Berlin Review: LAN Party | Hacker News Reader

Berlin Review: LAN Party

032c.com

87 pointskeiferski37 comments

>And when every other aspect of your life is being increasingly optimized by and for others, it is a small revolutionary act to be inconvenient.

That hit me. People often ask me why I do things so "inconvenient". Why do I not order everything online? Why do I not regularly order Pizza, but literally go into the restaurant (alone)? In short: Why do I sometimes (not always) take the long, hard route? Why do I scroll through the Gigabytes of Music on my HDD, to search for little gems, then to just let spotify recommend me the next best thing?

I think the answer, for me, is to just live in that moment and enjoy it. People often complain that they don't have enough time, but there is plenty of time, you just have to use it. Yes it can be inconvenient, but it feels liberating for me, even if it's on a very very small scale. Be more inconvenient.

I really love that quote, too. A few friends and I have been talking about going back to "dumb" phones again, just because they were more fun. Same vein.

Funnily enough, we're all in Berlin.

I tried that too, but it's just not practical. Even just going without gApps is difficult, but doable. Having some sort of encrypted messenger (like Signal) seems kinda necessary in times like these, especially to communicate with others who do not have the same mindset.

My solution is to have as few Apps as possible (I mainly use my smartphone just for texts and calls) and """just""" stop using it all the time, even just leave it at home on purpose sometimes. My screen time is well under 1h per day and that feels really good. I even resist having my mail accounts on my phone, which has two reasons: Not checking it all the time and a little bit security, since no one could access them if i'd lose my phone.

Oh, also one main factor for me was music. I am just very very sensitive to noises around me, especially when programming, so I need to have my NC headphones on while at work. Otherwise I'd go crazy.

Portland Oregon has PDXLAN https://www.pdxlan.net/site/

Edit: I found this also https://www.lanreg.org/ a website for registering LAN parties :)

There is a YouTube video on some of the technical aspects from Fall 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgtwA-N3eH0

Not sure if they did one in Spring 2023??

From the website:

What is PDXLAN?

PDXLAN is a PC gaming event near Portland, Oregon. Over a thousand PC gamers from around North America unite together and bring their computers to play video games with one another for four days while raising money for charity. Our goals are best described in our tag line: “Have fun, Frag hard, Give back.”

PDXLAN events are four days long, host multiple in game contests, analog contests, BYOC tournaments, Sponsor presentations, and raffles.

LAN parties were such a product of their time. Before high-speed bandwidth was ubiquitous (ADSL was just starting to spread). Before e-sports, and the skyrocketing of skill (ie when I could still have fun playing CS with friends without getting obliterated). Before all the AAA games were primarily online...

Perhaps my appreciation then was also a product of my age, and I've outgrown what they've become?

That's definitely some nostalgia there. Well except the last pic with the two girls. All the in person LANs I've attended were 100% male.

LTX still has a LAN I believe so not entirely dead.

I very much miss LAN parties. Analogous to meets in car culture, they where a fun place to show off your rig and see others. You diffused knowledge about hardware, software, and strategies, but not just about games. You had an opportunity to get support on tricky problems or help others. You got to lose yourself in your obsession with other people at or above your level, in a way you couldn’t in other social interactions. It could even lead to career opportunities. It’s no surprise that the two scenes I was heavily into (punk rock/hardcore/metal and LAN clubs) shared a DIY aesthetic.

The cherry on top was actually gaming and competition. Very little beats the satisfaction of dominating and actually seeing several people across the room react.

I still love building PCs. But today, when I finish a build, I feel a little sad I won’t be showing it off at the monthly LAN party. I’ve tried to reengage but between problems mentioned in the article and all the complications of adulthood, I’ve failed to recapture the experience.

Can definitely relate to all of these aspects. Something else, along the car culture scene, people come out of the woodwork with some of the most incredible builds.

The first time I saw sub zero cooling in person was at a LAN. A local air conditioning installer had made a cube of pipes and radiators with a long shielded hose. At the end the easily recognizable, polished flat copper plate.

Me, turning up with my Thermaltake water cooling kit thinking I had something worth showing off.

Was an amazing community and pretty happy to have shared in the brief moment. Loved it so much, I bought the book.

Dallas has two LAN groups that host decent sized parties.

Quakecon, the most formidable, is back this year in early August for the first time since 2019. Several thousand seats.

And LAN All Night which is a few hundred seats, more quirky, but friendly. Two LANs a year.

LAN parties are still really fun. In the age of online gaming, it still helps to go in with friends and have some idea of what games you want to play for several hours at a time.

If you're a game or but never have experience a LAN party, it's worth hauling your shit out to one! Bring a sweater.

Some ambience from Quakecon - https://youtu.be/SVfdVXxTOj0

Would love to play Quake 1 again in person, it was my first LAN party game. I occasionally hop online to the Quake 1 remake, but it seems mostly dead though I have met some cool people who just want to drink a beer and have a good time. I can’t hit the broad side of a barn these days and spend most of my time dying.

About every quarter, I get together with a group of friends a few hours away and we have an all-weekend LAN party. They all live in the same area, and have wives & kids so usually people are in and out as their schedule permits, but we all hole in up a house and play games for a few days. It's fantastic.

It's also allowed me to completely deal with any video game addict urges that I get. If I feel the urge to start playing some recently released game, I just tell myself "Ah, I'll play it at LAN", and then I don't need to play in the moment. The urge goes away. So now I only play 2 days a quarter at LANs (maybe 8 days a year total), whereas previously years of my life would go into games. It's been a hugely positive thing for me.

meta: something is going wrong with this web page for me (Firefox Android) where it stops letting me scroll about 10 seconds after the page finishes loading. I'm really curious what it's doing.

there's an embedded pop-up message that asks you to accept (cookies or something, I clicked too fast to read). the element may not have displayed on mobile

Firefox Android here as well. Works normally for me. Are you running ublock?

Also, all the images seem to have some sort of extreme blur filter applied (both in the URL parameter and as a CSS filter) which I suspect might be removed by some script that I've blocked. I don't know what effect they were going for, and it's nothing my filtering proxy can't fix with some regex, but this is quite user-hostile; on par with hiding all the content with a display:none and using JS later on the page to remove it.

It's a common thing nowadays to lazy load the images, and show a low-res blurred one while it's still loading.

If only browsers didn't drop support for LOWSRC all those years ago!

Had to google what lowsrc was, interesting... Well, apparently they advice now to use progressive JPEG images.

Yeah on Firefox on desktop (with uBO) scrolling doesn't work, and Reader Mode didn't have any of the content, so I just closed the tab. There's plenty of less user-hostile websites to read.

I loved LAN parties growing up. One benefit I don't see mentioned often, virtually everyone, even kids who had no interest at all in tech, knew how to setup a router, basic network config, and install Windows (because inevitably for some reason at least one person's entire setup died immediately at every LAN party.)

I have so many memories of lan parties turning into reformatting parties. or everyone huddled around one person's case, trying to get theyre new video card installed.

Your comment made me smile - so true!

Or inevitably, someone would be running a DHCP server on their machine for their home network and plug into the (flat) LAN, and somewhere mid-party, suddenly half the machines would drop out as their leases expired and they renewed off the rogue.

I hosted a LAN party, and due to space limitations, we had people upstairs and downstairs on two sides of the house. We were using Coax for Ethernet, and used a T-Piece located in the stairwell and some long cables to branch the network in the three directions we needed it to run (upstairs, living room, dining room). How this ever even worked still remains a mystery to me, but I suspect poorly is probably the answer.

I blame troubleshooting of these issues as the reason I ultimately ended up with a career in networking.

No doubt, doing a job badly is almost always a prerequisite for doing it better.

That's the fun right there.

The voodoo, the how the hell it's actually working without knowing how.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=vQ5MA685ApE

Funny. Makes me think of the "pets vs cattle" analogy. That server is for sure a "pet".

Very nostalgia inducing photos!

Hoping on the train for raising awareness of LAN Parties:

- MAGFest (Maryland) : Non-profit festival with a huge LAN center with tournaments and prizes. Non-profit too.

- DreamHack (Atlanta/Dallas) : Probably one of the most well known, but still has their BYOC areas at every event.

Anyone have any others?

LANWAR (Louisville, KY): https://lanwar.com 25 years going strong.

Insomnia iSeries [1]

Epic.lan [2]

Are the main two in the UK which have been running for yonks.

[1] http://insomniagamingfestival.com

[2] https://www.epiclan.co.uk/

And if you want to mix a LAN party alongside cool graphics programming tricks, there are still Assembly, Revision and a couple of others ones across Europe.

to this day i still havent had the kind of gaming experience I had as a teen in a LAN cafe playing Left 4 Dead with my buddies in the early 2000s. Was shocked to come to America and find that they're not a thing in the US. y'all missed out. There's something tribal and guttural about hooting and hollering over every victory and loss and taunting and screen sniping your friends IRL.

There were a couple my city in the late 90s and early 2000s. I remember playing Unreal Tournament and Counter Strike with my friends there in high school. None lasted very long though.

In high school through about 2010 I helped organize LAN parties. It was an underground thing. We had our own caching servers and networking equipment so two dozen rigs wouldn't overwhelm our hosts' internet. It was as much about sharing warez, helping each other with tech, trading parts for our rigs and hanging out as it was about the games. We'd go thirty hours straight then sleep it off for a whole day. Fantastic memories and some of the people from that scene were later my professional colleagues.

This has to be the first website I ever encountered that hijacks Wheel events and prevents me from scrolling with my mouse wheel :/

Never thought I'll see 032c on hacker news

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