Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 17, 2016 at 1:22pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, a work of newschool ASCII art by Publius Emeritus II from our 20th anniversary / revival artpack of October 2014, the first drawn by the artist in over a decade and a half. It plays with the conceit of the numerical substitution cipher (eg. num3r1c4l 5ub5717u710n c1ph3r) traditionally employed by elite hackers where numbers are substituted for letters of a similar appearance, and here takes the conceit further by rendering the numbers themselves out of different characters! Mise en abyme, my friends!

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 17, 2016 at 1:22pm UTC

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Today on Mistigram! In 1975, Stephen King wrote the book Salem’s Lot. (In 1994 Helter established a 604-area BBS of the same name.) In 1979 the novel was adapted into a TV miniseries with some striking promotional artwork. In 2010 the Swedish heavy metal band Ghost released their album “Opus Eponymous”, whose album illustration echoed the influence of the Salem’s Lot art.

And in 2014, Publius Emeritus II (who had not touched textmode art in this century) adapted the Ghost album artwork into a newschool ASCII celebrating the revival of our long-dormant underground computer artgroup Mistigris, not simply retaining the subject and approach, but dismantling and reassembling the logo into a new configuration.

Not bad, huh?