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)

(warning: this post is [not-so] oldskool)

The other constant push of demoscene, besides the possibility to fit as much as possible into executables of ridicolous dimensions (see the 4ks) is going beyond hardware limits, push known also as "hacking".

The "hacking" therm, more than indicating the fraudulent incursion in a bank terminal or in other informatic system (as nowadays press seems to think), means instead having some hardware and making with it something generally considered impossible on that platform or something for which that platform was not created.

The 4ks and all the production with kbyte size are certainly a form of "hacking".

But there are episodes in the scene where the results obtained hacking the hardware are much more impressive.

For example, IBM PC has an internal speaker apparently capable of reproducing only squeaks and gurgles (you'll probably remember the first, deafening, PC games).

Well, in 1990 the legendary Future Crew release the first intro where they start to do something serious. This intro, "Yo!", plays digital music from the PC speaker. How do they do that?

It's "easy": PC speaker is linked to a power source that emits only 5V and 0V voltages. The 5V voltage brings the PC speaker cone to the maximum extension, while the 0V one brings it to rest. But, what would happen if something stopped the cone actually before reaching full 5V position? Obviously we are talking of million-th of second intervals, but thanks to this technique, the limits of PC speaker are actually surpassed, and the "internal squeaker" becomes able to reproduce digital samples.

Back in 1992, the same group, the Future Crew, brings down another barrier. The most common videocard at that time was VGA (do you remember Tseng ET3000?), whose chipset was able to display up to 256 colours.

With a technique called "copper" (from the Amiga chip with the same name) or, more commonly, "raster effect", in the "Unreal" megademo, they manage to put thousands of colours simultaneously on the screen. Is this magic? Is this real?

That's how it works: in VGA videocards, the 256 colours are stored in a sort of table called "palette", and the card reads this table when displaying something on the screen. The Future Crew coders intercept the electronic beam when it's passing from one line of the screen to another, and they change the palette actually when the beam is switching lines (and not drawing anything).
Again, the demoscene coders "stopped" time (the videocard refreshes the display at least 60 times a second, and it shows at least 200 lines in a screen. So the code that switches the palette has to run in a 10.000th of second timeframe).

That technique is not a novelty, anyway: it was used already on Amiga itself, and even on C64, when it gave the possibility to show more than the 8 sprites the hardware designers had planned, or even to do the famous "border opening" effect.

Sometimes, unfortunately, the hacking ideas start to lessen, since technology evolution surpasses those barriers that were introduced for cost reasons or simply because time wasn't mature yet. At that point, the democoders do a step backwards and try to put some limitations themselves. What would happen, for example, if we tried to do a demo without hi-resolution graphic modes, not even 320x200?

The textmode demos are the answer. Textmode demos don't use, as said, high resolution modes (the ones where every single pixel is addressed separately), but just stick with text modes, where the atomic graphical element is, indeed, a character. Feel limited? Not for the democoders: using the special graphic chars of the charset and the 16 different EGA colours, they create effects that recall trustfully the ones used in high-res demos and, more than else, having to draw less "pixels", they can produce more complex effects.

Sometimes the difference between textmode and high-res effects is highly thin: in the "Textro" demo by OTM, there is a scene with wireframe solids. The OTM's coder had first to explain the algorithm (remap the charset at every frame) and then even release the source code to the effect, because noone was believing that effect was textmode!

The same trick (textmode) is used in the recent "8088 corruption" demo, just to do realtime video on a 4.77Mhz IBM PC (!).

Do you remember any other hardware tricks that made "impossible" things possible on a computer? Write them in the comments!

posted by friol at 9/10/2007 01:00:00 AM - under: copper, hacking, textmode - comments? here (11)

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