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!
Friday, January 6, 2017
Thursday, December 29, 2016
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!)
Five years in the making, and yet hastily thrown together over the past couple of days, it’s a fresh Horsenburger teletext portrait of the late George Michael given some proud rainbow colour-cycling in the background and paired with a 2011 chiptune cover of “Last Christmas” by bryface. Together, they’re better! All that plus a parting blow from Melodia, an unused b-side from MIST0416, interpreting an early ‘80s cultural phenomenon as it might have been experienced on an early '80s home microcomputer. Everyone out there, take care of each other – if we can just make it a few days further, we can escape the curse of 2016! (And meet: the curse of 2017.)
Thursday, December 22, 2016
Today we share with you the fourth movement of our five-part 1994 tracker music epic of original moody instrumental holiday music, remastered by Melodia in 2014, souped up with tons of period seasonal imagery from textmode and artscene sources in 2015 and … paraded out again in 2016. Enjoy!
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
Today we share part 3 (of 5) of 1994’s Bells of Yule suite of seasonal tracker music, from Admiral Skuttlebutt’s Atari ST to your ears! Remastered by Melodia in 2014, we put together a slideshow of plundered textmode visuals to accompany its ~10-minute runtime – this movement has a focus on period Public Domain ANSImation clips. Merry Mist'mas!
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!
Monday, December 19, 2016
Aaaand it’s that time of year again: time to dust off the holiday content which, while awesome year-round, is only appropriate in late December. This video combines footage of an early intro made by Dr. CPU in December of 1994 with a hits parade of other seasonal art and writing made by Mistigris members in that month, set to the soundtrack of the first movement of the Bells of Yule music disk, which was also first released in that month. Enjoy!
Tuesday, December 13, 2016
Today’s Mistigram item from MIST1116 was selected as the 16 Colours ANSI of the Day on November 27th (the second time that month the sporadic artist had been so honoured!) but I wanted to wait until I had the chance to share the souped-up version I’d tried cobbling together for the MIST1116 trailer video (before ultimately rejecting it as not thematically fitting in).
Well, here it is! VileR, in association with his fellow archivists at The Dos Collection, was celebrating the 35th anniversary of the release of the IBM PC computer, the best way he knew how: by making reference to the BASIC game by Bill Gates that shipped with the machine’s PC-DOS operating system (running under its BASICA interpreter), DONKEY.BAS. This is not the first time this year VileR released a masterpiece involving DONKEY.BAS – a few months ago, as you may recall, he re-implemented it in textmode as “Sorry Ass”, boiling it down so concisely it fit in a floppy diskette’s boot sector.
I was hoping to better ANSImate the car blasting through the BASICA start screen (Did You Know: double-arrow characters used on the BASICA screen are ANSI control characters, so attempts to depict them accurately will result in glitched display output. I sure found out, repeatedly!), but my window of opportunity to soup up this file’s presentation coincided exactly with me losing access to my main computer and the opportunity passed me by. Alas! Maybe for the PC’s 40th I can take another crack at it. Hats off, VileR!
Tuesday, November 8, 2016
Not two weeks after we released MIST1016, and already another collection is battering at the gates, demanding to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting public. This is it, folks, the collection for which we’ve been soliciting, gathering, stockpiling, and bottling up & shaking art for over six months now. Due to qualitative changes, what you end up with is somehow more than a mere six monthly artpacks would have been: it’s a massive monument of computer art, and we have skimmed some excellence off of its top to share with you in this video. The actual collection will follow this weekend. In the meantime, here’s a four-minute highlights reel for you to enjoy. (And if you find you’d like to spread the word, you’ll probably have better luck with the copy up on YouTube.)
Wednesday, November 2, 2016
While the version of the art included in our recent MIST1016 artpack was a static image, we all agreed that this was an optimal presentation for Ed “Starstew” Statsny’s Pixkeletal … somewhat akin to how it might be cranked out of a tractor feed dot matrix printer. I remembered how “back in the day” the old graphics viewing program CSHOW would present images that way, after performing some very processor-intensive calculations, no doubt! But CSHOW is unhappy performing in DOSBox today, and I had to go through a lot of MS-DOS graphics applications before I found one that could deliver the effect – that of underpowered limping – that I was searching for. Art isn’t always supposed to be easy! Even computer art. (ESPECIALLY computer art!)
Monday, October 24, 2016
Get your loot bags ready because we’ve got homemade goodies to share, mostly razorblade-free! In the lead-up to our annual anniversary artpack release, due to the season we always see a certain quantity of spooky art submitted. Last year it was a significant portion of the artpack – this year we elected to simply split it off into a more thematically-coherent collection all on its own.
So the creepy MIST1016 artpack is headed your way in one week – descending upon an unprepared populace on Hallowe'en – and to get you warmed up for it, we present a sampling of its eerie contents (but not 33rie contents, he has no time for that stuff anymore) in the form of this multimedia slideshow preview! (The annual anniversary artpack will follow in November, so fear not… by which I mean, only fear this extremely terrifying Hallowe'en computer art!)
Tuesday, October 4, 2016
Also, hats off to Freddy43! Upon learning, the night before the submission cutoff, that the Deadline demoparty in Berlin was accepting remote entries, he spent an hour throwing together this little aalib greetro, and took home 3rd place (admittedly of only three entrants, but the point spread wasn’t so very dramatically against him!)
Sometime I will have to write a longer post about Mistigris’ demoparty history, since a look at our Demozoo activity log indicates the hilariously long gap in activity – dipping our toes in the water in 1996 and 1997, I then headed off to Assembly and Evoke in the summer of 1999 with some fresh tracks and bearing with me the hazy memory of Mistigris… and then the conspicuous silence of the permanently stilled, until our name begins popping back up on the historical record in 2015. Maybe we’ll be able to take it a little further this time around! In the meantime, Freddy43 (and Creonix, another subject for a later post) have given us a great start for our second chance.
Monday, September 19, 2016
On again-off again Mistigris house composer Melodia, today of Empress Play, composed a ton of .XMs in FastTracker 2 circa 1999, many of them dabbling in the use of aggressive electric guitar riffs recorded by a friend, and the whole slate of songs – nearly two dozen of them, over an hour and half’s worth – was lost in one fatal hard drive crash around the turn of the century, seemingly forever.
However, the story doesn’t end there: while moving house this year, a data CD backup of the files came to light. Given this rare second chance, we opted to put the files, rudely displaced some 17 years into the future, into circulation as quickly as we could. In addition to the electric guitar, you can look forward to such late-‘90s phenomena as remixes of Enya and Fatboy Slim. (No, not at the same time.)
The attached video is a music video Melodia made for one of the songs, The Hangman’s Hoedown, arranged from clips from the 1976 spaghetti western Diamente Lobo. For the rest of them, you can download the entire collection directly or if you prefer, you can stream the songs individually from textmod.es. Enjoy!
Today Mistigris released “1999”, a musicdisk of lost songs by @empressplay from that year. https://t.co/jV7i8J00Wa pic.twitter.com/9mHKnmNIuh
— Mistigris (@mistfunk) September 19, 2016
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Saturday, April 30, 2016
I have embedded it at the bottom of the initial call for submissions, but in case you don’t see it go by again, you should know that today I spiced up the plain dry bread call for submissions with a classic loader-style annoucement of our upcoming artpack, complete with scrolly bars and music from the recent Tracker Fix competition. Hope it scratches a retro itch!
Tuesday, February 9, 2016
In another missive from the “better late than never” department, here’s another warning against cooking in a “best before” date into your computer art, because in a scene that has traditionally measured freshness in terms of 0-3 days, last year is ancient history. (Perhaps the best proof against staleness is to proudly wave the flag of an improbable anachronism such as Remorse 1981 – or the outright impossible Razor 1911.) And I know, sometimes serial numbers can be easily filed off, timestamp watermarks can be cropped out or photoshopped away… first you disappear the numbers, then you reverse the manual anti-aliasing in DP2E. But time spent amending old art could be time spent making new art, and suddenly this piece sucks away twice as much of your limited lifespan as you’d originally intended. Maybe to avoid the tainted stink of yesterday’s news, you just abandon the never-seen, mis-labeled art because you can’t justify the time to bring it back up to speed.
But I digress. Amending errant characters and uncooperative pixels is easy. Remodeling rooms and rolling back landscaping, that’s a mega project! Back up the truck and roll out the bulldozers! Back when cooking up MIST1014, I was struck by the notion of inserting Mistigris, Forrest Gump-style, into the history of the underground computer artscene – by which I mean slipping in references to us in classic video games. (This is an idea that hasn’t reached the end of the road yet; only this particular path has proven to be a cul-de-sac 8) In one case of my attempts to celebrate us through virtual land art (my own Spiral Jetty), I availed myself of a homebrew Java app (Super_Mario_Bros_Game_&_Builder.jar) that could be used, more or less, to generate custom levels for Super Mario Bros. So there we go – a hill here, a pipe there, a couple of platforms… et voila, Mario physically traversing a hostile environment spelling out our name in iconic, monumental form: MISTIGRIS, too big to ignore, hooked up directly to a mainline of nostalgia.
There were issues: the video lacked sound, and the cuts were a little too quick (gameplay videos spliced together because the level I had designed was simply too difficult for me to consistently play through successfully. Just couldn’t resist inserting that Hammer Brother!) Melody thought I was nuts when I asked for any fontists to comment on my kerning. And of course I had a lot on my plate, arraying my options before me while putting together our first artpack in 16 years and weighing over what to include and what to leave out. (The agony of senior staff: leaving yourself on the cutting room floor!) This particular work was, at that moment in time, merely half-baked (intended as one segment of a larger montage), so it was left on the back burner… where in short order it timed out, instantly expiring with its cloud-walking reference to MIST 2014 just as surely as if Mario’s timer had ticked down to zero.
There’s one more problem, however. In 2014 making a custom Super Mario Bros. level was a neat trick, possible only through the application of a somewhat obscure tool unknown to most. Sure, I probably could have gone into the guts of the data and re-generated the level, now reading MIST 2015, but it would not longer be a neat, “how did he do that?” trick, thanks to the release of a piece of software that singlehandedly doubled the number of WiiUs in circulation. I speak, of course, of … (here, I’ll let Reset Survivor of Blocktronics announce it:) SUPER MARIO MAKER!
Even if my level looked as good as the ones that program generated (which, ahem, it does not), now rather than being an intriguing and unique singular work of art, it was a mere grain of sand on a very large beach – one in which it compared quite unfavourably to many of the other, adjacent grains. I sweated over my user-unfriendly tools to come up with a passable proof-of-concept, and the marketplace of ideas (yes, DIY Mario levels… a great concept whose time has surely come!) overran me like an inventor who’d come up with an improvement on telegraph wires but didn’t present it to the patent office until the telephone system was already in place. (I do feel like this sometimes when I uncover a bug in SAUCE implementation while cramming metadata into files using Spoon.) Bryface recently participated in a Global Game Jam and even he got in on the act:
And so all I can do with this piece is dissect and analyse its circumstances, mourning my own perfectionist streak perhaps and presenting a stark warning to, y'know, gather those rosebuds while ye may. If there’s one lesson Mistigris has taught me since 1998, it’s “Don’t release tomorrow what you could release today!”
Friday, January 8, 2016
Texmode art demo “New.Txt” with graphics by Blocktronics artists The Textorcistand and Nail got 1st. place at TMDC 2015 event!
Congrats, buddies!
Link to results page:
http://www.pouet.net/party_results.php?which=167&when=2015&font=1
Thursday, January 7, 2016
We have provided a great testament to the “when it’s ready” mentality, the idea that some works of art are like fine wines, losing nothing if bottled up and left to ferment in a basement for a decade or so. Indeed, the audience for our 2014 re-release of the 1994 Bells of Yule music disk was undoubtedly larger – if we had been ahead of our time, perhaps popular tastes had finally caught up to our vanguardism. (Popular ears still aren’t quite ready for the modern 1930s sounds of Kurt Weill– being ahead of the pack doesn’t always pay off, but as it turns out, nothing we were doing is quite that avant-garde 8)
There is one thing that instantly freezes a piece into a moment in time, associating the two permanently like a stapler, and that is: including a date or year on it. This is why we had to use the Pablo jam ANSI in our MIST1015 memberlist (awesome though it was regardless) despite the fact that it was arguably incomplete (through several release tweaks and revisions, completion of Frankenstein’s shading was promise, but never delivered) – because at no point in the future would there ever be a better moment to release an ANSI that read “MISTIGRIS 1015”.
Dutch computer artist Freddy43, whose astounding work you got a chance to hear and see in MIST1015, presented us with a demo of some compelling technology – a sine-bouncing scrolly bar working its way across a pair of HTC smartphones. (It’s a trick, making fiddly work that is somewhat obvious in retrospect look easy and seamless. Parting the curtains and revealing the magician’s ruse: “i have to videocapture the sine scrolling text, then make 2 splitted video’s of it, and film it again when playing back at the phones..so it’s not some script running on both phone’s together or whatsoever..it takes a bit of time and patience to make it..”) We agreed that it would be a good fit for our vintage affectations and felt that we could totally incorporate that into our new run of artpack-promotional video imagery. But it wasn’t ready to roll prior to the pack’s launch, and though it eventually did come through the pipe in a complete form, it didn’t fit in with any of the year’s remaining (Christmas music video 8) releases, so it went unused.
No problem – we can just sit on it and use it later, right? BZZT! Sadly, we will never again be Mistigris 2015. Our proclamation of what computer art is and isn’t in 2015 is instantly stale here in the bold new world of 2016. Alas! And here is the downside of the great trick that is actually just hard work: due to the pain-in-the-ass factor of making so trivial an alteration as changing two instances of “2015” to read “2016” – basically, redoing all of the hard work over again in its entirety – instead it gets left, wasted, by the roadside, and we think to ourselves: “Too bad we stamped it with an expiration date, because it was a pretty cool trick!”
At least today we can say: it will never again be as close to 2015 as it is now, and squeak it out the gate to impress with what it does rather than just what it says 8)
Thursday, December 31, 2015
The MIST2000 Treasure Hunt: Puzzle #7, explained!
ANSI, ASCII, lit, RIPscrip, tracker music… did we represent all of the computer underground scene’s art forms yet? Not quite: where are the intros and loaders? I took the liberty of minting one in an old Intro Maker application, which bit.ly/pillarsofwisdom delivered up to you after a casual UUdecoding: PLEIADES.EXE, named for the Seven Sisters asterism. I don’t know if I was running out of time or out of ideas, but this is another no-puzzle puzzle (A WAR OF ATTRITION IS STILL A WAR REGARDLESS!); all you need do is sit through a list of greets. (The list consists of all Mistigris members currently credited on Demozoo, and runs around 6 minutes long, but if you don’t have that kind of time to burn, the first completer of the puzzle challenge took a shortcut and just thumbed through the loader’s data with a hexeditor to expedite the delivery of the scrolly’s text.)
But if you’re too busy even to help yourself, know that the message revealed at the conclusion of the scrolly bar oriented you toward the next helpful URL: bit.ly/spiderlegs … and with it, we approach the last of your opportunities to solve even a single step of this treasure hunt on your own!
Monday, December 28, 2015
The MIST2000 Treasure Hunt: Puzzle #4, explained!
OK, when you last saw us, unpacking this complex of computer stumpers, back on November 7th, we’d just unpacked the ANSI art black-on-black problem (with help from TheDraw fonts) and had been sent to puzzle number 4 by way of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, curiously: bit.ly/SopochtdasSchicksalandiePforte. And you were pointed to a .ZIP archive (a current compression standard at last, thank god!) FANTASTIC.ZIP (Fantastic Four, you dig?) which you then cracked open, only to be posed with this:
Maybe it would have been more fair to make it one of the classic overused passwords, like “password” or “God”. If I were to do this again, I probably would have styled the ANSI art clue as a fake BBS ad and listed this password as a New User Password. If I were to do this again… I’d be certifiably bonkers.
So you start playing the song, and you hear the creepy mantra repeated endlessly with an old interesting-failure word-by-word speech synthesis experiment: This is a red herring.
A “red herring”, for non-native English speakers, is a metaphor for a dead end of sorts – a distraction from an alternate fruitful avenue. And this song is full of them: open the file up in a tracker program and analyse the samples included in the song. One of them contains backmasked vocals – Satanic messages? No: sadly, an apology for being another red herring. One contains the old tracker trick of including a text file as a sample, and that text file will tell you everything you might have ever wanted to know about the etymology of the phrase “red herring”. A message in morse code? Sure. What you get when you decode the message? You can probably guess the species and colour of the fish. We even include one sample of noise that reveals a picture of a fish when run through a spectroscope… all different paths that lead to the same, unuseful, lack of progress. So how do we progress? What here is not a red herring?
In the first of my “no-puzzle puzzles” all you have to do here is play through the whole song, in its entirety, from within a tracker program that displays the names of the samples currently triggered. After listening to a great deal (well, a minute and 57 seconds) of creepy uselessnes, near the end of the playback, you will see a message silently display on the screen, assembled letter-by-letter, inspired by our longago insertion of ASCII stickmen dancing the YMCA in a tracked rendition of that Village People song for a Blender competition. And that message will tell you where to go. (And… where to go next, for puzzle number 5, is: bit.ly/fifthBeatle … maybe you can solve it before I get around to spoiling the puzzle, though for my sake I sure hope you don’t as I’ve really got to start dashing these off if I want to get MIST2000 into the public’s hands before New Year!)