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

[gallery]

April 5th, the day after my own birthday, marked the 22nd anniversary of the suicide of Nirvana singer songwriter Kurt Cobain – when it happened, not just a big thing in our shared region of the Pacific Northwest, but all over the world. Today, April 8, marks the 22nd anniversary of … the discovery of his body. Back in that fateful year of 1994, different fans reacted to the news in different ways: there were copycat suicides (though curiously, fewer than expected), there were public vigils, and surely a lot of angsty teens wrote a lot of poems about it.

(“GrownUps Read Things They Wrote As Kids” is a thing; our local variant has for years been “Teen Angst Poetry”, which I never found very funny because these feelings the emo teenagers were experiencing were very real to them, then, and looking back for a cheap laugh is a way of dismissing an earlier version of yourself – you know, back when I was so intense and actually believed in something. How naive! – which in turn undermines the very foundations of who you are today. But I digress.)

At the time I had my pop music blinders on, concluding somewhat rashly that anything part of the major media scene had to be crass emptiness, and had no understanding of the band’s body of work – only that it was popular, and hence: why on earth would I be paying attention to it? (My main “in” to Nirvana was the twist on their mega hit by my nerdy then-idol pop parodist “Weird Al” Yankovic, and for some time thereafter I had a knot of concern in my stomach wondering whether, had Al not made fun of Kurt in such a pointed and public way, the suicide might not have happened. It turns out, following the publication of Cobain’s diaries, that he refers to “Weird Al” as “America’s modern pop-rock genious”, and consequently we can reasonably conclude that … he was probably in on the joke.)

But my artscene “boss” of April 1994 – The Narccissist of iMPERiAL – apparently felt sufficiently moved by the current events to put forth his feelings (in his blind grief, violating his own file-naming conventions – this should have been named TN-COBAIN.LIT, not COBAIN.ANS) in the April 1994 iMPERiAL artpack – the freshly-merged group’s first release! For your “enjoyment”, I have transcribed it here:

Endless Nirvana - Dedicated to Kurt Cobain 1966 - 1994

I don’t know why I’m on this earth,
Why my mother’s given birth.
Why I cannot face my fears,
Why I’m afraid to shed my tears.

The devils inside me are taking their toll,
I’ve got one friend, my rock and roll.
But even that haunts me the same,
As I cannot shake unwanted fame.

I must do this for the pain to cease,
And finally be alone in peace.
I know my death’s already forseen,
My heaven, nirvana, my ultimate dream.

Nirvana - What the buddhists believe to be their form of [h]eaven; a state that can only be reached through meditation or death.

The Narc [Imperial]
We miss you Kurt.

I can’t speak to what The Narc was thinking when he decided to save this snippet of doggerel in his text editor, but it stands as a sign of the times. (If they didn’t throw you clues, you might have no idea what kinds of music a computer artist enjoyed. Nitnatsnoc was happy enough to regale you with anecdotes from the rich history of Queen, and Darkforce represented himself with Kate Bush iconography, but otherwise you were on your own. It wasn’t all “Hackers” soundtrack round the clock – including computer music in Mist packs was actually a wedge issue with our membership, many of whom wanted to get their tunes the same way everyone else did: purchased on audiocassette tape at Sam the Record Man. But I digress.)

Though this poem and its host group pre-date the establishment of Mistigris, they presage us in a couple of important ways: iMPERiAL had the extraordinary quality of being one of those minority of artgroups with a “lit” division. This was useful to me when it turned out that I had no aptitude for ANSI art and would need more time in the oven before my computer music could approach being half-baked. Doubly extraordinary was the anomaly of its being run by a lit writer rather than an ANSI artist. (Chico, The Narc, aka The Narccissist, was also credited as a courier – a highly handy quality for senior staff to possess in the final days prior to mass Internet access.) Without his lead, I would surely never had the gumption to accept the Mistigris mantle thrust upon me after iMPERiAL collapsed and we needed something local to rise and fill its position in the area code 604 ecosystem. And he even graced us (of the two competing successors for iMPERiAL’s legacy – the other being Fab One’s Patriot, which led to RAiD, which led in a roundabout way to Integrity) with his blessing and nominal membership… though he made it clear, his involvement in the artscene was now behind him. (I follow in his footsteps in one further important fashion: committing to the long-term use of a misspelled handle!)

Mistigris ended up lasting quite a bit longer than iMPERiAL ever did, releasing a great deal more work and probably being seen and appreciated by more people, but to those who got aboard on the ground floor, it’s all been part of one long, strange ride.

Credits for the illustrations (unrelated to Mist, just to the Cobain theme) go to Flubber (the Chinese “Big 5” piece) and Nootropic from Apathy06.

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!)

Summer’s over;
school is back.

Leaves are golden;
evening’s black.

Days of freedom-
far away.

Work and worry
in class all day.

Mistigris provided a home to as many forms of computer art as we could find, but the visual artwork and computer music still dominate people’s memory. One major quality that distinguished Mistigris from other artscene artgroups was its dedication to hosting a regular “lit” department (short for literature, encompassing the written word in all its forms – poetry, fiction, drama, creative non-fiction, other things we perhaps hadn’t thought of 8), an extension of an historical anomaly of the earlier local artgroups NWA and iMPERiAL supporting lit divisions as well. (For quite a while, lit was the only form in which Mist founder Cthulu released digital artwork, so if we had not supported it, we would have needed a different president – had we indeed ever been founded in the first place!)

Another priority of Mistigris was collaboration, specifically intermedia ones between members who practiced different forms of art. Here that takes the form of a seasonal poem by The Pope (typically a composer of computer music, this piece was extraordinary), illustrated in ANSI by Neophyte.

For many of us in the ‘90s, the rhythms of the artscene were dictated by the beats of the school year, summertime freeing us up to stay up late trying to connect to elite BBSes and granting us downtime needed to perfect our niche forms of expression. (Every summer would promise greater and greater gains and advances until typically the summer following high school graduation would result in artists’ sudden and often permanent disappearance from the scene, the hobby permanently shelved in favour of new, adult lives in university – with its exclusive access to high-speed internet access and the potentials it offered – and beyond.)

This piece was originally released in the MIST0996 artpack of September 1996.

[gallery]

This is it, my friends! I can’t manage to string another day out of posts celebrating the ever-loving 21st birthday of that fabulous but long-defunct BBS The Screaming Tomato, first WHQ of Mistigris, formerly situated at (604) 430-8805. Tumblr would only let me attach 10 pictures at a time, but I fooled it by smooshing them together into mega-pictures! They called me mad, mad I tell you!

We’ve been celebrating by sharing all the art that was made to promote the board to other adventurers in early cyberspace, and gee whiz, there was surely a lot (>60 pieces) of it! Not bad for a tenure that didn’t last quite three years! (Why that’s… a paltry 981 days! A new piece of promotional artwork every 15 days!) We started by looking at artwork made by the BBS’ administrators, then at art themed after its fruity name – now we’re just throwing the remainder of the art at you, including logos and “lits” – weird artscene poetry and fiction!

Now zoom in, because the embedded image is only showing you the middle third of the logocolly. We have, from the top down, ANSI TST logos by… Eerie and Zoltar of Mist, Neophyte of Mist four times in a row, Tribe (aka the 4th Disciple) briefly of Mist, The Naughty Tycoon of Mist, pre-Neophytal Solar Menace of Mist, Plastic (these two, and the one after the next, are ASCII) of Mist, Prince of Death, Jughead of Mist, The Iconoclast of Mist, Halaster of… Fire! (gotcha!), Destro of Mist, and Bandicoot (see Plastic and NME, another of his chronic rebrandings, above) of Mist. Phew! Three little letters, and how many, many ways there are to represent them!

Next we have the “lit"s. The first two are written by what were normally ANSI artists – these are likely the only poems they ever released, most likely as little jokes (but at Mist we took poetry a little too seriously) – Mavrik and Mage, and the third piece of a short story by our resident master of the absurd short story Livewire. And as a special courtesy to our readers… here is the full text of the lits! First, Mavrik’s:

I’ll give it my best shot..

Awakened in the night,

Scared with fright,
the little girl crept,
from where she slept.

to the kitchen she swished,
tho she truly wished,
that she hadnt seen the sight before her eyes,
of the tomato which sits and cries.

Thank you, thank you..

Then, Mage’s!

I awoke one morning to a horrible sound
A keen wailing that just wouldn’t end
I rushed to the kitchen unprepared for the sight
The food of the fridge was all dancing around
Singing and dancing in glee
But above the merryment again came that sound
A screech like a bird or tortured cat
No, it just could not be
The sound was much worse, a pain to my ears
A constant bombarge of noise
I was weak in the knees wondering what it could be
When I finally felt my fear
There, rolling on the counter was the source of my pain
A tomato.

My revulsion lasted only a moment
Before curiosity got the better of me
I moved to the counter, to look at this thing
My fear now within me, dormant
Curiosity killed the cat
Yet even this didn’t stay my hand
As I reached out to it
Unaware of the trap
How could it emit such a wail?
I found out a second later
When it jumped and bit into my hand
And my courage finally failed
Waves of pain erupted within me
From that awful screeching tomato

Furiously I shook my hand
Trying to dislodge the abomination
I howled, I begged, I threatened, I swore
But the damn things just didn’t understand
I cursed my luck and started to cry
It just wouldn’t let go!
And the scream, the shriek, still shook the air
This entity was sucking my lifeforce dry
I fell to the floor, gasping for breath
And I knew I was going to die
I sighed with acceptance of knowing my fate
And thus I had met with my death
The sound is still heard from my kitchen at morn
Of that godawful screaming tomato.

And finally, the main literary attraction… Livewire’s!

The Screaming Tomato
——————–

Tuny confronted his mother, shaking slightly…
"Mother, is it true? Am I not a full-blooded beefsteak tomato?

"Am I a bastard?”

Tuny’s shiny red mother tried her best to comfort him, then admitted,
“Yes, dear. Your father was a potato.”

“But… i thought a potato was a starchy white tuber, while a tomato
is a pulpy berry-like fruit…?”

“Well, that’s true…”

“Then how…?”

“I don’t know, look it up in Webster’s dictionary.”

Tuny was horrified to find out that he was, in fact, related to the
potato. He quickly packed his things, with only one thought in mind:

He must kill the potato.

So, despite his mother’s pleadings and ketchup tears, he stormed out
of the house.

He bought a ticket forthe next available train for Idaho, and
gathering his vegetable peeler and julienne cutter, he boarded the
train.

Idaho came quickly, and he began his long search for the potato which
had defiled his family’s bloodline.

Rumours of the existence of a potato which had left behind a wife and
a seedling soon led him to a small farm near the southern border.

Confronting each of the potatoes in turn, he finally found the
offending potato.

To his disappointment, the potato had grown old. Its eyes were
stretched out over several feet and it was almost dead.

Readying the peeler, he stepped forward and demanded, “Why?”

The old potato stirred, waited a few seconds, and then replied,
“You may not believe this, boy, but I really loved your mother.

"I left because I knew how tough it would be for you, going to school
with all the other tomatoes. You’d have been pureed by the other
tomatoes just for being a half-breed. I left because I cared.”

Not buying this feeble emotional crap, Tuny chopped the elderly
tuber into hash browns.

“You’re not my father!” he screamed.

And so, with his father properly julienned, Tuny set out for the
library, to find out just how the hell a tomato can possibly
be related to a potato. Balderdash!

OK, mega-compilations aside, what else can I show to you here? A jolly punk by Neophyte of Mist, who I guess really came of age under that handle in the TST era, not maturing as Quip until the Jade Monkey years. A fantastic Ferrengi, Quark, by The Extremist of Mist (well, Blistigris – a tour pack appearance, though I note in retrospect it also appeared in an Irato pack!), and the fabulous Bone brothers by Toon Goon of iCE.

Then we have a work of hirez of unknown provenance, undoubtedly “found” somewhere and reprocessed by our resident secret ripper, Thanatos of Mist, plus a rare RIPscrip, also by Neophyte. (He was a machine!) Wrapping up the spree, in my estimation the best ANSI that Neophyte ever made under that name! (Looks better in textmode than VGA.) A couple of these pieces celebrate the board’s 2nd anniversary; sadly, it would never reach its third.

Wrapping things up, we have the BBS’ shocker surprise death announcement, lifted from an extensive article about its closure in issue #13 of our e-mag (electronic magazine) Kithe.

It may well have been the first Screaming Tomato, though far from the only – but to anyone who found their way to this blog post, I think we can all agree that it was the best!

(A parting note: though only in operation for 981 days, you can see from my Telemate dialing directory that I connected to it 2183 times, over 2 and a quarter times daily in that period – including a few weeks when I was locked out! Clearly I put a lot of myself into it, which is one reason I was able to get so much back out of it so long after the fact!)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9kjKwrUTqc?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]

Here it is, the culmination of our multimedia Christmas presentations: sounds and sights to beggar the imagination.  Well, ASCIIs and ANSIs, poems and meet reviews, high resolution works and all set to the strains of tracker music.  December 1997, this marked a rare demonstration of Sylphid’s MAGnum engine for generating e-mags (electronic magazines).

There are lots of little details at the video description over at YouTube including a full credits roll; some of the highlights include a Christmificated menu set for the DoDEL BBS and a surprise soundtrack switch when we begin displaying artwork by Silent Knight.

Not every part of the program was 100% functional run through DOSBox in 2014, so a few poems which failed to load were magically inserted back into the video, scrolling by at a much happier 14.4k baud.  Also a pair of monochrome logos from the pack’s FILE_ID.DIZ and infofile were tacked on as bookends, because the whole darned presentation was in a seasonal mode.

That just about concludes our look back at Mistigris’ Christmases past.  The well has run dry!  If we want to show you any new Christmassy computer art, we’re going to have to make more.  Hope it helped to give you an oldschool Christmas for 2014!

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VZ8wNA8_Rc?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]

20 years ago, it was just another month on BBSes, and underground computer artists continued along in their low-resolution hobby same as they ever did, minting blocky logos for BBSes and waiting for busy signals to resolve into symphonies of modem handshakes.  But December being what it is, and us being a bunch of kids, the occasion of Christmas was looming large in our collective subconscious.  So here’s what you get:

Resident coder Dr. CPU drew on some sound libraries and logos (and, all right, did some programming of his own as well 8) to put together a joint “intro”, an executable MS-DOS program that displayed scrolling pictures and text while playing music, acting as a multimedia Christmas card from the members of Mistigris and our fellow travellers in would-be 604 demogroup Sonic Equinox.  It was released in our third artpack, MIST1294.ZIP.

But that’s not all the Christmas content that was to be found in that pack, so as a bonus, I’ve presented our two grand Christmas ANSI and lit (or poetry) “collies” – compilations glommed together into a single large file – scrolling by at a respectable period speed of 2400 baud… to the sweet strains of the first part of the Bells of Yule, which appeared in that artpack as a preview of sorts to the music disk we released later that month featuring all five parts, which was subsequently lost for 16 years and just this week re-issued in a remastered form.

(Full credits in the description of the video over at YouTube!)

We released another Christmas intro the following year, but … one post at a time!

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

A writer of poems, I had long aspired to achieve a species of illuminated text – a poem calligraphically written out in visual typography… specifically in my preferred medium of labour-intensive ANSI or ASCII fonts, a generally graffiti-derived idiom. Steps toward this cyber-concrete-poetry were realized in the All-Stars experiment at Evoke 1999, but more was needed. But the year was 2001, and though there were still textmode fontists to be found in the wild, I lacked sufficient pull with any active artists to compel them to put the hours and sweat needed to make my words pop off the screen with the commission of original logos for my powerful words.

The occasion was Christmas 2001, and now living away from my parents’, I wanted to show my new independence as an artistic adult and make a run of Christmas cards. But I didn’t like the idea of celebrating that consumeristically co-opted clichéd religious occasion Christmas – so concluded I could achieve the same effect more palatably by refashioning them as winter solstice cards… in a sense, taking back the reason for the season. A few words about darkness and rebirth would do the trick – a very short poem by poetry standards, somehow managing to contradict itself in places, but apparently more coherent when viewed atomically in segments. And having it writ large would help to obfuscate its extreme brevity! Finally, I could derive a deeply personally satisfying resonance producing an illuminated manuscript… on the very subject of light itself. (In letters painted from light emerging from a darkened screen!)

But who would make it real? I had no choice: I would have to do it myself. But with no visual or graphic design sensibilities, I could not draw my way out of a paper bag. This project – a prototype, perhaps, for some future undertaking – would have to be tool-assisted. Figlet is and has been for years the premiere ASCII logo generator, but between its various typefaces on offer I was not able to quite satisfy wanting to locate a suitable style for each line’s sensibility. So I was compelled to do something that I was possibly the only person on the planet to do that year: I fired up the classic ANSI art editor TheDraw and loaded up some stock TheDraw .TDF typefaces. The one used here, hilariously entitled “Elite”, had been previously employed in some April Fool’s Packs, but despite being employed ironically elsewhere, here it was genuinely my best option. I inserted a small quantity of gradient shading with the F1-F4 blocks to emphasize that critical word “ALIGHT” with ASCII rays emanating from it (and the cherry on top, a single exclamation mark), then the remainder of the presentation practically filled itself in – dimming “dim” and “responding in kind”, distinguishing “blazing” with a highlight, a few flakes of classic ANSI snowfall (“rain” of that sort added 50 lines or so to countless scrollers circa 1993), and the insertion of a Figlet Inuit character peeking up over the letters.

The blueprints drawn up, the execution was a simple matter of some shopping around. Several copy shops were visited to find one capable of producing nice black blacks for the background, then milling them out in a quantity of maybe a hundred – mostly sent to people on The Everything Mailing Address Registry at everything2.com. Because I was at a point in my life where I couldn’t afford to both make colour copies and send the prints by mail, I saved a few cents by printing in b&w and then adding spot colour to relevant areas with a highlighter pen.

The back of every print had lots of white space for me to write holiday notes to the recipients, and between the notes and addressing and return addressing a hundred envelopes with my tiny, intensely engraved handwriting, I exacerbated a bad case of writer’s cramp (aka “scrivener’s palsy”) which plagued me for years afterward. So this was the start and end of my Christmas card tradition; mailing continued on a small scale with a postcard fiction spree on postcardx.net, and then my muse wandered down different avenues circa 2003.

For those wonderful Google spiders and such human readers who may be in the audience tonight, the eve of the winter solstice some 13 years later, we provide a transcript of the poem’s contents:

when days / grow short / and dim
we must / resist / responding / in kind / instead / setting / ourselves / alight
blazing / brilliant / and tall
bringing / the sun / back
in our own / thoughts / and actions
burn low and long

(and for readers in a seasonal mood, please don’t forget to download our recently-exhumed remastered and re-released music disk, The Bells of Yule, brought 20 years forward from 1994 to save the future… now with four mirrors because demand exceeded our original host’s ability to serve it up!)

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.

It is said that a poltergeist marks a charged physical site where some tremendous psychic activity once occurred, echoing through time with physical disturbances.

A revenant is an apparition informed by those who loved too much or dared too deep before they departed, bound to return without their flesh to attend to the unfinished business they couldn’t let go of and leave behind.

Just in time for Hallowe'en, a writhing cadaver that’s been in the ground for over 15 years improbably creeps back to the overworld to once again make its mark in the land of the living.

Ladies and gentlemen, avert your eyes, for I present to you a bold affront against the very Gods, the revival that nobody expected, least of all us: the first new Mistigris artpack release since June of 1998.

MISTIGRIS: THE MODERN PROMETHEUS, featuring 27 new works ripped from the very souls of 19 classic artists in both traditional and contemporary computer art mediums, genres and styles.

Returning from limbo to mark the 20TH ANNIVERSARY, to the month, of its first artpack release.

Download at:
bit.ly/mist1014

Cthulu / Mistigris