Today, Happyfish – again of Mistigris (after a detour to Hallucigenia and many, many years off for good behavior) – found out how her Mist-representing contribution to the ANSI art competition at the NVScene 2015 demoparty in San Jose, California placed, in the presence of God and RaDMaN (supposing the two don’t cancel each other out.)  It’s the first time we’ve fielded an entry at a demoparty in … quite some time … and it’s a peculiar, polarized time to be competing in that particular category.

The demo folks who thought that making fireworks by speaking directly to their CPU in 640 bytes of assembler was an excellent passtime in 1995 have only honed their already-narrow focus in the interim, optimising their algorithms down to 16 bytes and throwing in phong shading!  Their concern has matured from vintage to classic.  The ranks of the textmode enthusiasts, on the other hand, have withered and been almost totally dispersed since the glory days of textmode being the natural environment of the dominant operating stystem (or the desktop computer being the dominant computing device, for that matter!) and the only ones left standing are basically cast-iron titans of visual art who could take an atomic bomb hit and still come out the other end of the mushroom cloud crafting heartbreaking pixelated portraiture with no equal across the entire history of the artform.  At the 2014 instalment of the long-running Evoke German demoparty, Blocktronics – basically the Serpentor of the ANSI scene, constituted of the DNA of all its cruellest despots – released the WTF4 megajoint, a 4636-line (!) ANSI created as a collaboration between 24 artists from 10 different countries, scrolling as tall as a 7-story house.

Happyfish, conversely, picked up an unfinished work-in-progress from 1998 and polished it off in an afternoon for kicks after 17 years of getting rusty.  But maybe Blocktronics would still be recovering from St. Patrick’s overindulgence and wouldn’t bring their A-game to the competition?  It was anyone’s guess.  Happyfish took the ANSI gold at Crash 1997, as the only serious entrant.  Here, six of the eight contenders are unfeeling Blocktronics ANSIbots, more machine than men, guaranteed statistically to dominate no less than 72% of the competition by weight.  Cut them, and they bleed a stream of red F10 characters at a steady rate.

…

It was a foregone conclusion: her nostalgic piece (even by 1998 standards!) placed last, but only by a margin of four votes.  In a field such as this, it was an honour simply to be a contender!  The top three places were all roundly well-earned, and as for the remainder, it was simply down to a matter of taste.  If you like, you can ruin your appetite on the whole sumptuous menu, or if you can find it in you to contain yourself, wait for Happyfish’s plucky-yet-underperforming contest entry (we just show its FILE_ID.DIZ, silly!) to appear in our second annual revival collection in October of 2015… but there is much to release and much to analyse here before then!

(Coming “soon”: an overview of historical Mistigris demoparty performance.)

           Here’s a post for St. Patrick’s Day.  There can’t be much explicitly Irish-themed ANSI artwork out there, but this must be the strangest item atop that small pile.  It’s an early work (from MIST0195, our 4th artpack) from Nitnatsnoc, SysOp of our WHQ The Screaming Tomato BBS (an eventual post subject of its own, in progress), who got Cthulu into the local small-press minicomics of eg. Ian Boothby (and moving on himself, so we could never discuss them!) and whose sister serendipitously ended up being a comics professional (creating Yokaiden and putting in some art duties on The Simpsons Comics.)

           Nitty (the full handle, an inversion of “Constantin” from a French Immersion social studies word-jumble, was such a mouthful of apparent gibberish that a cutesy shorthand was inevitable) was a scene outsider, always his own agent even when holding membership in (reverse chronology) Avenge, ACiD, Integrity, Mistigris, or the local no-pack-released Sensation.  He wouldn’t do anything merely because it was popular (well, I can’t really account for his interest in the Image comics of the early ‘90s) and while able to play well with others, always acted with independent motivations.

           From time to time, this led to some peculiar choices for the subject matter of his visual art creations.  This one speaks for itself: Lucky, perennially hounded leprechaun mascot of Lucky Charms cereal, in vampire form, intoning the unforgettable caption: “Just try an’ bite me ya wee bastards!”  It’s an odd piece: every element of it is serviceable – a decent font, a well-proportioned freehand embellishment of an established character – but at the same time everything is a bit “off”: where’s the background?  Why no flat ‘toon” shading for a context clearly calling for it?  The transitions from header to pic to font are a bit abrupt… the BBS advertised was by now an also-ran (run by the onetime Op of my first warez board, the 9th Plane of Hell, who rebranded himself “Nosferatu” – who pranked me at the end of my very first “meet people from modem-land” adventure by dropping me off at a SkyTrain station which was not yet in operation – who jumped into the artscene affiliated with PAiN, putting prefab fonts on scans from White Wolf RPG illustrations… but I digress) and, of course… what’s with that picture?  

           We may never really know for sure.

          (Edited to add: the first half of the header text is worth repeating, and may be displayed too tiny to be easily readable:

“Helter (the sysop of Salem’s Lot) claims that this pic should have been drawn for his board.  Apparently, Salem’s Lot is a book about green vampires attacking a town.  Plus, he’s Irish.  Well, he wanted me to mention that.”

Anne Rice was really a ‘90s thing, wasn’t it? Also, for an obsessive Queen fan, that’s a hilarious typo at the end of the header.)