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We got the new year off to a good start on New Year’s Day with Horsenburger’s second illegitimate appearance in the esteemed Sixteen Colors ANSI of the Day listings… illegitimate since his particular textmode artform is, of course, teletext rather than ANSI. But we can’t argue with the results! The AOTD appreciated his manly take on the Christmas holiday as epitomized by this trifecta of pieces celebrating the movie Die Hard (not incidentally also acting as a send-off to actor Alan Rickman who shuffled off this mortal coil early in 2016.)

(As for the first… it appears to have slipped us by in all the confusion surrounding the release of MIST1116, but fear not: we will be returning to set the matter straight!)

[wpvideo vXykNdCX]

Today’s Mistigram item from MIST1116 was selected as the 16 Colours ANSI of the Day on November 27th (the second time that month the sporadic artist had been so honoured!) but I wanted to wait until I had the chance to share the souped-up version I’d tried cobbling together for the MIST1116 trailer video (before ultimately rejecting it as not thematically fitting in).

Well, here it is! VileR, in association with his fellow archivists at The Dos Collection, was celebrating the 35th anniversary of the release of the IBM PC computer, the best way he knew how: by making reference to the BASIC game by Bill Gates that shipped with the machine’s PC-DOS operating system (running under its BASICA interpreter), DONKEY.BAS. This is not the first time this year VileR released a masterpiece involving DONKEY.BAS – a few months ago, as you may recall, he re-implemented it in textmode as “Sorry Ass”, boiling it down so concisely it fit in a floppy diskette’s boot sector.

I was hoping to better ANSImate the car blasting through the BASICA start screen (Did You Know: double-arrow characters used on the BASICA screen are ANSI control characters, so attempts to depict them accurately will result in glitched display output. I sure found out, repeatedly!), but my window of opportunity to soup up this file’s presentation coincided exactly with me losing access to my main computer and the opportunity passed me by. Alas! Maybe for the PC’s 40th I can take another crack at it. Hats off, VileR!

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Queen fiend Nitnatsnoc must be spinning in his retirement! I was waiting to feature this one in Mistigram to build some tension, but the Sixteen Colors ANSI of the Day was drawn straight toward it like a moth to a flame! The artist: cccfire, another parallelly-evolved case of ANSI art from the 8bitMUSH like today’s Mistigram artist LDA. The artwork: an extra-wide XBin piece of monochrome ANSI art enshrining the members of the glam rock Queen (and enjoy the bonus, the same scene quite more minimally arranged by some anonymous SharpSCII artist), plus a late-breaking addition of the group’s logo in glorious colour… and what we can most definitiveely describe as the ultimate, final “smallest textmode Mistigris logo” of all time.

The piece competed against the fruit of Blocktronics (including no fewer than four pieces by the godly ungennant) at the Demosplash demoparty earlier this month in its truncated form, and placed… 10th. (But in his defense, cccfire runs laps around all of the multi-decade veterans who outscored him in light of a “most improved” metric, maturing as a real contender with – an admittedly idiosyncratic style – in under a year. At this rate cccfire will be pulling down top scores for his ANSI art when all of Blocktronics will have been 15 years in the cold ground!)

We will revisit the piece on Mistigram to take a peek at some of its finer details. And happy to say, we have other recent pieces that the AOTD has lighted upon over the past few days to also celebrate with you – but they carry with them a little additional bonus content that needs to be a massaged a bit before we serve up their full stories to you.

The Sixteen Colours’ ANSI of the Day series has always been disproportionally generous to us – since, let’s be fair, despite coming close at our most vigorous, Mistigris ANSI never set the artscene on fire and it was always our most troubled division, eternally torn between striking out on their own or just throwing in the towel altogether. But one of our most consistent guiding lights over the course of Mistigris’ Classic period was Mavrik, SysOp of Daemon’s Gate, host to our BBS echomail network KiTSCHNet and instigator of our newsletter/e-mag (electronic magazine) KiTHE. He, uh, wore many hats, and consequently ANSI art never got his full focus – but when he slipped a few hours in PabloDraw into his crowded schedule, he always got excellent results. (Even today, having dug Mav up from deep retirement, though we haven’t yet tricked him into coughing up any new artwork, he has graciously provided web hosting at mistigris.org , so to him we say hats off!)

His appearance in today’s AOTD is the result of a recent swing toward the “roundup” format, of showing off multiple pictures of the same subject. Today’s theme is Julie Winters from The Maxx, and he represents us with an offering from the MIST0695 artpack.

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Not long after Mistigris’ first big slumber around the turn of the century, I wrote my friend Suzie (hi, Suzie! You are, er, totally not reading this blog) about incidents through my adolescence growing up in Vancouver where my story intertwined with those of 604-local Neuromancer author (and cyberspace visionary) William Gibson (… a correspondence I really ought to reproduce here someday, as somewhat relevant to computer art in the 604. But I digress.) The e-mail client glitched up and, brain fresh with the aftershock of a well written e-mail that failed to launch, I re-wrote the whole thing from memory – beat for beat, fact for fact, joke for joke… it would have been impossible to reproduce the message exactly, but in terms of semantic content the second draft was congruent to the first, and both being written in my voice, the apple was only ever going to fall so far from the tree. Unbeknownst to me, the first e-mail sent, so Suzie wrote back reporting how she got to enjoy the peculiar experience of reading the same thing, twice, two different ways. In short, given identical tasks in the same contexts, we may reasonably conclude that a given brain will approach them identically.

This must be why the only work of textmode art from our MIST1015 collection to be featured in the Sixteen Colours ANSI of the Day back on November 22nd… was just featured again on April 16th, this time under the texty auspices of Blocktronics. The same brain surveyed the same pack as before and the one work that jumped out at the same pair of eyes was, unsurprisingly, the same piece as before.

Just as well! It’s an exceptional piece, it warrants celebration outside of the scrum kudos of the previous post, and due to ongoing disruptions with 16 Colours, this time it’s touted before fans of Blocktronics – the most sophisticated textmode art enthusiasts on the planet!

There were other textmode pieces in that collection deserving of some spotlight (especially the videos – they rightfully touted Whazzit’s “Dead Man’s Pants”, but that was only one of three!), but I can’t argue that this one’s appeal is very immediate and obvious. I enjoy every part of it – the green seaweed on top, the floppy disks in the “total” font, the groovy textures in the “DOS”, the shaded IBM PC typeface for “collection”… nothing is more iconic of MS-DOS gaming than a cacodaemon from Doom (neatly cropped from the front cover of the “Manual of the Planes” AD&D sourcebook), the crunching of the cartoonish TDC letters is apt, “release” is radically written… and I don’t even mind that the purple swirlies at the bottom are just the green ones of the top, inverted.

The AOTD authorities adopted a canonical position of bafflement as to what “the Total DOS Collection” might be, but if I had to speculate, I’d imagine that it hearkens to the roots of the underground computer art scene (and the demoscene before it) and would be some kind of encyclopediac platform-complete compilation for purposes of “curation and preservation”.

People have all kinds of reasons for wanting to maintain their privacy, and so I don’t have that much more to tell you about the celebrated artist VileR here – but here’s what I’ve been able to glean: He’s the only computer artist I’ve been able to lure out of the background through my long association documenting games of the gloriously obscure over at MobyGames, the video & computer game database founded by onetime Hornet archive FTP maintainer (and notorious artscene antagonist – keep your warez-scene-tainted ANSI art away from our totally-not-directly-descended-from-game-cracking demoscene works, it’s attracting heat from the feds!) Trixter… and the two of them have worked together as part of a team, most notably on the latest of the retro-demos written for the original IBM PC (with PC Speaker sound and CGA graphics card), the gob-smacking 8088 MPH.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y&w=560&h=315]

He maintains a fascinating blog of the same name where he explains tricks and and tips pursues mysteries of ancient lore pertaining to early home computers, including his recent Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack project (as billed). Also he has some textmode works waiting in the eaves using the Macrocom “ANSI from hell” technique (including another amazing cacodaemon) which will someday blow you all away … once they are made public.

In the meantime, we wait. Impatiently.

(Speaking of waiting impatiently, stay tuned for the annoucement of our call for submissions for MISt1016! This… is only the announcement of the announcement.)

Well, I stand corrected. Not one month after I speculated that a piece from a Mistigris artpack had appeared as the Sixteen Colours ANSI of the Day for perhaps the last time ever, and here we are again with one of our historical pieces endowed with the honour (the day after, what’s more, one of my post-Mist lits washed up in another AOTD by The Green Hornet of Dark!)

Misfit couldn’t adequately explain what he was doing rooting around in Mistigris artpacks from 1996 looking for ANSIs Of The Day, as that was all around a bit of a rough period for us – still recovering from our depredation by Integrity, not yet drunk on our infusion of Krap’s members. But if you had to pick one piece from this artpack, this was definitely the one to pick.

Mage (MZ-, because Mavrik had taken MA-) was on top of his game here (it’s not even the first time he’s represented Mist in the AOTD), having graduated from Mistigris, sharpened his talents in Integrity, and gotten them certified in ACiD (which Int merged into) before bizarrely circling around back home to toss us the occasional solid gold bone for reasons known only to himself.

He doesn’t know quite remember who the subject of the piece is – doubtless some instantly forgettable Image Comics goon, if noseless faces and fists larger than heads are anything to go by – but he is on the record as directly deriving inspiration from a piece also by him in an Integrity pack a year earlier; in both cases hands figure prominently, but the difference a year makes! “I liked drawing hands (and still do!), but wasn’t happy with much else in that first pic - the face, the background, the hair.”

Because I’m a poet, I would have waited until the middle of March to make an ad for the BBS “Ides of March” as my selection for the ANSI Of The Day, but we’ll take what we can get. Stay tuned for more elucidation into our affairs past, present and future!

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It doesn’t happen often, and heck – it may well never happen again – but at least once more, a Mistigris artist has taken point of pride in having featured as the Sixteencolors “ANSI of the Day”, with a piece from our recently-discharged MIST2000 collection:

I love being surprised with little gems like this.

The artist goes by the name Happyfish, and she represents one of the few textmode pieces in the new Mistigris pack, “Mist2000”. The pack comprises some compiled works by Mist artists circa 1997-2001 - work that was collected but never released.

I have no idea if she ever produced more ANSI work, or if she’s around at all, but if you’re reading this, Happyfish, you really ought to give the ol’ blocks another go. This piece is a definite standout.

I kindly pointed out that while this particular work dates back to approximately the turn of the century, she came out of retirement to take last place in the ANSI category of last year’s NVScene demoparty, and graced MIST1015 with that and one other work of ANSI art (attached), plus the FILE_ID.DIZ actually predating her involvement with Mistigris. So it turns out she’s not 100% retired… just closer to 95%. (And then… I explained our NSFW Eat Poop You Cat work at some great length. Probably it will warrant a blog post here also, eventually.)

In the meantime, however, she has remained creatively busy, chasing a strange new muse as a filk songwriter par excellence. While an early specimen of this work was also included in MIST2000, in a case of serendipitous timing, just as she was being awarded the esteemed AOTD, she also announced the release of a new collection of her songs:

Some people have asked if I’ve been writing fewer songs this year, and the answer is no, but most of them have been D&D songs for a campaign Wesley Crowell has been running at filk cons, and they seemed a bit too… specific… to throw in my regular bandcamp. Which is otherwise a cohesive blend of carefully curated, aestheticall– okay maybe not. But ANYWAY, here in their own little bucket are half a dozen songs by Melinda Vulluvette, the NPC…ish… bard voiced by me in the Abandoned campaign.

Walking to Valspar: The Increasingly Angry Songs of Melinda Vulluvette. There’s even one song the players haven’t heard yet, the national anthem of Melindarokin, a country I now… accidentally kind of… own.

The content involves a LOT of in jokes, because the songs were all written to be performed in-universe to make the players snicker - but I hope they can be enjoyed even if you weren’t there to watch the gaming sessions. :)

So hats off to Happyfish, and her splendidly peculiar artistic achievements past, present and future!

http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=1243800073/size=small/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/transparent=true/

BONUS CONTENT! The AOTD-winning piece resonates with HF-GLEEP (excerpted) from the Mistigris World Tour stop in DARK0597, another negative-space hand, and it’s no coincidence:

In both cases I “traced” my hand help up to the monitor because it seemed fun. I also have a tattoo of my own hand. So I’m er, very handsy? Hands-on! Something like that.

One thing you can say: no one else has ever drawn ANSI like Happyfish, and no one ever will.