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This is it, my friends! I can’t manage to string another day out of posts celebrating the ever-loving 21st birthday of that fabulous but long-defunct BBS The Screaming Tomato, first WHQ of Mistigris, formerly situated at (604) 430-8805. Tumblr would only let me attach 10 pictures at a time, but I fooled it by smooshing them together into mega-pictures! They called me mad, mad I tell you!

We’ve been celebrating by sharing all the art that was made to promote the board to other adventurers in early cyberspace, and gee whiz, there was surely a lot (>60 pieces) of it! Not bad for a tenure that didn’t last quite three years! (Why that’s… a paltry 981 days! A new piece of promotional artwork every 15 days!) We started by looking at artwork made by the BBS’ administrators, then at art themed after its fruity name – now we’re just throwing the remainder of the art at you, including logos and “lits” – weird artscene poetry and fiction!

Now zoom in, because the embedded image is only showing you the middle third of the logocolly. We have, from the top down, ANSI TST logos by… Eerie and Zoltar of Mist, Neophyte of Mist four times in a row, Tribe (aka the 4th Disciple) briefly of Mist, The Naughty Tycoon of Mist, pre-Neophytal Solar Menace of Mist, Plastic (these two, and the one after the next, are ASCII) of Mist, Prince of Death, Jughead of Mist, The Iconoclast of Mist, Halaster of… Fire! (gotcha!), Destro of Mist, and Bandicoot (see Plastic and NME, another of his chronic rebrandings, above) of Mist. Phew! Three little letters, and how many, many ways there are to represent them!

Next we have the “lit"s. The first two are written by what were normally ANSI artists – these are likely the only poems they ever released, most likely as little jokes (but at Mist we took poetry a little too seriously) – Mavrik and Mage, and the third piece of a short story by our resident master of the absurd short story Livewire. And as a special courtesy to our readers… here is the full text of the lits! First, Mavrik’s:

I’ll give it my best shot..

Awakened in the night,

Scared with fright,
the little girl crept,
from where she slept.

to the kitchen she swished,
tho she truly wished,
that she hadnt seen the sight before her eyes,
of the tomato which sits and cries.

Thank you, thank you..

Then, Mage’s!

I awoke one morning to a horrible sound
A keen wailing that just wouldn’t end
I rushed to the kitchen unprepared for the sight
The food of the fridge was all dancing around
Singing and dancing in glee
But above the merryment again came that sound
A screech like a bird or tortured cat
No, it just could not be
The sound was much worse, a pain to my ears
A constant bombarge of noise
I was weak in the knees wondering what it could be
When I finally felt my fear
There, rolling on the counter was the source of my pain
A tomato.

My revulsion lasted only a moment
Before curiosity got the better of me
I moved to the counter, to look at this thing
My fear now within me, dormant
Curiosity killed the cat
Yet even this didn’t stay my hand
As I reached out to it
Unaware of the trap
How could it emit such a wail?
I found out a second later
When it jumped and bit into my hand
And my courage finally failed
Waves of pain erupted within me
From that awful screeching tomato

Furiously I shook my hand
Trying to dislodge the abomination
I howled, I begged, I threatened, I swore
But the damn things just didn’t understand
I cursed my luck and started to cry
It just wouldn’t let go!
And the scream, the shriek, still shook the air
This entity was sucking my lifeforce dry
I fell to the floor, gasping for breath
And I knew I was going to die
I sighed with acceptance of knowing my fate
And thus I had met with my death
The sound is still heard from my kitchen at morn
Of that godawful screaming tomato.

And finally, the main literary attraction… Livewire’s!

The Screaming Tomato
——————–

Tuny confronted his mother, shaking slightly…
"Mother, is it true? Am I not a full-blooded beefsteak tomato?

"Am I a bastard?”

Tuny’s shiny red mother tried her best to comfort him, then admitted,
“Yes, dear. Your father was a potato.”

“But… i thought a potato was a starchy white tuber, while a tomato
is a pulpy berry-like fruit…?”

“Well, that’s true…”

“Then how…?”

“I don’t know, look it up in Webster’s dictionary.”

Tuny was horrified to find out that he was, in fact, related to the
potato. He quickly packed his things, with only one thought in mind:

He must kill the potato.

So, despite his mother’s pleadings and ketchup tears, he stormed out
of the house.

He bought a ticket forthe next available train for Idaho, and
gathering his vegetable peeler and julienne cutter, he boarded the
train.

Idaho came quickly, and he began his long search for the potato which
had defiled his family’s bloodline.

Rumours of the existence of a potato which had left behind a wife and
a seedling soon led him to a small farm near the southern border.

Confronting each of the potatoes in turn, he finally found the
offending potato.

To his disappointment, the potato had grown old. Its eyes were
stretched out over several feet and it was almost dead.

Readying the peeler, he stepped forward and demanded, “Why?”

The old potato stirred, waited a few seconds, and then replied,
“You may not believe this, boy, but I really loved your mother.

"I left because I knew how tough it would be for you, going to school
with all the other tomatoes. You’d have been pureed by the other
tomatoes just for being a half-breed. I left because I cared.”

Not buying this feeble emotional crap, Tuny chopped the elderly
tuber into hash browns.

“You’re not my father!” he screamed.

And so, with his father properly julienned, Tuny set out for the
library, to find out just how the hell a tomato can possibly
be related to a potato. Balderdash!

OK, mega-compilations aside, what else can I show to you here? A jolly punk by Neophyte of Mist, who I guess really came of age under that handle in the TST era, not maturing as Quip until the Jade Monkey years. A fantastic Ferrengi, Quark, by The Extremist of Mist (well, Blistigris – a tour pack appearance, though I note in retrospect it also appeared in an Irato pack!), and the fabulous Bone brothers by Toon Goon of iCE.

Then we have a work of hirez of unknown provenance, undoubtedly “found” somewhere and reprocessed by our resident secret ripper, Thanatos of Mist, plus a rare RIPscrip, also by Neophyte. (He was a machine!) Wrapping up the spree, in my estimation the best ANSI that Neophyte ever made under that name! (Looks better in textmode than VGA.) A couple of these pieces celebrate the board’s 2nd anniversary; sadly, it would never reach its third.

Wrapping things up, we have the BBS’ shocker surprise death announcement, lifted from an extensive article about its closure in issue #13 of our e-mag (electronic magazine) Kithe.

It may well have been the first Screaming Tomato, though far from the only – but to anyone who found their way to this blog post, I think we can all agree that it was the best!

(A parting note: though only in operation for 981 days, you can see from my Telemate dialing directory that I connected to it 2183 times, over 2 and a quarter times daily in that period – including a few weeks when I was locked out! Clearly I put a lot of myself into it, which is one reason I was able to get so much back out of it so long after the fact!)

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Day 3 of our celebration of the 21st anniversary of The Screaming Tomato BBS and, whew, we’re storming our way through a tremendous pile of artwork. We blitzed through the material created by the SysOps and the stuff that celebrated the board’s nightshade mascot; that just leaves us… the rest. Here we open with pictures by Prisonernumberone of ACiD (starting in Fire and briefly passing through Mist on his way up after the 0395 merger between the two groups) and Cannibal Corpse (of Integrity, this piece was slurped right out of the Mistigris artpack submissions directory and retooled for release in the pack of our more distinguished local competition.)

The next row sees a prestigious piece by Cat(bones) of ACiD who was at that time overturning the rigid, demoscene-dictated pixelart/raytrace school of artscene high resolution artwork by introducing his soulful tattoo flash lowbrow comix sensibilities into this group of uptight nerds (always wished the side panels had contained more art and not just orange static) … it’s accompanied by a smallscale piece by Halaster, FiRE founder, released in a Relic pack for some reason – Hal perhaps adrift in the wilderness following the undoing of its merger into Mist (an if you ask me disproportionate trade to Nitnatsnoc for the second of his two pieces for Hal’s BBS The Regency) – and a somewhat abstract piece (the letter “t” floating in a punch bowl?) by Handiboy of Mistigris.

Next row! Two more works from Mist alumni in Integrity – an anime babe by Questor and a goth-y monster by Inquisitor, who had another piece in the same pack we felt would have been a much better fit for our board, oh well! And then the next row – two pieces of high resolution artwork, the first by Questor again and the second by Smokescreen of Mist, an adaptation of promotional artwork for an Itchy and Scratchy video game. And the coup de grace, an epic scroller (goes on for page after page at 80x25), again by the unique Prisonernumberone.

If I’d really been thinking I would have noted which packs all these artworks were sourced from, so I could have presented them in chronological order and allowed them to be viewed in their proper context. Alas! Apologies, historians, I’ve taken all of these relics out of their proper strata and put them on the same shelf. Sorry!

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… and as promised, the rest of those tomatoes. Pieces by, in order: Mass Delusion of iCE, Mage of Mist, Mad Bomber of Spastic, Nail of Fire, Sentience of Mist, Platinum of Mist (an unprecedented combination of picture and logo!), Plastic of Mist, White Insanity of mOP!, Minus of Mist, Weird of Mist, Xeryrus of Mist, and Weird of Mist. (You see what running an artgroup gets you? Art by that group’s members!)

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Picking up from yesterday, we’re still celebrating the 21st anniversary of the BBS (bulletin board service) The Screaming Tomato (TST), the first WHQ (world headquarters) of Mistigris and a pretty groovy little place in cyberspace from 1994-1997. In our last post, we got to the conception and launch of the BBS by its SysOp (system operator) Nitnatsnoc and his bumbling visionary Co-SysOp Cthulu, and through to the creation of Mistigris. This account of “the early years” included an exclusive gallery of the self-publicising art for the BBS executed (perpetrated in my case) by its proprietors. Sure, that’s all well and good, but those guys hardly had an unbiased opinion…

In case you weren’t “there” then, a recap: a BBS was a computer-to-computer connection via phone line, moderated by modems (modulator-demodulators). After a banshee screech of the two pieces of equipment negotiating their “handshake”, users would be prompted to press Escape twice and proceed through to the login with a unique username and password, allowing them access (as fast, but no faster, as an adult can read) to designated areas of the SysOp’s computer sitting on the other end of the phone line. Through hot-keyed menus ([Y]es/[n]o) they could navigate a kind of way-station (the bulletin board analogy is not glib) where they could, generally one at a time, write messages to each other, share new files with others or help themselves to ones left behind by prior callers, play simple online games through BBS “door” programs, and enjoy live chat with the SysOp, if they were home. You enjoyed a limited number of minutes’ free access daily (supposing you were lucky enough to not just hit busy signals when you called!) and if that time was exceeded, you were unceremoniously kicked off. All this in textmode, with a screen resolution of 80x25 characters at 640x480 pixels, decorating things with ANSI art – generally with a kind of EGA colour scheme, mixing and matching from 16 viable foreground colours and 8 solid (and 8 blinking) background ones. But just like the MS-DOS command prompt, the default background was black. Your BBS experience may have differed in some superficial ways if you called boards on your Commodore 64 or your Apple Macintosh, but the general idea was the same – except that the artscene was resolutely ANSI-centric and PC-grounded, so the use of a terminal program to access one of these artscene boards was not entirely dissimilar to a session spent at the command prompt in MS-DOS or CP/M.

Unlike many BBSes, this one featured a mascot of sorts in its whimsical name (a refreshing breath of fresh air in a scene that was filled with teenaged boys trying to out-grim each other, cf. “Morbid Grindoris” – I don’t know what it is, but it’s grim all right!), and what’s more, it’s one that virtually anyone with two eyes and a finger could attempt to render in ANSI. Can I draw the Mona Lisa or a rocket ship? I don’t know – but I sure as heck can draw a tomato. Many artists from many different groups drew art to celebrate and promote this BBS, sometimes as a favour to us, sometimes because we asked them to, sometimes as a display of fealty to us, and sometimes just because our board’s name granted them a draught of strange inspiration, and today’s post compiles the ones who opted to include textmode renderings of that most vegetablian of fruits, the tomato. Often, screaming.

I wanted to touch briefly on the affiliations held by the board. Largely empty honours lavished upon boards, an affiliation could be used to trick others into believing that you were a big deal crossroads, and if you were lucky you could sit back and let the self-fulfilling prophecy take over… the artistic tributes would roll in because your BBS’ name had achieved the kind of stature and proportions that people simply expected to see in artpacks, over and over again, after seeing it hammered in repeatedly in lists of distro sites. (While by and large, the particular letters making up a BBS’ name probably didn’t contribute greatly to people’s decision to make art out of them, it didn’t hurt to make things easy for fontists by giving your board, if not a short name, an appealingly-abbreviatable one. It was all an exercise in branding.)

Our earliest ads (as in the first in this lot, by Darkforce briefly in Union between the downfall of iMPERiAL and the advent of Patriot->RAiD->Integrity) see us boasting ties to the local music groups EuphoniX, Digitallusions, and Happy Fetus Records, but I don’t believe we ever actually legitimately held any of those music distro site credits – that was a case of wishful thinking on my part, with intent to fake it until we made it. I mean, I’m on the record in one place, Issue #13 of the Kithe e-mag, saying that we definitely did hold them; I’m on the record elsewhere saying that we definitely didn’t. In at least one account I’m lying! The truth likely falls somewhere in between: sure I asked, but probably I was stymied.

The first legitimate affiliation held by the board was that of iMPERiAL Member site, courtesy of my somewhat underhanded membership in said group, but as noted … iMPERiAL dissolved before the board went public, so its utility as a feather in our cap was limited. In an attempt to bring his own membership of some group to the board, Nitnatsnoc very briefly held pre-Mist membership in a local (non-releasing, if memory serves correct) group named Sensation (SNS), one of Grateful Dead’s numerous failure-to-launch group aspirations… TST would have worn that dubious laurel, but he backed out quick after seeing the company he’d be keeping and, well, let us never speak of it again. Of course it quickly ascended to status as the WHQ of Mistigris (were there ever any real contenders? Atlantis and Alpha Centauri I remember were thriving local contemporary artscene hubs, though distinctly neutral territory), which got us far in receiving art from our members, but not much further in getting us art from non-members. Nit made a bit of a blunder accepting an IRC-offered distro site status from WiND, a new group which was to primarily make its mark accidentally releasing ripped ANSIs… and we must never speak of it again. The remaining affiliations were touches of genuine class: Fire BC outpost, on what basis I cannot recall (consolation prize for the disappointingly temporary nature of their merger with Mistigris in 0395?); Integrity Member site, a difficult-to-obtain honor from a hot group that had no non-member board distro sites; ACID Member site, the logical follow-up to Integrity’s merger into ACID, and finally the strangest of our affiliations, WHQ of Cenobite, one of the artscene’s very few “lit”-exclusive groups (the canonical three were Revolt, Reality and Candelabra) – a distinction perhaps only possible in a place where poetry and writers were already so extraordinarily celebrated as the WHQ of Mistigris, the group that published by far the best of the artscene poetry… that nobody in the artscene read. Mistigris survived the end of TST, but it was a fatal blow that Cenobite never recovered from.

OK, so what else do we have here? An offputting (ugh, the eyebrows!) tomato menu, screaming with rage, by Pestilence’s pet ANSI artist Inquisitor – very briefly of Mistigris; a more jubilantly hollering tomato by Estatic of CiA, the long-running “#3” group which often rated lower, but outlasted all other contenders; a shrunken-head interpretation of a tomato (looks more like an onion painted red) by Destro of Mist; Egoteq’s outraged tomato from an iCE pack, garnering us some legitimacy by getting our little project mentioned in the perennial #2 group; blink-and-you’ll-miss-them ASCII tomators in this logo by Feral of Trance (which looked even better in Amiga mode, but which kept glitching when I tried saving it that way in Pablo – try it yourself!); Happyfish’s straightforward explanation of just what it is that makes the (cherry) tomato scream?; a tomater hiding in the red background of Zoltar’s font accompanying Eerie’s drawing of a blue troll; cutie tomatoes cowering on either side of Mavrik’s logo accompanying his ANSI of Image comics character Pitt; and an ANSI of a cool dude tomato wearing a suit, a branching-out experiment by Dead Soul of Mistigris (where the rest of those unallocated pictures were released) who typically drew ASCII rather than ANSI … and … there are 13 more ANSIs of tomatoes I have here made for our board, realizing I must have just run up against some sort of internal Tumblr limit. Maybe I’ll just follow up this post venting the rest of them without all of the drainingly exhaustive commentary… Stay tuned, there are more coming!

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Happy birthday to The Screaming Tomato BBS, which opened to the public August 24th, 1994 – 21 years to the day. (Nitnatsnoc made a great “Odd Couple” foil to me: “TST birthday in August? That’s weird, because the way I remember it, I talked to you about my idea of starting up a BBS when we were in the caf at Kits.”) This marks the first of three posts I’ll be making here to celebrate all the great art that was made to promote a point in cyberspace that, well, was ephemeral but made its mark!

Around the turn of the century, acutely aware that my command over that exciting but rapidly-receeding time would fade over the years, I made an effort to document the salient points of all my top bulletin board services over at bbsmates.com (then mirrored them over at textfiles.com). Here’s what I said about TST:

Tragic victim of the “the adjective noun” BBS-name syndrome of 1994 [strongly influenced by Eerie’s “Sarcastic Toaster”], this was the board I was both co-SysOp of and locked out from - on numerous occasions. From an early start of adolescent silliness (great, a message base called “World Wildlife Wrestling Federation” - now what are we going to put in it?) this provided the base from which MiSTiGRiS was almost accidentally founded. Also WHQ of Cenobite, a lit group run by Schtroumpf gleaning from the creme of Mist’s writers, it is bizarre that this BBS didn’t amass more surreal artwork than it did [actually, you know, that was maybe enough of it], but when all is said and done this board probably represented the 604 to more long-distance artscene callers than any other.

We were just kids joking around at the cafeteria table (see, on that point we agree!) when we began plotting out our BBS, like other kids might obsessively design a customized sports car with dual cassette deck and an afterburner or doodle a luxury mansion with an alligator pit and a rooftop helipad on wrinkled foolscap. All of our friends had to be folded in somehow, even those who didn’t own modems or even computers. We would host all the online games, providing us something to chat about between classes, unique files (not much room for storage, so better make them text files reflecting our interests and serving to promote our cyberspace hideaway when they were invariably widely circulated)… and for a touch of class, a special focus on computer music, an art that was practiced widely in our area code.

Most importantly, it would be fully tricked out and customized, because we had personality in spades oozing out through every teenaged pore like a bad case of acne, and would have been incapable of reining it in even were we so inclined.

OK, ok. I had the oozing personality, and he had the spare phone line and hardware (but still no monkey fondulator drive!) Between the two of us, we knew that we had what we needed to bring to the table (well, the computer desk) to make this a BBS the likes of which no one had ever logged into before.

Nitnatsnoc came up, somehow, with the name. (“I remember you seemed initially unimpressed until you asked me what the name was going to be.”) Trying to contextualize it, I actually drew countless sketches of tomatoes in a variety of precarious, scream-inducing situations, manually tracing over them in jaggies (turning curves into straight lines alternating with corners) so as to suggest the ANSI blocks the pictures would need to be translated into over in BBS-land. (I didn’t have any particular aptitude for ANSI art, but despite having just learned about the underground flipside to the public domain BBS community, I knew that with my boundless creativity and limitless enthusiasm, I would surely have it well in hand in a matter of weeks. I applied to NWA (New Wave Artists that is, straight outta Richmond!) as an ANSI artist and computer musician – hey, how hard can it be? – and only grudgingly conceded to writing some poems, sorry, “lits” when I ran up against the crude state of PC tracking software (KingMod, never yet having heard the phrase “Scream Tracker” or the group name “Future Crew”.) Hm, writing rhyming couplets into a text editor results in no interface friction! Maybe this’ll go somewhere!

I had managed to parlay my way into NWA and from there, it merged with GRiP into iMPERiAL, and suddenly hosting a BBS with local .MOD music and a “Weird Al” Yankovic song lyric section wasn’t enough. We’d require elite affiliations for our board, for with them would come textmode ornamentation beyond anything either of us could produce! Nitty spent the summer tinkering with the BBS-to-be (using, I can’t remember, either Telegard or Renegade, one of the “Forum hacks” [EDITED: I was right, Nitty elaborates… and alludes to his poorly-timed period obsession with the band Queen – “TST originally ran on Telegard. Eventually, I felt a need to make the design more in-line with the art scene, but Telegard didn’t allow for much customization. So I shut it down (for a week or two? a month?) while I updated the board using Renegade and created new promo and menu art. That’s why that Batman ansi you posted has "revisited” written on it – it was used as part of the refresh. (Incidentally, I had totally forgotten about that pic and was surprised to see my sig on it. Also, “revisited” is a Queen reference; on their third album, the 7th track was called “In the Lap of the Gods” and their 13th and final track had the same name, with “revisited” tagged on.)“]), getting some hot tips from Access Denied of Field of Eggplants and Eerie of Sarcastic Toaster about how to get his own board off the ground, hooked up to echomail networks (ultimately plugged in to TABNet, Mistigris’ KiTSCHNet, SiHFNet, and ACiD’s AgoraNet), when catastrophe struck: shortly after releasing its August 1994 artpack, iMPERiAL dissolved. Our precious member board status! And from there, the frantic discussions resulting in the formation of Mistigris. It required a BBS to act as a WHQ and, fortunately, we just so happened to have one on the verge of being opened to the public. Before the end of the month, by August 24th, the "last callers” door was showing strange new nicknames beyond merely those of myself and Nitnatsnoc.

The first hurdle had been overcome: circumstances threw us in the water, and we swam. In June we were going to be faking it until we made it, and by the end of the summer… we were making… something! (Pictured: early welcome screen by Nitnatsnoc, early promotional art by myself, later promotional art by Nitnatsnoc – after Mist, after Integrity, in ACiD. Spoiler warning: he made it. And see below: my April Fool’s pack loader advertising the BBS; whether I ever “made it” was debatable, but faking it was never so fun.)

Next post – the salad days: other people also made promotional artwork for us! Lots of them!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucOb5UMQX6E&w=640&h=360]

MISTIGRIS 2015:
WE WANT YOUR ART

(to be submitted to us pro bono for free digital circulation
because that’s how we rolled when we were kids in the ‘90s with no bills to pay
and this particular collection is to be in memory of that freewheeling time
apologies to the pros)

In a nutshell:

The somewhat revived computer art group Mistigris, established in 1994 (but not much active since 1998), is casting a wide net, seeking submissions of creative works in all forms (visual, literary, musical, programmed… surprise us) to appear in an “artpack” (collection of computer files containing creative works) for release in late October of 2015, in celebration of the group’s first release 21 years prior. So we’re up front about it, there is no compensation beyond the hackneyed “exposure”, “opportunity for networking” and a certain satisfaction from playing some nominal part in the ongoing history of the storied digital underground’s artscene… and also hopefully you may receive some of that nebulous and unquantifiable perk, fun. The submission deadline is October 15th, 2015. Please field inquiries to cthulu at tabnet dot ca.

But if you’d like further information, please do read on at some great length for our FAQ:

“You want my art?  How do you know what kind of art I make?  Just what kinds of art are you looking for, anyhow?”

Textmode/pixel(/trixel/voxel/hexel) art: ANSI, ASCII, PETSCII, PlaySCII, teletext, typewriter art, cross-stitch, perler bead, mosaic, Lego, Minecraft, Blockout, Snake or Tetris and punch-card instructions.  You get the idea!

…but that’s not all!

“High resolution” visual art: raster/bitmap drawings made in Deluxe Paint 2, MS Paint or Photoshop, vector line art from the Tombstone Artist RIPscrip editor or Adobe Illustrator, clicked into place with a mouse or drawn on a tablet or touchscreen, raytraced, kaleidoscoped in Photo Booth, generated by an algorithm, portraits, landscapes and typography painted on a canvas or spraypainted on a wall or train, smeared on a scanner or squished on a photocopier; sculpted in marble, ice, butter or polys for screens or .STL files for 3D printers, photography (all three varieties: pinhole, conventional and Game Boy camera), silkscreen stencils, quilt patches, collage, tattoo flash, gig posters, comix (web or conventional), papercraft, stained glass, jewelery, aerialist display, cosplay and extreme hairstyles or set design and architectural CAD.  What are we missing?  Demo reels and short films (ANSImation, YouTube video or animated .GIF are great); flipbook animations; intriguing PowerPoint presentations, Macromedia Director projects or VRML databases; Second Life textures.

Phew!  I’m just getting started!

Music: 4-channel tracked, sequenced, presented in any style as new as black MIDI or as classic as Mario Paint, or just plain plucked out on an ukulele and recorded over a webcam or improvised on saxophone quartet into voice mail via conference call.  Sheet music, player piano rolls, long-forgotten demo tapes on audiocassette, cellphone ringtones and instructions for dot matrix printer orchestra are great, too!

But wait, there’s more!

Writing.  Yes, we want your poems – limericks, haiku, sonnets and more – short stories, flash fictions, novels, articles, memoirs, manifestos, one-act plays, film scripts, personal essays, reviews, recipes, pages from your dream diary, fan fiction, a sample chapter from your ebook, text adventures, Twines, visual novels, audiodramas, lipograms and conlangs.  Send it in as raw text, as painstakingly calligraphed or meticulously laid-out concrete poetry, or as an incomprehensible Dadaist soundscape collage recorded and manipulated through spliced tape loops (in which case please submit as MP3).  (When we closed up shop in 1998 I was investigating new digital avenues for poetry, like simulating a nutritional information label tattooed on the dorsal fin of an orca whale – for the informed dietary benefit of our Arctic neighbours – through laborious Photoshop work.  This time last year I attempted, unsuccessfully, to compose a meaningful poem entirely in Hayes AT modem commands… triumph where I failed!)

Surely that’s about it?

Software: video games, APKs, BBS doors, hypercard stacks, Java applets, revealing source code listings, intros, romhacks, screensavers, Quake levels and everything in between.  (No viruses or malware, please.  They can be interesting but regretfully we must decline.)

Outta gas?

Conceptual art; net.art; fluxus “happening"s; puppetry.  Pyrotechnics!  Choreography?  Try us. (Because in this strange new world, all art is computer art.)

The creative works don’t have to be new or recent – indeed, it can be from lost decades of yore, back in the last century if you like. But it should be something that ideally is not currently still in circulation. (And you should have the proper rights to authorize its distribution by us 8)

"What’s this all about, anyway?”

When I was a teenager half a lifetime ago, I ran a computer art group for four years from a beige IBM PC clone in my parents’ basement. There and in similar computer rooms, me and dozens of other inspired youths released “artpacks”, digital collections of creative work in mediums visual, literary, musical and programmed. The technology was crude, but we had abundant free time and the fire of adolescent monomania burning beneath us, and were able to transcend the technical limitations of the era and create great art for the ages. Our group’s name was “MiSTiGRiS” (Mist for short), and we were but one regional group among many internationally, striving and vying to discover some new trick and push past constraints and limitations, through to some new cyber realm of digital creative potential, leaving the path open for our peers to follow into the unknown realms. (But mostly, it must be acknowledged, we made advertisements for bulletin board services out of comic books and graffiti.)

We may as well have been exploring the outer reaches of what was possible to achieve with Betamax VCRs, Pioneer LaserDiscs, Walkmans and Polaroid cameras, because unbeknownst to us, the technological underpinnings of our revolution were stale and fragile, and our anarchic digital utopian frontier of aesthetic hedonism was being subtly undermined, in a ruinous and permanent fashion, by the rise of Windows 95 and AOL. Our community (as with others, eg. Compuserve and UseNet) was vibrant but not agile, unable to respond to the changes in a timely manner, and in short order it was almost entirely dismantled in favour of a new online regime where the order of the day was not to create but to consume.

Just what remained for the term “computer art” to precisely describe after the lingering vestiges of the C64/Amiga/MS-DOS BBS/IRC scene finally dissipated beyond the point of no return circa 1999? As best as I could tell… superbad (surprisingly ahead of its time, it actually launched in 1997 making it a postmodern contemporary to our efforts) and zombo.com – there was room for outsider virtuosity in the new mediums, but nothing to build a community around. (Or: we were just too inflexible and crusty to get on board with Newgrounds.)

In the cold light of a new millennium I tried to apply what I knew about putting creators in different mediums into a bottle and shaking it up to see what kind of fizz erupted out, first by co-opting the monthly variety show series the Living Closet in marginal spaces like the millennial Church of Pointless Hysteria, then the long-running (5 years, longer than Mist with a more regular release schedule to boot!) 57 Varieties open stage series, which resulted in some intriguing surprise juxtapositions, compelling performances and curious spin-offs but they all imposed a distracting drag factor of requiring quite a bit of time and effort to be devoted to crudely material matters only tangentially related to creating and sharing art (eg. does the bar have enough disposable cups, is there toilet paper in the stalls, what is the fairest way to divide our $30 of profit among our 17 participants and why do I need to stick around until 1:30 am to do this math?)

If only I could somehow return to the seamless medium of computer art in a thriving milieu!

But after the last of my efforts ran their course and I found myself organizing only invoices and ledgers, no art or revolution, the trail went cold. Years of beating the dead horse and trying to turn back time, striving to put the genie back into the bottle and somehow infuse the smoke back into the resistor. Finally, I gave up, believing in my heart: I’m crazy, it’s stupid and no one cares.

But following the “reunion” turnout achieved last October for the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Mist’s first artpack release, I have since been proven wrong: I’m crazy, it’s stupid and some people might care a little bit. Many’s the time I’ve toiled away fruitlessly in dead ends without even a shred of hope; that little bit is all I need to stoke my fires and charge blindly back into action!

For the past year I’ve been making soup from the bones of history, packaging, contextualizing and immortalizing fragments and forgotten creations from a lost world I’d allowed to linger on the fringes of my hard drives. That was a fun and interesting experience, reminding myself of the me I used to be and the dissipated context that forged that “me”. Maybe… if I could entreat some people to come on board and play along… we might discover more playful, creative selves we’d forgotten we ever were!

“Sorry, what’s an 'artpack’ again?”

You might prefer the term “group show” or “anthology”: in this case, it is taken to refer to a collection of small pieces of artwork in various mediums and formats from a plethora of different artists, represented in computer-accessible form for web browser accessing and local download. Sights, sounds, words and other lovely surprises.

“But what are the themes you’re hoping to engage with this art?”

Why, nothing less than the sum of human experience! But, uh, if you need a starting point, you could reflect upon the changes in your life and in the world over the past 20 years … or just make a “Mistigris” logo 8)

“So what am I going to get out of participating in your weird little project?”

In keeping with our “WHY CHEAP ART?” background, we take in no money (taking “cheap” to extremes) and consequently have none to disburse, so for the love of God please don’t send us something you hope someone might want to pay you first publication rights for someday. A deprecated or experimental portfolio piece would be ideal, something you’re proud of and have fondness for, but which isn’t going to undercut your regular art practice. Or, if you prefer, you can send us a taste, an excerpt or slice of the new work you’re keenest about, and its appearance here can be promotional – “If you like that, you know who to look up for more…” – in the interest of which we hope to compile brief bios and social media contact information for participating artists, under their current brand (if they want to build a link to their ongoing practice) or a nickname (if they want to hide any connection 8)

“How can I reach you?  Where do I submit?”

Any interactions of substance are best fielded to cthulu at tabnet dot ca. Our WHQ BBS is down, but we have an active private Facebook group and a dormant slack of great potential.

You can find further information, context and deeper interaction through our Tumblr (you are here at the moment) and our Twitter account @mistfunk

“When do you want submissions to be in by?”

The project is envisioned as an artpack to be entitled MIST1015, which would put release squarely in October of 2015.  Last year’s revival artpack, MIST1014, squeaked out hours before November 1st; we hope to not be pushing this one out in not quite as last-minute a fashion – the submission deadline is tentatively stated as midnight beginning October 15th, which leaves us two weeks of wiggle room to round everything up, chase out the bugs and get it all together.

Submissions due Countdown

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BONUS! "OK, I’m game, but I don’t have the tools.”

I will not presume to instruct you how to sculpt, cross-stitch or work with pyrotechnics, as it would be spurious and downright dangerous for me to do so. But I am qualified to recommend some (generally cheap-to-free) software that should all run in contemporary operating environments (some combination of: Windows, Mac OSX, Linux) to facilitate creation of some of the recommended traditional computer arts:

• For ANSI and ASCII art there is no better tool than the (Mistigris-produced!) PabloDraw
  editor. If you have further aspirations for a textmode aesthetic, you could tinker with PlaySCII and its variant textmodes and auto-conversion capabilities.



• If MS Paint is not enough and Photoshop is too much, Paint.NET sits as a happy medium for the creation and editing of high resolution images.



• So you don’t have an old computer at your disposal but you’d like to be able to distress your photos to make them throwbacks to that era of limitations? We can endorse Retrospecs for iOS devices and Bitzah on Android.



• If you’d like to make some sounds, you can start with the Audacity sound editor; you can then use the sounds you whipped up as samples in a music tracker such as the Impulse Tracker clone SchismTracker or the Fast Tracker II clone MilkyTracker. Or, if you hate messing with samples and just want to sequence, you could try that old Mario Paint Composer.



• And if you’d like to try to present some text in an interactive fashion, some easy and powerful tools you could consider might include Twine, Inform 7 or a new contender with a goofy name, Squiffy.

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Here it is, the big project this music-releasing spree was supposed to lead up to.  Its position as the zenith was jumbled up a bit as we found more Sonic Equinox artefacts than we expected to still be in existence, and it jumps the gun on a few crews we have yet to introduce you to here, retroactively.  But it was a big release for the big round number 10 on the tenth day of Mistigris May Music Madness and Mayhem.  We couldn’t get all the parties in area code 604’s artscene / music tracking / demoscene community to join forces into one megagroup, but we were at least able to lure most of them (Happy Fetus Records, as usual, marched to the beat of their own drum machine) under a single umbrella for a major project that would see The Pope of Mistigris and the Immortal Syndicate travelling to a rare North American demoparty, NAiD ‘96 in Montreal (“East of Vancouver”), and “presenting” this collection to represent our teeming yet otherwise-unrepresented area code (and, heck, the whole West Coast) as peers.  (There was no competition for music disks, nor any mechanism for noncompeting materials to be presented at the party, so this gesture was pretty nominal… and as for the reception, not mirrored with official demoparty archives of competing entries, it slipped into the pool like an elegant Olympic diver making nary a splash, disappearing from view immediately and, if not for May Music Madness, forever.)

The groups present and accounted for here are: Mistigris, Sonic Equinox (who we covered here at some great length), EuphoniX (whom you may recall from our last post), The Immortal Syndicate (who we’ll be discussing shortly), Digitronic (do keep posted for their delayed but regardless upcoming retrospective under the Trideja banner), Digitallusions (no retrospective forthwith, but still with us in the form of Empress Play) and Radiance (…just basically undocumented anywhere and likely to remain that way.)  The collective umbrella flag we all marched under was “New Media Productions”, a scene-politics-free zone that was also the official presentor of our Tracker Fix parties (wherein computer musicians would attend a party and take turns composing (including my very first track!) under a time limit using a common sample set – all lost forever, alas!) and this was its big huzzah.  Getting the groups all officially involved was the major coup, but as most of their musicians were affiliated under multiple “labels”, each group maintains a pretty meagre presence musically.  This could have just been a Mistigris music disk, but the idea of being part of a flourishing ecosystem is a compelling one, and we hoped that by blowing a spark into the notion, it would come to life and become… more true.  But things don’t always work out the way you want, and instead, this contains the very last song ever released by Admiral Skuttlebutt of Digitallusions, both undergoing some radical and extensive rebranding, and two of the very final tracks released by EuphoniX… Digitronic changed its name midway, and I think that Radiance was already defunct by the time we shipped the disk in May of 1996.

But all things change, and you can’t fight it; what we can do is appreciate the disk for what it is and what’s in it, which is… a pile of great music from the 604 (nearly all of it entirely unavailable in any form until now), some sweet group logos, a then-mind-blowing realtime 3D interface, and the personal touch I simply couldn’t ship it without: the world’s first (? and only?) multiple-personality-disordered scrolly bar (pictured), shouting itself down in what must be construed to be a brief and strange piece of theatre.

Eto of Sonic Equinox did all the heavy lifting for this project, not only programming and implementing the music-playing routines, visualizer effects and 3D interface, but also providing 3D-modelled logos, artwork and textures needed to make the octagon (each face represented one participating group, plus one to exit) really roll.  I was kindly solicited input for the look and flow of the disk, providing a list of painfully poor selections given their actual roles, then the final product dropped with all of my suggestions mixed up and undone, reflecting the realities of how long the program took to prepare itself, loading and pre-calculating.  I wanted to open with a ripping thrash number, tearing the listeners a new one with our eXtReMe attitude and dropping into the action posthaste, but setting that tone would get us nowhere fast, as the program was going to take the time it was going to take to get ready, and an motivational high-BPM soundtrack wasn’t going to change that.  The song shuffle was ultimately a much better fit than anything I came up with: the accompaniment for the closing credits, especially, is an incredible fit.

When the autumn came around and high school was back in session, I packed the music disk along to our computer lab on a deck of floppy diskettes and installed it on all the PCs in order to, er, double or triple the number of people who got a chance to enjoy the blasted thing.  My poor impostor-syndrome teacher raised his eyebrows and mosied along, leaving unsaid that the project represented a high water mark light years beyond anything he could teach or indeed code himself.  My apparent fluency with “multimedia” (yeah, yawn, I just run a computer art group online, no biggie) resulted in a couple of weeks being reappropriated from the curriculum calendar for me to teach the class how to use Scream Tracker 3, once I had satisfied the teacher’s concern that it was unpirated freeware… I figured there was a chance (hey, a CS presentation about our BBS The Screaming Tomato drew Happyfish out of the woodwork!) I might be able to make a couple of new Mistigris fans (or to train new members from the ground up) from the student body… but no dice.

Zero for two, then; the BBS scene withered away and all known copies of the 604 music disk dried up.  Eto and I both suffered hard drive crashes and lost our copies, and for years it only existed in frustrating vivid memories I would have of my wasted youth and its projects that, at the time, seemed to perhaps be leading somewhere.  But in the wake of the re-gathering of the old crew for MIST1014 and a complete accounting of what releases we had made and what had been lost, Eto located a copy he’d given out long, long ago to demonstrate a programming trick he’d used – and now, it has been put back into circulation and can live again, Lazarus-like, until all memory of all scenes collapse into entropy in the heat death of the universe.

Until then, it’s a good selection of good songs, an interesting program, and a great document of a moment in time at a locus in cyberspace that could otherwise never be proven to have existed.  If it was released today, we would have had to name it The 604/778/236/(672) Music Disk and, well, that’s just not as catchy.

Oh yes – the obligatory reminder that you can hear its many songs and (to some extent) even run its remarkable executable in-browser over at pc.textmod.es!

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text-mode:

ANSI-animations made in ASCII-Paint, 2002. Maybe posted before here?