Interview with Adok

We decided to interview Adok, not because we wanted to present his personality to you once again (you have probably read many interviews with him by now), but because we wanted to... well, you will see.

Q: What were the first reactions on the release of Hugi #20?

A: As always, there were first mostly very short comments and one-liners on IRC - hugi rocks, hugi rules, hugi ownz, and of course, but seldom, hugi sucks, mostly intended to provoke the others. Of course I couldn't expect long comments on individual articles such a short time after the release. If anybody would claim on that day he had already finished reading the mag then I'd have to be sure he either lied or hadn't read it thoroughly at all.

On the first day, serious, valuable criticism was only expressed concerning the size-to-text-ratio. Indeed Hugi 20 was pretty huge to download, 3.8 megs packed, which mostly was due to the music. Unfortunately I had promised two musicians to use their tunes in this issue; in one case actually I had already promised almost two years ago that I'd use this tune as soon as it would be possible to play .it tunes in Hugi. .it support had been implemented in issue 16, yet I hadn't used the tune. Now I hadn't been able to postpone it any more, I had to use it in Hugi 20. I've sworn no more to promise that anything will be used in a particular issue.

Only with time I got more extensive comments on individual articles; some authors have also told me about the feedback they themselves got on their texts, so I guess most people who wanted to give feedback just clicked on the author's name in the article.

Q: Do you broken break promises?

A: Erm, what do you mean?

Q: Well, you said you used the .it tune in Hugi 20 although you promised to use it as soon as technology would allow it, and that was already the case a year ago. For me this is a broken promise.

A: Hugi is free of charge, neither do we earn money with it nor does any contributor financially profit of his contribution being used in Hugi. So there was no damage for anybody in this case. Besides, the original version of the tune was not that optimal and thus wouldn't have been a good advertisement for the composer. I think the author noticed it himself, which is why he sent me a new version short before the release of Hugi 20.

Q: Blah blah. Fiddlesticks. - How many hours do you work on Hugi per day?

A: Usually about 2 hours, during holidays of course much more. This also includes replying to emails (i.e. organizing and keeping contact with the contributors), not just writing and editing articles. What I did exactly on which day you'll be able to read in my diary about the making of Hugi 21 which I'll publish in the mag.

Q: That's lazy, shame on you. The mag would certainly be better if you worked 12 hours or more a day on it during the whole year. - You talked about editing, does this mean you change the contents of other people's articles?

A: Not at all! I just correct grammatical and spelling mistakes, and format the articles (that is, include the control tokens for paragraph alignment, italic texts etc.). Sometimes I also stumble across sentences which seem not to make sense, logical mistakes and other grave things. In this case I contact the author and we discuss what was meant. I propose him how I'd re-write these parts, but I'll fix this only if he agrees. Don't worry, the article remains his.

Q: But in Hugi #20 you commented some articles at the end, e.g. my own one. That's bad. - What gives you the right to write about the scene at all? Can you code, pixel or make music?

A: If your Mohammed Napoleon calls himself a coder, then I definitely am one, too. :) Just read the tutorials I wrote about Assembler and C programming, and keep in mind I've won the Pain coding competition. Also remember I coded the engines of Hugi up to issue 11 myself. Due to my editing work, I just don't have so much time to code now.

Apart from that, I am of the opinion that even people who never coded or produced "art" have the right to express their opinion in the scene media.

Q: Har har. We know you're only really good at BASIC coding. It doesn't matter you won a size coding compo, because all the other 30 people who took part were lamers anyway. BTW, this inspires me to another question... - Do you ever steal ideas? For example, what about the Hugi Size Coding Competition, isn't the idea a rip-off of the Pain Size Coding Competition you just talked about?

A: I guess I have to answer this question in a different style... How many ideas did you "steal"? You "stole" the idea of making a diskmag and the rumour & political "news" corner concepts from other mags. I wouldn't call this stealing though, it's rather inspiration. After all the actual contents of your mag's sections vary from the original sections, our compo series has different tasks than Pain's, and so on. Where would the demoscene be now if nobody were allowed to get inspired from somebody else? Probably nobody would make demos then except one group as they would say, "hey, we made the first demo, all others who want to make demos have stolen our idea and this is not allowed". And we might thus still be at the level of text-scroller-demos.

Q: Do you ever censor articles?

A: I publish almost everything I get. Only in a few cases I recommend the author that it'd be better not to publish his article, because of poor or anti-democratic contents.

Q: You're not very consistent then. I remember having read a pro-communism article in some Hugi issue written by a guest writer, and another one in which some dude said the scene needed a Mussolini-like scener. Besides, by not censoring you get all sorts of crap-articles in the mag. - We won't ask you about El Afghano because we don't want to give you the possibility to attack you. So thanks for being masochistic enough to let yourself be interviewed by us, and bye.

Interview done by Afghanbashi

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