Doing our little bit to pump more mad science into the world at this time of year, here’s this bubbling test tube of an ANSI art logo from Blender #31 in 1997, drawn by Happyfish (who now ironically finds herself a real life mad scientist, compounding pharmaceutical substances into bubbling test tubes of her own) atop a strange story knitting together the target subjects of “scientists / running / down a one-way street”. There isn’t room on Instagram for the typo-riddled story, but if you insist, you can read it here.
Today on Mistigram, another classic Happyfish joint, this one from February of 1998. It’s a work of RIPscrip vector art, and differs from most artscene productions in that it’s not promoting a BBS or an artscene group or project, but rather the long-lived roguelike phenomenon NetHack! Happyfish has a long and illustrious relationship with the game, being one of the blessed few to have successfully Ascended and won the game. I like to believe that this picture depicts her valkyrie character successfully traversing the Elemental Plane of Fire on her way to the endgame.
The original use of the word “Mistigris” is to denote an alleycat in French. This has resulted in us garnering more than a few pieces of feline promotional artwork over the years. This resolute ANSI art stray was drawn by Happyfish, the only artist ever to enshrine both senses of our name, and used in the infofile of our 1096 artpack – so condensed it could almost (almost!) be used as a sprite in some hypothetical textmode remake of Bill Williams’ 1983 Atari 8-bit platform game Alley Cat. Alternately, with the addition of a tiny ASCII cockroach it would be a boffo illustration for an ebook release of Don Marquis’ archy and mehitabel poems – first appearing in print 100 years ago! But I digress.
Today on Mistigram, an exploration of the other meaning of “Mistigris” – not just French for “alleycat”, it’s also a variant of poker in which the Jokers are wild. In our early days we explored that use as a metaphor for our limitless potential, and later it… fell by the wayside completely. This ANSI art logo could be the final echo of it, drawn by Happyfish in July of 1997.
THE WOMEN OF feMIniSTIGRIS. (Pictured: art that could only have come from women, as none of them include any washboard abs, stoic grimaces, or lit spliffs.)
Happy International Women’s Day! The underground computer artscene was not traditionally known as a great place for the ladies. I mean, you could ogle them by the yard as Gen13 supplanted Spawn as the most popular subject of ANSIfication, and Integrity (WHQ: “The Ho-Zone”) rose to success on an official internal policy of maintaining a strict minimum quota of “babe” pictures, decorating the artscene with wallpaper you might expect in the break room at a car repair shop. (Given a starting point of the Image comics revolution underway then, was this a foregone conclusion? As in the Sensational She-Hulk before, the only major title there in which women were treated as anything other than eye candy was The Maxx, and even there if you ignored the word bubbles – admittedly the first place I’d ever been exposed to the names Steinem and Paglia in print – Sam Kieth could easily exude a kind of En Vogue syndrome… whose empowering messages were reversed into objectifying ones when you hit “mute” on the music video. Does the artscene have a Bechtel test? Sure: how come none of Alison Bechdel’s comic strips ever got ANSIfied?) If you had a male gaze, you were in luck. But all there was to gaze upon was fiction and fantasy, right? Well… it turns out that there were a handf^H^H^H^H^Hfew women active in the artscene, primarily known as the girlfriend of x or the wife of y… not due to any failures in their own right as talented artists… being overshadowed by one’s man is just something that naturally happens, right? (Ask Frida Kahlo.) Tabaqui did good work; Kitiara was an amazing force to be reckoned with! And Superchick was, well, super. But where were the rest of them? Why such under-representation here when women were so at the vanguard of video art and net.art? (I, uh, don’t have any answer to that last one.) In PD circles, ‘90s textmode art was dominated by women – jgs in ASCII and Ebony Eyes in ANSI. Raquel Meyers lords over PETSCII and teletext, Keira Rathbone is the typewriter art hero of the day, and Jennifer Daniel just got ASCII stickmen printed in The New Yorker – but never released in an artpack! What kept them out of the realm of the underground elites? (Or am I answering my own question?)
The BBS world was one where you could largely be as anonymous as you wanted to – while the uptight Fido zone coordinators might require registered users to send in photocopies of their drivers’ licenses in order to access their private directory of Cindy Crawford swimsuit .GIFs, that kind of trail was exactly what you didn’t want haunting you in the legally grey area of ThE uNdErGrOuNd… so no one needed to know your real name, location or sex unless you chose to share them in a message base or at a meet; those kinds of details weren’t what we were about, and could in a sense be considered actual liabilities: we weren’t here to represent how we existed in the real world, it was supposed to be an escape from all that!
As BBSes withered on the vine and the scene shifted over to the IRC some of that privacy was lost: despite the given assumption that There Are No Girls Online, dudes (a/s/l?) were constantly sniffing around (a/s/l?) looking for a hint (a/s/l?) of evidence (a/s/l?) to the contrary. Hackers and crackers are devious sorts, skilled at connecting dots from trails of breadcrumbs, and so now that I have your home phone number, surely you wouldn’t refuse a friendly offer of a coffee date, would you?
Mistigris served as a refuge of sorts, an island and oasis for outliers of various stripes; on top of our stubborn resolve to continue including computer music in our artpacks, we were notorious for providing a home for lit writers when the rest of the scene was prepared to turn its back on them, and (perhaps not unrelatedly) we also counted quite a few women beneath our umbrella. I don’t know precisely what factors lent us this preeminence – beyond lip service to egalitarian and democratic rhetoric (meaning that Cthulu agonizingly consulted with everyone before doing what he wanted anyway), I can’t think of any policies we consciously enacted intended to provide this effect, so it may have just been dumb luck. (I can’t take any personal credit for it, thinking back to the time long, long ago that I followed Bast home uninvited from a meet like a complete creep, resolving to be bold and get to know this fascinating and troubled writer better… and staying on my best behavior of course, especially after observing her mantleplace overflowing with 1st prize trophies from Tae Kwon Do tournaments. I must thank her after all these years for not turning me into a grease stain on her carpet. But I digress.) If I had to speculate, it might be related to Mist’s long-toothed message echomail culture, increasingly as time went on fostered on bulletin boards whose system operators and network coordinators were women (the heavy-lifting Happyfish and Etana to be specific): so straight off the bat, the cyber toilet seat stayed down.
Ladies we provided an outlet for in our first century included (but aren’t necessarily limited to):
Following our revival, we’ve done better by this metric – representing contributors from eg. MIST1015, the ladies’ numbers come in quite a bit higher, including Mistigris appearances from women we’ve never featured before:
In conclusion: hats off, ladies, I’m sure it hasn’t been easy getting to this point in your computer art practice, with pushback every step along the way, from the dismissive dudebro clerks at the computer store asking technical questions from your tag-along boyfriend when it was you who were the one dropping a grand on your first new desktop machine, to the fedora-clad nice guys who were hoping for some kind of payment-in-kind for their tokens of seemingly freely offered technical support, to being uninvited from raids with your guild until you “grow the balls” to take part in the VoIP coordination (and all the victorious teabagging you consequently miss out on), to the run of the mill trolls, MRAs, GamerGaters and pick-up artists harrying your every movement online and who won’t take “buzz off” for an answer. Thanks for sharing your art with us. (Art: where we can imagine a future where things are better.) I can’t embed Happyfish’s on-point Tweets about how relatively culturally non-toxic we’d somehow managed to make Mistigris for the ladies due to the protected and private nature of her account (a woman securing her social media account against unwelcome visitors? How extraordinary!), so the last word is left to me and my pledge to continue working on boosting my gender ratios and curbing my micro-aggressions so that someday we can just get down to the business of making amazing art on computers without half of us having to take that order with a side of eating unfair treatment and smiling. We were the idealistic kids of computer art: we were supposed to improve on the institutions we were riffing on. The computers now are faster and display more colours – time to prioritize making participation a little more user friendly.
(So: which artscene ladies managed to carve out a little niche outside our small circle of light in the pervasive gloom?
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.
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. :)
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.
Today, Happyfish – again of Mistigris (after a detour to Hallucigenia and many, many years off for good behavior) – found out how her Mist-representing contribution to the ANSI art competition at the NVScene 2015 demoparty in San Jose, California placed, in the presence of God and RaDMaN (supposing the two don’t cancel each other out.) It’s the first time we’ve fielded an entry at a demoparty in … quite some time … and it’s a peculiar, polarized time to be competing in that particular category.
The demo folks who thought that making fireworks by speaking directly to their CPU in 640 bytes of assembler was an excellent passtime in 1995 have only honed their already-narrow focus in the interim, optimising their algorithms down to 16 bytes and throwing in phong shading! Their concern has matured from vintage to classic. The ranks of the textmode enthusiasts, on the other hand, have withered and been almost totally dispersed since the glory days of textmode being the natural environment of the dominant operating stystem (or the desktop computer being the dominant computing device, for that matter!) and the only ones left standing are basically cast-iron titans of visual art who could take an atomic bomb hit and still come out the other end of the mushroom cloud crafting heartbreaking pixelated portraiture with no equal across the entire history of the artform. At the 2014 instalment of the long-running Evoke German demoparty, Blocktronics – basically the Serpentor of the ANSI scene, constituted of the DNA of all its cruellest despots – released the WTF4 megajoint, a 4636-line (!) ANSI created as a collaboration between 24 artists from 10 different countries, scrolling as tall as a 7-story house.
Happyfish, conversely, picked up an unfinished work-in-progress from 1998 and polished it off in an afternoon for kicks after 17 years of getting rusty. But maybe Blocktronics would still be recovering from St. Patrick’s overindulgence and wouldn’t bring their A-game to the competition? It was anyone’s guess. Happyfish took the ANSI gold at Crash 1997, as the only serious entrant. Here, six of the eight contenders are unfeeling Blocktronics ANSIbots, more machine than men, guaranteed statistically to dominate no less than 72% of the competition by weight. Cut them, and they bleed a stream of red F10 characters at a steady rate.
…
It was a foregone conclusion: her nostalgic piece (even by 1998 standards!) placed last, but only by a margin of four votes. In a field such as this, it was an honour simply to be a contender! The top three places were all roundly well-earned, and as for the remainder, it was simply down to a matter of taste. If you like, you can ruin your appetite on the whole sumptuous menu, or if you can find it in you to contain yourself, wait for Happyfish’s plucky-yet-underperforming contest entry (we just show its FILE_ID.DIZ, silly!) to appear in our second annual revival collection in October of 2015… but there is much to release and much to analyse here before then!
(Coming “soon”: an overview of historical Mistigris demoparty performance.)
