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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!)