Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 31, 2016 at 1:54pm UTC

19 years ago to the month Dead Soul drew us this clean experimental newschool ASCII art Mist logo. It’s simple, but there’s surprisingly a lot going on beneath the surface.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 31, 2016 at 1:54pm UTC

[audio https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/280534877/stream?client_id=3cQaPshpEeLqMsNFAUw1Q?plead=please-dont-download-this-or-our-lawyers-wont-let-us-host-audio]

We don’t come by this song fairly; though composed by Cthulu (well, arranged by Cthulu – it’s a cover of a song, “Now or Never”, by flyingfish’s band, Perpetual Dream Theory), the founder of Mistigris, it was released in an ACiD artpack – ACiD-100, their final Acquisition, in 2004. Cthulu always aspired to be a computer musician, from the very earliest days even prior to Mist’s founding (hence all of the early music affiliation aspirations for The Screaming Tomato), and after a decade of chipping away at it, he was … really getting somewhere! But in the meantime Mistigris had both arisen and collapsed (it’s hard to believe that there wasn’t always a Mistigris, but anytime before August 1994 and anytime between August 1998 and October 2014 and you were out of luck!) and he was fortunate just to have any old place in which to vent this.

Finding the chiptune aesthetic fascinating from the start, The Pope’s experiments in that direction (A Night With Musidia, DODEL, ETO) compelled him to begin working in that direction also, which informed an early draft of this piece. Still, it was lacking a certain je ne sais quoi. Enter the High Voltage SID collection, the canonical pile of Commodore 64 music. Mining it for outrageous samples from memories of long-forgotten games, he used them to ice the cake and transform the song completely into something almost unrecognizable. Then it disappeared in part of the vast depths of ACiD-100’s multitudes of multitudes, forever to be forgotten until now.

For like Aphex Twin’s 1992 “We Are The Music Makers”, this arrangement also began with a sample of Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka in the 1971 movie, quoting Arthur O'Shaughnessy’s 1873 poem “Ode”. So due to the circumstances of yesterday, it was dusted off and put back on the shelf. We’ve only just made the acquaintance of Steve “Horsenburger” Horsely, but already we were able to capitalize on his extremely punctual minting of teletext gold to find some appropriately suitable visuals to accompany the track with. Thanks to everyone giving this old tune a second lease on life!

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 30, 2016 at 2:04pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, this piece of ANSI art by the unique Rash, first released in our March 1998 artpack. Elsewhere I described it as a Mist promo but actually it was an ad for the BBS “The Living End”. Rash brought with him an almost cubist sensibility to the ANSI medium that I’ve never seen before or since – I wish we could look him up and interview him, but with no idea what his real name is, that becomes nigh impossible!

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 30, 2016 at 2:04pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 29, 2016 at 2:03pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, the sad story (expounded upon at great length on Instagram) of this lovely little piece of surreal Amiga hirez drawn by Sentience sometime in the mid-‘90s and then reserved for use as cover art for a printed collection of Mistigris literature that was never to be. The hand-tree, the land-shark, the restful penguin… probably all reaching a wider audience today than in the previous 20 years combined. Thank god for the long tail!

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 29, 2016 at 2:03pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 28, 2016 at 3:24pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, this swell Mistigris ANSI art logo drawn by Grymmjack of Polyester, released in their artpack in February 1999. In its original setting, it congratulated us on our 4th birthday, which is ironic since that birthday would have been quite a bit earlier, in October of 1998… and we had dropped out of releasing artpacks two months prior to that, bogged down in the impossible M-9808 website/artpack.

We did eventually discover this strange artefact and put it to good use in our infofile for the MIST1014 20th anniversary reunion / revival artpack. Better late than never!

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 28, 2016 at 3:24pm UTC

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Today on Mistigram, Illarterate drew us this lovely garish teletext cake for our 21st birthday marked by the MIST1015 artpack. To celebrate the occasion I posed in a goofy selfie blowing out the candles with his VR girl enjoying the scene through augmented reality. (Truthfully, though I’ve always been a fan of angry fruit salad, I don’t know if my stomach is strong enough for teletext cake.)

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 26, 2016 at 2:00pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, a beautiful piece of ANSI art drawn for our use by Kyo in 1998 and never exposed to the light of day until 2015, being sunk with the doomed Mist-killing “lost pack” of M-9808.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 26, 2016 at 2:00pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 25, 2016 at 2:04pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, another classic Happyfish joint, this one from February of 1998. It’s a work of RIPscrip vector art, and differs from most artscene productions in that it’s not promoting a BBS or an artscene group or project, but rather the long-lived roguelike phenomenon NetHack! Happyfish has a long and illustrious relationship with the game, being one of the blessed few to have successfully Ascended and won the game. I like to believe that this picture depicts her valkyrie character successfully traversing the Elemental Plane of Fire on her way to the endgame.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 25, 2016 at 2:04pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 24, 2016 at 1:59pm UTC

We’ve enjoyed recent looks at two of the varying meanings of “Mistigris” – cats, jokers – but thus far we’ve largely overlooked the most straightforward reading of our most typical abbreviation: Mist. Or, if you prefer, fog, haze, vapour, smog… miasma. But we have some pillowy billows of it here on this ANSI art logo, drawn by Mist Classic fontist extraordinaire Platinum, for our 2014 reunion / revival artpack… assuredly the first ANSI art he’d drawn in this century. Memory may grow foggy, but we refuse to get lost in the mists of time!

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 24, 2016 at 1:59pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 23, 2016 at 2:03pm UTC

There are some warning signs here, and I don’t mean the obvious. Rage was the local (604 area code) SysOp of the bulletin Neosporin, an important hub to a new cohort of would-be artscene-sters. Unlike The Edge and Atlantis before him (and Ranma and Alpha Centauri before him!) he concluded eventually that he’d like to get his own hands dirty in the production of some computer art. Everyone can make art, right?

Pro tip: if you’re not happy with your work, don’t submit it. If you do choose to submit it, don’t disavow it with regrets written all over the piece. (I do wonder which part of this was the good start, speculating… perhaps a yellow rectangle?) It does reveal the weakness at the heart of the vague “mistfunk” current – empowering as it was (and it did inspire some great art!), it’s impossible to know whether you’ve got the funk or not. I’m not sure what Rage had, but I don’t think it was funk.

The typical compromise was that if we were on the fence about a piece, we’d run it anyway – otherwise a stung artist would flee to a less discriminating group to vent all their stuff, and we’d wind up cut out of the loop once their skills improved and they consistently wowed people. So despite everything, this went in the pack as an investment in the future. Only one problem: making this artpack, spinning this sow’s ear into a hypertext silk purse (we gambled on a big step into the future by trying to release an artpack-as-website in August of 1998… and lost big) fell flat and the attempt resulted in a total deflation of morale and momentum (from an historically unprecedented spree of monthly artpack releases), culminating in the end of Mistigris Classic and nearly 16 years of torpor. So it’s a lose-lose: we accepted Rage’s lukewarm art and never did get a chance to intercept his more skilled, confident work – indeed, we don’t even know his real name and have no way of locating him today now that we have gotten over ourselves. (And, er, probably my dragging his juvenilia through the mud will not much inspire him to emerge from the woodwork. As I said on Instagram – “Funk you too, Cthulu!”)

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 23, 2016 at 2:03pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 22, 2016 at 1:57pm UTC

The original use of the word “Mistigris” is to denote an alleycat in French. This has resulted in us garnering more than a few pieces of feline promotional artwork over the years. This resolute ANSI art stray was drawn by Happyfish, the only artist ever to enshrine both senses of our name, and used in the infofile of our 1096 artpack – so condensed it could almost (almost!) be used as a sprite in some hypothetical textmode remake of Bill Williams’ 1983 Atari 8-bit platform game Alley Cat. Alternately, with the addition of a tiny ASCII cockroach it would be a boffo illustration for an ebook release of Don Marquis’ archy and mehitabel poems – first appearing in print 100 years ago! But I digress.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 22, 2016 at 1:57pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 21, 2016 at 9:22am UTC

Today on Mistigram, a guest appearance by one “Everlast” (presumably not our 604 colleague in RAiD… thanks for nothing, House of Pain!) with this oldschool Amiga-style ASCII art Mist logo from our 2nd anniversary artpack in October of 1996.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 21, 2016 at 9:22am UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 20, 2016 at 3:15pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, the most epic letter “M” you ever will hope to see in ANSI art. This one was drawn by Enzo of Blocktronics as part of a group networked PabloDraw session set up by Sudden Death, and used atop the (itself epic) memberlist of last year’s MIST1015 artpack. A single letter writ huge, the group’s entire name writ small, flying hearts, skulls, an eyeball… this logo has it all!

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 20, 2016 at 3:15pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 19, 2016 at 2:01pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, a very cautious teletext celebration from our 21st anniversary artpack released in October of 2015, drawn by Illarterate. (Full disclosure: only five of those 21 years included artpack releases 8)

@mistfunk Ah yes, the design stolen from @Factory_Records @P_Saville_Assoc. :)

— Dan Farrimond (@illarterate) August 19, 2016

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Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 19, 2016 at 2:01pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 18, 2016 at 1:59pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, a red, red ANSI art logo by the amazing Eerie from our inaugural artpack release way back in October of 1994. Packing in a ton of bang for its buck, it really got the starting gun fired in the “smallest Mist logo” competition.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 18, 2016 at 1:59pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 17, 2016 at 1:22pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, a work of newschool ASCII art by Publius Emeritus II from our 20th anniversary / revival artpack of October 2014, the first drawn by the artist in over a decade and a half. It plays with the conceit of the numerical substitution cipher (eg. num3r1c4l 5ub5717u710n c1ph3r) traditionally employed by elite hackers where numbers are substituted for letters of a similar appearance, and here takes the conceit further by rendering the numbers themselves out of different characters! Mise en abyme, my friends!

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 17, 2016 at 1:22pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 16, 2016 at 4:16pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, a hirez Mistigris tribute by Derksar of Irato in July of 1997 – touting us in Quebec while here in Vancouver we were on the verge of crumbling away to nothing! We never knew about this one at the time, though after it was eventually discovered it was pressed into service in a loader as part of the MIST2000 Treasure Hunt. The Instagram blurb contains a great deal more detail, for the curious.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 16, 2016 at 4:16pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 15, 2016 at 1:16pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, this unique (check out the contrasting two-tone shading!) ANSI art Mist logo sets up a larger piece from which it is excerpted. First released in April of 1995.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 15, 2016 at 1:16pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 14, 2016 at 1:40pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, a small part of Illeraterate’s hugely substantial contribution to our 21st anniversary artpack in 2015. The blocky medium here is extraordinary – teletext! (You may recall he kindly shared an interview with us describing the medium in more detail.)

Bonus trivia: the logo up top is a condensed version of the cursive ANSI art logo Mattmatthew kindly drew us when he first set up this very Tumblr!

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 14, 2016 at 1:40pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 13, 2016 at 2:48pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, something a little more recent – ANSI art by bryface from our 2014 reunion / revivial / 20th anniversary artpack! I’d be very surprised if he’d touched PabloDraw at all since the turn of the century, and yet what he came up with is the equal (or better) of anything he ever drew back when it was a going concern! The logo, a rare full “Mistigris”, looks great, and the picture doesn’t let it down! All in all, a modern classic.

Stay tuned, as we have other breaking developments to report from his traditional wheelhouse (that being electronic music), but one thing at a time.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 13, 2016 at 2:48pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 12, 2016 at 1:57pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, Cthulu’s long-delayed (originally dating to circa 2001, re-generated for release in MIST2000 in early 2016 to reflect the much-increased passage of time) make-your-own Red Meat comic strip in which Bug-Eyed Earl stays true to both the conventions of the strip and the aesthetic underpinings of the textmode art scene.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 12, 2016 at 1:57pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 11, 2016 at 1:15pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, an exploration of the other meaning of “Mistigris” – not just French for “alleycat”, it’s also a variant of poker in which the Jokers are wild. In our early days we explored that use as a metaphor for our limitless potential, and later it… fell by the wayside completely. This ANSI art logo could be the final echo of it, drawn by Happyfish in July of 1997.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 11, 2016 at 1:15pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 10, 2016 at 1:20pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, an oldschool ASCII art Mist logo, full of graffiti influence, complete with a peculiar little mascot (“Brace-Face”) and drawn by Feral… released in our July 1997 artpack. (Not everything oldschool is old, but much of it is quite aged!)

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 10, 2016 at 1:20pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 9, 2016 at 1:21pm UTC

Today on Mistigram: this ANSI art Mist logo by Jughead is a month shy of 20 years old! Don’t be deceived by the serifs on the “S”! There’s surprisingly a lot going on here.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 9, 2016 at 1:21pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 8, 2016 at 1:15pm UTC

Today on Mistigram: a rare contribution in the RIPscrip vector graphics format, this one was drawn by Grinch in March of 1998, long after any viable application one might have expected for the BBS enhanced display format.

The curious thing about the “Mistfunk” movement is that, unlike dA pHUNK, lacking a gold standard for mistfunkiness (mistfunkitude?), it could be whatever you thought it was. This is definitely … something. Funky? …I don’t know about that. Mistfunky? It must be, it says so itself!

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 8, 2016 at 1:15pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 7, 2016 at 12:53pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, a piece of ANSI art in the exotic 80x50 screen mode by Sentience, drawn on his Amiga using homebrew software. It was released as part of a “colly” (an end-to-end compilation if you will) of other works drawn in the same 50-line mode in our January 1996 artpack. The logo is purple and pleasant, round and friendly, but the Terminator-esque illustration warns of the promises and perils of the cyber era knocking at the door.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 7, 2016 at 12:53pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 6, 2016 at 2:24pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, we have a very purple ANSI art logo (hm, a friend spilled iodine all over themselves yesterday – coincidence?) drawn by Xeryrus during his very brief stint in Mistigris in June of 1995. Graffiti styles + grape jelly?

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 6, 2016 at 2:24pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 5, 2016 at 12:49pm UTC

For today’s sunny summer’s day, today on Mistigram, we offer up a coloured newschool ASCII by Weird, breaking up a complete “Mistigris” logo with a charismatic, leonine sun (ostensibly having a bad hair day, I don’t believe it). First released in July of 1997. Weird reports:

i was obsessed with this smiling sun motif in high school. i drew it all the time on paper and in ascii. if any notebooks from my high school days could be unearthed you would definitely see this sun. everything i drew had a smiling face on it. sometimes with a saturated blue cloud. someone asked me if that was the only thing i knew how to draw. it might have been

i should note that after that random person in high school asked if that was the only thing i knew how to draw, i became super self-conscious about it stopped drawing it.!

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 5, 2016 at 12:49pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 4, 2016 at 1:14pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, this small and unassuming but semantically loaded piece of ANSI art by Handiboy for our 2nd anniversary artpack in October of 1996. Spicing up what is essentially a study of three spheres with personalised background panels (complete with frames!), extra texture is also imbued into the piece with selective application of ASCII art details. Keep your eyes on this young man, he’s sure to go far!

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 4, 2016 at 1:14pm UTC

[gallery]

I know that the particular timing of Pride weekend varies from town to town, but our homebase of Vancouver, Canada just celebrated its Pride this past weekend and that makes a good opportunity to make this post! We don’t have a lot of rainbows in our back catalogue, but this excerpt from a massive July 1996 colly does the job nicely.

Its artist, Etana, has worn a number of hats over the years – from SysOp of DODEL (Dreams of Dark, Enchanted Lizards – for a time, acting WHQ of Mistigris), to founder of our successor artgroup Hallucigenia, to administrator of Keyframe: The Animation Resource… all endeavours which rate a blog post, but I’m here to mention her most recent undertaking today: Tilted Windmills – a social justice initiative that celebrates wellness, creativity and collaboration, with a focus on gender, disability and minority rights. But she puts it best, so please let me stand back while she sets the scene:

When I first conceived of the name of Tilted Windmills—some years before I met Stefan—it was from a place of solitary frustration. As both an artist and a woman with a disability, I felt very much like I was railing at the establishment from the outside edge and that my ambitions were viewed as a little “crazy”.

What? As someone with a disability, I somehow thought I should be able to live independently above the poverty line? Contribute to society at large rather than be seen as simply a burden upon it? Live, love and create passionately and with purpose? Clearly, I had some kind of Don Quixote-complex, so I thought why not simply go with the metaphor.

And then one day I sat down to coffee with a transgender man and started what continues to be a fascinating conversation about what it means to live a life outside the mainstream. Our worlds and our life experiences have been very different, but Stefan and I have discovered a startling amount of common ground in areas such as mental health challenges in the face of adversity, trying to make sense of the barriers and attitudes flung upon us by mainstream society, as well as just trying to understand our own place in the greater picture.

I have come to believe that as human beings we are far, far more diverse and spectacular than we have ever realized. Whether you are ablebodied or disabled, cisgender or living outside the gender binary, you are part of that diverse fabric. In founding and re-envisioning Tilted Windmills with my partner, we hope to clear a space for that extraordinary diversity to be supported, nourished and celebrated, to take this unique conversation that we’ve been having between ourselves and invite you to the table.

Historically, anyone who chose to spend their spare time online was probably kind of an outsider, cyberspace a new territory in which escapist flights of fancy could be role-played – or where imposing power systems could be reproduced as elaborate power fantasies, the downtrodden now the down-treading. Due to its history of criminality, the digital underground wasn’t an especially welcoming or accessible place. As explored in our International Women’s Day piece, we did what we could in Mistigris, but an utopian sub-subculture can only achieve so much when both the wider society and even subculture are continually bearing down with negativity, oppression and regressive values. (Did anyone ever sign on to IRC using the Bastard-X client?) If you want to find a more just society, don’t head for the teenaged boys, is all I’m saying.

It’s 20 years on now and the online world is more and more congruent with its parent, the world… and whether you see it as having become a more or less just place depends on, well, a number of factors. Life is a complicated thing and the world is a complicated place, and so probably the answer is “both more and less”. But any way you slice it, it’s clear that there’s still much work to be done here before an online utopia is achieved – not just for the fair-skinned sons of privilege, but for everyone – and fortunately cyberspace is also able to provide a home for the conversation at Tilted Windmills (both at its website and its Facebook group)… perhaps containing the seeds of what tomorrow’s more just and respectful cyberspace might look like.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 3, 2016 at 2:04pm UTC

Though the angular letterforms are reminiscent of some of the more experimental fonts by The Extremist, who provided yesterday’s featured Mistigram logo, the arrangement and presentation are unique to the outsider stylings of Grim Reaper, Mist’s longtime freewheeling VGA department head. Endlessly productive, he scoured his life experiences non-stop in search of inspiration to feed the endless furnace burning in his brain – sometimes used “whole cloth” with inadequate processing or adaptation. But you always knew when you lit upon a piece that was 100% GR, because it was impossible that anyone else could have made it, gazed upon it and said to themselves “There, that’s it! THAT’S the piece I’ll submit!”

We originally released this piece in February of 1996, but it is as timeless today as ever it was then! Popular tastes simply have not yet caught up to his strange genius!

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 3, 2016 at 2:04pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 2, 2016 at 1:08pm UTC

Today on Mistigram: this ANSI art logo, unmistakably by The Extremist, was just a small part of a much larger (500 lines!) multi-artist collaboration in the Fire tourstop of our Mistigris World Tour, but playing to Instagram’s strengths, we provide you the excerpt. Maybe you didn’t think that the word “Mistigris” had that many pointy letters in it, but he could always find a way to coax the points and edges out.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 2, 2016 at 1:08pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 1, 2016 at 2:20pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, this postmodern, deconstructed angel by our Hawaiian member Kyo – the computer counterpart, perhaps, to the album art to Nirvana’s 1993 album In Utero. It was released in May of 1997 in our Dark Illustrated visit on the Mistigris World Tour.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 1, 2016 at 2:20pm UTC