Inteview with Cesium
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Diskmagazine interviews | Balance Bad Karma - Candyman - Casket - ... | a11/93 added 6/96 |
INTERVIEW WITH CESIUM TODAY'S PORTRAIT: CESIUM / BALANCE Written by D'fence / Balance He started at the bottom, this now so famous editor of Upstream. After living eleven years of his life without a computer, he suddenly became the proud owner of a Commodore 64. For a small fee, he would let the other kids play, but 'Frode's Gamehall' never became the big hit he had expected it to be. After a few years of playing games on his 64, he bought himself an Amiga. And continued to play, in more colors and better resolution. But something more important happened these days: Frode was born again - this time he was given the name 'Front Soldier'. Fascinated by wonderful demos with bobs and colorbars, he and a friend started a computergroup they called 'Frogs'. The first three letters came from his name, and the last two, were collected from his friend, GS. Together with this mysterious person carrying the mysterious name, he went to his first computerparty... - GS and I carried all our computer equipment from our home town Stavanger to the small Norwegian place called Hisøy outside Arendal. Wow! What a party it was! Almost 300 people gathered in a "huge" gym hall. The two groups IMP-666 and No Limits were the arrangers, and I remember we were quite shy and embarrased about being there in the first place, knowing little about the scene and not knowing anyone. We rigged up our equipment, and sat down in front of our machine and pretended to be doing something serious, like all the others seemed to do. GS loaded his DPaint and started painting some totally ugly green "frogs" in an animation (notice the ""'s) I remember GS told me not to attract too much attention, not to go around telling who we were, but just sit down and keep quiet. Some time before this I had started to swap a bit with some then unknown people (Hi Drain/Orient!) so I decided to walk around asking some guys if they had some new stuff which I could copy. "Yes, we have, but not for you!" was the answer. Gee, I felt good about this... If you didn't know, the famous "Hunt for the 7th October" by Cryptoburners won the demo competition at this party. And then you decided to make your own demos? - Oh no, since the only member except me was Corporal Clegg, a musician (we actually competed in the music compo with one of his tunes!) we didn't have any coder to make demos for the group. But after this, GS started packing - only cli-menus of course, with the "rainbow"-background utility... :-D When he was bored, I took over most of the work and we started the famous (!?!) Swamp-compilations. These contained various stuff from time to time and included utilities, demos and other snack for each issue. Frogs didn't get a coder until one year later when Beez teamed up with us. The first thing he started on was to code a selector for my pack serie. After half a year, it was ready. (Beez = Lazy) What a great thing! A "real" production from FROGS! With a logo on the top, music and my own scrolltexts! Gee, that was one big moment, I can tell you. The autumn of '91 you bought a high speed modem and some months later you recieved the now so famous bill. You must have known that this bill would come, so why didn't you take it a little easier? - Ehh... Well, I hadn't expected it to be THAT large (10000,- NOK), I thought it would perhaps be half of this amount. But you know, modeming is like narcotics for me - I just CAN'T stop when I'm first at it... hehe... So, what's so fun about it? - I know you are quite bored with it, but I always have a lot of fun when I have a modem connected to my machine.. I chat with lots of people, download stuff from the boards and so on. The difference is of course big from 2400 to 14400 bps... I tried a bit to be among the top uploaders on my favorite boards and I dialed foreign bbs'es quite a lot, among them our then Irish HQ called "Forbidden Planet". That's why the bill grew that big!!! I had to sell the modem to cover the expences. Some weeks later you decided that Frogs should release a diskmag, with yourself as the main-editor. You were at this time quite bankrupt. Did you see the mag-project as a way out of your financial problems? - Haha, no not at all. It started with 3-4 newsletters as plain textfiles about recent changes in the group. We included a couple of articles, and I launched the idea of making an official diskmag instead of this internal one. I can't actually say that the response was overwhelming, but anyway I decided to go on with this and the project grew bigger and bigger. At last, approximately half a year later, the first issue of Upstream was ready. You all know the rest of the story. I didn't make Upstream to earn money, (isn't that what they all say?) but because I've always been very interested in doing my own papers / magazines. Another reason was to make Frogs (and myself) more known in the scene and all which that brings. Frogs became a little more known after the first issue, but then all members suddenly joins Balance. Why? - It happened a couple of weeks before easter 1993 - I'm beginning to forget the details about it actually, but I think it was after I had read Magbox #4. I had been thinking for a while about a possible merge with some other diskmag. The group Balance and their diskmag seemed to be a suitable choice, I felt that they were more or less on the same level as us. A merge could mean that we'd get twice the support on the mag, a new, strong and powerful group with more coders. This would again lead to more frequent releases of high quality productions. I then picked up the phone and dialed Wolfman of Balance DK. Fortunately, he was very interested and after some hours on the phone the next days we had figured out most of the management on how we were going to work it out. The week after came The Gathering 93 where we got the chance to meet each other and discuss various things in person. Balance were represented with more than 10 members on the party, so we had an internal meeting in the cafeteria and brought up different topics about the merging between the groups and the diskmags. How do you think the future for Balance and Upstream will be like? - Our goal is to make Upstream the best diskmag in the scene. We're constantly trying to improve the mag in all ways, both its contents and looks. Furthermore, I think I have all my members behind my back when I say that Balance is going to be a so-called legend in the scene. Our artists are working seriously and professionally (without loosing the fun!) with future projects to entertain the other scene freaks out there. We enjoy what we're doing, and I hope it shows! What about yourself? How will your private life be like? - How detailed do you want it? ;-) Everything except the juicy details.. - About my love life? OK, no I'll try to be serious here, since that's what you want. The BIG project I'll be occupied with in the next months, will be the opening of my own Bulletin Board System. I estimate the opening date will be January 1st, 1994. The board will be completely different from all others around this planet, and it will be the best. Believe me. D'fence (you!?) will be the co-sysop, and we have great many ideas for the running of it. It's going to be run on an A4000/030, 16.8k and 400+ MB harddrive. The system hardware is not the most important though, every serious user of the Amiga should buy a modem and log on to Omaha Thunder. Await more details in the next issues of Upstream. Another aspect worth mentioning here, is that I'm planning to move away from home around this period of time. I'm having some internal problems with my parents, especially when it comes to modems and stuff like that (My father, quote: There shall never more be a modem in this house!), so... If I get that blunt D'fence to go and rent an appartement together with me it'll be quite awesome. Imagine the atmosphere we'd make with all our equipment! The BBS would be the main attraction, plus we have a great deal of sound equipment to boost. Besides that, I'm going to work a lot this year - to save up money for computer equipment and for later studies. The plan is to go to the states around 1995 to study journalism in Florida. As many of you know, I'm exercising quite a lot, Chagall and I are practising Jiu Jitsu together, and perhaps I'll get the chance of going for the black belt next May. Let's see what life brings! I've got business to make... Ok, we'll stop here. Thanks. - D'fence