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The MIST2000 Treasure Hunt: Puzzle #9, explained!

This is it. I’ve held your hand through every contentious piece of show-stopping material along this path, standing between you, the avid vintage computer art enthusiast, and me, the gatekeeper of the jam-packed MIST2000 archive. If you had any aspiration to figure out any of the treasure hunt’s puzzles, this is the last unspoiled territory for you to try your hand at – the final speed bump.

So here we go. bit.ly/planesofHell brought you to a web page, joker.html – the group name “Mistigris” carries a few meanings, but despite the early emphasis on “a variation of poker in which the joker is wild”, largely we ended up celebrating the “French for alleycat” interpretation instead. But here we have a couple of vintage Mist jokers harrassing you, because … not everything here is entirely as it seems. It is the final puzzle – again, not much of one, but a little drag factor at least. Both ANSIs depict jester heads and – is that a clock around the neck of the first one? Mid-‘90s Menace, Flava Flav is a hype man, not a jester.

Now, where were we? Oh yes, there’s the link – you click it, and … what? 404? Is nothing in this accursed world as straightforward as it pretends to be? (OK, an invalid complaint: this has all along pretended nothing less than to be a puzzle.) There are no hints on the 404 page. It really does want you to go back. (If I’d been in a crueller mood, I would have made the 404 page’s link redirect to a different “joker” page that looked the same and whose URL read the same – some lowercase-“l” / numeral “1” / capital-“I” ambiguity perhaps – whose “step across the finish line” link was now valid. But that would have been cruel. The finish line was, it turns out, right in front of you all along: it was just, as in puzzle #3, hiding in plain sight. Hit Ctrl-A or whatever your system understands to invoke the “Select All” command, and marvel in amazement as additional text is revealed beneath the bogus hyperlink:

There are no lines in nature, only areas of colour, one against another. – Edouard Manet
__________

(I bet that’s probably the only time Edouard Manet has ever been referenced in artscene history! But it’s a nice quote, seemingly applicable to ANSI art – perhaps a mantra for practitioners of pHUNK.)

Anyhow: THAT line of underscores is the “finish line” described above. Anyhow, if it is clicked upon, the computer user will skip to the very end of the merry chase and see the eye-bleeding congratulatory extravaganza you never earned, on which we blew our entire VFX budget. (Also, next time you run The Secret of Monkey Island in SCUMMVM, try “Ctrl-W” to Win the Game. It will bring with it a parallel thrill.) It really is worth seeing, words will only take you so far, but before you go here, you need to have been given a Pokemon epileptic seizure warning. Warning! OK, now go knock yourselves out.

That’s it! No more puzzles! Go home already!