Mistigris computer arts

Sunday, July 31, 2016

[gallery]
Today on Mistigram, a tiny, almost throwaway monochrome high-ASCII logo Blocktronics artist (and TeklordZ veteran) Mattmatthew tossed off to help us let people know our 20-year reunion artpack, MIST1014, had left the gates… nearly two years ago now. (He also put in a number of other necessary labours, up to and including setting up this very Tumblr to act as our most substantial pulpit.)

It wasn’t included in the artpack in question, but was quickly repurposed to act as FILE_ID.DIZ for the re-released “best-of Mistigris” Living Closet artdisk, finally being shared with a wider audience since its failed distribution on floppy diskette at an art party back in 1999

With a nip, a tuck and a tweak, the logo (the elegant “M” massive and masterfully designed, leaving plenty of room for almost occult ornamentation, the “Mistigris” perhaps the smallest possible rendition of the full group name in only two rows of characters) was also put to work extensively in the MIST2000 Treasure Hunt, including this colour-cycling variant reserved for the grand finale… which to this point perhaps no more than three people have ever seen.

Saturday, July 30, 2016

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 30, 2016 at 1:19pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, one of the crowning achievements of Mistigris artist Muton (seriously, as best as we can tell he never released pieces with any other groups), his ironic Mistfunk newschool ASCII used in the infofiles in our 3-part 3-year anniversary artpack in October of 1997. He really hit the burgeoning zeitgeist with the stylized DJ (a burgeoning that has never quite deflated in the 19 years since) and clearly we missed an opportunity by never getting this printed on stickers!

Bonus! See the “krap” logo on his baseball cap in homage to the plucky little crew who provided such an infusion of fresh blood and morale into Mistfunk!


Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 30, 2016 at 1:19pm UTC

Friday, July 29, 2016

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 29, 2016 at 1:12pm UTC

Platinum (briefly Bleak) made his mark on Mistigris Classic for years, lingering in the eaves as an ANSI logo specialist, endlessly experimenting with different approaches and new effects. In today’s specimen from Mistigram, he laid the logo on an ASCII art bed, then superimposed a pair of virtual triangular prisms on the ANSI font like a pair of sunglasses lenses, lending everything on the other side of it a smoky appearance.


Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 29, 2016 at 1:12pm UTC

Thursday, July 28, 2016

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 28, 2016 at 2:05pm UTC

Today on Mistigram: an astounding hirez Mist logo in dope graffiti style by our Hawaiian friend Kyo, drawn for us in 1998 and resolutely sat upon until the MIST2000 artpack, released at the start of 2016 (or a little bit earlier for the resolute few who successfully traversed the puzzle-filled MIST2000 Treasure Hunt!)



It was worth the wait!


Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 28, 2016 at 2:05pm UTC

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

[gallery]
Dracomage: the man, the myth, the enigma. It looks like sometime around the start of 1998, I was getting antsy for an injection of fresh blood – I could see the close of the 1998 high school year on the horizon, and knew that most of our members in that Grade 12 cohort would not remain with us following that life transition. So I began looking further afield; the artscene had eschewed us, so I had to draw in new computer artists from outside. What does that get you? Outsider art.

I found Dracomage in EFNet #poetry, while trying to branch out and build bridges, so naturally after I drafted him he primarily submitted… tracker music and high resolution art. He didn’t possess an easy mastery of the forms, but what he lacked in raw skill he made up for in enthusiasm and ease of access, with a nigh ubiquitous IRC presence.

We only showcase his visual work today (the blue iceberg piece is featured today on Mistigram, our Instagram feature), but in addition to his musical and literary sides, this lonely seaman, lost forever in the mists of time, also got points for trying (in vain) to get us up and online with mistigris.org circa 1998. (It didn’t happen, and indeed the attempt destroyed us, but he tried!)

If you know of the current whereabouts of Dracomage, please consider putting us in touch! Cheers.

Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 26, 2016 at 1:18pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, this juicy ANSI art logo was drawn for our use by guests “rz” and “tr” – there was so little textmode art coming our way in 1998 you figure I would have remembered what their full nicknames were, but no dice. We first used it in infofiles in May 1998 (which explains the bizarre caption beneath the logo – informative and creative text followed) and then again in our 2014 revival artpack when confusion and forgetfulness impelled us to re-use the logo in infofiles there as well. Just as well – ACiD re-used logos over and over again, and no one had greater access to fresh textmode art than them!


Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 26, 2016 at 1:18pm UTC

Monday, July 25, 2016

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 25, 2016 at 1:13pm UTC

This monochrome newschool ASCII logo was drawn by Weird – who drew us a lot of logos, didn’t she? – and released in our 3rd-anniversary artpack back circa October of 1997. It doesn’t read “Mist” or “Mistigris” – remember, we were busy reinventing ourselves as, if not an elite clique, at least a hip crew… an approach which worked until it failed.


Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 25, 2016 at 1:13pm UTC

Sunday, July 24, 2016

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 24, 2016 at 3:55pm UTC

Today on Mistigram: this hirez sketch by Tincat, formerly Jughead, landed in our July 1997 artpack with a hearty helping of sass and urban attitude. The relationship of this crew of primarily white suburban young men to “street” style was never less than a little problematic, but (as with artscene typography’s obsession with graffiti styles) it was the fashion of the era and for the first time, Mist was embracing the zeitgeist rather than shunning and rejecting it, because after three years of ups and downs, it allowed us to re-cast ourselves as a bunch of happening hepcats rather than spotty losers (as Tincat also portrayed us in the very same artpack!) I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a bit of a morale boost.



The helpful transition from Mistigris to Mistfunk (even today, a useful workaround for namespace conflicts here and on Twitter and Instagram) was deeper than a mere rebranding – in addition to a fresh, post-World Tour identity, it went as far as yielding several pieces of internal jargon (such as “chunk” for awesome and “flog” for its opposite.) The move to Mistfunk probably would have been very useful if we’d followed Tribe!’s early lead and gone down that path in 1995, but by 1997, the whole artscene had so little gas left in the tank that we were but one high school graduation away from a stark crossroads.


Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 24, 2016 at 3:55pm UTC

Saturday, July 23, 2016

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 23, 2016 at 2:58pm UTC

On Mistigram today, this ANSI art Mist logo by Quip from an infofile in February of 1998! Though the colouration makes it akin to a tropical coral reef, the drifting shapes of the letters suggest that they’re composed of smoke or some vapour (mist?)



It’s a good one.


Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 23, 2016 at 2:58pm UTC

Friday, July 22, 2016

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 22, 2016 at 11:55am UTC

Another contender for the smallest Mist ANSI logo of all time, this one was drawn (as part of a much greater work) by Diamond Traveller, part of our remote 418 area code division, released in our debut artpack of October 1994. From small things big things one day come!


Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 22, 2016 at 11:55am UTC

Thursday, July 21, 2016

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 21, 2016 at 1:21pm UTC

A big change of pace for today’s Mistigram post: this is a piece of hirez (high resolution artwork) by Weird, most recently seen rocking the Alpha-Bits logo style in newschool ASCII art. But the times were changing (this is from our January 1997 Fistful of Steel artpack on the Mistigris World Tour), and sometimes you have to go from being the best at the old style to being a rank beginner of the new style. Certainly Photoshop gave artists powerful options (did I mention lens flare?) that PabloDraw did not, so in the interest of moving forward our artists had to shift gears from time to time. Weird ended up doing visual work for the video game industry, a path that assuredly this kind of stuff unlocked more helpfully than her elegant but outmoded ASCII art. But commercial concerns aside, that latter has probably better stood the test of time as an eternal classic of computer art 8)


Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 21, 2016 at 1:21pm UTC

Wednesday, July 20, 2016

[gallery]

Today on Mistigram! In 1975, Stephen King wrote the book Salem’s Lot. (In 1994 Helter established a 604-area BBS of the same name.) In 1979 the novel was adapted into a TV miniseries with some striking promotional artwork. In 2010 the Swedish heavy metal band Ghost released their album “Opus Eponymous”, whose album illustration echoed the influence of the Salem’s Lot art.

And in 2014, Publius Emeritus II (who had not touched textmode art in this century) adapted the Ghost album artwork into a newschool ASCII celebrating the revival of our long-dormant underground computer artgroup Mistigris, not simply retaining the subject and approach, but dismantling and reassembling the logo into a new configuration.

Not bad, huh?

Tuesday, July 19, 2016

[gallery]

You know what they say: we’re flexible and pliant in our youth, but as we age our minds get more made up, and we become rigid and calcified, mentally as well as physically. Well, we’re pleased to say, Bast has beat the odds! Sadly, creating art seems to have had little to do with it. Compare the first photo, posted to Acheron circa 1998, with the second from just last year (actually, it looks kind of like in the first, she is coiled like a spring, released in the second… SPROING!): she hasn’t aged, only matured like a fine wine. (And like a tannic red, as you can plainly see, she is fully capable of knocking your ass to the floor.) As a bonus, you can observe her in the fullness of life in the third photo casually doing two things simultaneously, neither of which I have ever or will ever be able to achieve: resting in an unsupported splits position, while simultaneously appreciating the finer points of Immanuel Kant’s Lectures on Ethics. (Me, I can barely manage to lie down flat on the ground with Thus Spoke Zarathustra splayed open across my face.)

If only we could credit involvement in the artscene for this apparent elixir of youthfulness (demoparties can stimulate both worlds, blowing minds with 16k programs while getting swole throwing hard drives – or undertaking crazy prize-winning wild compo activities), but research suggests it probably has more to do with lots of stretching, rock climbing, and long wilderness hikes with some very good dogs, but it goes to show that it pays off to balance the internal life with a vigorous external one: we may be going bald and lumpy but its still not to late to switch to an ergonomic keyboard or transition to a standing desk… or at least log a few levels on Zombies Run or Pokémon Go 8)



Bonus: philosophy is something that’s hard to depict in a photograph, but here’s a recent interview with her in which you can subtly detect the mental muscle fully flexed, though the engine is barely ticking over.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 19, 2016 at 1:19pm UTC

Today on Mistagram, what might possibly be the world’s smallest Mist ANSI art logo. This was drawn by our resident Renaissance man and all-around helper (even today hosting mistigris.org) Mavrik, and topped a larger piece released in our 4th artpack in January of 1995.


Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 19, 2016 at 1:19pm UTC

Monday, July 18, 2016

[audio http://mistbackup.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/walker.mp3]

Last weekend I travelled through New York City for a wedding, a location I have only ventured through three times – on average, once every 12 years. So I have no roots in the city, little history, and despite having been there, virtually everything I “know” about it has been sucked up in childhood through pop culture such as Ghostbusters, The Critic, or The Muppets Take Manhattan. But I thought that the occasion would make for a fun opportunity to look at an old creative work we re-released last year, set in New York. The work is the song WALKER.MOD, titled “Stroll Thru New York” by Darren Grant of EuphoniX, first released on the last day of February 1993. (Where historical computer art is concerned, the easily-embeddable, instantly experienced visual artworks get the lion’s share of the social media love, and even Mistigris’ little-loved “lit” – easy to paste and explain – gets more airtime than our extensive and formidable music back stacks, so I’d like to try placing a stronger emphasis on vintage tracker music… because there’s a ton of it, and much of it is truly awesome!)



If Jovian and Tom were the core of EuphoniX, Jason and Darren were always its outliers – JaZz on the experimental, bruitist side, Darren on the sentimental, traditionalist side. That means that this tune is accessible, if extraordinary in the annals of computer music. Described internally as “humorous new age theme music”, it was released only a week after the composer’s similarly left-field Mystic Valour (also described as “new age” – a phrase that keeps being seen in the EuphoniX catalogue, but conspicuously only when applied to Darren’s songs.) You might get the feeling from JaZz’s anarchic tracks that he was throwing everything at the wall and seeing what stuck, but with Darren’s songs you can always be assured that they are precisely what they are intended to be, so any speed bumps listeners encounter will not be ones of composition or production, but rather mismatches of musical taste.



The instrument name messages don’t reveal much beyond the song’s release date, and pressing the onetime composer for further remarks two decades down the line didn’t result in much more: “Oh haha.. hmm not much. Mostly I raided other sample sets and played around. :) super cheese”.



As he sowed, so too do we reap: “super cheese” is the order of the day. The two minute and twenty-five second long song begins at a dawdling pace, like a record (let’s get you in the ‘80s mood here right off the bat) starting up midway through a song before the turntable reaches its cruising speed. The overall theme here is one of intrepid success to those who dare: in my mind’s eye, the opening of the song shows a businessman in a tailored suit emerging from a taxicab with his briefcase, quickly getting his bearings before power-walking – unhurried, but confident and in command – toward his destination: wealth and high finance. Within five seconds the song has achieved the pace it will enjoy for the rest of its duration, and its main theme rings out with a certain air of inevitability – as though somehow, the whole system of Wall Street was rigged. (But rigged in the businessman’s favour! No sour grapes in this song!)

As if to hammer itself home, it plays a neat trick with with the synth-horn lead line, at intervals re-triggering at phrase’s end the same sample at the same pitch with a louder intensity, like some record-setting Kenny G trick of circular breathing. This is all punctuated by a kickin’ slap bass line in the lower register, perhaps some inheritor of the New York sophistication of similarly New-York-set Seinfeld, launched in 1989.

There’s nothing particularly Big Apple about this song, which I like to think has its counterpart in Jovian’s Thursday Night in the City following in September of that year, a much more urban piece of work. For years, the image that comes to mind when I think of WALKER.MOD is actually the introduction to the short-lived cartoon Beverly Hills Teens, hitting the wrong coast but both fundamentally evoking a kind of fantasy of upper-class '80s white privilege where the future’s so bright, I gotta wear new wave sunglasses and a neon surf unitard.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu2eawfTiCM&w=420&h=315]

One minute in, the song dramatically slows down through an agonizing series of tempo gear shifts. Seventeen seconds later, our businessman finds that he has power-walked into the wrong side of the tracks – I believe in the '80s, The Bronx was the borough with that dangerous reputation. (Then again, as The Warriors demonstrated, even Central Park in the heart of Manhattan could be no cakewalk if you have the wrong enemies.) Whether Wall Street Kid is in any actual mortal peril or not is – as in The Bonfire of the Vanities – entirely beside the point, as from the sound of things he clearly sees himself at the mercy of a ruthless biker gang, one of whose members is likely spinning a chain menacingly. (No hint of “urban” music here, his boogeymen are plainly no b-boys.) But shortly thereafter, he hops a retaining wall or ducks out from under the right tunnel and emerges (at 1:34) into full sunshine in the business district again, with a transition back to the main theme as seamless as the departure from it was contrived. The anthem trumpets once more, then echoes its own return some 50 seconds later, and it wraps before risking overstaying its welcome.



In essence, this song is the sound of a bolt of totally awesome fabric my wife picked up at an estate sale last weekend.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 18, 2016 at 12:40pm UTC

Today from the vaults we spring a piece of hirez (high resolution artwork) from the desk of Silent Knight, a man who loved to debate and whose passion for indie comics led to the creation of the one-off Dream Factory comic book anthology. The stylized woman and the jailhouse logo both are coloured with a bold, high-contrast scheme, while the sans-serif sloganeering just let you know that … this piece dates to the 1990s.


Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 18, 2016 at 12:40pm UTC

Sunday, July 17, 2016

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 17, 2016 at 12:42pm UTC

Straying from the status quo was a delicate gambit in the competitive underground computer artscene, where anything other than conformity to established standards would be considered failure. And when the standards were to plaster artpacks with anatomically impossible babes in sprayed-on costumes, how could one beat them at their own game? By applying reductio ad absurdum: “More is better, right?”



This piece of ANSI art was drawn by animation buff, Hallucigenia founder (13 paltry months down the road) and Dreams of Dark, Enchanted Lizards SysOp Etana, helping Mist to distinguish itself among the big fish in Dark Illustrated, asserting ourselves in the culmination of our Mistigris World Tour in May of 1997.


Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 17, 2016 at 12:42pm UTC

Saturday, July 16, 2016

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 16, 2016 at 2:22pm UTC

Today’s exhibit on Instagram is this little piece of hirez, super rave flier aesthetic in effect, made by syncr0w and originally released in our M-9806-B artpack… featuring the mother of all lens flares!


Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 16, 2016 at 2:22pm UTC

Friday, July 15, 2016

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 15, 2016 at 1:45pm UTC

Today from the Mistigris Instagram feed: this is a solid (I mean it’s hollow, but well assembled 8) newschool ASCII art logo, totally monochromatic (only one colour), first appearing in the July 1997 Mistigris artpack. It was drawn by Dead Soul, who we have only recently lured out of retirement, and are looking forward to featuring more from this slow-burn textmode rockstar!


Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 15, 2016 at 1:45pm UTC

Thursday, July 14, 2016

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 14, 2016 at 12:37pm UTC

Our Instagram post from the vaults this morning is an ANSI art Mist logo (give or take a letter, you get to interpret!) by Mr. Wrong from Quebec. It is blue and hollow and a style of logo design I haven’t previously observed in the artscene! He drew us a logo last year in MIST1015, but this one dates to quite a bit earlier – our January 1998 artpack! Hats off!


Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 14, 2016 at 12:37pm UTC

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 13, 2016 at 1:04pm UTC

In March of 1995, Fire merged into Mistigris, a pairing that would not last for long. But as late as June of that year, we still had a few Fire members chugging along under our umbrella, including Fire’s skilled resident programmer Wintermute (named, naturally, after William Gibson’s AI from Neuromancer: I believe Fire was based out of Georgia, but we always found ways to relate something back to a 604 source.) This is a piece of what would have been in ‘95 cutting-edge 3-D rendering, an envisioning of a MiSTiGRiS CD-ROM (cutting-edge technology in its own right at that point) boasting what might, if not for the hole punched in the middle, read: “ANSI-VGA-LIT-CODING”. Of course we ultimately offered more, but ASCII wasn’t really on deck yet at that point.


Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 13, 2016 at 1:04pm UTC

Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 12, 2016 at 1:16pm UTC

No one has ever shaded an ANSI art logo quite like this, and the piece contains its own explanation. (I’ve always sided with the idea that it was put together using nonstandard ANSI tools on an Amiga, hence it would naturally be a little offbeat, but that could be pure speculation on my part.) It was drawn by Sentience and used in infofiles for our November 1996 artpack collection, and … there is really nothing else quite like it.

Edited to add: Sentience explains some of the reasoning behind his ANSIs’ non-standard appearance!
I programmed my own ansi editor in Blitz Basic for the Amiga. I could set the cursor position with a mouse! I added a color picker with the halftones. Eventually I put in the ability to load up a bitmap to trace over.. But that got me in trouble and truncated my visit to ANSIland.
Anyways, things always looked a little different because the colors were slightly non standard and the DOS font slightly off.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 12, 2016 at 1:16pm UTC

Monday, July 11, 2016

https://www.instagram.com/p/BHtYNkEDz-H/



Another newschool ASCII art Mistigris logo by Weird (a popular choice of subject for her), these fun letters spell out a good time. An unorthodox choice of lower white space characters give the logo a 3-D appearance, of being embedded in some malleable medium (and surely ascii qualifies!) Originally released in our 3rd anniversary artpack in 1997.

Sunday, July 10, 2016

https://www.instagram.com/p/BHqzsL_DwqK/



Today on Mistigram, a Mist promo VGA (piece of high resolution art) depicting a surreal 3-D landscape, modelled by Quebec’s Enelf Daragard and submitted to our doomed M-9808 artpack. (Doomed because we’d bitten off more than we could chew in framing an entire artpack as a website, an effort that stopped Mistigris dead in its tracks until the logjam was finally resolved in 2015.) But unburdened of that fateful context, it was a nice piece for 1998!

Saturday, July 9, 2016

https://www.instagram.com/p/BHpNbreDKIn/



Today on the daily archaeological Instagram dig from the Mistigris back archives, we have this true blue ANSI art Mist logo, rendered in the distinct and unmistakable typographical style of The Extremist(igris), first released in an infofile in MIST0996.

Friday, July 8, 2016

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 8, 2016 at 10:29am UTC

It could sure be frustrating, but when it worked, Mistigris sure made losers like me happy! Today’s artefact from the vaults of time is a splendidly sketchy, self-deprecating piece of ripscrip vector art, drawn by the zany Tincat - a man with a beautiful mind - and first released as we were emerging from the Mistigris World Tour in July of 1997, eyes once again blinking in the harsh light of day, once more standing unsupported, on our own.


Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 8, 2016 at 10:29am UTC

Thursday, July 7, 2016

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 7, 2016 at 2:05pm UTC

Today’s liberated prisoner from the oubliette of time is this ANSI art Mist logo by Gasol, released in our March 1998 artpack – tiptoeing up to the edge, with textmode art at that point an increasingly rare breed. The logo is interesting for its close focus excluding the implied lower half of the S, and also for the use of yellow as a high-intensity highlight on white-coloured letters. This is a logo that’s telling us a story, I just don’t know what that story is.


Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 7, 2016 at 2:05pm UTC

Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 6, 2016 at 12:52pm UTC

It wasn’t long ago that we featured an appearance by Tribe! during his brief but impactful stint in Mistigris before he moved along to his geographically closer colleagues in Dark as the 4th Disciple. But while he was here with us, here is another one from the infofile of that artpack in June of 1995 – a glimmer of hope as the Fire merger was crumbling, just prior to the glimmer itself crumbling in turn. (But we still had a long way to go yet!)


Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 6, 2016 at 12:52pm UTC

Tuesday, July 5, 2016

[gallery]

You first saw it in MIST1015, a Mistigris logo made of text symbols – but curiously not arranged according to the gridly demands of a fixed-width screen display. Robert “Lord Nikon” Doerfler, having conquered oldschool ASCII primarily under the auspices of Impure, had pursued new frontiers to tame and set his sights on the related undertaking of typewriter art. Through fiddly hand-tuning, a typewriter can do many things that PabloDraw, though it grieves me to say, cannot. He took first baby steps, as demonstrated in our collection, then continued since, making confident paces, and now travels with enormous, cocky strides – selling prints and commissioned originals from his typewriter art website at typewriter-art.de … but unsurprisingly, there’s not a huge market for Mistigris logos. (I know, the world is a cold and fundamentally unjust place, but that’s quite simply how it is.) So he decided to declutter his place (a single sheet of paper can really tip the balance!) and unsolicitedly mailed the original artwork over to the Mistigris WHQ (er, my front door).

However long it takes to transmit data from Germany to Canada, even at a historically low (300 baud?) speed, it typically takes even longer to send a physical object by post. (The sneakernet is the exception for short distances, but sneakernet would not traverse the Atlantic. The postal service actually played a crucial role in the European warez scene, where postage was cheaper than metred telephone use. But I digress!) We were nervous over here in Canada, knowing that our package was en route, yet also knowing that a massive (and wholly warranted) labour dispute is brewing in our postal system.
Spoiler warning: the package arrived. Not just containing the original artwork (you’d think that the coordinator of an artgroup would have accumulated more of these, but digital originals are hard to come by 8), the envelope also included a jolly note and a handful of what appear to be DeZign ASCII stickers of girls, b-boys and sword-wielding monsters – artscene subjects, in other words. Basically a bonanza of computer art made real, sitting in my living room where I can feel, smell and taste it. (Spoiler warning: doesn’t taste like much.)



Serendipitously, the very day the package arrived, I had been playing the part of the native speaker (ie, frantically dialing down the poet within) helping Robert work out some idiomatic English verbiage on a new piece of typewriter art on an epic scale, so it’s not just all about me – here’s something you can enjoy, also!

A video posted by Robert Doerfler (@lordnkon) on Jul 4, 2016 at 1:59pm PDT


//platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js

Here, it looks like the Instagram video is having some challenges, let’s try the YouTube one instead:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Dajx7SAAE0&w=560&h=315]

Monday, July 4, 2016

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 4, 2016 at 12:15pm UTC

Today we’re taking a brief break from our endless promenade of historical “Mist” logos in the interest of topicality, to celebrate both the American holiday of July 1st and the recent release of the seemingly unnecessary sequel to Roland Emmerich’s 1996 blockbuster movie Independence Day (ID4). (And how did he manage to anticipate the onslaught of ️ emoji awaiting us?) Handiboy (who’s undergone a few name changes in the meantime) submitted this curious mixed ANSI/ASCII piece to MIST2YR1, our 2-year anniversary artpack collection which must have come out sometime near October of 1996 – the artpack that I believe may have been his first releases anywhere in the scene!

It’s sure not advertising any BBSes, a failure considered considered anathema when I joined up to NWA in 1993, but by 1996 (perhaps thanks to boundary-pushing efforts by the merry Mist crew and others like us) we were more than happy to feature interesting computer art regardless of whether it shilled for anybody or not. Handiboy of course went on to further heights of success in both textmode and music creations, but the time will come to continue blogging about those 8)


Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 4, 2016 at 12:15pm UTC

Sunday, July 3, 2016

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 3, 2016 at 2:14pm UTC

Bearing the unmistakable imprint of ‘90s tablet use, this whole little world of greyscale sketching inside the twisting proportions of a Mist logo was drawn by longtime Mistigris fellow traveller Pure Voltage and released in the 2nd (high resolution) volume of our May 1998 artpack – two months away from our grand crashing to a halt. As you can see, things were coming to a head.


Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 3, 2016 at 2:14pm UTC

Saturday, July 2, 2016

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 2, 2016 at 9:35am UTC

Today from the vaults, we spring this guest appearance from the infofiles of our March 1995 artpack (the Fire merger, a deceptive moment of hope) by graffiti fontist par excellence Veks, an ANSI Mist logo showing us shining a light from the “I” like a candle. This logo was later used as the header for the Mistigris Facebook group for months while we pored over the matter of our reformation. (Should we? But that’s crazy! Well, let’s try it and see how it goes.)


Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 2, 2016 at 9:35am UTC

blockygraphics:



Crosscountry Canada, 1991. Via @dosnostalgic.


Friday, July 1, 2016

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6xzW1ZGTsE?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=375]
We vented most of the Canada-specific art from the Mistigris back stacks this time last year, with our parade of all the awesome Mist entries in the Canada-themed (and midget-wrestling-themed) Blender #39 art competition from back in 1997.



This year we found that we had a previously unreleased arrangement of the national anthem gathering dust, “O Canada” put together in Scream Tracker by Onyx of Mist and Sonic Equinox, also from way back in 1997. But because free video sharing arrangements are less suspect than audio sharing ones in 2016, we decided to throw together some quick visuals to accompany the audio.

The ANSI art maple leaf is by Quip, and you may recall it from last year’s roundup; we have lent it some ongoing visual appeal by colour-cycling it with the legendary GLOW3.EXE utility – credited to members of ACiD and iCE, but not conclusively belonging to either. Finally, there is a grand finale poached from a 1995 intro by Melkor.

Now the well is good and truly dry, so I have no idea what we’ll do for Canada Day 2017. Maybe… create new art? (shocked gasp) In the meantime, we’ll continue celebrating nostalgic outmoded notions like MS-DOS, modems and nation-states.