Pouët

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pouët, or pouet.net, is one of the largest comprehensive on-line directories for the demoscene today. The site was established in 2000 by Laurent “analogue” Raufaste and as of 2007 is maintained by a team headed by Filipe “ps” Cruz. The name “Pouët” comes from the French onomatopoeia for the trumpet sound.

While there are several archives and forums in existence (e.g. Scene.org), Pouet.net is unique in that it offers screenshots and commentary on each multimedia production or software tool (“Prods”) and links to an external URL where that file may be found, rather than storing the file locally. Pouët does not cater to any one specific hardware or software platform, listing prods for Commodore 64, Atari, Amiga, Linux, MS-DOS, Windows, and even game consoles and handheld PDAs.

The site was hosted on a private server for two years, when it became apparent that the current hosting wasn’t capable of handling Pouët’s considerable traffic load. In July 5, 2002, Pouët was officially moved to the servers of Scene.org and continues to remain there since.

On June 21, 2006, Pouët was “cracked” by tongue-in-cheek demogroup Limp Ninja, when visitors were unexpectedly redirected to a “cracktro” website. The actual “crack” turned out to be a minor exploit of the lack of parsing HTML entities in BBS topics, thus allowing HTML tags or even JavaScript to be placed on the main site - the trick, hence, didn’t affect users with JavaScript disabled or JavaScript-incapable browsers.

[edit] The “oldskool pouët.net bbs”

While useful as a resource to research or locate demoscene-related files, Pouët also hosts a notorious Internet forum (a self-proclaimed BBS of sorts) for discussions, with a high amount of spam/trolling threads. While there are no administrating supervisors on this forum, and no general rules, even the most deranged threads maintain some demoscene-relevance. There exists, however, a highly descriptive (and quite humorous) warning from the maintainer in the bottom of the BBS sub-page.

[edit] Memes

As any other infamous Internet forum, the Pouët BBS also gave home to various demoscene memes, which, given the sociocentric nature of the demoscene, eventually crept into various demoscene parties and gatherings, or sometimes even into productions.

Perhaps the most popular Pouët-meme is currently “BASS”, a phenomenon that spawned from the RNO intro Wessyde, released at Assembly 2004. The intro featured heavy ad nauseam sampling of the beginning word of Public Enemy's hit single Bring the Noise, and immediately became a repeated word at the party. The Pouët prod-page of the intro immediately escalated into a “BASS-fest” after everyone kept pasting images which were somehow related to bass, be it the fish, the low frequency, or the instrument.

Another currently popular meme is “the Pouët pig”, which started out as a curiosity thread about why the rating system on pouet contains an icon of a pig for a neutral vote, next to the thumbs up and down. In generic Pouët-manner, the thread was soon flooded with pictures of pigs until a comic of a pig complaining to an electric socket appeared (in the original German cartoon, the pig says Komm raus, Du feige Sau – approx. translation Come out of there, you cowardly pig, obviously making a visual pun on the fact that a pig's nose somewhat resembles a wall socket). Users would first change the contents of the speech bubble to various humorous messages, then later, would continue photoshopping the pig first onto other bizarre situations within the contents of the original cartoon, but eventually montaging the pic with other demoscene related pictures such as photos or demo screenshots. The thread became vastly popular, and after several users entitled the thread as “the best thread on pouet ever”, the pig eventually became an unofficial Pouët mascot, appearing in logos and even in a production, regardless of no one really knowing who drew the original comic. The original artist was later revealed to be the German cartoonist Tetsche.

[edit] External links

• pouet.net website
• Surviving Pouet, a critical article by the members of Threestate, published in the disk magazine PAiN