Mistigram: @illarterate pays tribute to the unsung heroes of the legendary and notorious #Action52 cartridge for the NES, #ActiveEnterprises’ #Cheetahmen, looking rather nonplussed in this #teletext screen. This piece was included in the MIST0919 artpack collection. https://instagr.am/p/CUaay5YMEFL/
Mistigram: @bhaal_spawn doodled the cover art to #BullfrogProductions’ 1997 evil sim #DungeonKeeper to accompany another one of her #gaminghaikus about (over)use of its #HandOfEvil to motivate the monstrous denizens of the player’s domain. This piece was included in the MIST0919 artpack collection. https://instagr.am/p/CUaaWkZAASg/
Mistigram: here’s a @horsenburger #teletext tribute to the flick-screen platform game that made the #ZXSpectrum matter, Matthew Smith’s #ManicMiner from 1983! This screen was included in the video games-themed MIST0919 artpack collection released two years ago this month. https://instagr.am/p/CUaZYxVM13F/
Mistigram: I don’t know how the particular isometric angle of this photograph was achieved, but I understand that with a layer of high-resolution grain and a sprinkling of interface, @my_life_computerized was able to make life imitate art imitating life and turn it into a tribute to the culmination of Will Wright’s work at Maxis, #TheSims. This piece was included in the video games-themed MIST0919 artpack collection. https://instagr.am/p/CUYFFSLMb9n/
Mistigram: this #Lego #pixelart portrait of #Agent47, from the long-running #Hitman series, was made by @lego48x48 and included in the video games-themed MIST0919 artpack collection released two years ago this month. https://instagr.am/p/CUYEeUQLqdk/
Mistigram: this #roguelike mock-up, part of the #RexPaint artist @piquansi ’s “Unplayables” series of concepts and prototypes, was included in the video games-themed MIST0919 artpack collection. https://instagr.am/p/CUYEC53FOme/
Mistigram: During her downtime over the years, @athenacreative has logged more than a few hours playing #WorldOfWarcraft. I understand that this comic by her, titled “Hunter’s Best Friend”, was sent in and included in one of their fan newsletters at some point. It was also included in our video games-themed MIST0919 artpack collection. https://instagr.am/p/CUVTyb-rkYF/
Mistigram: this is a #teletext portrait of Brilliant Digital Entertainment’s 1997 Multipath Movies spokesporker #Cyberswine, drawn in #teletext by @ZXGuesser and included in the video games-themed MIST0919 artpack collection. https://instagr.am/p/CUVTHo-sPFV/
Mitsgram: from the #Homestuck game #Hiveswap #Friendsim, here’s a #pixelart portrait of the Alternian troll #TyziasEntykk, drawn by c00k13_m0n5t3r and included in our last video game-themed artpack collection, MIST0919. https://instagr.am/p/CUVSjltJks1/
Mistigram: some conflicts transcend mediums. In @polyducks’ wacky greyscale pop culture mash-up #GameBoy demake screen here, The Simpsons’ #PrincipalSkinner faces off in the Pokemon arena against his nemesis, #SuperintendentChalmers. This piece was included in the videogame-themed MIST0919 artpack collection. https://instagr.am/p/CUNq-HJrBBk/
Mistigram: Not just a skull with X-Ray glasses, here’s an @8bit_poet #pixelart portrait of #UncleDeath, from the 2016 game #LETITDIE by #SUDA51’s renowned #GrasshopperManufacture. This piece was included in the videogame-themed MIST0919 artpack collection. https://instagr.am/p/CUNqeTiJxnH/
Mistigram: The titular 2019 subject of our “Noel Gamboa Was Here” career retrospective collection of his pioneering works in the #ANSIart medium c. 1989-1991… has no memory of working on this blinking illustration of a Ghoul from Interplay’s #Wasteland. And yet here his name is written plainly on the screen, along with that of Fredrik Edlund, who he imagines must have put in most of the footwork. Regardless, here it is for your viewing enjoyment. Cheers!
Mistigram: later this month, we look forward to sharing with you a collection of computer art on video game themes. Here’s a piece from the final artpack release (iMP-0894) of Mistigris’ predecessor, iMPERiAL. This #ANSIart portrait of #Metroid’s hero #SamusAran was drawn by Black Lightning for “Sin of Damnation” BBS. I love the very 1994 “rain” effect in the background! https://instagr.am/p/CULKbb6r0uV/
Mistigram: this risque composition is Fetus69’s early-Photoshop postmodern cyber take on a #FabergeEgg, included in our Mistigris World Tour stop with Fistful of Steel in January of 1997, 24 years ago. (Fetus69, a colleague of Foolish Bird, has the unusual distinction of having spent his entire tenure in Mistigris releasing exclusively at our tour stops, never actually releasing a piece in a standard Mistigris artpack.) https://instagr.am/p/CUIj812r3K2/
Mistigram: this #ANSIart logo for Pedantik’s BBS “The Neon Jesus” was drawn by Neophyte and included in our Mistigris World Tour stop with Blade in December of 1996, a quarter-century ago. https://instagr.am/p/CUIjogtJNfH/
Mistigram: @ZXGuesser here goes into the mis-en-abyme of making computer art about the making of computer art. Is it inspired by #MSPaint specifically or any one of a whole category of image editor programs? Who knows.
This #teletext screen was included as a still image in the MIST0318 artpack collection, but Cthulu gave it a little motion graphics treatment working up the trailer for that artpack.
Mistigram: in this extraordinary complete scene from @axltm’s line of #PETSCII-inspired action figure dudes, things got really ultraviolet. This purple piece from the Planet of the Grapes was included in last year’s MIST0220 artpack collection. https://instagr.am/p/CUF_3wljehT/
Mistigram: and one final celebration of the #ZXSpectrum colour clash, here’s a landscape – titled “ClashScape” – drawn by @blippypixel. https://instagr.am/p/CUEir1MjKhW/
Mistigram: having developed a taste for the distinctive graphical colour clash of the #ZXSpectrum during his recent memorials for Clive Sinclair, @blippypixel found himself growing fond of the glitchy constraint! Here he has minted a portrait of #KingTut in the style. https://instagr.am/p/CUEijsMDwEy/
Mistigram: late in the 20th century, fresh out of high school, a cohort of our cadre were let loose on the higher education system. After getting a bellyful of Art History 101, Ice Cream Emperor, who in the present day celebrated his birthday, took to #MSPaint for a masterclass in #expressionism. We included the entire set of them in the long-delayed MIST2000 artpack collection. This is number five of the suite. https://instagr.am/p/CT8JUs_MlS0/
Mistigram: I was thinking that the #ANSIart specimen I’d chosen to represent Neophyte’s work yesterday, though conveniently related to his colleague Trinity, was not the best ambassador of his work, so I went back into the vaults looking for a more prime candidate. This, also, is not the best logo, but its story is irresistible. Many BBSes had “One-liner” doors, allowing callers to leave their two cents over the course of their connection, but the later Mist WHQ, @hsifyppah’s The Jade Monkey, had *C*one-liners.
Why? It is, ehh, difficult to explain, but it involves a teenaged TABNet summer spent cruising by sites of recent road maintenance, surreptitiously gathering seemingly abandoned stacks of orange traffic cones in truly massive quantities, culminating in Cthulu’s parents returning from vacation and asking him to please return the 300 traffic cones in the garage to wherever he had obtained them. We all go wilding in different ways as young adults, but most of us never go on to speculatively hypothesize schemes for applying the fruits of our misdemeanors to eg. convert our city’s downtown core into a CPU by regulating its traffic flow, treating individual private automobiles as electrons. Neophyte, I’ll find a better piece of your work tomorrow! This screen was included in the MIST0797 artpack collection released 24 years ago. https://instagr.am/p/CT8IXybAkO-/
Mistigram: one further @blippypixel memorial to #CliveSinclair today, here’s a wildly colour-clashing high resolution graphics screen titled “Ode to ZX”. https://instagr.am/p/CT5ZP61g13C/
Mistigram: one of @axltm’s series of action-figure-inspired, #PETSCII-tiled, brutal characters of a more heroic age, here’s a sky chariot rider, included in last year’s MIST0220 artpack collection. https://instagr.am/p/CT5L1JVpjRy/
Mistigram: from the M-9803 artpack collection released 23 years ago, here’s an #ANSIart logo intended to head an infofile of the #Hipe netlabel, drawn by tricolore. https://instagr.am/p/CT5LqzMMF8T/
Mistigram: hot off the presses, here’s “Happy Days”, a memorial tribute to #ZXSpectrum founder #CliveSinclair in #teletext by @blippypixel. https://instagr.am/p/CT5JjLYgH34/
Mistigram: we’d also somehow passed over Neophyte in yesterday’s spree, so here’s an #ANSIart logo by him for Trinity’s oddly well-advertised BBS “Malpractice”. This piece was released in our Mistigris World Tour stop with Fistful of Steel in January of 1997. https://instagr.am/p/CT2pQ1OLQ8p/
Mistigram: yesterday I noted how extremely statistically unlikely it was I had made it through visits to every one of our Mistigris World Tour stops without sharing a single logo by Trinity, so here he is now, with one of the instant newschool #ASCIIart logos he minted by the bucketful, promoting our first WHQ BBS, Nitnatsnoc’s “The Screaming Tomato”. This piece was included in the MIST0996 artpack collection released 25 years ago this month. https://instagr.am/p/CT2on9Zligd/
Mistigram: from the Mistigris World Tour stop with Fistful of Steel in January of 1997, here’s a great fluid #ANSIart logo for “Courier of Sins” drawn by Jughead (later Tincat), practically dripping right off of your screen. https://instagr.am/p/CTz6bRQLbsv/
Mistigram: from the Mistigris World Tour stop with Dark Illustrated in May of 1997, here’s a highly abstract and very colourful newschool #ASCIIart logo by Dead Soul promoting Kestrel and Wetworks’ BBS “Legion of Knights”. https://instagr.am/p/CTz5vj1J4ET/
Mistigram: from our first Mistigris World Tour stop with Blade Productions in December of 1996, here’s the #ANSIart debut of Handiboy (later Haquisaq and @bryfacetron), with a rather delightfully colourful (in a vaguely stained glass fashion) logo for the hip-hop themed e-mag “Sense” (about which… I can neither confirm nor deny that it ever released any issues, but it definitely generated some promotional materials.) https://instagr.am/p/CTz5ZcKDVPD/
Mistigram: from our Mistigris World Tour stop with Fire in April of 1997, here’s a newschool #ASCIIart logo for “Kolch(e)” BBS (a teenaged misspelling of Kölsch beer or kolache pastry?) drawn by Wishbringer, a member of the Mist Classic crew who’s gone under-represented in the Mistigram annals. (I’m not certain that giving the L the cross-bar is doing it any favours, but otherwise the letterforms have a nice calligraphic feel to them!) https://instagr.am/p/CTz4q-VNVzq/
Mistigram: on the other end of Cthulu’s long 14-year retirement from the underground PC computer artscene, he was invited by his old colleague @filipdehaes of Galza, last seen at the Pukkelpop festival in the summer of 1999, to contribute some poetry to the political collection of #ASCIIart and block ASCII comprising the Galza-22 artpack released in February of 2014. “The Pathology of Power” accompanied this newschool ASCII portrait of Russia’s #VladimirPutin, whose hold on absolute power is if anything somehow even more consolidated seven further years down the line. https://instagr.am/p/CTx80WvDgHs/
Mistigram: following their formidable “Gecko Temple” #ANSIart-illustrated lit released in TL199602, Cthulu floated another poem by @mattmatthew67 , this time for another iconic 604 BBS, “The Pelvis of Elvis” – WHQ of Happy Fetus Records. ts wasn’t able to give it the complete treatment, making a small sketch of #ElvisPresley and moving on. Four years later Cthulu bundled the doodle and the lit with a revision of the “TekMist” logo from their earlier collaboration and presented the joint as exclusive content in his January 2000 “Get Ready To Read” collection of illustrated lits. https://instagr.am/p/CTx7krgMCXX/
Mistigram: Of course, you can’t swing a dead cat on the internet these days without hitting anime-inspired drawings by Western otaku, but back in the 20th century this was still somewhat of a specialist niche, especially in the underground computer artscene. Creative polymath Onyx, better known for his relentless output of tracker module songs, drew his fair share of these images in Paint Shop Pro, during the JASC years. Here’s a specimen that was included in the M-9801 artpack collection released 23 years ago. https://instagr.am/p/CTp9a9EBgMS/
Mistigram: this login screen for the BBS “Geeksta’s Paradise” was drawn by Rash in his unique cubist-graffiti #ANSIart style and released in the M-9802 artpack collection released 23 years ago. https://instagr.am/p/CTp8Pc6B_sI/
Mistigram: this newschool #ASCIIart #TeenageMutantNinjaTurtle was drawn by Dead Soul for a promo for Happyfish’s Mistigris WHQ BBS “The Jade Monkey” and included in the M-9803 artpack collection released 23 years ago. https://instagr.am/p/CTnCfOVgLQ3/
Mistigram: this collaborative #TurnerTheWorm #teletext fancomic has been so much fun, it seems like it would be a real shame to let the character lay fallow in his silty burrow for another 18 years. So just putting this out there, we’ll have to get together and make another one sometime! This screen is by @AndyUglifruit. https://instagr.am/p/CTnBsjKAQ-A/
Mistigram: From the M-9805 artpack collection released 23 years ago, here’s an #ANSIart logo for the group Irato drawn by the distinguished typographer Mr. Wrong (not the NoMeansNo singer, but perhaps inspired by him 8) https://instagr.am/p/CTlEQl0AWIU/
Mistigram: there somehow wasn’t room in the first page of credits for the author of our #TurnerTheWorm fancomic, Cthulu (who only first learned of Turner secondhand through the #teletext revival), so @illarterate sourced a @horsenburger illustration from his vast back catalogue to celebrate his hugely-edited wordy contribution to this project. (Also roping in Steve, who otherwise had been conspicuously absent from the joint effort!) https://instagr.am/p/CTlDZWKgdhT/
Mistigram: This #ANSIart logo for Rage’s BBS Neosporin was drawn by Jughead and included in our 2-year-anniversary artpack collection in 1996. https://instagr.am/p/CTiG9EyPOsA/
Mistigram: Hope you enjoyed the month+ of our daily serial #TurnerTheWorm fancomic! Many hands came together to make it possible, most critically all of these Digitiser-loving artists in that sixel-filled #teletext medium. Thanks to @AndyUglifruit, @illarterate (who drew this screen), TitaniumDave, @horsenburger , @the_mr_biffo and @GentlemanNikki! https://instagr.am/p/CThXBlegqTJ/
Mistigram: Canada Place and the skyline of downtown Vancouver – Mist’s traditional cachement zone of area code 604 – provide the setting for this #ANSIart advertisement for Lush BBS, drawn by @MaxMouse__. This screen was included in the MIST0318 artpack collection. https://instagr.am/p/CTgSdRrDN2u/
Mistigram: and our #TurnerTheWorm #teletext fancomic was gently brought to a close… or was it? Today’s screen is a distinguished guest appearance by the artist historically best associated with Turner, @digitiser2000’s own @the_mr_biffo!
Narrator: “The disappointingly mundane normalcy of the timeline restored, our heroes returned to their retirement… unaware of what #OttoMatik had planned for them next…!!!” https://instagr.am/p/CTfqsi1BomP/
Mistigram: another #TelephonePictionary round of #EatPoopYouCat just wrapped on the Mistfunk Discord server, starting with a Janelle Monae lyrical fragment, working its way down to Cthulu’s description “we are all in the simulation, toiling our entire lives crunching numbers to answer a question the full nature of we could never imagine”, followed by this illustration by @littlebitspace, then a follow-up description by @otnooishphoo reading “Intel has begin developing ways to tap into Jung’s Collective unconsciousness as a math co-processor for their next line of CPUs.” You can see the entire game via https://ift.tt/3jO5gqz or join the Mistfunk Discord to play along! https://instagr.am/p/CTfpWhhB3yu/
Mistigram: this purple #ANSIart logo is perhaps not the finest moment of textmode typographer Platinum (at this time, known as “Bleak”), but the spirited blurb redeems the font. This piece, advertising Sylphid’s BBS “The Fuzzy Doorknob”, was included in the MIST0396 artpack collection released 25 years ago. https://instagr.am/p/CTdGFSahmhR/
Mistigram: in today’s closing panel of our daily serial #TurnerTheWorm #teletext fancomic, illustrated by @Illarterate, all’s well that ends well, our chrononaut being hefted bodily back into his own time period.
Old Glug: “Hang on…”
YANK
Turner 2003: “Farewell, brave worm!”
Turner 2020: “I’ll be seeing you in about seventeen years!”
Mistigram: this newschool #ASCIIart logo for Trinity’s BBS “Malpractice” was drawn by Publius Enigma and was released in the MIST0796 artpack collection released 25 years ago. https://instagr.am/p/CTbl1wjAWoi/
Mistigram: @illarterate is hard at work wrapping up the dangling plot threads of our daily serial #TurnerTheWorm #teletext fancomic.
Old Glug, Through A Time Portal (SHUM): “T-Turner, is that you? I was cleaning up this glowing mess you left on the ground…” https://instagr.am/p/CTbgL8xDk_a/
Mistigram: from the MIST0797 artpack collection released 24 years ago, here’s an #ANSIart advertisement for The Extremist’s BBS “City iZ Burning” drawn by Quip (well, Neophyte at that time, as the header suggests 8) https://instagr.am/p/CTamKKhAnaE/
Mistigram: It’s been fun and all, but this jaunt to the past in our daily serial #TurnerTheWorm #teletext fancomic is about to resolve itself. Illustration by @illarterate.
Narrator: “But then…”
Hand reaching through portal: “ZUMP! T-Turner?”
Young Glug: “What the?”
Young Turner: “We’ve won the lottery?” https://instagr.am/p/CTalpjTgIQy/
Mistigram: historically we haven’t released that many artpacks in the month of September (which was, in the Mist Classic period, “back to school” time), and of those we did release, mostly their contents have already been shared here. So enough with “25 years ago _this month_”, but we have plenty of other artefacts from other times of year to share.
This is a hugely curious specimen, a mid-game panel from a round of “Eat Poop You Cat”, a semantic transmission party game we adopted at the turn of the century (more descriptively known as “Telephone Pictionary”). This MS Paint drawing was made by Ice Cream Emperor, illustrating the Laughing Fool’s descriptive phrase “My Pooh is jammed and dripping blood red.” It was in turn described by early Twitter lead developer Crystal Lattice as “Rabbit, this reminds me of the time Pooh got stuck after eating too much Hunny… But this is just twisted and kinky.
I don’t know if Pooh will ever go near a hunnypot again, even if we get him out before he bleeds to death!”
Every time someone describes a picture, then someone illustrates that phrase, then a third party describes that illustration, the meaning conveyed shifts a little bit. To demonstrate – this round began with the phrase “Time has its lives to eat” (a quote from the poem “Night Poem, Vancouver Island” by Robin Skelton) and ended with the phrase “rabbit was a stern taskmaster : even though he only took a very short hunny break, pooh was threatened with a whipping for only stacking some of the poo.”
This game of EPYC was bundled up in the MIST2000 artpack collection of “computer art gathered between the final Mist Classic artpack and the first Mistigris Reunion pack”, released at the start of 2016, five years ago, in hopes that I might inspire people to take up the game again.
Well, now it is 2021, and Eat Poop You Cat is once again available for play in a computer-moderated fashion in #epyc at our Mistfunk Discord server at https://ift.tt/2WRfP3B https://instagr.am/p/CTVDsThj_Ox/
Mistigram: In today’s panel of our daily serial #TurnerTheWorm #teletext fancomic, @illarterate illustrates the Turners of 2020 and 2003 reconciling themselves to their inevitable fate of a cancelled Digitiser:
Old Turner: “I guess we couldn’t change fate, this was the way things had to be…”
Young Turner: “What didn’t kill you made you stranger!”
