While the Mistfunk Tumblr was … down for maintenance during the holidays, we ran several swell Horsenburger teletext pieces on Mistigram to celebrate the holiday season. We’re doing a bit of a batch catch-up here, so as you can see you missed his blocky renditions of the Grinch, Scrooge McDuck in Mickey’s Christmas Carol, Jimmy Stewart in It’s A Wonderful Life, and Stripe the Gremlin dressed as Santa in Gremlins. Also, a totally nuclear New Year’s wish for everyone. You could catch most of these as part of his teletext advent calendar through December, and also we used the images for visuals in the music video for our 1999 “Silent Night” remix and from there in the MIST1216 artpack. So now we should be just about all caught up! Cheers!
Monday, January 9, 2017
Friday, January 6, 2017
And after all the sweat of assembling the collection of assets for that music video, we figured… why not give people a chance to look at them, static, for longer than a few seconds? So here they are, all the bits that went into “Silent Night”, lovingly reassembled for a reunion as the MIST1217 artpack.
It was a retrocomputing extravaganza, with the Apple ][ represented via Melodia’s curation of seasonal demos for that pioneering platform extruded into three dimensions through her Octalyzer, the Commodore 64 in full effect thanks to @C64_endings and his winterized screenshots of classic C64 games, Atari ST representing courtesy of STuART “Forgotten Grove” and his STatariART cadre… I faked a Mac Classic selfie thanks to the iOS Retrospecs app, and of course we had a pile of amazing Horsenburger pieces on board thanks to his advent calendar project this year! (The only truly vintage platforms missing are the TRS-80 and ZX Spectrum… well, and the Amiga, but they have their own thing going.) All that plus a few pieces from Mistigris irregulars – Diane Smithers’ Prismafied photos, FidoNet-style ASCII art by ldb and more.
You can enjoy the whole thing, admittedly a little after the fact, through a browser-accessible web gallery at textmod.es. Cheers!
Thursday, December 29, 2016
Happy Holidays! That’s my way of saying “Here’s one more piece of Christmas art we didn’t get around to sharing with you until after Christmas!” It’s the final installment of the Bells of Yule suite of tracker music from 1994 – the grimmest, darkest song representing the longest night of the Winter Solstice, illustrated here with a Rogue’s Gallery of nasty and crude textmode dudes, plus some filler from the artscene and textmode-related visual idioms of RIPscrip vector art and teletext. Better late than never! (Speaking of which… stay tuned!)
Thursday, December 22, 2016
Today we share with you the fourth movement of our five-part 1994 tracker music epic of original moody instrumental holiday music, remastered by Melodia in 2014, souped up with tons of period seasonal imagery from textmode and artscene sources in 2015 and … paraded out again in 2016. Enjoy!
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
Today we share part 3 (of 5) of 1994’s Bells of Yule suite of seasonal tracker music, from Admiral Skuttlebutt’s Atari ST to your ears! Remastered by Melodia in 2014, we put together a slideshow of plundered textmode visuals to accompany its ~10-minute runtime – this movement has a focus on period Public Domain ANSImation clips. Merry Mist'mas!
Mistigris Christmas 1997 intro
Today we share our final Mist Classic holiday presentation, after skipping 1996 due to the Mistigris World Tour then in effect (and with December 1998 ahead nothing but a bitter waste of failure for us) … but this multimedia bit rocks, with plenty of great tunes, lit and meet reviews, textmode and hirez visuals, a complete Christmas re-skinning of DoDEL and a little musical trolling of Silent (K)night to boot! There’s something for everyone!
Mistigris Christmas 1997 intro
Yesterday we re-shared the second installment of the 5-part Bells of Yule epic seasonal holiday tracked music suite made on an Atari ST in 1994, remastered in 2014 and given period visuals from the PC artscene last year. This time around all we have to do is share the links! The music was composed by Admiral Skuttlebutt, remastered by Melodia, and the visuals this time around focus on 25-line ANSI art, largely from Public Domain sources, especially featuring the works of Ebony Eyes.
Yesterday on Mistigram, our Mist Classic Christmas celebrations of December 1995, spliced in and around another coded effect (snowfall here), with the full representation of ANSI, hirez, tracker music (Sentience pulled out the stops rearranging Auld Lang Syne here!) and even lit in this collection. Season’s Greetings and Merry Mist'mas!
Monday, December 19, 2016
Aaaand it’s that time of year again: time to dust off the holiday content which, while awesome year-round, is only appropriate in late December. This video combines footage of an early intro made by Dr. CPU in December of 1994 with a hits parade of other seasonal art and writing made by Mistigris members in that month, set to the soundtrack of the first movement of the Bells of Yule music disk, which was also first released in that month. Enjoy!
Tuesday, December 6, 2016
Cyber Monday? Let me tell you about Cyber Monday. Back when I was a kid, every Monday was “Cyber Monday”! But… I guess it didn’t mean quite the same thing it means now. What was I talking about again?
Oh yes – our artists, they do not get paid for appearing in artpacks. But if you approve of their work, here you do have a timely chance (for there is a gift-giving occasion rapidly approaching) to become their patron or at least a collector of their creations. In some cases, you can get your hands on physical versions of their artworks – reproductions, or even occasional originals – and in other cases you can purchase the services needed to mint virtual goods to order, deliverable immediately upon completion with no shipping of electrons needed! (And in some final cases – curiously over-represented among the musicians – all you get is the opportunity to give an artist a tip in support of the work they’re creating anyway. But they may provide convenient legitimate MP3 downloads where the only free alternatives were streams and hassle.) I’m here to lay out the grand catalogue of Mistigris artpack participants with goods for sale this holiday season, and if you’re part of the artscene and have a storefront that could use a signal boost, let us know and we can fold you in here, as what you’ve got will probably be up the alley of any of our hypothetical customers also.
* Abstract painter Andrea Schmidt, last spotted in MIST1015, has micro and macro paintings for sale to suit a range of budgets, from $28-840… and not much in between!
* An Historic, whose accordion JRPG arrangements you’re still enjoying from MIST1116, is a musical genius engaged in several compelling projects. One donation gets you access to his entire vaults!
* Another feverish musical madman, Seattle’s Brad Dunn, gives you precious few opportunities to financially support his vital work. But here is one!
* For the love of God and all that is holy, please fund bryface, so he can give up his day job and become a full-time international chipmusic evangelist.
* They only contributed a single song to MIST1015, but the Creaking Planks have … a second song available by donation for you to further enjoy. They also have awesome T-shirts, but need to get their act together before they can send you one. But while on the subject of their music…
* You can enjoy $20 prints of Elin Jonsson’s perfectly gothy creatures from Afterland (which you can also play for free on iOS and Android devices – micropayments optional!)
* Mist Classic writer Eoanya is living the dream, and has a few books available for sale – including a brand new one not yet turning up on her Amazon page.
* Mist Classic visual artist Etana has her original paintings available for a song ($50-250), plus other goodies. (But I have the only Mistigris coffee mug she designed!)
* You can give Mist Classic mainstay Happyfish a tip for her award-winning filk music!
* The teletext genius known as Horsenburger, rockstar of the recent MIST1116, is not only taking £20 commissions for portraits, but he’s just branched out into wearables also!
* Production guru Ill-esha has a vast back catalogue and it is for sale, so load up!
* Tireless painter Jenn Ashton sells a wide range of both prints and originals as well as a variety of other goods.
* You only saw the drawings of Jenny Ritter in MIST1015, but you’ll thank me for having a chance to get an earful of her music!
* Jeremy Stewart also is a creative industry whose iceberg we’ve only been in a position to show the merest tip of.
* Self-publishing DIY guru Jim Munroe has books and ebooks, comics, movies and games, all available for sale and all eminently worthwhile.
* Kevin Bryce was the favorite musician of Mist Music when we revived in October 2014; maybe his tunes will catch your fancy also?
* Lord Nikon has graced our collections with insanely detailed typewriter art, which is also available for sale as prints and on T-shirts.(Also available for sale: shirts featuring his ASCII art designs, released elsewhere.
* The paintings and drawings of Mist Classic artist Maeve Wolf are available for sale on a casual basis: “Just email me to buy!”
* The vintage video game cover art designs of Marc Ericksen are available for sale as prints and on T-shirts.
* The textmode art designs of Blocktronics typography wizard Matt Matthew are available as prints and you would be exceedingly foolish to not take advantage of the opportunity to class up your house with his works on every flat surface.
* Melodia is just pivoting her “Paleotronic” shop from store to workshop, so opportunities to financially support her ventures there are up in the air… and her indispensible mobile apps are given away for free, so no luck there… but you can at the least show your appreciation by flipping her a tip on her Empress Play music page!
* It didn’t ever really occur to the Mythical Man that anyone would want to buy his paintings… but he was delighted when someone inquired, and is happy to sell his original pieces. Just ask him about the one you’d like!
* A selection of the colourful original paintings of Nick Lakowski are for sale at prices ranging from $360-1150.
* Mist Classic musician Onyx pivoted to writing sometime around the turn of the century, and you can purchase his books and ebooks through Amazon (or, if you like, in hardcover from Lulu.)
* Galza’s ASCII art (and now PETSCII) genius Otium has his textmode designs for sale as prints, garments and phone cases, with a secondary EU-based shop to help local consumers avoid import taxes.
* Phatal’s striking design “Two Minutes to Midnight” from MIST1016 is available in limited quantities as a print and on T-shirts. Inquire directly!
* When we say that Raquel Meyers delivers the goods, we usually aren’t speaking quite so literally, but her brutalist PETSCII and teletext are available for sale in book and fabric forms through her website.
* Drum ‘n bass producer Psidream has an enormous back catalogue of recordings, and they are all available for sale.
* Mist Classic artist Sentience is involved with the graphic design venture Heart Monsta, whose creations are available for sale today!
* Starstew’s latest offering is a book for the cat-lovers on your Christmas list, but he has other goods for sale through his Etsy page.
* Also on Etsy, you can find the Sculpey creatures that crawled out of the feverish brain of Theresa Oborn.
* A limited supply of the original fine art creations of Tom Heuckendorff are available for sale for budgets ranging from $30-300.
* Finally, you can flip Vordreque, the hardest working man in retrowave, a tip.
Saturday, December 26, 2015
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!
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Tuesday, December 22, 2015
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!
Monday, December 21, 2015
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!
Wednesday, December 24, 2014
Here it is, the culmination of our multimedia Christmas presentations: sounds and sights to beggar the imagination. Well, ASCIIs and ANSIs, poems and meet reviews, high resolution works and all set to the strains of tracker music. December 1997, this marked a rare demonstration of Sylphid’s MAGnum engine for generating e-mags (electronic magazines).
There are lots of little details at the video description over at YouTube including a full credits roll; some of the highlights include a Christmificated menu set for the DoDEL BBS and a surprise soundtrack switch when we begin displaying artwork by Silent Knight.
Not every part of the program was 100% functional run through DOSBox in 2014, so a few poems which failed to load were magically inserted back into the video, scrolling by at a much happier 14.4k baud. Also a pair of monochrome logos from the pack’s FILE_ID.DIZ and infofile were tacked on as bookends, because the whole darned presentation was in a seasonal mode.
That just about concludes our look back at Mistigris’ Christmases past. The well has run dry! If we want to show you any new Christmassy computer art, we’re going to have to make more. Hope it helped to give you an oldschool Christmas for 2014!
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
No Mistigris December 1996 festivities due to the Mistigris World Tour in progress, but here’s a holdout from nearly a year earlier – January of ‘96, a straggler from the pack of Dec '95 pieces in yesterday’s post. This is a typically strange work by Grim Reaper aka Thanatos, so bizarre (happy holidays – enjoy my initials spelled out in urine!) that you just know it had to be his authentic work rather than some manipulation of a found source.
This is, of course, a representation of a scene from Dr. Seuss’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Theodor Geisel never spelled out “MIST” in Christmas tree ornaments, but this inexplicable omission was here addressed.
Sorry for the micro-post, turns out our December '97 multimedia Christmas extravaganza I was planning on blogging today was even more bombastic than I’d realized, and has taken longer than expected for me to get into a shape suitable for presentation here. Hopefully by tomorrow!
Monday, December 22, 2014
Christmas 2014 is nearly here! We won’t be able to mine the past for holiday material indefinitely, so we’re hauling as much out of the stacks and middens for your inspection and enjoyment as we can now: the remastered re-release of The Bells of Yule, Cthulu’s 2001 ASCII Art Christmas card… Yesterday you got to see & enjoy our Christmas 1994 intro and some supplementary seasonal ANSIs and lits, and today we magically skip forward a whole year, sharing the greatly-expanded Christmas 1995 intro released (belatedly) as DCXMAS95.ZIP in the MIST0196.ZIP artpack.
As before, this one was spearheaded by Dr. CPU, and now includes a straightfoward programmed “snowfall” effect as well as several ANSIs and a strange piece of high-resolution artwork… all to the splendidly strange seasonal sounds of Sentience, who was at this time releasing music as part of EuphoniX – lightly skipping over the complicated occasion of Christmas, he instead opts for the traditional tune “Old Lang Syne” as written by Scottish poet Robbie Burns… but in a super ‘90s electronic arrangement. (He is also responsible for the “Mist” logo on the bottom right of that scary Santa skull. Amiga users, they were all polymaths.)
Full credits in the YouTube video description! Merry Christ'mist!
Sunday, December 21, 2014
20 years ago, it was just another month on BBSes, and underground computer artists continued along in their low-resolution hobby same as they ever did, minting blocky logos for BBSes and waiting for busy signals to resolve into symphonies of modem handshakes. But December being what it is, and us being a bunch of kids, the occasion of Christmas was looming large in our collective subconscious. So here’s what you get:
Resident coder Dr. CPU drew on some sound libraries and logos (and, all right, did some programming of his own as well 8) to put together a joint “intro”, an executable MS-DOS program that displayed scrolling pictures and text while playing music, acting as a multimedia Christmas card from the members of Mistigris and our fellow travellers in would-be 604 demogroup Sonic Equinox. It was released in our third artpack, MIST1294.ZIP.
But that’s not all the Christmas content that was to be found in that pack, so as a bonus, I’ve presented our two grand Christmas ANSI and lit (or poetry) “collies” – compilations glommed together into a single large file – scrolling by at a respectable period speed of 2400 baud… to the sweet strains of the first part of the Bells of Yule, which appeared in that artpack as a preview of sorts to the music disk we released later that month featuring all five parts, which was subsequently lost for 16 years and just this week re-issued in a remastered form.
(Full credits in the description of the video over at YouTube!)
We released another Christmas intro the following year, but … one post at a time!
Saturday, December 20, 2014
A writer of poems, I had long aspired to achieve a species of illuminated text – a poem calligraphically written out in visual typography… specifically in my preferred medium of labour-intensive ANSI or ASCII fonts, a generally graffiti-derived idiom. Steps toward this cyber-concrete-poetry were realized in the All-Stars experiment at Evoke 1999, but more was needed. But the year was 2001, and though there were still textmode fontists to be found in the wild, I lacked sufficient pull with any active artists to compel them to put the hours and sweat needed to make my words pop off the screen with the commission of original logos for my powerful words.
The occasion was Christmas 2001, and now living away from my parents’, I wanted to show my new independence as an artistic adult and make a run of Christmas cards. But I didn’t like the idea of celebrating that consumeristically co-opted clichéd religious occasion Christmas – so concluded I could achieve the same effect more palatably by refashioning them as winter solstice cards… in a sense, taking back the reason for the season. A few words about darkness and rebirth would do the trick – a very short poem by poetry standards, somehow managing to contradict itself in places, but apparently more coherent when viewed atomically in segments. And having it writ large would help to obfuscate its extreme brevity! Finally, I could derive a deeply personally satisfying resonance producing an illuminated manuscript… on the very subject of light itself. (In letters painted from light emerging from a darkened screen!)
But who would make it real? I had no choice: I would have to do it myself. But with no visual or graphic design sensibilities, I could not draw my way out of a paper bag. This project – a prototype, perhaps, for some future undertaking – would have to be tool-assisted. Figlet is and has been for years the premiere ASCII logo generator, but between its various typefaces on offer I was not able to quite satisfy wanting to locate a suitable style for each line’s sensibility. So I was compelled to do something that I was possibly the only person on the planet to do that year: I fired up the classic ANSI art editor TheDraw and loaded up some stock TheDraw .TDF typefaces. The one used here, hilariously entitled “Elite”, had been previously employed in some April Fool’s Packs, but despite being employed ironically elsewhere, here it was genuinely my best option. I inserted a small quantity of gradient shading with the F1-F4 blocks to emphasize that critical word “ALIGHT” with ASCII rays emanating from it (and the cherry on top, a single exclamation mark), then the remainder of the presentation practically filled itself in – dimming “dim” and “responding in kind”, distinguishing “blazing” with a highlight, a few flakes of classic ANSI snowfall (“rain” of that sort added 50 lines or so to countless scrollers circa 1993), and the insertion of a Figlet Inuit character peeking up over the letters.
The blueprints drawn up, the execution was a simple matter of some shopping around. Several copy shops were visited to find one capable of producing nice black blacks for the background, then milling them out in a quantity of maybe a hundred – mostly sent to people on The Everything Mailing Address Registry at everything2.com. Because I was at a point in my life where I couldn’t afford to both make colour copies and send the prints by mail, I saved a few cents by printing in b&w and then adding spot colour to relevant areas with a highlighter pen.
The back of every print had lots of white space for me to write holiday notes to the recipients, and between the notes and addressing and return addressing a hundred envelopes with my tiny, intensely engraved handwriting, I exacerbated a bad case of writer’s cramp (aka “scrivener’s palsy”) which plagued me for years afterward. So this was the start and end of my Christmas card tradition; mailing continued on a small scale with a postcard fiction spree on postcardx.net, and then my muse wandered down different avenues circa 2003.
For those wonderful Google spiders and such human readers who may be in the audience tonight, the eve of the winter solstice some 13 years later, we provide a transcript of the poem’s contents:
when days / grow short / and dim
we must / resist / responding / in kind / instead / setting / ourselves / alight
blazing / brilliant / and tall
bringing / the sun / back
in our own / thoughts / and actions
burn low and long
(and for readers in a seasonal mood, please don’t forget to download our recently-exhumed remastered and re-released music disk, The Bells of Yule, brought 20 years forward from 1994 to save the future… now with four mirrors because demand exceeded our original host’s ability to serve it up!)
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
In December of 1994, Mistigris released a holiday-themed music disk, entitled “The Bells of Yule”, built around a five-movement epic instrumental suite from our friends at Digitallusions. Though widely circulated locally on BBSes, it never made the leap to the internet, and when the final local boards went kaput circa ‘98, it appeared to be withdrawn from circulation… forever?
But this group of songs was much too special to lose: Cthulu kept his copy of it. (Cthulu keeps as much as humanly possible.) And now, two decades later, the disk emerges upon the Yuletide stage once again, 4-channel .MOD tracks remastered as MP3s, bolstered by fellow traveller holiday songs from the Mistigris glory days in the late ’90s and newer, thematically resonant tunes from Empress Play, which Digitallusions has gradually evolved into. The 2014 collection boasts over double the songs of the 1994 one, has sprawled from an hour to 105 minutes, and as for its filesize… woah, Nelly! The 186 meg archive is over a hundred times as big as the original release, which was in its time considered too large to mirror widely. (Have you ever circulated an mp3 on a floppy diskette? Cthulu has… but I digress.)
You can find the complete archive here (two days later: due to higher demand than anticipated, we hit a bandwidth limit, but the music disk is now mirrored at http://pixelwitches.com/MISTYULE.ZIP, http://bbs.ninja/pub/original/pack/2014/mistyule.zip , and http://bigbox.chattaway.com/temp/MISTYULE.ZIP), with supporting music from Melodia, Onyx, Freaq and Cthulu, or click below to enjoy the heart of the work, the updated 2014 remastered version of the original 5-part suite that got the whole (snow)ball rolling.
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