The Gathering 2001

Written by Stein Magnus Jodal
Published 22 April 2001

Yes, I did it again. We, katmai, tripod and I, went to The Gathering 2001 - a cyberspace odyssey. Still known as the world largest LAN party. There is no exact official number of attendees, but i would guess that about 4500 nerds were present this easter. Five days and four nights of whatever-you-want: playing, coding, modding, leeching, trading and so on.

I am still holding on to the fact I embraced one year ago: that the most important thing on LAN parties are the social aspect. TG is social in many ways; the registration-queues, the toilet-queues and the IRC-channels. The mix of people from very many and different social classes, which all share a interest in computers.

It is said that TG00 was a bit quiet, TG01 was really quiet, considering there where 4500 people there. Due to the strict restrictions, more and more people bring their headsets instead of blasting stereos. I can understand the crew enforcing this, but it takes a bit of the fun out of it. LANs are meant to be noisy. After all, it's a party.
At the end of the third night the Net-crew tried to do something with the soundlevel. They launched a contest between the western and eastern parts of the hall. The side which pushed the volume button hardest was allowed to keep their network. Results were achieved. The soundlevel rose up to new hights together with the atmosphere, and the sleeping people woke up for a new day.

Compos

The gaming compos are probably not going to disappear in the near future. This year almost 2000 people divided into 500 clans fragged eachother in the Counter-Strike compo. Team9 won 4on4 in both the CS and Q3A compo.

Scene compos
If people just could learn to respect the hard work behind the demos and turn of their loudspeakers everything would be nice. Though, TG is a party for everybody, not like The Assembly (Finland), The Party (Denmark) and Mekka (Germany) which are Mekkas for sceners. The Java demo disappeared, probably because they didn't get any/enough submissions. Some friends and myself won the wild compo for a four min long video we made for a school project some month's ago. This was the first time I attended a scene compo, and it will not be my last :)

Modding

A new thing at TG this year, was the casemod compo. Lots of cases where submited. It was most certainly a success. katmai got his casepic taken, but a guy with homemade case with a glasscage for his scorpion on the top won. The prize was an all-plexi-case from 3DfxCOOL.

Overall, modding has become a popular thing the last year. I will guess that you could find at least one not-normal-case at each row. Also, people are bringing in lots of other weird stuff, like ice-cream-men and inflatable aliens. I also noticed that not to few people have gone over to the Addtronics 789x instead of AOpen Hx08.

Internet and network

The Internet connection this year was about 48 Mbit. Last year it was 34 Mbit. Most people was satisfied with both the Inet and the net. I, though, and probably lots of other people sitting on the same switch as large fileservers, which are beeing leeched at 90 Mbps 24/7, wasn't to happy with it. It's nice to be close to the fileserver so you can leech at high speeds, but you can live without it when you already have what you want, and the owner of the fileserver lives nearby.

Physical Education for Nerds

This year, again, Norske Nerder (Norwegian Nerds) hosted some physical education for nerds. Don't know what to say about that, but it's just wrong. If you want, you can train what-ever-you-want one of the 51 other weeks each year. NN, go hide in a corner.

Stage entertainment

Throughout the party there was entertainment on the stage, each night around 2100, starting with an impressive opening ceremony on wednesday. Dancers came... how should I put it? ...dancing down from the roof while an enormous loudspeaker-set syncronized everyone's heartbeat. The other climax was when Wymen performed at Friday. The three girls in Wymen, and all the other performers, are interested in computers too, in opposite to last years guest: Swedish Tess (formerly La Cream).

For more information visit The Gathering at www.gathering.org.
Thanks to Christian Tellefsen (Homesite) for the pictures.

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