DARK0597/YT-TT1.RIP

 Mistigram: This #RIPscrip vector illustration, advertising watOr's BBS toOns town, was drawn by Neophyte for our Mistigris World Tour stop visiting Dark Illustrated in the DARK0597 artpack collection, released 28 years ago this month.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU266CumO7E?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]

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!)

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Nov 6, 2016 at 1:34pm UTC

Not that we wouldn’t post Hallowe'en art and works by Nail every day if we could, but today on Mistigram, back to the regular routine: one of the final huzzahs from Mist Classic, this piece of RIPscrip vector art by longtime Mist RIP specialist Lady Blue, with her buddy Kitiara of RCA helping out with the background miasma. It was released in May of 1998, and is one of the very, very few pieces of artwork to acknowledge the initial metaphorical conceit of the name “Mistigris” – though more commonly understood as French for “alleycat”, from there the word was further applied to a variant of poker in which the jokers are wild. Ripe with (largely untapped) symbolism potential! The writing on the playing cards looks simple, but I can’t think of a simple way to make it happen in RIPscrip editors – which is the hallmark of a great artist, making the difficult look effortless! If anyone has seen Lady Blue, please send her our way: we miss her!

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Nov 6, 2016 at 1:34pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Oct 15, 2016 at 2:58pm UTC

Totoman (formerly Grinch) strikes back with another stab at outsider RIPscrip vector graphics! Though there are elements of abstraction all over this canvas, I always liked to believe that the central tangle was merely a deeply obfuscated Mist logo, rendered illegible in the best graffiti tradition… but I would be hard pressed to prove it!

This piece was originally released in our March 1998 artpack, but as you can see, it is eternally timeless.
Instagram photo by Cthulu • Oct 15, 2016 at 2:58pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Oct 10, 2016 at 2:33pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, this RIPscrip vector art Mist logo drawn by Quip and released in our February 1998 artpack. Purple haze or fleshy brain mass?

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Oct 10, 2016 at 2:33pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Sep 29, 2016 at 12:50pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, as counterpoint to our earlier RIPscrip vector image of Sam Kieth’s Image Comics antihero The Maxx… an entirely different RIPscrip vector image of the same character by a different artist, this one drawn by Kestrel (better known for his ANSI art, but – this was no stumbling first try!) and released in our June 1996 artpack. Now the only question is what is the “ETHiC” that it is promoting?

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Sep 29, 2016 at 12:50pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Sep 15, 2016 at 1:21pm UTC

Point Grinch at a new creative tool and he rushed to go give it a whirl. If no Picasso, he was nonetheless a polymath of computer art. Here he was giving RIPscrip vector art a whirl, yielding a recognizable (if stylized) rendition of Sam Kieth’s Image Comics antihero The Maxx, from our July 1997 Mistigris artpack. (I love the way the letters are throbbing with muscles just as much as the hero is!)

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Sep 15, 2016 at 1:21pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Sep 4, 2016 at 1:30pm UTC

I try to mix up our Mistigram features by genre, artist and age, but once in a while our manual algorithm seizes and we end up with this situation, two pieces from the same artpack two days in a rown. Go figure. So here we are, with another piece from our Mistigris World Tour stint with Fistful of Steel in January of 1997. It’s a twirly, whirly Mist logo (I know, that “T” is something else, isn’t it?) drawn in RIPscrip vector graphics by Neophyte, midway along his quest from Solar Menace to Quip (… and beyond.)

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Sep 4, 2016 at 1:30pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 25, 2016 at 2:04pm UTC

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.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 25, 2016 at 2:04pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 8, 2016 at 1:15pm UTC

Today on Mistigram: a rare contribution in the RIPscrip vector graphics format, this one was drawn by Grinch in March of 1998, long after any viable application one might have expected for the BBS enhanced display format.

The curious thing about the “Mistfunk” movement is that, unlike dA pHUNK, lacking a gold standard for mistfunkiness (mistfunkitude?), it could be whatever you thought it was. This is definitely … something. Funky? …I don’t know about that. Mistfunky? It must be, it says so itself!

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 8, 2016 at 1:15pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 8, 2016 at 10:29am UTC

It could sure be frustrating, but when it worked, Mistigris sure made losers like me happy! Today’s artefact from the vaults of time is a splendidly sketchy, self-deprecating piece of ripscrip vector art, drawn by the zany Tincat - a man with a beautiful mind - and first released as we were emerging from the Mistigris World Tour in July of 1997, eyes once again blinking in the harsh light of day, once more standing unsupported, on our own.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jul 8, 2016 at 10:29am UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jun 29, 2016 at 12:50pm UTC

Today’s blast from Mistigris’ long and illustrious past: this RIPscrip vector logo dates back to the hirez disk of our 3rd anniversary collection, MIST3YRB, from October 1997. It was drawn by ts of TeklordZ, a Hawaii-based group we’d long danced around attempting to join forces with (intended as one of the first stops of our Mistigris World Tour, it died just before we had a chance to trial-realise this ambition), now known better as mattmatthew of blocktronics.

For a decade now it’s represented Mistigris on its Wikipedia page after Sodium spruced the entry up with relevant artworks, so for most of the modern period this swell picture has been our primary representation to the world. You could certainly do worse!

Though the theory has been debunked, I like to imagine that the detail work on the surface of the letters represents the skyline of downtown Vancouver (the city that has been the traditional homebase of Mistigris) as seen from the West Side, with a backdrop of the North Shore mountains behind them. It’s a lie, but a nice one!

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jun 29, 2016 at 12:50pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jun 15, 2016 at 1:16pm UTC

Further catchup from the “all-time Mistigris classics” gallery currently being served up at our new Instagram account, this is a work of RIPscrip vector art from guest artist Prisonernumberone, who briefly passed through Mistigris en route from the original Fire to ACiD. It appeared in MIST0895 and adapts a panel from Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V For Vendetta (long before Anonymous was a germ in anyone’s eye… for that matter, originally (1988) published before quite a number of them would even have been born!)

The slogan was a lovely, if somewhat vague, sentiment.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jun 15, 2016 at 1:16pm UTC

[gallery]

The MIST2000 Treasure Hunt: Puzzle #5, explained!

So, here we are. We’ve breezed through the puzzles in the textmode artforms of lit, ANSI and ASCII, and have even blitzed through tracker music, which brings us to puzzle #5 in the MIST2000 treasure hunt: nightsatFreddies.zoo located at bit.ly/fifthBeatle, containing aeiou.rip

.RIP? That’s right, it’s a piece of RIPscrip artwork, that vector graphics format intended for use on BBSes and never really embraced by them either. This one is a no-puzzle puzzle as well: it writes where to go next directly on the screen. Then, it writes it again. It writes it over and over again, until the sheer texture of all the layers of the instructions renders any one of them unreadable – and (unless you opt to throttle the display speed to that of a slower simulated modem) it displays them so quickly (and the message itself is sufficiently strange) that you will be unlikely to interpret it on-the-fly. Tauntingly, it concludes with a message: palimpsest? Yes, since the heyday of the artscene, we also have taken 100-level art history courses in college. If only you could scrape beneath the layers of extraneous verbiage and restore the simple statement of this puzzle’s clue…

Well, there is another way: because the message was input as plain text (vs. vector instructions for drawing specific outlines that coincidentally spelled out letters quite a bit more slowly), the clue is spelled out … quite a few times … in the .RIP file’s data, laid open for any text editor to enjoy:

!|10000$SBAROFF$|1K|*|W00|=00000001|c0F|Y01000A00|@071Gdegrees|@E31Qo
f|@0543bean|@8Z4Dwith|@3Y67bacon|Y04000A00|@0016degrees|@E31Lof
!|Y04010A00|@1EJM33bean|@6636with|@B61Gbacon|Y07000A00|@031Bdegrees
!|@DK1Gof|@0648bean|@8Z4Kwith|@3W66bacon|Y03000A00|@002Hdegrees|@EA1Bo
f|@0240bean|@924Iwith|@3464bacon|Y08000A00|@0212degrees|@E313of|@003Wb
ean|@8Y48with|@2W5Sbacon|Y0A000900|@020Pdegrees|Y0A010900|@CN2Cof
!|Y0A010700|@1EJG37bean|@6P3Qwith|@EA1Pbacon|Y00000A00|@012Edegrees
!|@274Cof bean|@016Ewith|@6L7Dbacon|@252Cdegrees|@004Bof bean|@8D60wit
h|@037Fbacon|Y0A000A00|@0103degre|Y0A000800|@000Ydegrees|@2H3Cdegrees
!|@041Eof bean|@AN3Cwith|@7U5Abacon|Y0A010600|@1EJQ0Jdegrees|@180Tof b
ean|@3G2Ewith|@5Y2Abacon|Y00000600|@0024degrees of|@0442bean with
!|@005Qbacon|@4624degrees of|@5O42bean with|@AU60bacon|@3W5Qdegrees of
!|@046Ubean with|@0K7Ybacon|@466Adegrees of|@5O74bean with|@AU88bacon
!|c04|Y05000A00|@0Q3Epalimpsest?|#|#|#

“degrees of bean with bacon”? Some bizarre conflation of Six Degrees of Separation (or our favorite variant, Mistigris of Separation) and Commander Keen’s Bean-With-Bacon Megarocket? Well, yes. So, off the puzzler must go, to bit.ly/degreesofbeanwithbacon!