Today on Mistigram, an ANSI art Mist promo by Dionyzos of Irato that broke M-9808 and threw us off the rails, ultimately for the better part of 16 years.
The fun piece was destined to be a central showpiece in M-9808, our August artpack-as-website – a rising ANSI talent in an era of textmode decimation… as long as we could hang on to one active ANSI artist (our “blade of grass” to hold on to) we could maintain our connection to our BBS, MS-DOS traditional foundations from which to move forward. But making things work as a website was a stiffer challenge than anticipated… putting things in a precise position on the screen in both major browsers – Netscape AND Internet Explorer! Manually generating thumbnails… making sure that links weren’t in mixed case… trying to arrange for tracker music playback in-browser… re-colouring ASCII art with HTML colours to appear natively in-browser… integrate the works with profiles of their artists, folding in interviews and contact information. In short, there was a great deal of additional work associated with making a webpage of the artpack above and beyond the baseline work (already no cakewalk) of simply putting together an artpack to begin with.
Because we knew we were only going to get one shot at clearing this gap, we delayed the pack’s release (a not uncommon practice in all points of our classic history up to 1998, a year of unprecedented monthly releases), because to be taken as a credible move forward, it had to be done right. And, you know, if additional submissions came through during this lengthy process, it would only serve to make the final product all the more appealing! Of course, it was more work – new submissions needed to be SAUCEd first, then they needed bitmaps and thumbnails generated to represent them… then space needed to be made in the appropriate, alphabetical, location in the HTML tables to accommodate their inclusion. Now, note the artist’s participation in the ANSI and HTML versions of the memberlist and infofile! Phew! A lot of work, but worth it!
But the reverse is not applicable. Things dragged on so long that skeptical artists (come on, the Mistigris World Tour was a much more unlikely venture than this bold step forward!) began withdrawing their submissions and releasing them elsewhere. Now all those steps still needed to be taken, but in reverse, and what do you get at the other end but … a diminished collection. “Nice framework! Pity about the lack of worthwhile content!”
Sad to say, this piece was withdrawn – growing impatient with delays (and the outside appearance that we had died – with the collapse of the BBSes, our cross-country communications were sparse, dependent on accidental meetings on IRC), Dionyzos released it in the 7th Irato artpack, stuffed with worthwhile works by his Quebec-based compatriots. Its loss hit us hard – not just the hit to the overall artpack, with the rug pulled out from its barely-there textmode art faction, and not just the hassle of removing the piece from the website-artpack superstructure, but the morale-draining symbolic value of a Mistigris promotional piece being withdrawn from a Mistigris artpack. If we couldn’t even keep the support of our cheerleaders, what hope did we have among the great indifferent masses? You can call it the straw that broke the camel’s back, the wind taken out of our sails… crushed by a sense of defeat, we put the artpack on hiatus, where it remained until 2015, when (in the aftermath of our 2014 20th-anniversary reunion artpack) we were moved to call a general amnesty on computer art prisoners who hadn’t seen the light of day in 15 years and air our stockpiles of unreleased, never-seen computer art (in M-9808 and MIST2000.) Then, recovered from our emo teenage bout of angst, we reclaimed the piece and used it in the artpack’s infofile. Nice, huh?
Instagram photo by Cthulu • Sep 7, 2016 at 2:08pm UTC
