Mistigram: our early revival flagbearer @Freddy43 cooked up an idea for an #ASCIIart logo printer we needed to prototype. Unable to scrape together new imagery for the demonstration, we cannibalized a '90s piece by our own Dead Soul and included this animation in the MIST1117 artpack collection released six years ago this month.
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!
Is it possible that we somehow failed to tell you about our major Christmas 2016 project? It is possible – the smashing of my main computer’s screen interfered both in the commission of the project and the promotion of it. Well, season’s belated greetings, folks – it’s an outtake from Melodia’s “1999” music disk, a remix of Enya singing “Silent Night”, complete with an array of vintage and contemporary retrocomputing holiday imagery from Horsenburger’s teletext advent calendar, @C64_endings’ winterized screenshots of classic Commodore 64 games, imagery from Apple ][ demos run through Melodia’s Octalyzer, a few tidbits from the STatariART crew… plus even a couple of seasonal pieces by Mistigris regulars! Don’t worry if you didn’t get a chance to see this in time this year, we’ll certainly be parading it out again next December!
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!
Along the way, you can enjoy the diversions the logo went through – an icy take to counter its ultimately fiery temperament. Also you can see a version moderated by “Deep Dream”, as well as xer0’s post-complete glitched-out version. They’re only four little letters, but they leave you many, many options!
In the style of the logo from Viz Magazine comes this, the teletext introduction to Illarterate’s MISTFAX teletext sequence in the just-released MIST1116 artpack! (which, of course, you can browse over here.) Sadly, the promises of naughty words and pictures are not substantiated… unless it turns out that something prurient is waiting to be unleashed by the teletext “REVEAL” button!
It gives us great pleasure (and enormous relief) to announce that MIST1116, the Mistigris computer artpack collection for which we’d been gathering submissions since the end of April, is finally out following a series of delays.
With a strong current of pieces dealing with themes of technology, transhumanism and cyberspace, there’s also plenty to enjoy to suit camps old and new alike – several varieties of textmode artwork, including typewriter masterpieces and an unstoppable parade of teletext, plus the “real-life” art forms historically absent, including drawing, painting, photography and collage. (Still no dance! We’ve got to have something to strive toward, I guess.)
And keeping us relevant despite our celebrating the occasion of our 22nd anniversary, the kids will enjoy an unsettling SnapChat face-swap and an canonical literary work transliterated into emoji.
(Also, at least three accordions. They’re made to fit in there thematically somehow, but huh – go figure!)
If you’d like to download the entire collection in one 185-meg go for local enjoyment, please point your web browser to bit.ly/MIST1116 ; if on the other hand you’d like to wander through a garden of thumbnails via a web gallery, textmod.es is hosting (most of) it at bit.ly/MIST1116gallery
Today on Mistigram, a piece of hirez (high resolution graphics) trapped for years in the belly of the shipwrecked M-9808 artpack (finally released to the public in 2015) drawn by Knightmare, depicting some green cartoon character (my guess is The Mask) performing some incomprehensible gesture with his hand with the assistance of some props. It’s not bad – I just don’t understand it.
Today on Mistigram, a curious experiment from the desk of Grim Reaper, the longstanding VGA department coordinator of Mist Classic. The one major idea in play here is wondering what a hirez (high resolution) artist could do with the circumscribed canvas permitted a textmode artist in the space alloted for use in a FILE_ID.DIZ file, the brief description of an archive’s contents that would display on BBS file bases. I guess he got stuck thinking on iconic logos beginning with the letter “M”, so we got a peculiar association with a brand we likely would never have endorsed or given free advertising to.
Today on Mistigram, an ANSI art Mist logo veering on the abstract by Tincat from a collaboration in our July 1997 artpack. As for the slogan? You know what you get when you throw everything at the wall and see what sticks? Then you take everything that stuck, and see which among those sticks the most… basically, the Mistfunk movement Tincat spearheaded was selectively breeding for catchiness rather than clear messaging.
Wake up, sheeple! Yesterday on Mistigram we featured this ANSI art sheep – one of only two I can think of, both from Mistigris – drawn by Etana as part of a BBS-screen-sized Mistigris promo in our two-year anniversary artpack in the vicinity of October 1996. I don’t know who this ovine is giving the side-eye to, but they’ve clearly got some suspicions about the company they’re keeping.
Tempo probably didn’t intend to kill Mistigris for fifteen years and change when he gifted this piece of website art to us, but nonetheless that was the effect of his generous gesture. Thinking we could kill two birds with one stone by innovating the artpack-as-website, we invested our energies heavily in exploring the untravelled territory at great length (in M-9808, finally released in 2015) and the only thing we ended up killing was ourselves. Hardly seems worth it, to look at it, but at the time it seemed a promising sign that we were on the right track. Signs: don’t read too much into them.
What’s that squiggle in between the I and the S? Oh – it’s his initials, TH, which look perfect when viewed in hirez mode.
