Demo for the demo competition at the Instanssi 2019 demoparty, held in Jyväskylä, Finland in march 2019. Won first place.
Again, it might run correctly in a browser but there might also be some sync issues (specifically in Chrome, in my experience). The cart runs just fine in PICO-8 itself, of course.
UPDATE: Now fixed for 0.1.12! Which means it won't run correctly in older versions anymore, since it depends on time() for sync.


Not just sync issues, Pico-8 crashed with an Out of Memory error for me while running it in Chrome on Windows. But it's DOPE AS HELL.
EDIT: Happens consistently when the words "The Future Is" appear.


@zep Wow. Thank you so much :)
@WingedRobot Thanks for the feedback! I'm not actually surprised there are memory issues as well, the demo precalculates very near 2 megabytes of data in _init() so any effect running just a bit too long without old data having been purged would probably cause the demo to crash. I'll have to make a habit of clearing out arrays as soon as they're not used in future demos.


This is amazing. What about turning it into a video and putting it on YouTube or something? Might expose more people to it


New to Pico-8 and yours was the second cart I pulled from the BBS – loved this! Had to run it a second time to see whether the sloganeering was procedural…😉


This message makes me sad and horrified. I will be disposed of callously, according to your edict.


@delphiusextempor I'm sorry if I made you feel distressed with my demo. If it helps, though, the message isn't really intended to be taken at face value.
I don't want to explain my demo too thoroughly, or get preachy here, but I find that technologically minded idealists don't always factor human beings into their idealism, and they sometimes fail to consider the far spreading social implications of their ideals. Also, those ideals sometimes walk hand in hand with blind libertarianism and laissez-faire capitalism.
This is what I was hoping to satirize with my demo.


@jobe The word "satire" is encouraging! There's no need to apologize for your excellent work. I was being a flaky pink wafer of raw nerves at the time of my comment. I can definitely see this demo playing on a vid screen for some Brotherhood of Nod training facility. I immediately thought of Mr. Wordsworth in The Twilight Zone: "I am a human being!"


@Trianull that's interesting, my experience with my own demos has been exactly opposite - ie. everything runs smoothly in the desktop software, but when I try to run them on a browser I get timing issues. Which browser are you using? I'd like to investigate if it runs my demos better than the others.
Overall, I'm using a lot of dirty tricks that abuse the stack, and unfortunately that seems to lead to performance issues on some platforms. I ran some of my earliest test effects on a PocketCHIP and some of them ran at a snail's pace. My guess is that the memory reading speed couldn't keep up, since I had problems with effects that used a lot of precalculated data in particular.


The elon musk part hasn't aged well, however this is a great piece of art
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