The next row sees a prestigious piece by Cat(bones) of ACiD who was at that time overturning the rigid, demoscene-dictated pixelart/raytrace school of artscene high resolution artwork by introducing his soulful tattoo flash lowbrow comix sensibilities into this group of uptight nerds (always wished the side panels had contained more art and not just orange static) … it’s accompanied by a smallscale piece by Halaster, FiRE founder, released in a Relic pack for some reason – Hal perhaps adrift in the wilderness following the undoing of its merger into Mist (an if you ask me disproportionate trade to Nitnatsnoc for the second of his two pieces for Hal’s BBS The Regency) – and a somewhat abstract piece (the letter “t” floating in a punch bowl?) by Handiboy of Mistigris.
Next row! Two more works from Mist alumni in Integrity – an anime babe by Questor and a goth-y monster by Inquisitor, who had another piece in the same pack we felt would have been a much better fit for our board, oh well! And then the next row – two pieces of high resolution artwork, the first by Questor again and the second by Smokescreen of Mist, an adaptation of promotional artwork for an Itchy and Scratchy video game. And the coup de grace, an epic scroller (goes on for page after page at 80x25), again by the unique Prisonernumberone.
If I’d really been thinking I would have noted which packs all these artworks were sourced from, so I could have presented them in chronological order and allowed them to be viewed in their proper context. Alas! Apologies, historians, I’ve taken all of these relics out of their proper strata and put them on the same shelf. Sorry!
… and as promised, the rest of those tomatoes. Pieces by, in order: Mass Delusion of iCE, Mage of Mist, Mad Bomber of Spastic, Nail of Fire, Sentience of Mist, Platinum of Mist (an unprecedented combination of picture and logo!), Plastic of Mist, White Insanity of mOP!, Minus of Mist, Weird of Mist, Xeryrus of Mist, and Weird of Mist. (You see what running an artgroup gets you? Art by that group’s members!)
Picking up from yesterday, we’re still celebrating the 21st anniversary of the BBS (bulletin board service) The Screaming Tomato (TST), the first WHQ (world headquarters) of Mistigris and a pretty groovy little place in cyberspace from 1994-1997. In our last post, we got to the conception and launch of the BBS by its SysOp (system operator) Nitnatsnoc and his bumbling visionary Co-SysOp Cthulu, and through to the creation of Mistigris. This account of “the early years” included an exclusive gallery of the self-publicising art for the BBS executed (perpetrated in my case) by its proprietors. Sure, that’s all well and good, but those guys hardly had an unbiased opinion…
In case you weren’t “there” then, a recap: a BBS was a computer-to-computer connection via phone line, moderated by modems (modulator-demodulators). After a banshee screech of the two pieces of equipment negotiating their “handshake”, users would be prompted to press Escape twice and proceed through to the login with a unique username and password, allowing them access (as fast, but no faster, as an adult can read) to designated areas of the SysOp’s computer sitting on the other end of the phone line. Through hot-keyed menus ([Y]es/[n]o) they could navigate a kind of way-station (the bulletin board analogy is not glib) where they could, generally one at a time, write messages to each other, share new files with others or help themselves to ones left behind by prior callers, play simple online games through BBS “door” programs, and enjoy live chat with the SysOp, if they were home. You enjoyed a limited number of minutes’ free access daily (supposing you were lucky enough to not just hit busy signals when you called!) and if that time was exceeded, you were unceremoniously kicked off. All this in textmode, with a screen resolution of 80x25 characters at 640x480 pixels, decorating things with ANSI art – generally with a kind of EGA colour scheme, mixing and matching from 16 viable foreground colours and 8 solid (and 8 blinking) background ones. But just like the MS-DOS command prompt, the default background was black. Your BBS experience may have differed in some superficial ways if you called boards on your Commodore 64 or your Apple Macintosh, but the general idea was the same – except that the artscene was resolutely ANSI-centric and PC-grounded, so the use of a terminal program to access one of these artscene boards was not entirely dissimilar to a session spent at the command prompt in MS-DOS or CP/M.
Unlike many BBSes, this one featured a mascot of sorts in its whimsical name (a refreshing breath of fresh air in a scene that was filled with teenaged boys trying to out-grim each other, cf. “Morbid Grindoris” – I don’t know what it is, but it’s grim all right!), and what’s more, it’s one that virtually anyone with two eyes and a finger could attempt to render in ANSI. Can I draw the Mona Lisa or a rocket ship? I don’t know – but I sure as heck can draw a tomato. Many artists from many different groups drew art to celebrate and promote this BBS, sometimes as a favour to us, sometimes because we asked them to, sometimes as a display of fealty to us, and sometimes just because our board’s name granted them a draught of strange inspiration, and today’s post compiles the ones who opted to include textmode renderings of that most vegetablian of fruits, the tomato. Often, screaming.
I wanted to touch briefly on the affiliations held by the board. Largely empty honours lavished upon boards, an affiliation could be used to trick others into believing that you were a big deal crossroads, and if you were lucky you could sit back and let the self-fulfilling prophecy take over… the artistic tributes would roll in because your BBS’ name had achieved the kind of stature and proportions that people simply expected to see in artpacks, over and over again, after seeing it hammered in repeatedly in lists of distro sites. (While by and large, the particular letters making up a BBS’ name probably didn’t contribute greatly to people’s decision to make art out of them, it didn’t hurt to make things easy for fontists by giving your board, if not a short name, an appealingly-abbreviatable one. It was all an exercise in branding.)
Our earliest ads (as in the first in this lot, by Darkforce briefly in Union between the downfall of iMPERiAL and the advent of Patriot->RAiD->Integrity) see us boasting ties to the local music groups EuphoniX, Digitallusions, and Happy Fetus Records, but I don’t believe we ever actually legitimately held any of those music distro site credits – that was a case of wishful thinking on my part, with intent to fake it until we made it. I mean, I’m on the record in one place, Issue #13 of the Kithe e-mag, saying that we definitely did hold them; I’m on the record elsewhere saying that we definitely didn’t. In at least one account I’m lying! The truth likely falls somewhere in between: sure I asked, but probably I was stymied.
The first legitimate affiliation held by the board was that of iMPERiAL Member site, courtesy of my somewhat underhanded membership in said group, but as noted … iMPERiAL dissolved before the board went public, so its utility as a feather in our cap was limited. In an attempt to bring his own membership of some group to the board, Nitnatsnoc very briefly held pre-Mist membership in a local (non-releasing, if memory serves correct) group named Sensation (SNS), one of Grateful Dead’s numerous failure-to-launch group aspirations… TST would have worn that dubious laurel, but he backed out quick after seeing the company he’d be keeping and, well, let us never speak of it again. Of course it quickly ascended to status as the WHQ of Mistigris (were there ever any real contenders? Atlantis and Alpha Centauri I remember were thriving local contemporary artscene hubs, though distinctly neutral territory), which got us far in receiving art from our members, but not much further in getting us art from non-members. Nit made a bit of a blunder accepting an IRC-offered distro site status from WiND, a new group which was to primarily make its mark accidentally releasing ripped ANSIs… and we must never speak of it again. The remaining affiliations were touches of genuine class: Fire BC outpost, on what basis I cannot recall (consolation prize for the disappointingly temporary nature of their merger with Mistigris in 0395?); Integrity Member site, a difficult-to-obtain honor from a hot group that had no non-member board distro sites; ACID Member site, the logical follow-up to Integrity’s merger into ACID, and finally the strangest of our affiliations, WHQ of Cenobite, one of the artscene’s very few “lit”-exclusive groups (the canonical three were Revolt, Reality and Candelabra) – a distinction perhaps only possible in a place where poetry and writers were already so extraordinarily celebrated as the WHQ of Mistigris, the group that published by far the best of the artscene poetry… that nobody in the artscene read. Mistigris survived the end of TST, but it was a fatal blow that Cenobite never recovered from.
OK, so what else do we have here? An offputting (ugh, the eyebrows!) tomato menu, screaming with rage, by Pestilence’s pet ANSI artist Inquisitor – very briefly of Mistigris; a more jubilantly hollering tomato by Estatic of CiA, the long-running “#3” group which often rated lower, but outlasted all other contenders; a shrunken-head interpretation of a tomato (looks more like an onion painted red) by Destro of Mist; Egoteq’s outraged tomato from an iCE pack, garnering us some legitimacy by getting our little project mentioned in the perennial #2 group; blink-and-you’ll-miss-them ASCII tomators in this logo by Feral of Trance (which looked even better in Amiga mode, but which kept glitching when I tried saving it that way in Pablo – try it yourself!); Happyfish’s straightforward explanation of just what it is that makes the (cherry) tomato scream?; a tomater hiding in the red background of Zoltar’s font accompanying Eerie’s drawing of a blue troll; cutie tomatoes cowering on either side of Mavrik’s logo accompanying his ANSI of Image comics character Pitt; and an ANSI of a cool dude tomato wearing a suit, a branching-out experiment by Dead Soul of Mistigris (where the rest of those unallocated pictures were released) who typically drew ASCII rather than ANSI … and … there are 13 more ANSIs of tomatoes I have here made for our board, realizing I must have just run up against some sort of internal Tumblr limit. Maybe I’ll just follow up this post venting the rest of them without all of the drainingly exhaustive commentary… Stay tuned, there are more coming!
Happy birthday to The Screaming Tomato BBS, which opened to the public August 24th, 1994 – 21 years to the day. (Nitnatsnoc made a great “Odd Couple” foil to me: “TST birthday in August? That’s weird, because the way I remember it, I talked to you about my idea of starting up a BBS when we were in the caf at Kits.”) This marks the first of three posts I’ll be making here to celebrate all the great art that was made to promote a point in cyberspace that, well, was ephemeral but made its mark!
Around the turn of the century, acutely aware that my command over that exciting but rapidly-receeding time would fade over the years, I made an effort to document the salient points of all my top bulletin board services over at bbsmates.com (then mirrored them over at textfiles.com). Here’s what I said about TST:
Tragic victim of the “the adjective noun” BBS-name syndrome of 1994 [strongly influenced by Eerie’s “Sarcastic Toaster”], this was the board I was both co-SysOp of and locked out from - on numerous occasions. From an early start of adolescent silliness (great, a message base called “World Wildlife Wrestling Federation” - now what are we going to put in it?) this provided the base from which MiSTiGRiS was almost accidentally founded. Also WHQ of Cenobite, a lit group run by Schtroumpf gleaning from the creme of Mist’s writers, it is bizarre that this BBS didn’t amass more surreal artwork than it did [actually, you know, that was maybe enough of it], but when all is said and done this board probably represented the 604 to more long-distance artscene callers than any other.
Most importantly, it would be fully tricked out and customized, because we had personality in spades oozing out through every teenaged pore like a bad case of acne, and would have been incapable of reining it in even were we so inclined.
OK, ok. I had the oozing personality, and he had the spare phone line and hardware (but still no monkey fondulator drive!) Between the two of us, we knew that we had what we needed to bring to the table (well, the computer desk) to make this a BBS the likes of which no one had ever logged into before.
Nitnatsnoc came up, somehow, with the name. (“I remember you seemed initially unimpressed until you asked me what the name was going to be.”) Trying to contextualize it, I actually drew countless sketches of tomatoes in a variety of precarious, scream-inducing situations, manually tracing over them in jaggies (turning curves into straight lines alternating with corners) so as to suggest the ANSI blocks the pictures would need to be translated into over in BBS-land. (I didn’t have any particular aptitude for ANSI art, but despite having just learned about the underground flipside to the public domain BBS community, I knew that with my boundless creativity and limitless enthusiasm, I would surely have it well in hand in a matter of weeks. I applied to NWA (New Wave Artists that is, straight outta Richmond!) as an ANSI artist and computer musician – hey, how hard can it be? – and only grudgingly conceded to writing some poems, sorry, “lits” when I ran up against the crude state of PC tracking software (KingMod, never yet having heard the phrase “Scream Tracker” or the group name “Future Crew”.) Hm, writing rhyming couplets into a text editor results in no interface friction! Maybe this’ll go somewhere!
I had managed to parlay my way into NWA and from there, it merged with GRiP into iMPERiAL, and suddenly hosting a BBS with local .MOD music and a “Weird Al” Yankovic song lyric section wasn’t enough. We’d require elite affiliations for our board, for with them would come textmode ornamentation beyond anything either of us could produce! Nitty spent the summer tinkering with the BBS-to-be (using, I can’t remember, either Telegard or Renegade, one of the “Forum hacks” [EDITED: I was right, Nitty elaborates… and alludes to his poorly-timed period obsession with the band Queen – “TST originally ran on Telegard. Eventually, I felt a need to make the design more in-line with the art scene, but Telegard didn’t allow for much customization. So I shut it down (for a week or two? a month?) while I updated the board using Renegade and created new promo and menu art. That’s why that Batman ansi you posted has "revisited” written on it – it was used as part of the refresh. (Incidentally, I had totally forgotten about that pic and was surprised to see my sig on it. Also, “revisited” is a Queen reference; on their third album, the 7th track was called “In the Lap of the Gods” and their 13th and final track had the same name, with “revisited” tagged on.)“]), getting some hot tips from Access Denied of Field of Eggplants and Eerie of Sarcastic Toaster about how to get his own board off the ground, hooked up to echomail networks (ultimately plugged in to TABNet, Mistigris’ KiTSCHNet, SiHFNet, and ACiD’s AgoraNet), when catastrophe struck: shortly after releasing its August 1994 artpack, iMPERiAL dissolved. Our precious member board status! And from there, the frantic discussions resulting in the formation of Mistigris. It required a BBS to act as a WHQ and, fortunately, we just so happened to have one on the verge of being opened to the public. Before the end of the month, by August 24th, the "last callers” door was showing strange new nicknames beyond merely those of myself and Nitnatsnoc.
The first hurdle had been overcome: circumstances threw us in the water, and we swam. In June we were going to be faking it until we made it, and by the end of the summer… we were making… something! (Pictured: early welcome screen by Nitnatsnoc, early promotional art by myself, later promotional art by Nitnatsnoc – after Mist, after Integrity, in ACiD. Spoiler warning: he made it. And see below: my April Fool’s pack loader advertising the BBS; whether I ever “made it” was debatable, but faking it was never so fun.)
Next post – the salad days: other people also made promotional artwork for us! Lots of them!
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucOb5UMQX6E&w=640&h=360]
