[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzChk35zgus?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=375]

The MIST2000 Treasure Hunt: Puzzle #7, explained!

ANSI, ASCII, lit, RIPscrip, tracker music… did we represent all of the computer underground scene’s art forms yet? Not quite: where are the intros and loaders? I took the liberty of minting one in an old Intro Maker application, which bit.ly/pillarsofwisdom delivered up to you after a casual UUdecoding: PLEIADES.EXE, named for the Seven Sisters asterism. I don’t know if I was running out of time or out of ideas, but this is another no-puzzle puzzle (A WAR OF ATTRITION IS STILL A WAR REGARDLESS!); all you need do is sit through a list of greets. (The list consists of all Mistigris members currently credited on Demozoo, and runs around 6 minutes long, but if you don’t have that kind of time to burn, the first completer of the puzzle challenge took a shortcut and just thumbed through the loader’s data with a hexeditor to expedite the delivery of the scrolly’s text.)

But if you’re too busy even to help yourself, know that the message revealed at the conclusion of the scrolly bar oriented you toward the next helpful URL: bit.ly/spiderlegs … and with it, we approach the last of your opportunities to solve even a single step of this treasure hunt on your own!

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

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The MIST2000 Treasure Hunt: Puzzle #6, explained!

This puzzle doesn’t require mastery of any of the classic artforms of the underground computer artscene, though implementing it demanded a fluency with the same hexediting that would have been called for were I trying to crack or train a piece of fresh warez. But I get ahead of myself. Puzzle #5, recently explored, pointed us to bit.ly/degreesofbeanwithbacon … and there we found, yea, the very archive of Commander Keen 4: Secret of the Oracle that we could have expected. (Not quite the very archive, mind you – most of you remember the game in EGA, but for bonus nostalgia, I tweaked the CGA-only version.) But this installation is not “stock”: while most of the files are the untampered originals, some of what you will find here bears fingerprints more recent than John Romero and Tom Hall’s.

Much to my dismay, I was unable to re-ICE the tweaked game state back to the ID standard “needs to be De-ICEd first” distribution format, adding one more to my list of “obscure forgotten file compression formats revived for the MIST2000 treasure hunt” candidates, but those are fine points tangential to their function for passing along codes to explorers.

So where is the new business? You can begin where any search on a BBS would begin, perusing the archive’s FILE_ID.DIZ:

You’re doing well, now take a break!
Relax so you won’t make mistakes.
Try a round of Commander Keen 4!
Don’t worry about achieving the highest score.

OK, that tells us… everything we need to know, but let’s fire up the program just to make sure.

Yup, it’s Commander Keen 4. Are explorers expected to achieve a position on the high score table? Well, no: that would require 10 000 points, which would be time diverted from my precious treasure hunt (on a probably more fun endeavour; you might simply fail to return!) So play a bit (or not; sitting through a couple levels’ demonstrations will also get you there – so yes, this is another puzzle that can be solved by patiently sitting through on autopilot after being set into motion), but when you’re done, do take a look at the conspicuously-mentioned high scores table. Hey, it at the top of the list there that our next code resides! Also, some elite greets.

This method of embedding a secret message was, incidentally, first imagined way back in the conception of the BBS treasure hunt that was the ~1991 seed for how this puzzle series would ultimately unfold. The technique for embedding arbitrary text (well, within tight string limits) was explored (I was always fascinated by the literary implications of the protagonists of Altered Beast brawling with the credits roll upon completion of the Genesis cart – hm, my childhood memories appear to have overstated the case) in preliminary experiments for my incomplete, unreleased machinima WIP for MIST1014 – you can see a poem hiding here:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibRMhd3y_OE&w=480&h=360]

But I digress. We now have everything we require in order to progress to puzzle #7, located at bit.ly/pillarsofwisdom without a shred of pretentiousness.

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The MIST2000 Treasure Hunt: Puzzle #5, explained!

So, here we are. We’ve breezed through the puzzles in the textmode artforms of lit, ANSI and ASCII, and have even blitzed through tracker music, which brings us to puzzle #5 in the MIST2000 treasure hunt: nightsatFreddies.zoo located at bit.ly/fifthBeatle, containing aeiou.rip

.RIP? That’s right, it’s a piece of RIPscrip artwork, that vector graphics format intended for use on BBSes and never really embraced by them either. This one is a no-puzzle puzzle as well: it writes where to go next directly on the screen. Then, it writes it again. It writes it over and over again, until the sheer texture of all the layers of the instructions renders any one of them unreadable – and (unless you opt to throttle the display speed to that of a slower simulated modem) it displays them so quickly (and the message itself is sufficiently strange) that you will be unlikely to interpret it on-the-fly. Tauntingly, it concludes with a message: palimpsest? Yes, since the heyday of the artscene, we also have taken 100-level art history courses in college. If only you could scrape beneath the layers of extraneous verbiage and restore the simple statement of this puzzle’s clue…

Well, there is another way: because the message was input as plain text (vs. vector instructions for drawing specific outlines that coincidentally spelled out letters quite a bit more slowly), the clue is spelled out … quite a few times … in the .RIP file’s data, laid open for any text editor to enjoy:

!|10000$SBAROFF$|1K|*|W00|=00000001|c0F|Y01000A00|@071Gdegrees|@E31Qo
f|@0543bean|@8Z4Dwith|@3Y67bacon|Y04000A00|@0016degrees|@E31Lof
!|Y04010A00|@1EJM33bean|@6636with|@B61Gbacon|Y07000A00|@031Bdegrees
!|@DK1Gof|@0648bean|@8Z4Kwith|@3W66bacon|Y03000A00|@002Hdegrees|@EA1Bo
f|@0240bean|@924Iwith|@3464bacon|Y08000A00|@0212degrees|@E313of|@003Wb
ean|@8Y48with|@2W5Sbacon|Y0A000900|@020Pdegrees|Y0A010900|@CN2Cof
!|Y0A010700|@1EJG37bean|@6P3Qwith|@EA1Pbacon|Y00000A00|@012Edegrees
!|@274Cof bean|@016Ewith|@6L7Dbacon|@252Cdegrees|@004Bof bean|@8D60wit
h|@037Fbacon|Y0A000A00|@0103degre|Y0A000800|@000Ydegrees|@2H3Cdegrees
!|@041Eof bean|@AN3Cwith|@7U5Abacon|Y0A010600|@1EJQ0Jdegrees|@180Tof b
ean|@3G2Ewith|@5Y2Abacon|Y00000600|@0024degrees of|@0442bean with
!|@005Qbacon|@4624degrees of|@5O42bean with|@AU60bacon|@3W5Qdegrees of
!|@046Ubean with|@0K7Ybacon|@466Adegrees of|@5O74bean with|@AU88bacon
!|c04|Y05000A00|@0Q3Epalimpsest?|#|#|#

“degrees of bean with bacon”? Some bizarre conflation of Six Degrees of Separation (or our favorite variant, Mistigris of Separation) and Commander Keen’s Bean-With-Bacon Megarocket? Well, yes. So, off the puzzler must go, to bit.ly/degreesofbeanwithbacon!

[wpvideo byLvT4xX]

The MIST2000 Treasure Hunt: Puzzle #4, explained!

OK, when you last saw us, unpacking this complex of computer stumpers, back on November 7th, we’d just unpacked the ANSI art black-on-black problem (with help from TheDraw fonts) and had been sent to puzzle number 4 by way of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, curiously: bit.ly/SopochtdasSchicksalandiePforte. And you were pointed to a .ZIP archive (a current compression standard at last, thank god!) FANTASTIC.ZIP (Fantastic Four, you dig?) which you then cracked open, only to be posed with this:

A password? No previous prompts provided me with any kind of password! This is unfair! But here’s a hint: the encrypted file’s name is “Horse Feathers”? Now, what comes up if you Google “Horse Feathers + password”? This isn’t rocket science, it was even the name of a movie. In fact, it’s the name of a trope: The Password Is Always Swordfish.

Maybe it would have been more fair to make it one of the classic overused passwords, like “password” or “God”. If I were to do this again, I probably would have styled the ANSI art clue as a fake BBS ad and listed this password as a New User Password. If I were to do this again… I’d be certifiably bonkers.

So you start playing the song, and you hear the creepy mantra repeated endlessly with an old interesting-failure word-by-word speech synthesis experiment: This is a red herring.

A “red herring”, for non-native English speakers, is a metaphor for a dead end of sorts – a distraction from an alternate fruitful avenue. And this song is full of them: open the file up in a tracker program and analyse the samples included in the song. One of them contains backmasked vocals – Satanic messages? No: sadly, an apology for being another red herring. One contains the old tracker trick of including a text file as a sample, and that text file will tell you everything you might have ever wanted to know about the etymology of the phrase “red herring”. A message in morse code? Sure. What you get when you decode the message? You can probably guess the species and colour of the fish. We even include one sample of noise that reveals a picture of a fish when run through a spectroscope… all different paths that lead to the same, unuseful, lack of progress. So how do we progress? What here is not a red herring?

In the first of my “no-puzzle puzzles” all you have to do here is play through the whole song, in its entirety, from within a tracker program that displays the names of the samples currently triggered. After listening to a great deal (well, a minute and 57 seconds) of creepy uselessnes, near the end of the playback, you will see a message silently display on the screen, assembled letter-by-letter, inspired by our longago insertion of ASCII stickmen dancing the YMCA in a tracked rendition of that Village People song for a Blender competition. And that message will tell you where to go. (And… where to go next, for puzzle number 5, is: bit.ly/fifthBeatle … maybe you can solve it before I get around to spoiling the puzzle, though for my sake I sure hope you don’t as I’ve really got to start dashing these off if I want to get MIST2000 into the public’s hands before New Year!)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9kjKwrUTqc?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]
So while we came to the conclusion of our “original” re-heated Christmas content on Christmas Eve, we still have our spree of similar proportions from last year. We dug up a pile of seasonal loaders, lits and works of ANSI art from our own ‘90s artpacks in chronological order, but the secret was that it was all in the service of drawing more attention to the re-release of the never-heard-much-in-its-original-format music disk The Bells Of Yule, which finally in 2014 found the audience it so richly deserved.

This was the same motivation behind our cooking up these five ten-minute music videos we shared with you this year, an enormous promotional effort (with, I think, lesser primary success) behind spreading the word about old tunes from 1994, but fortunately it was an interesting exercise regardless.

And now we have ten artefacts to use to promote its enjoyment for Christmas 2016! Two more and we can do a genuine “12 Days of Christmas” run-up! (Sit down, Catholics, I know that the 12 Days actually come AFTER.)

So if we’ve worn down your resistance to hearing new things (or, actually, incredibly old things), know that you can enjoy listening to all five movements of the Bells of Yule suite right here!

[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/177307886" params="auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%" height="450" iframe="true" /]

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

prostheticknowledge:

Little Drummer Toy

Online musical sequencer from Ableton lets you create musical tracks with a minimalist seasonal arrangement.

Make a festive jingle out of the available shapes.
Some of these might be played by someone else – a collaborator from around the world.
For the best musical experience, use the latest desktop versions of Chrome, Firefox or Safari.
     

Try it out for yourself here

H/T: @notational

In time for Christmas, here’s a cute and fun seasonal musical sequencer!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU266CumO7E?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]
Happy holidays, friends! Here it is, just in time for Christmas, the final instalment of our 5-part music video series for the 5 movements of the Bells of Yule suite of computer music, composed way back in 1994 as 4-channel .MODs on an Atari ST! (Remastered in 2014.) To provide period visuals, we’ve dug deep into the annals of seasonal computer artwork from the public domain and the computer art underground! Suiting the extraordinary dark tone of this fifth and final movement (suitable for the darkest time of the year – at least, here in the northern hemisphere), we saved all of the grimmest “bad Santa” pieces (boozing, smoking, six-shooting, tripping balls) popular in underground circles… but it proved inadequate even scrolling at modem speeds to fill the song’s runtime, so we also drew on a wealth of hitherto-untapped RIPscrip vector graphics, nearly all by the astounding Outworld Arts, as well as a tremendous selection of whimsical teletext advent calendar works by Illarterate (who you saw in MIST1015) as well as a handful by Raquel Meyers (ditto) and Simon Ferre, among others.

This suite of video experiments has been our main project since MIST1015 was released, diverting most of our discretionary time and energies from such competing activities as blogging the compelling contents of MIST1015 and telling you just why it was all so fascinating, but rest assured we’ll be getting back on that horse at our earliest opportunity… after a brief respite and resolution of a couple of remaining loose ends for 2015. Until then – happy holidays and Merry Mist'mas!

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fApZFio-aTo?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]
Now you’ve had a chance to enjoy Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 … we’re definitely rounding the bend of the old candy cane here, and approaching the fifth and final movement of our 2015 music videos for our composed-in-1994-remastered-in-2014 Christmas music disk The Bells of Yule.

The thing about these music videos, you may have noticed, is that they draw on period textmode visuals from the ‘90s computer art scene to illustrate what the sights would have been when the sounds were also like this. Helps to establish the context for an overall computer art milieu, if you will. Every video has had its own themes for the visuals – finally here in part 4 we begin exploring longer-form works of wintry ANSI art from the computer art underground – less ancient history, however much most of it may still be ancient history … just, y'know, less ancient. At this point, some of the pieces may even date to last year or even last week! But regardless of the actual age of the pieces, they still reflect an antiquated art practice. You can still find people weaving tapestries and smithing horseshoes, but … y'know, historical re-enactment in the present doens’t cease to be historical just because it manifests now.

This concludes our confused pseudo-philosophical digression into the nature of time. Now enjoy our music video and stay tuned for the final movement tomorrow, just in time for Christmas Eve! Merry Mist'mas – share and enjoy!

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p-D0j-awns?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]

On Sunday, you saw part 1; yesterday, you saw part 2… today, we bring you part 3 of the 5-part Bells of Yule holiday suite of period (1994) computer music, illustrated with fellow traveler pieces of textmode artwork from the Public Domain and the underground. Today’s video especially places an emphasis on a handful of animated ANSI art screens – or ANSImations. Stay tuned for the final two videos as we continue marching along on our Christmas countdown! Merry Mist'mas – share and enjoy!

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9NRRadx-zY?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]
You probably got the general idea from yesterday’s posting of the first of our five holiday music videos, but if you missed it and don’t feel like following that link, in a nutshell: in December 1994, we released “the Bells of Yule”, a music disk featuring a central 5-part suite of seasonal .MOD music composed on an Atari ST. It was sent to all of the BBSes, and when they dried up, it disappeared, seemingly forever… but in 2014, Cthulu made his personal copy available to the composer, who had since lost the originals, and in a remastered form, they were sent out back into the world once again, greatly fortified with other holiday computer compositions.

Now it is Christmas 2015, and we are following up this Lazarus-like feat from last year by making music videos for each of the five parts, one daily in the run-up to Christmas Day. We have drawn on the rich history of computer art, public domain and underground, to provide a wintery potluck of hundreds of pieces of thematically-appropriate fellow traveler works in a textmode, low-resolution idiom; part 2’s visuals draw specifically on brief, single-screen (or “25-line”) pieces of ANSI art – full attribution of the participating artists (and gosh golly, there sure are a lot of them) can be found at the end of the video. Merry Mist'mas – share and enjoy!

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d5gbddtQcg?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]

Last year, we shared a number of posts commemorating minor holiday celebrations we had made in our computer art idiom during our original, 4-year run from 1994-1998, culminating in the re-release of the long-lost “Bells of Yule” music disk, remastered, enhanced and considerably fortified for a total 1h45 runtime.

One thing that I thought would have been “nice” would be to provide relevant visuals, but what with all the time I spent drafting infofiles that fall, the time bank was empty when the right moment came along to promote this music disk… so we went without for one year. But we did not forget!

Now, a year older and seemingly no wiser, we have raided the collected vaults of the history of textmode art, public domain and underground, ASCII, ANSI, ANSImation and more, ferreting out literally hundreds of brief holiday-themed works of visual art with which to present you a vintage slideshow, the best and most fitting possible accompaniment to the 5-part “Bells of Yule” suite composed in Winter 1994 on an Atari ST.

We’ll be sharing one instalment daily for the next five days; today’s features a focus on FidoNet/UseNet style ASCII art, notably focusing on the works of the disappeared ASCII master jgs (Joan G. Stark), with a cameo appearance by ldb (Laura D. Brown). Merry Mist'mas! Share and enjoy!

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

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How many Mistigris alumni and special guests are vending goods available for your purchase this holiday season? Huh… probably quite a few. But they have not all brought the matter to my attention, and consequently I can’t offer up a complete gift guide for your enjoyment. Instead, locals please consider the following invitation from local artist Alexander Bell, who opened MIST1015 (appearing first, alphabetically) with some of his unique ASCII art-screenprinted oil paintings. And yes, the artist addresses the question on everybody’s mind: “I’ll have a number of textmode influenced artworks on offer as well.” (Not necessarily the one pictured; that’s just an example from MIST1015 8) Don’t wait for Boxing Day! Here are the details:

Dear friend,

I would like to cordially invite you to come to my studio this weekend for an open studio.

What: Open Studio Sale
When: This Saturday Dec. 19th, from 11am - 6pm
Where: #26 - 108 E. Broadway Street (the grey door next to the Burrard Arts Foundation Gallery)

It’s that time of year when I need to clear some things out, so prices will be discounted. I’ve pulled out a variety of work ranging from:

works on paper, panel, canvas, digital prints, screen prints,
very small to very large
watercolors, oil paints, drawings, sketches, photographs
new works and old works
$10 dollars and up
Come find a holiday gift for a friend, or perhaps something for your own home.


For more information please take a look at the facebook event page. Please feel free to forward this message to your friends if you think they would be interested.

As well, a number of other studios will be open in the building selling a variety of arts and crafts. Open studios also include:

Anita Sikma Design, Lacar, Kaw, Lindsey Hampton, Karenn La, noon, Daub + Design, Christopher Rodriguez, Rox x Rox, Locomotive Clothing, Feest, Brine Adams, + treats, hot refreshments, cheer

I would like to wish everybody the best of the season; health and happiness in the new year.

Uhh… what he said!

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I have so much yet to discuss: I have MIST2000 puzzles to spoil; I have MIST1015 artworks to discuss… I have a holiday multimedia extravaganza to hype! But in keeping with my mandate to not let timely matters get away from me… I have a concert to plug by a Mistigris alumnus. Oldschool Misters might remember him as Handiboy or Haquisaq; you last saw him in MIST1014 under his modern sobriquet of “bryface”, which not only hints at his real name, but lets you know that yes, he has a face. (He is also represented in MIST2000, so I’d better get around to cracking that nut for the benefit of all of you lazy gadabouts who refused to do so for themselves.) Though he had a deft handle on sample use back in the ‘90s, he has since refined his masterful art down the manupulation of pure square, sine and triangle waves, and you can hear him leading the way to some retrofuturistic palace of wisdom in a chiptune idiom. I praised his musical achievements before, and I guess his turn has just come around again.

Here, it’s nearly Christmas, enjoy a seasonal video of his handiwork. (Er, I mean haquiwork. Uhh… workface.)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQPCr95vkJM&w=560&h=315]

And now, the concert details:

Thursday Dec 17, 8 PM
Rickshaw Theatre (254 E. Hastings)

Music and Gaming Festival’s GAME OVER event series is coming to the northwest at the Rickshaw theater. $15, 19+

Performances by:

bryface
————————————–
bryface composes and performs chipmusic using real game hardware: his most recent project, “VARIOUS TOPICS”, is a full-length album written solely using, of all things, a 1980’s Nintendo Game Boy. But this music is a far cry from the nostalgic, simplistic video game stereotypes of yesteryear – watch bry demonstrate prowess in a multitude of modern genres such as House, Electro, and Drum and Bass, all using nothing more than the sound coming from the Game Boy’s antiquated 4-channel sound chip. bry’s music has gained notoriety throughout the worldwide community of chip musicians for being highly sophisticated and forward-looking, yet deeply rooted in oldschool demoscene aesthetics.

The Runaway Four
————————————–
The Super Smash Bros. of video game music! The Runaway Four performs video game music in the form of themed medleys, tying songs together from all different games. A regular at local conventions including the Vancouver Retro Gaming Expo and Nerd Fest, this band is known for performing high-energy sets and long, expository audial journeys. They can also be be seen frequently around Vancouver collaborating with other geek-themed performers like Geeks vs Nerds, and they always keep a healthy stock of medleys uploaded on their YouTube channel.

missingNo.
————————————–
Founded in 2011, missingNo. has played venues from house parties, to clubs and local conventions, to some of the largest video game music gatherings in North America. missingNo. boasts a full horn section that injects a heavy soul-fusion influence into their arrangements of classic and modern tunes and they’re consistently blowing away the crowd with their big sound and ability to draw out the inner child in their listeners. Their first album, Warp Zone, dropped in 2013. Epoch, the band’s next studio recording is slated for digital release in Fall 2015. Their music is available for sale on Loudr, Bandcamp, iTunes, among others and is also available for streaming on all major internet radio sites. Be sure to track them down on YouTube and Facebook to track down their latest videos and music releases.

Freaky DNA
————————————–
Freaky DNA plays his own NES-style chiptunes from the Retro City Rampage album which currently has 200,000+ plays on Bandcamp. Previous live shows include Osaka, O’Porto, Brooklyn, Banff, Zürich, Seattle, Toronto, Norwich, Newcastle, Berlin, San Francisco, Amsterdam and other locations around the globe.

Late-breaking update: Bryface tells us that he will have merch at the concert! We never did end up making the Mistigris CD sampler, but this … is probably quite a bit better.

also, at the venue i’ll be selling a collection of most of my existing / unreleased works on SD card! not only will there be .MP3’s but also a handful of tracker files and other music source file equivalents.

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In any artscene anthropological digs, lit (short for “literature” – poems, fiction, rants) maintains its traditional scene status by getting the short end of the stick. Due to biases inherent in our delightful Web 2.0, images (textmode, vector and high resolution) are very easy to share, needing only a conversion if indeed any treatment; music is less trivial to put up, especially if initially distributed in tracked form, but still very possible. Getting programs to work (or at least demonstrate their output) in-browser is a hurdle but not an insurmountable one. But displaying period text – which should be the most seamless medium to share of all, much as it was considered the easiest (and least “skilled”) computer art form – is rarely, if ever, undertaken. This is a shame, because it was one of our traditional strengths (but, y'know, one of those strengths that is also a weakness.)

Ironically, while (some of) our practitioners of other art forms have kept on chugging along, most of Mist’s lit writers, deprived of the primarily textual cyber medium in which they reflexively expressed themselves, fell by the wayside as writers… to the point where we had a hard time finding any to put in our recent revival artpacks. But but but… it simply wouldn’t be a Mist pack with no lit! (That would be like an ACiD pack without the WE-WILL.SUE disclaimer!) So I had to go a bit further afield and headhunt some relevant words to include in our collections.

Jim Munroe (not all of our contributors rate Wikipedia articles about them!) was never part of the artscene, though he did write for the digital underground. While we were active in Mistigris making artpacks, he was also here in the 604, working for The Media Foundation as managing editor of the influential Adbusters magazine in its heyday. But before then, he was putting together e-zines in the newsgroups and small press scene of Southern Ontario – I asked him if he knew any members of Dark Illustrated, but though they were in the same place, they were not active at the same time. (Fo shizzle he knew BBSes, though – one of them provided the initial textmode setting for one of his video games, “Guilded Youth”.)

His time in Vancouver informed the setting of this third novel, 2002’s Everyone in Silico, a slice of West Coast near-future dystopia. (He’s been working with SF themes regularly, a bit of a Canadian Cory Doctorow (whoops, as Jim reminds me – Cory IS the Canadian Cory Doctorow), but instead of Boingboing, he established the Perpetual Motion Roadshow, a small press indie tour circuit I helped prop up the Vancouver end of back in my days at the Butchershop Floor art gallery.) As I approached him regarding permission for us to reprint an excerpt, we found my timing was perfect, as he was discharging his back catalogue of novels and graphic novels as temporarily-free, forevermore-pay-what-you-like ebooks (hot off the presses: Therefore Repent!, a story of magical hipsters hustling in post-Rapture Chicago while avoiding angelic death squads.) The Vancouver setting and cyberpunk tone of Everyone in Silico made it the perfect candidate for appearing in our artpack – how revelatory, for the kids who grew up in William Gibson’s cyberspace matrix (not just sharing the byways of imagination, for Gibson lived and walked the same streets of Vancouver as we did – we joked more than once about how we should look him up in the phone book and pay him an unsolicited late-night visit, imploring him to autograph our cybernetic implants… and, oh geez, I will just have to write a follow-up post about William Gibson later on) to finally see their own home rendered in some sour future form, not just the world capitols of Tokyo, New York and SoCal. Here we are, we have a future also! It’s not great, but at least we rate mention! Is Vancouver a world class city? Who knows, but the 604 is in effect!

I need not excerpt the excerpt here – you can read our chunk in the artpack, and of course you can also access the entire work as an ebook now for … name your price. Jim’s always got several exciting projects on the go – novels, comics, games and also films (Ghosts With Shit Jobs: required viewing) – and his latest project is recently-launched, a Torontonian historical mystery audiobook puzzle app for iOS, Wonderland, described as a walking stimulator. Jim Munroe doesn’t need an artgroup, he by himself is a veritable creative industry! Check his work out, because for every work I highlighted here, there are three more I was obliged to skip over for conciseness.

[gallery]
I’ve been remiss – other duties have called me away from my sacred charge of talking up specific works and individual contributors to our groundbreaking mega-artpack MIST1015 back at the end of October (to say nothing of earlier releases I have yet to discuss), but I have good excuses… some of these duties have involved further and ongoing Mistigris projects. But some subjects are timely and are left idle at the risk of irrelevance!

Antti Minkkinen (aka Unseen) contributed two of his paintings (and an ANSI logo for his scene project PEN15 whose name I am regrettably unable to satisfyingly explain) to the artpack, and now (and indeed, since November 25th… and until December 20th, so you still have a chance) you can see some of his other paintings hanging on a wall in an art gallery. That is, if you happen to be situated in or near the town of Tapiola in Finland. (If I know the computer underground, definitely that applies to a few of you!)

The exhibition has a website whose blurb I was invited to translate:

“This exhibition is of my most recent works. I rarely sketch during the process and I hardly think anything while painting. I never pick themes consciously while working but I often find myself exploring similar topics. I’m interested in honesty, authenticity and humour, and try to search for beauty, as mundane as it may sound. I want my art to, at some primitive level, narrate my experience with authenticity.”

Antti Minkkinen is a fine artist from Espoo. He has graduated from Vapaa Taidekoulu with a BFA degree majoring in painting. He works mainly as a painter but also in other medias like sculpture, video and digital art.

This exhibition was also the subject of a bit of media coverage which I, with the generous assistance of Google Translate, have tried to render comprehensible to non-speakers of the notoriously obtuse Finno-Ugric language group… with some middling success:

Antti Minkkinen reflects on the challenge of the concept of beauty
by Anneli Tuominen-Halomo

Artist Antti Minkkinen mostly paints, but also makes sculptures, videos and multimedia. His paintings raise a smile – there on the Studio Aarni wall next to a portrait are a couple of still lives of flowers. “The face started to look like an evening rose, so I painted it between two tables covered in flowers,” the artist explains.

The exhibition includes Minkkinen’s latest paintings, from which eyes, noses or tongues may emerge: Minkkinen has used “everything that can be found on the floor” to make the protrusions. “People have a dull perception of beauty - I have deliberately chosen random themes, but I see them manifesting the same topics.”

Through a lens of his interest in honesty, authenticity and humour, he has begun to explore beauty. Inspiration is all around – when he sees colors running together from garbage in the gutter, he remembers the shades and hues, then subsequently applies the color scheme to a painting.

The paintings in this show are all quite small in size. “A small canvas concentrates an idea down to be stronger.” Minkkinen says he makes quite a lot of drawings and some of the paintings emerge from the sketches. He always carries a sketchbook to take notes in case he sees an interesting subject of study, but with mobile phone use on the rise he finds more often a quick digital photograph is made for reference instead. “The works are often syntheses. If a part isn’t working, paint over it – you can’t afford to fall in love with your own work.”

For his own influences, Antti Minkkinen points at the Dutch Karel Appel, as well as Espoo visual artists Tycho Elon and teacher Tarmo Paunu.

Antti Minkkinen is an Espoo-based artist who graduated from the Free Art School in 2012. He is up for election as the representative for the Painters’ Union board.

The exhibition of Antti’s paintings at Studio Aarni in Heikki’s Square, Tapiola, will continue until 20 December.“

The photograph came from the article; the ANSI logo and the painting of the yelling man are from MIST1015, while the pair of bearded men are an adaptation of another of his submissions to MIST1015, tweaked by myself in an (unsuccessful) attempt to come up with some interesting visual effects (colour cycling, in this case) for the MIST1015 promotional video.

Unseen isn’t the only Mistigris contributor to exhibit his works in a gallery context; he probably isn’t even the first. (At least one of us is currently curating a gallery space!) Someday, we hope to curate and mount a textmode art retrospective gallery exhibition ourselves! (That’s an aspiration that’s been in the works since 2004, pre-dating any notion of reforming Mistigris, and which actually set everything that followed in motion.) Stay tuned for more highlights from our recent (and distant) back stacks, plus shout-outs to ongoing achievements by Mist folks past and present!