IMBIBE01/TJ-KRAFT_DINNER

 Mistigram: the Barenaked Ladies weren't the only ones to sing the praises of that uniquely Canadian culinary phenomenon, the prepackaged preparation of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese they presumed to brand #KraftDinner. This poem honouring the neon orange dish was written way back in the '90s by The Judge about his student days at BCIT, when he basically lived on the stuff, and was included in the new food-themed IMBIBE01 electronic magazine -- basically a time capsule of how the chronically online were eating 30 years ago.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jun 28, 2016 at 3:07pm UTC

From the memberlist of M-9801, here’s a striking and unique ANSI art logo by The Extremist. January is the start of a New Year and a rising sun is an optimistic symbol, so it’s perhaps ironic that this was the beginning of our hardest-working and most catastrophic year yet, one which saw Mist crash hard and not stir again until our 2014 revival.

On the Instagram sharing of this logo I allude to an “old poem”, composed basking on modern art one sunny day circa 1999 at Capilano College and released at long last in MIST2000 at the end of last year, but for full disclosure of the ominous foreboding in which I hold optimistic suns (a true native son of Raincouver) I may as well share the whole thing here:

IT IS TOO NICE OUT
to write poetry today.
not for lack of subject matter
	- the world is still a terrible place:
genocide—multinational corporate tyranny—human rights violation-
mass extinction—small arms proliferation—rape—
antibiotic-resistant bacteria—wage inequity—intolerance
and right now 
right now
a parent
is telling their child 

"Because I say so!"

but the sun is out
people are smiling, buying, doing their best to bring more people into this world
(do they know something I do not?)
so like a lizard on a hot rock 
I renew my concern for creature comforts -
like a frog in a pot
on a slow stove
I feel no need
to move.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Jun 28, 2016 at 3:07pm UTC

searching for satellites

No Bowie appearances in the released Mistigris body of work… and yet, an old memory tickles. There it is – file dated July 30, 1998: a poem, omitted from M-9808 (not that it ended up waiting all that much longer for the big reveal, as it turns out.)

observation while star-gazing
examples of how the sky has been sold
he says this is a david bowie song
“searching for satellites.”

and I feel violated
like innocence stolen
but worse
culture relived (and it wasn’t even my culture
no redemption in nostalgia)

profound sadness
is it no longer possible to live in a modern world
without experiencing post-modern apostasy?

“He” would have been The Laughing Fool, the starlit cloudless summer sky likely observed from our pseudo-rural Kerrisdale/Southlands corner on the edge of Vancouver, far removed from the bright lights of downtown.

After having our stargazing (perhaps punctuating an overnight on Tower Beach after a spate of late-night coning) interrupted by one too many satellites, we shifted focus and began explicitly satellite-gazing. (cf. Wikipedia: Because of the shape of the Iridium satellites’ reflective antennas, the satellites focus sunlight on a small area of the Earth’s surface in an incidental manner. This results in an effect called Iridium flares, where the satellite momentarily appears as one of the brightest objects in the night sky and can even be seen during daylight.)

I believe he was mistaken; to the best of my knowledge, David Bowie never did make reference to watching satellites in any of his songs – probably what my friend intended to convey was that the situation was Bowie-esque… but what I got out of the remark was a frustration at the apparent impossibility of being the first person to encapsulate and enshrine an experience in art, the notion that no matter the idea, someone older (that garish spectre haunting my older sister’s bedroom in pin-up form during my childhood) had already gotten there first – potentially decades earlier in this case, not satisfied with his generous share, having to reach far into the future and snatch seeds of potential greatness right out of my grasp. Had I thought to unpack the remark a bit, I might have taken the comparison as a compliment, but that perspective would have been fundamentally incompatible with the freshly-minted Serious Prose Poet, who always finds the storm cloud to any silver lining: “I feel violated / like innocence stolen / but worse”. Oh, get over yourself!

“But worse.” This was not an unknown device for the period, sometimes employed with tongue lodged firmly in cheek as in “thank you”, recently released in MIST2000 (and with less irony as in “her braid; i obeyed” in M-9806-A):

thank you for reminding me

last night

that I am not a hot stove -
that I am capable of contact

sustained
without immediate withdrawl
and mutual discomfort.
I did not
burn you
though you did
touch me.

Perhaps worse.
Perhaps with a capital “T.”

(I don’t recall there being
a “t”
in “Perhaps”…)

Wherever a poem by a Serious Prose Poet starts, gravitational physics dictates that its predictable trajectory is oriented only in one possible direction: downward. Even on rare occasions where it may appear to be raising in exaltation, an obligatory twist or implied subtext of tragic flaw invoked at the conclusion will spike it down to the ground like Icarus, the volleyball of the gods; Serious Prose Poems understand that all emotions are bad, but that good emotions are worse because the world is still bad and the speaker is merely sadly deluded. But the icing on the cake:

is it no longer possible to live in a modern world
without experiencing post-modern apostasy?

Dense, huh? Here, permit me to translate:

ATTENTION LADIES: do not permit this man to insert his penis into any portion of your anatomy.

Fortunately, they seemed to have gotten the memo, instead reserving their erotic interest and devotion to more suitable subjects who weren’t so prone to flying into histrionics upon realising that they weren’t the only ones to ever taste their particular sweet breath of air; calmer, more sedate and successful subjects, which brings us right back around to David Bowie.

Early on in my accordion career (indulge me in the digression, it finds its place on the meta level), around the turn of the century, I had a method: get booked to provide music for a strangely specific function (eg. a fundraiser to recover from a house fire, hi Ivan E. Coyote!); the afternoon before the show, cram just-recognizable arrangements of thematically-relevant songs (Ring of Fire, Burning Down the House, etc.); perform a totally musically disjointed set; blame the theme. The sets weren’t any good, but you could not accuse them of being off-topic. But in time, I concluded – probably there is more to art than being relevant.

(And so in all likelihood you won’t be seeing a great deal more blog posts of this type 8)

Sorry to disappoint with the poetry (disappointing with poetry: a long-cherished artscene tradition) – if you were hoping for some textmode art with which to commomorate the starman, perhaps I can turn you on to some period teletext Illarterate exposed me to, further teletext by Horsenburger or a hastily-wrapped ANSI WIP from our Blocktronics colleague mypalgoo. Cheers & stay strange, everyone!

unwashedmass:

“Remember, remember, the fifth of November…”

http://pc.textmod.es/pack/galza-22/us-masks.ans

The chain runs, somewhat tenuously I suppose, from Guy Fawkes through Alan Moore’s comic V for Vendetta to its later film adaptation and from there to use of the masks by members of Anonymous, first seen in these parts protesting outside the Church of Scientology.

Then one further link, my old Belgian friend Filip De Haes illustrating some current-events subjects in his uncoloured textmode computer art style circa February 2014. Hearkening to my traditional role as poet of the computer art scene, he asked for some words with which to frame the illustrations, so during silent 2 am coffee breaks in the basement of the sleeping Lion’s Gate Hospital, I free-associated some lines vaguely engaging the themes the pictures evoked.

There is more of our collaboration at http://pc.textmod.es/pack/galza-22 , and he has a fascinating new collection together of Soviet characters rendered in Commodore 64 PETSCII, viewable at http://pc.textmod.es/pack/galza-23

In early 2014, the first Mistigris lit released since 2000 – and the beginning of all the momentum 2014 would see carried through into 2015 to get the artscene wheels in Cthulu’s brain spinning again.

Greetings and salutations to the Mistigris puzzle quest nation! Tuesday, October 6th, we gave a monster artpack, MIST2000, a limited release – for a limited time made exclusively available to any parties able to overcome a devious series of oldschool puzzles only solvable by a master of the traditional computer arts.

What this means is that so far, the pack has been released to two people – devious and crafty oldschool types, who, as it ironically turns out, already had access to the artpack due to being longstanding members of the Mistigris inner circle for decades. (But they diligently sweated through the puzzles anyhow, for strange kicks.)

So far, 36 of you have taken on the first puzzle in the chain, but following the better part of a week, only 10 of those 36 managed to progress through to the second. (And, as we have seen, only 2 of those 10 successfully followed the chain all the way to its conclusion.) Now, despite appearances, I actually do want people to be able to access the contents of that artpack, and I also do want people to be able to appreciate the work that was put into the puzzles – which they cannot if over 75% of them are turned away at the very first step. So I will do 28 people a favour and “spoil” the first puzzle for them, and I will try to do so in the methodical step-by-step fashion of Infocom’s classic InvisiClues, so you needn’t get spoiled in regards to parts of the puzzle you hadn’t seen yet.

Now, the first thing that you’ll see when you start doing the puzzles is a redirected URL, http://bit.ly/WeTakeManhattan. This is nearly enough to actually guess the second URL, but I don’t require you to make the jump; there are further clues. If you follow that URL, you download a compressed file entitled killallthelawyers.lzh. The ‘90s were a time of a shrinking of a teeming microcomputer ecosystem (not just the PCs and Macs, the Amigas and Atari STs, and a special few BeBoxes and NeXT Cubes, but also the end of the line for the Apple 2s and C64s) and rapid technological change even within then-new product categories like file compression standards. Most of these have been casualties left by the wayside but I thought that it might be fun and adding period flavour to give the old formats one last kick at the can as part of this nostalgic exercise. (Just be glad I didn’t require anyone to mount a Stacker- or DoubleSpace-compressed filesystem.) So in order to access the clue, you first had to know what an LHA file is (mostly used on Amigas and in Japan) and how to open it. Now, I’ve got to say that my free copy of IZArc, my standard all-purpose unarchiver, handled these all seamlessly, but I regret to announce that my experience was far from universal.

Whazzit> In opening it, I get this:

Now, while my program was able to open these all with deft aplomb, getting the historical archive files made in the first place was not as easy, and typically I had to resort to period programs running under DOSBox. It seems that not all unarchivers are born equal or support all versions of archives equally effectively, so some of you would see repeated errors if you did not use equivalent unarchivers of a similar vintage. Sometimes the errors interfered with your accessing the file, sometimes not. Let’s assume not. So, what you would see in the archive is a file named theangryflea.lit.

What do you do with a .LIT file?

Whazzit> I had no “.lit” viewer, so the first one stymied me. I may not be the only one.
Cthulu> while historically some were coloured as ANSIs, most .lit files, including this one as it turns out, are just raw text files 8)
/me furrows his brow and ponders if any group, anywhere, ever released a dedicated .lit viewer. The closest I can think of is Tribeview’s unsolicited auto-enhancement of .LIT files
W> I just installed Microsoft Reader, but it can’t open the file, saying Error: A book file may be missing or damaged.
C> You’re, uh, trying too hard! Notepad will do the trick!

Anyhow, this file, when opened in a text editor, yields the following puzzling contents:

jvaqf bs punatr jrne uvyyf gb fnaqcvgf
rer gurve frpergf pbzr gb yvtug.
guvax bs nyy lbh'ir yrsg oruvaq,
nyy lbh'ir lrg gb yrnir.
xabjvat jung'f sbhaq jvyy or ybfg sberire,
rire fubhyq lbh tevrir.
Or gur punatr lbh jnag gb frr,
rfpncr gur punatr lbh'q engure abg
eryrnfr lbhe qhgvrf,
ynl qbja lbhe znagyr.
vg'f abg zhpu bs n cbrz…
arire jnf, gubhtu.SAUCE00the angry flea (encrypted) cluethulu Mistigris 20150928j

I know, it looks mostly like gibberish.

W> Ahh. It’s a cipher. I thought it’d be a riddle, so when confronted by absolute nonsense I figured something had gone wrong somewhere.

But then at the end, a glimmer of coherence. There, what we see is the contents of the file’s SAUCE entry – SAUCE (“Standard Architecture for Universal Comment Extensions”), that ridiculous but handy ACiD-dictated metadata format for computer art scene files. We can see that the SAUCE was added (with SPOON) on September 28th of this year, that the file is assigned to “Cluethulu” (that’s me, plus a clue) of Mistigris, and that its title is “the angry flea (encrypted)”. Encrypted? Well, that would explain the gibberish – that or else it might be Klingon poetry.

Now, with encrypted texts, there are a few approaches you can take: you can count all the letters, chart their frequency, and map them against standard English letter frequency (which trends toward the most common letters looking like ETAOIN SHRDLU); or you can take brief 2- or 3-letter clumps and do substitutions to test hypotheses such as “what if this was 'and’ and that was 'if’?” Or you can just shift the whole text along one letter at a time and stop when the results look like something. This was not encoded with strong cryptography; in fact, it uses about the most bog-standard, nominal cryptography scheme in wide usage, generally to avoid printing spoilers in blog comments. The crypto scheme employed here is that known as ROT13, so dubbed because every character in the alphabet is shuffled along 13 spaces, totally garbling the message but making it very easy to decrypt – by shuffling it along a further 13 spaces, amounting to a total movement of 26 spaces or one full rotation through the alphabet.

In this case, what you get is a bad poem:

winds of change wear hills to sandpits
ere their secrets come to light.
think of all you’ve left behind,
all you’ve yet to leave.
knowing what’s found will be lost forever,
ever should you grieve.
Be the change you want to see,
escape the change you’d rather not
release your duties,
lay down your mantle.
it’s not much of a poem…
never was, though.

There is some rhyme, the lines are coherent enough on their own but it doesn’t seem to amount to anything, a radical departure from the Mistigris World Tour (1997), where the poem was the main thrust of the riddle-clue. More ScrollZ standard than the rarefied lines Mistigris was known for! (Sorry, am I supposed to be over that cattiness yet?) OK, so where could there be hints embedded in this poem? Is it a certain kind of poem, conforming to particular metric and rhythmic constraints? Do the lines point their way to a specific word? Is … OK, we don’t have much to go on here. Does anything stand out? Well, there are no capital letters except for one B at the start of a line, could that be important?

Maybe the title of the poem, “the angry flea”, will shed some light on things. I don’t see the flea anywhere in the poem, however… could it be some kind of metaphor? Well, it is wordplay of a very “cryptic crossword” variety (an aside: did you know that the UK government recruited codebreakers to work at Bletchley Park on decrypting WWII Enigma transmissions by headhunting the winners of special newspaper crossword puzzles? This led to the invention of Colossus, “the world’s first electric computer” (before which computers were typically rooms full of women with calculators) and leads in a roundabout fashion to our computer art of the '90s and indeed your reading these online words today) — if you switch out “angry” for the near-synonym “cross” and “flea” for its bloodsucking relation, you can shimmy from “the angry flea” to “a cross tick”… which, pronounced phonetically, gives you the word “acrostic”.

No, it’s not painting on beeswax – that’s “encaustic”. An acrostic is a poetic device where messages can be embedded in texts running perpendicular to their usual read sequence, as you might see in a word search puzzle. Typically acrostics spell out missives using the first character in each line. Back in college I wrote a terrible poem pastiching all the styles of my classmates while simultaneously spelling out the acrostic “HELP I AM A PRISONER IN A POEM FACTORY”. Now, over a decade later, I wrote another terrible poem spelling out a more concise message:

“we take Berlin”. As in the Leonard Cohen song lyric, “First we take Manhattan” (which we have just recently seen variantly capitalized, delivering us to this problem!) / “then we take Berlin”. (Why? A sequence is implied: what we do “first” comes first, and “then” something else follows.)

Hence… this trail has delivered us to its transfer point, a phrase to plug in following a bit.ly URL, giving us bit.ly/wetakeBerlin … and suddenly, the chase is on again!

Are there any further easter eggs hidden in the work? Why, that’s entirely up to you…

Nail> So I’ve just started your treasure hunt and either you’ve intended it and I’m just too stupid to get think of the right clue… or the reference to German reunification is utterly accidental. 8D

Cthulu> I can assure you that is unintentional! Are you reading deeper meaning into the poem? Some German-ness does come up later on…

N> Well, you start with a link of “WeTakeManhattan” … there’s a song by Leonard Cohen that goes on with “then we take Berlin”

C> I went for [First] “We Take Manhattan” just because it was the First clue. Every subsequent clue includes some sequential or numerical referent
just to help me keep track of what order they were going in 8)

N> And the first line of the poem, “Winds of Change”… that’s a song by the Scorpions that was played a lot during the time of the fall of the Berlin wall
add to that the fact that German Reunification was 25 years ago last Saturday… 8D

C> Ahaha, I was aiming to write a bad, disposable poem, and “winds of change” is a cliche line … that happens to meet certain requirements needed to provide the code for the next puzzle. The words are only on the page in service of the code; most of them are pure filler.

N> Good thing you said you were aiming for a bad poem, cause… that was my wife’s first comment when I asked her for help, thinking that maybe it’s a language barrier that keeps me from getting anything useful from the poem ;)

C> It’s fascinating that you were able to read that additional context into it however, it goes to show that they say the writer comes in with his baggage, the reader comes in with his baggage, and the poem the reader experiences lies midway between them.

Maybe it was insider bias or genre chauvinism that compelled me to make the lit puzzle the first one – I just didn’t think that any of the individual bumps amounted to much of an obstacle, though of course I am not the best judge of just how hard my own puzzles are. The next one is quite a bit easier! Go on, take a whirl!

The challenge of poetry! As a genre it takes the form of the first of our MIST2000 puzzles, but it has been troubling people for far longer – and enriching them! (Spiritually, that is.) Mistigris, of course, classically maintained an extensive stable of writers, supplementing them on a regular basis by simply capturing BBS arty postings that caught our fancy, dipping a fisher’s net into an ocean of words, and republishing them with credit (and, occasionally, with permission.)

Some few other groups in the underground PC artscene (eg. Blade) also maintained “lit” divisions in tandem (and collected with) their visual art departments; others, like CiA, spun them off (eg. ScrollZ) into distinct-but-related organizations. There were also a few (eg. Reality, Revolt, Revival, Candelabra, and especially the 604’s own Cenobite) lit-exclusive groups, but we were all part of one big underground artscene.

It’s hard to prove, however, since the artistic misers in charge of the PC-scene’s FTP archives refused to grant all-lit collections a tiny footprint on their hard drives. (Schtroumpf of Cenobite wrote an impassionned essay on the topic which we reprinted in issue #13 of our house e-mag Kithe.) This meant that for poets who didn’t want to write their names on water, they needed to work out … alternate hosting solutions.

An accomplished poet from the Mistigris stable responded to this straw man argument by setting up an arrangement with etext.org to electronically publish an exclusive collection of his writings, and so our cornfield king Crowkeeper earned the distinction of having his collection, “Scarecrow Poetics”, go live at that website on April 14, 1999.

The poems’ date of composition range from 1994 through to 1999, and the author’s affected diction and style make the collection uniquely his, as remarkable today as they were then – or indeed would be in any time period. Etext.org is just a placeholder now (as of 2009), and since the poetry packs never did find their way on to the Dark Domains DVD, this digital chapbook became unavailable for six years (or… forever, to anyone who didn’t go rooting around in the guts of the Internet Archive to retrieve them like I did.)

So today it gives us great pleasure to re-issue and “bring back to life” Crowkeeper’s poetry collection “Scarecrow Poetics”.

(Tomorrow we will unpack the poetry puzzle from the MIST2000 treasure hunt and your life will be doubly literarily enriched!)