are bilinear filtered (no, you don't need a Geforce GTX 690 for that). Mother lode has blue objects on a red background and red objects on a blue background. Mother lode is the prodrome to all the orange, TPOLM, TBL and everybody else's intros of the second half of the nineties.

Mother lode has that stylish, linear, fire-esque fudge logo you'll envy forever.

Pandemic/Byterapers (1997)

Pandemic: adj. 1. widespread; general. 2. Medicine: Epidemic over a wide geographic area and affecting a large portion of the population.

You want to watch this just for that chick's picture. Yeah, that chick with the alien skin.
You want to watch this just for that underwater scene.
You want to watch this just for the [B] logo in 256 colours, even if the demo is in truecolor.
If you watch Pandemic, you'll appreciate 1bit animations and two overlapped, alpha blended free directional tunnels.
You would have never said that.

Space/Euthanasia (1997)

Euthanasia is probably more a forgotten group than the maker of forgotten demos.
A little is known of this Hungarian demogroup, but one thing we remember is the absolute consistency of their productions, starting from the *names* of those production (always a one-letter word). Each production had also a powerful 3d-engine (640x400, not bad for 1997), capable of filling your screen with advanced software-rendered scenes. Each demo had also a little "story" in it.

"Space" is worth mentioning for the smoothness of its scenes and for the spacey killer-plant.

Only downside of this otherwise mythical group: re-releasing "Spirit" in the mobile demo compo at Assembly 2004.
But you know, no one is perfect and we can forgive Euthanasia for this. And love them.

Stream/mfx (1996)

Mfx, aka the most hermetic group in the demoscene.

"Stream" is full of symbols, strange writings (maybe because they are just upside down) and strange pictures.
And it has an astonishing lens flare (not hexagonal) running through an hyper-smooth tunnel.

Music is pounding, obsessive.

You don't have to try to understand mfx's demos. You just have to let them flow through you and be assimilated.

Blind/eufrosyne (1996)

With only six productions in the timespan of 2 years, eufrosyne is nothing less than a legend.
In 2 years, they managed to win Assembly, place in the higher slots of the most important parties, and write a masterpiece like "time zone + 13:00".

Blind *has* hexagonal lens flares. Yeah, almost 20 years before.

Blind has the usual circular distortions that are a watermark of Sucho (the same coder of Pandemic). And that "water" effect. You have to see it to belive and never forget it (again).

Public demand/purple (1999)

This intro has 4 metatoruses. Not 9, but 4 is good for old 1999.
And an impressive goa-ish module by rez, that compresses down to 21kb (size counts).
I don't know what's appealing in this one. Maybe the danish-style pointillized background or such. For sure, travelling through two concentric spheres filled with particles is trippy. We want purple and danish style back, that's for sure.



So?
Probably there is more of this. Write about your personal, forgotten pearl in the comments.
In the mean time, I'll go watch Stash for the 124th time, just to hear that synth bass resonating in my subwoofer again.

(Greetings to sublogic, purple, euthanasia, fudge, blasphemy, soopadoopa, inf, quad, acme, cryonics, excess, tpolm, dubius, cubic team, $een, complex, jamm, moottori, eufrosyne, orange, japotek, deathstar, coma, nooon, wildlight, valhalla, psychic link, realtech, astroidea, capacala, mfx, bug2fix, camorra, doomsday, trauma, TPOLM and everyone I forgot - you made the 90s rule, guys)

(pssst: as always, we've packed those 9 gems here for your pleasure and your laziness. Watch with dosbox)

posted by friol at 6/22/2014 09:40:00 AM - under: 64k, demo, demoscene, nineties - comments? here (4)

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