Mekka/Symposium 2002 report	April 8th, 2002
Thanks to Deez / Mind Design for typing this report! Mekka-Symposium 2002 Mekka.. biggest sceneparty of them all, no gamers, no warez and no leeching. All during easter in a small town in Germany. Is it worth attending? That was the question I think we all asked us before going there. For me the trip started like a nightmare, SAS (the airline, not the special forces) lost my luggage on my way from UK to Sweden, luckily I was able to borrow sleepingbags and airbeds from other atarisceners at the party. We had our own table reserved for the atariscene only, room for about 10-15 computers near the entrance and surrounded by PCs and the occasional c64. We had already planned to do some sort of demo so work started immediatly. However, since I didnt bring any sources at all I couldnt contribute very much but in the end we managed to finish atleast a short 96kbtro. About 1400 sceners had found their way to Fallingbostel this year, mostly PC users and not as many amigas as I had expected. A few c64s and about 20 atariusers. Personally I expected a lot of sceneactivity with C/asm sourcecodes on every other monitor and I was very disappointed to find the usual 'partyscenario' with porn/warez leeching and drunk/stoned people. Most annoying thing was (not surprisingly) the polish 'sceners', they kept drinking and running around with a polish flag. I spoke to a few other sceners (PC) and they were well pissed off because of them. 1400 is a huge amount of people, stuck in one big hall but a lot of people were interested in atari and falcondemos which was a nice surprise, I wish more atariusers had attended the party. During the party I was very negativ towards going there again but now I have almost changed my mind, I dont mind attending Mekka again, as long as more of us go there. If we can boost some 50 atariusers I'm sure the organizers would let us participate in amigacompos if we wanted to. This is our chance to show the rest of the scene that atari is still alive! deez / mind-design

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