Well, I stand corrected. Not one month after I speculated that a piece from a Mistigris artpack had appeared as the Sixteen Colours ANSI of the Day for perhaps the last time ever, and here we are again with one of our historical pieces endowed with the honour (the day after, what’s more, one of my post-Mist lits washed up in another AOTD by The Green Hornet of Dark!)

Misfit couldn’t adequately explain what he was doing rooting around in Mistigris artpacks from 1996 looking for ANSIs Of The Day, as that was all around a bit of a rough period for us – still recovering from our depredation by Integrity, not yet drunk on our infusion of Krap’s members. But if you had to pick one piece from this artpack, this was definitely the one to pick.

Mage (MZ-, because Mavrik had taken MA-) was on top of his game here (it’s not even the first time he’s represented Mist in the AOTD), having graduated from Mistigris, sharpened his talents in Integrity, and gotten them certified in ACiD (which Int merged into) before bizarrely circling around back home to toss us the occasional solid gold bone for reasons known only to himself.

He doesn’t know quite remember who the subject of the piece is – doubtless some instantly forgettable Image Comics goon, if noseless faces and fists larger than heads are anything to go by – but he is on the record as directly deriving inspiration from a piece also by him in an Integrity pack a year earlier; in both cases hands figure prominently, but the difference a year makes! “I liked drawing hands (and still do!), but wasn’t happy with much else in that first pic - the face, the background, the hair.”

Because I’m a poet, I would have waited until the middle of March to make an ad for the BBS “Ides of March” as my selection for the ANSI Of The Day, but we’ll take what we can get. Stay tuned for more elucidation into our affairs past, present and future!

The MIST2000 Treasure Hunt: Puzzle #3, explained!

All right, folks; clearly everyone who was going to solve the MIST2000 treasure hunt on their own has already done so. Foolishly I’d thought that it would spur interest in the then-upcoming MIST1015 but it looks like we might have done better by going the other way around. Oh well, we may as well unpack the rest of these puzzles in short order so that archive can also enjoy public wide release as well.

When last we visited this treasure hunt, we had been directed by Bubble Bobble letters in ASCII to go to bit.ly/omnetriumperfectum , yielding trois.lzh, which when opened contains luddyvan.ans. And what do you see when you load up that piece of ANSI art?

Having already gone the uncoloured route in the previous ASCII art puzzle, you’d think I could have thrown in a splash of pigment here, but apparently not. Apologies for the misleading opening quote; it had a way of misleading people who investigated the hint, which, when itself viewed, looks similar:

“Now you see it, now you don’t.” Why couldn’t I have chosen a phrase that elegant and unambiguous? Both images clearly present frames in which something should be visible, but what and where? What we have here are the artscene’s first and second artworks substantially relying upon the quirk of ANSI colouration known as “black on black”, 20 years apart, where individual character cells on the screen are assigned both a foreground colour of 0 (black) and a background colour of 0 (black). This trick was not infrequently used to conceal greets, artist credits, and other hidden messages in an ANSI picture – I have a vivid memory of stipulating text for illustrator Eerie to hide in my poem “I am Elite” released in MIST1294. There are a few techniques for revealing black-on-black characters. The puzzle’s first winner brute-forced it in a powerful text editor, removing all ANSI colour codes. The intended solution involved cycling in some classic ANSI viewer software like ACiDview or GoldView from colour mode to grey mode to ASCII mode, when it is revealed. Another approach could involve using a block or brush recolouring tool in an ANSI editor such as Pablo and assigning new, visible, foreground colours to whatever was contained there.

Happyfish> This is hilarious, I can see in text file that there are line segments presumably spelling something out; AcidView just renders it as a featureless grey block in monochrome mode. FAIL
This is my punishment for not downloading pablo. OFF I GO

Applied to Mage’s earlier piece, that resulted in the following appearance:

… and here’s where my alleged cleverness came to bite me in the bippy: everyone who got to this puzzle thought that the hint was the name of the character in the hidden ANSI (character is what you are in the dark, and there’s the character in the dark, right?) – but no one knew what his name was. (No, I don’t, either.) I intended only to indicate that the same technique was called for on my minimalistic greyscale ANSI, which when properly massaged would reveal the following message in ugly TheDraw ANSI fonts, one of the few allowing mixed letter-case use for the message to appear in correctly-capitalized German:

“So pocht das Schicksal an die Pforte”: Destiny knocks on the door. (You know what it describes, even if you’ve never heard the phrase before: the four notes opening Beethoven’s 5th Symphony – da da da DUMMMNH!) And that, there, is the next stop in the treasure hunt: bit.ly/SopochtdasSchicksalandiePforte

On the occasion of today, here’s a piece from the back catalogues: nineteen years ago today in fact!  I still have vivid recollections of stringing the verses together on foolscap in the breaks between classes and then rushing to the MS-DOS computer lab running Novell Netware to draft a legible copy for after-school submission to the local Royal Canadian Legion Hall – they were running a youth poetry contest for poems about Remembrance Day and I had a fire lit under me to rock the contest adjudicators with my hardline idealistic conscientious objector perspective that war brutalizes all its participants, even uninjured victors.  "How strange,“ I thought, that the contest deadline was at noon, "because all participants in a youth poetry contest will be tied up in school at midday, yet they are the only ones eligible to submit.”

I rushed off to the Legion Hall as soon as the tractor-feed printout finished chugging out and breathlessly handed the printout to the combination doorman/bartender.  Before he had a chance to ask me to remove my headwear (as a gesture of respect toward the portrait of Queen Elizabeth hanging in the room), I asked him if I’d missed the contest deadline.  He had absolutely no idea what the heck I was talking about and I slunk out in defeat, denied an opportunity to break out of the artscene lit ghetto with my rhyming thoughts.  Back to rhyming BBS names!

Just as well, the poem probably would have just upset an old man.  I doubt I knew much about eg. Operation Paperclip in 1995, but I figured my eyes were clear enough to see that something stunk about a country with a single border shared with a friendly nation maintaining a standing military. My countryman John McCrae wrote one of the most canonical poems of the Great War, In Flanders Fields, but my tastes ran more toward the veil-lifting clarity of the stark writings of Wilfred Owen.

Mage kindly illustrated the work: within 13 months of Mist’s first artpack launch, he had graduated from our company to Integrity and from there to ACiD.  Many people took that achievement as a sign to retire at the height of their game, but apparently he felt he still had one or two pictures left in him.  I don’t know if this one was ever even submitted to an ACID pack, but it gave us the distinction of having a work by an ACID artist appear in our humble collection, MIST1196.ZIP.  Thanks again!

(Edited to add: some remarks from the artist!  "I wish I had something, but I don’t. I vaguely remember thinking a minimalist silhouette would be appropriate. I think, too, that my quitting the scene soon afterwards had less to do with being at the top of my game, and more to do with being 17 and having a car and a girlfriend.“)

For the benefit of Google spiders here, now, is the raw text of the lit:

Lest we Remember

A war-hardened soldier, a young farmer lad -
he’s one and the same.
Trying to hide his doubts, silently mad;
he plays no man’s game.

Holding a rifle, he chokes back his bile
and hopes not to use it.
Eat or be eaten, he thinks all the while
and tries not to lose it.

Crouching in ditches, he smells the rank scent
of the battle’s grim toll.
Comrade and brother swears not to relent,
his fond face shows no soul.

A gunshot rings out, ripping through the tense silence;
a man meets the ground.
This crude overture starts the music of violence,
a sickening sound.

He’s been enraptured to make old wrongs right
at no matter the cost.
It doesn’t matter for which side he fights
for he’s already lost.

The poppy of peace flashes bright nowadays;
the "remember-me-not.”
We fought for our truth but we practise their ways;
We forgave and forgot.