MIST1025/NI-CTVCT

 

Mistigram: @_n1tr0n, who graciously put together the spooky new MIST1025 artpack collection in my stead, drew for it this #ANSIart portrait of Sesame Street's #CountVonCount, a promo for @sixteen_colors (16! 16 colors! Ah ah ah ah!) in homage to an endless parade of William Gibson-loving Count Zeroes in the digital underground of the '90s.

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We got the new year off to a good start on New Year’s Day with Horsenburger’s second illegitimate appearance in the esteemed Sixteen Colors ANSI of the Day listings… illegitimate since his particular textmode artform is, of course, teletext rather than ANSI. But we can’t argue with the results! The AOTD appreciated his manly take on the Christmas holiday as epitomized by this trifecta of pieces celebrating the movie Die Hard (not incidentally also acting as a send-off to actor Alan Rickman who shuffled off this mortal coil early in 2016.)

(As for the first… it appears to have slipped us by in all the confusion surrounding the release of MIST1116, but fear not: we will be returning to set the matter straight!)

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Queen fiend Nitnatsnoc must be spinning in his retirement! I was waiting to feature this one in Mistigram to build some tension, but the Sixteen Colors ANSI of the Day was drawn straight toward it like a moth to a flame! The artist: cccfire, another parallelly-evolved case of ANSI art from the 8bitMUSH like today’s Mistigram artist LDA. The artwork: an extra-wide XBin piece of monochrome ANSI art enshrining the members of the glam rock Queen (and enjoy the bonus, the same scene quite more minimally arranged by some anonymous SharpSCII artist), plus a late-breaking addition of the group’s logo in glorious colour… and what we can most definitiveely describe as the ultimate, final “smallest textmode Mistigris logo” of all time.

The piece competed against the fruit of Blocktronics (including no fewer than four pieces by the godly ungennant) at the Demosplash demoparty earlier this month in its truncated form, and placed… 10th. (But in his defense, cccfire runs laps around all of the multi-decade veterans who outscored him in light of a “most improved” metric, maturing as a real contender with – an admittedly idiosyncratic style – in under a year. At this rate cccfire will be pulling down top scores for his ANSI art when all of Blocktronics will have been 15 years in the cold ground!)

We will revisit the piece on Mistigram to take a peek at some of its finer details. And happy to say, we have other recent pieces that the AOTD has lighted upon over the past few days to also celebrate with you – but they carry with them a little additional bonus content that needs to be a massaged a bit before we serve up their full stories to you.