The c64 scene is a culture of its own. It welcomes new members, but always remind us of the past. Some has been in the game since the dawn of the mid-80s and others joined recently. This gives us continuity and common frames of references. For this reason we are a bunch of good friends, we share memories and allow ourselves some escapism for grown up men every now and then. When Intensity passed away in January it hit us hard as a community. We remember the tunes he composed, his comments in cyberspace and the chats we had at the nerd gatherings we visit. It is a very sad thing what has happened, but the show will go on. Intensity would certainly have wanted it to.

This year Vandalism News celebrates its 20th birthday. It was born as a brainchild of The Vengeance in Hobart in 1991 and has served the above mentioned society of ours with quality journalism since then. I first joined the staff in 1996 after having been let into Onslaught as a megaswapper and boardcruiser. Skills of trading that today, even in our out-of-date scene, for the most part is regarded obsolete. When too little of it is C*Base, calling cards and disk copying, and too much of it is instant messages in no more than 140 characters or even explained without letters in a video stream, it can for some be hard to focus on reading a magazine. That is what the internet risks doing to our brains, and here we present some medicine against the trend towards attention deficit.

The Opinion Poll investigates our attitudes towards oldskool multiplatforming and the questions were presented on the ascii votesheet sent out for The Charts. As the sheets were also handed out at the Datastorm event this time, there will also be The Charts on other platforms as a curiosity. No worries, this is a c64 diskmag, but it may be of interest to some to be introduced to what demos are good on all those other odd old machines out there. To make sure you receive the ascii votesheet for The Charts and with it the questions for the Opinion Poll for next issue, send an e-mail to macx64(at)nospam.gmail.

At Datastorm Archmage and I wandered around investigating the drinking habits when co-joined with SID music, and besides that there was a whole lot of Gubbdata performed. As we are geezers with old computers, Gubbdata alongside with Kalsongdata is a must (though not always at the same time). Now I would strongly encourage you to make it to the main menu and browse the contents of this fine issue of your favourite disk magazine.

Jonatan "Macx".