Line By Line (A BBS Love Story) by ill-esha http://ift.tt/20xHsGH
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
… 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
“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
This was engineered to satisfy a demanding criterion from the developers at Imaginary Games, namely that the in-game music be simultaneously happy and sad. Well, can it take turns? This live off-the-floor take of the five musicians huddled around a single microphone is a good shot at the New Orleans Dixieland voodoo concept he had rattling around in his head, but to the good folks at Imaginary Games it was a little bit too much like sitting in a club listening to live music and stroking your chin, and not enough like … holding your mobile device and tapping at a screen. Oh well, as the wide varieties of Hallowe'en costumes testify, there are many paths to gloom!
[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/49591292" params="auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%" height="300" iframe="true" /]
I don’t know much about Brad Dunn’s composition practice, but if I had to guess based on my experiences producing concerts for him on prepared guitars a decade ago, my suspicion would be that he experiments to see what works or doesn’t – either way, then does it again, like he means it. Dissonance? Yes, that’s a dissonance – a big, satisfying dissonance. Let’s do it again! What do you mean, you don’t like my new Christmas carol?
[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/227614719" params="auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%" height="300" iframe="true" /]
Melodia of Empress Play, on the other hand, has achieved a supreme calculated mastery of genre. I’ll never forget, back in the ‘90s, how an aimless experimentation proceeding at a glacial pace transformed overnight into the fully realized “Spaghetti Western” as soon as it crossed her desk. Her triumph is in sussing out before she gets there just what kind of song a given song is trying to be, and then making it live up to those specific aspirations, hitting the nail on the head squarely and repeatedly. I jokingly describe us as drag factor on, her slumming it by hanging out with this weird group of retro computer art weirdos, but her canny piggybacking of holiday seasonality means that this song, Horror on Channel 3, has been enjoyed an order of magnitude beyond how many times the Mist artpack has been served up.
[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/211276792" params="auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%" height="300" iframe="true" /]
Theorica, conversely, explicitly describes his approach as “If sound were colour, I’d be what you’d call a finger painter. I do what feels and sounds right.” And so what if “Dark Charlie” sounds like an uninspired Stephen King bugaboo, the man has his finger on the pulse!
http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=1207596880/size=small/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/track=2484575138/transparent=true/
One final grim piece of audio, this is a positively ancient guest poem by performance poet RC Weslowski, pointing at the eternal horror far more frightening than ghosts and werewolves – state militarism, endless war against an endless series of evil axes… in this case, earthworms. It brings to mind how of the two camps name-checked in the opening of Black Sabbath’s sludgy anthem “War Pigs”, “generals gathered in their masses / just like witches at black masses”, it is the generals who are scarier. (Also scary: rhyming “masses” with “masses”.)
Oh yes, and while we’re on the subject of poetry, I forgot our poem of terrifying implications by Prince George’s Jeremy Stewart:
CLOTHES HAIKUToo bad I didn’t think to throw it in while we were showing off all the skeletons! Actually, it’s kind of a perfect lead-in to, again, the crazy ANSI music video Whazzit made for the song Dead Man’s Pants. (Sure, I can keep linking it, but can I just make a post dedicated to it? Darned sure I can! Stay tuned…)
your skin is clothes for
your blood & bones & your clothes
are skin for your skin
We open with Sara Ciantar’s “Red Sky At Morning”, the traditional omen of foreboding to oceanbound sailors. I really appreciated her pixelart aesthetic, and only moreso when it was revealed that she had merely taken a photograph through a screen door. To its right, a piece of PETSCII – the textmode of the Commodore 64 – by its rock star artist Raquel Meyers. (It has a name, but I have tentatively given it a new one: “Dead Kids of Instagram.”) Do look up Raquel, as she is curently crowdfunding to support similar work on a similar theme – textmode illustrations of the stories of H.P. Lovecraft.
Next is a mean little skull logo by Nail that you might have missed in the artpack proper, hiding out at the bottom as the footer illustration to the pack’s infofile.
On the following line is Freelance Pete’s detailed take on the nuclear family’s suburban fantasy, followed by another early-'90s Amiga pixelart piece from the portfolio of $too.
Onward, we get two paintings, the first by Mythical Man – which seems ominous but not too grim until you look a little more carefully at the running man burning in the background – the other “Heart Goes Here” by Jenn Ashton. All the skulls nonwithstanding, this painting demonstrates that there’s nothing necessarily creepy about mere bones… after all, as the pithy quote has it: “You’re a ghost driving a meat coated skeleton made from stardust, what do you have to be scared of?”
This (small-e) eerie gallery ends with the fabulous header to our memberlist, a networked PabloDraw ANSI art session jointly drawn by numerous contributors, notably the logo by the bothersomely talented enzO of Blocktronics (not just a fabulous letter M, also note the spooky skulls beneath it – sorry, Jenn, maybe the skull is just the scariest bone in the body), followed by a menacing Frankenstein’s monster sketched out by Sudden Death, with contributions from Whazzit and Sephiroth.
OK, that’s almost it for the spooky stuff – next time I’ll see if I can’t squeeze in some spooky tunes and make Tumblr sing!
ANSi art based animation by Whazzit with music by Rowan Lipkovits.
You saw it first in MIST1015!
Get the fabulous Mistigris 21st anniversary artpack: http://bit.ly/mist1015 or catch the teaser at https://youtu.be/dlC1B9jCjOU !
Complete with guest typewriter art by the talented lordnkon!
