Do go to a site like pouet.net, and recalibrate yourself based on what people were doing way back toward the genesis of the scene, when there weren't any demo competitions and it was just a few guys fooling around with stuff for hack value.

Compare a hack like this to what people were doing back when even something like copper bars was seen as being pretty cool. Don't compare people doing the equivalent of display hacks using a relatively new technology to what the culture around display hacks grew into after several decades of active fermentation. That'd be right up there with poo-pooing a local recreational sports league because the players aren't as good as what you're used to seeing in the professional leagues on TV.

I assumed that there were even neater HTML/CSS hacks on that site, but couldn't find them. Are there any? It's pretty hard to navigate the site.

looked at pouet.net. Not sure what I'm supposed to be seeing?

Ok fair point I shouldn't have been so glib as puet is pretty horrible from a web design standpoint.

It's a website for the demoscene, where people do stuff like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqu_IpkOYBg in 177 kilobytes.

Thanks for following up. I had assumed you were talking about some aspect of the site's design so I just looked through the html for a couple minutes before giving up. And now I'm too busy being impressed to feel like a dumbass

They do that complete render in 177kb...? I remember crack intros but that's insane. Is this in C?

I don't get the fascination with Farbrausch. While I respect and admire the feat which I'm unable to pull of myself, there are comparatively much better realisations both in terms of art and technique. See the following 64k demos:

- chaos theory - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfuierUvx1A

- turtles all the way down - sub dream https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z48t2R2hEJM

- the timeless — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwFVlNytq0Q

- turtles all the way down - brain control - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBKmqkh9bb8

Rewatching those reminded me of how phenomenal Demovibes 9 is: http://www.demovibes.org/dv_info.htm

As far as the Farbrausch comment, I think the appeal of Debris, in particular, is the stunning audio component of the demo. Chaos Theory is beautiful, but the audio/video components don't feel as tightly integrated as some of Farbrausch's work.

C++, maybe a little assembly, and lots of shader code.

Took me about five seconds to read the first post. It's a site for the demo scene.