[gallery]

The MIST2000 Treasure Hunt: Puzzle #6, explained!

This puzzle doesn’t require mastery of any of the classic artforms of the underground computer artscene, though implementing it demanded a fluency with the same hexediting that would have been called for were I trying to crack or train a piece of fresh warez. But I get ahead of myself. Puzzle #5, recently explored, pointed us to bit.ly/degreesofbeanwithbacon … and there we found, yea, the very archive of Commander Keen 4: Secret of the Oracle that we could have expected. (Not quite the very archive, mind you – most of you remember the game in EGA, but for bonus nostalgia, I tweaked the CGA-only version.) But this installation is not “stock”: while most of the files are the untampered originals, some of what you will find here bears fingerprints more recent than John Romero and Tom Hall’s.

Much to my dismay, I was unable to re-ICE the tweaked game state back to the ID standard “needs to be De-ICEd first” distribution format, adding one more to my list of “obscure forgotten file compression formats revived for the MIST2000 treasure hunt” candidates, but those are fine points tangential to their function for passing along codes to explorers.

So where is the new business? You can begin where any search on a BBS would begin, perusing the archive’s FILE_ID.DIZ:

You’re doing well, now take a break!
Relax so you won’t make mistakes.
Try a round of Commander Keen 4!
Don’t worry about achieving the highest score.

OK, that tells us… everything we need to know, but let’s fire up the program just to make sure.

Yup, it’s Commander Keen 4. Are explorers expected to achieve a position on the high score table? Well, no: that would require 10 000 points, which would be time diverted from my precious treasure hunt (on a probably more fun endeavour; you might simply fail to return!) So play a bit (or not; sitting through a couple levels’ demonstrations will also get you there – so yes, this is another puzzle that can be solved by patiently sitting through on autopilot after being set into motion), but when you’re done, do take a look at the conspicuously-mentioned high scores table. Hey, it at the top of the list there that our next code resides! Also, some elite greets.

This method of embedding a secret message was, incidentally, first imagined way back in the conception of the BBS treasure hunt that was the ~1991 seed for how this puzzle series would ultimately unfold. The technique for embedding arbitrary text (well, within tight string limits) was explored (I was always fascinated by the literary implications of the protagonists of Altered Beast brawling with the credits roll upon completion of the Genesis cart – hm, my childhood memories appear to have overstated the case) in preliminary experiments for my incomplete, unreleased machinima WIP for MIST1014 – you can see a poem hiding here:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibRMhd3y_OE&w=480&h=360]

But I digress. We now have everything we require in order to progress to puzzle #7, located at bit.ly/pillarsofwisdom without a shred of pretentiousness.

[gallery]

The MIST2000 Treasure Hunt: Puzzle #5, explained!

So, here we are. We’ve breezed through the puzzles in the textmode artforms of lit, ANSI and ASCII, and have even blitzed through tracker music, which brings us to puzzle #5 in the MIST2000 treasure hunt: nightsatFreddies.zoo located at bit.ly/fifthBeatle, containing aeiou.rip

.RIP? That’s right, it’s a piece of RIPscrip artwork, that vector graphics format intended for use on BBSes and never really embraced by them either. This one is a no-puzzle puzzle as well: it writes where to go next directly on the screen. Then, it writes it again. It writes it over and over again, until the sheer texture of all the layers of the instructions renders any one of them unreadable – and (unless you opt to throttle the display speed to that of a slower simulated modem) it displays them so quickly (and the message itself is sufficiently strange) that you will be unlikely to interpret it on-the-fly. Tauntingly, it concludes with a message: palimpsest? Yes, since the heyday of the artscene, we also have taken 100-level art history courses in college. If only you could scrape beneath the layers of extraneous verbiage and restore the simple statement of this puzzle’s clue…

Well, there is another way: because the message was input as plain text (vs. vector instructions for drawing specific outlines that coincidentally spelled out letters quite a bit more slowly), the clue is spelled out … quite a few times … in the .RIP file’s data, laid open for any text editor to enjoy:

!|10000$SBAROFF$|1K|*|W00|=00000001|c0F|Y01000A00|@071Gdegrees|@E31Qo
f|@0543bean|@8Z4Dwith|@3Y67bacon|Y04000A00|@0016degrees|@E31Lof
!|Y04010A00|@1EJM33bean|@6636with|@B61Gbacon|Y07000A00|@031Bdegrees
!|@DK1Gof|@0648bean|@8Z4Kwith|@3W66bacon|Y03000A00|@002Hdegrees|@EA1Bo
f|@0240bean|@924Iwith|@3464bacon|Y08000A00|@0212degrees|@E313of|@003Wb
ean|@8Y48with|@2W5Sbacon|Y0A000900|@020Pdegrees|Y0A010900|@CN2Cof
!|Y0A010700|@1EJG37bean|@6P3Qwith|@EA1Pbacon|Y00000A00|@012Edegrees
!|@274Cof bean|@016Ewith|@6L7Dbacon|@252Cdegrees|@004Bof bean|@8D60wit
h|@037Fbacon|Y0A000A00|@0103degre|Y0A000800|@000Ydegrees|@2H3Cdegrees
!|@041Eof bean|@AN3Cwith|@7U5Abacon|Y0A010600|@1EJQ0Jdegrees|@180Tof b
ean|@3G2Ewith|@5Y2Abacon|Y00000600|@0024degrees of|@0442bean with
!|@005Qbacon|@4624degrees of|@5O42bean with|@AU60bacon|@3W5Qdegrees of
!|@046Ubean with|@0K7Ybacon|@466Adegrees of|@5O74bean with|@AU88bacon
!|c04|Y05000A00|@0Q3Epalimpsest?|#|#|#

“degrees of bean with bacon”? Some bizarre conflation of Six Degrees of Separation (or our favorite variant, Mistigris of Separation) and Commander Keen’s Bean-With-Bacon Megarocket? Well, yes. So, off the puzzler must go, to bit.ly/degreesofbeanwithbacon!

[wpvideo byLvT4xX]

The MIST2000 Treasure Hunt: Puzzle #4, explained!

OK, when you last saw us, unpacking this complex of computer stumpers, back on November 7th, we’d just unpacked the ANSI art black-on-black problem (with help from TheDraw fonts) and had been sent to puzzle number 4 by way of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, curiously: bit.ly/SopochtdasSchicksalandiePforte. And you were pointed to a .ZIP archive (a current compression standard at last, thank god!) FANTASTIC.ZIP (Fantastic Four, you dig?) which you then cracked open, only to be posed with this:

A password? No previous prompts provided me with any kind of password! This is unfair! But here’s a hint: the encrypted file’s name is “Horse Feathers”? Now, what comes up if you Google “Horse Feathers + password”? This isn’t rocket science, it was even the name of a movie. In fact, it’s the name of a trope: The Password Is Always Swordfish.

Maybe it would have been more fair to make it one of the classic overused passwords, like “password” or “God”. If I were to do this again, I probably would have styled the ANSI art clue as a fake BBS ad and listed this password as a New User Password. If I were to do this again… I’d be certifiably bonkers.

So you start playing the song, and you hear the creepy mantra repeated endlessly with an old interesting-failure word-by-word speech synthesis experiment: This is a red herring.

A “red herring”, for non-native English speakers, is a metaphor for a dead end of sorts – a distraction from an alternate fruitful avenue. And this song is full of them: open the file up in a tracker program and analyse the samples included in the song. One of them contains backmasked vocals – Satanic messages? No: sadly, an apology for being another red herring. One contains the old tracker trick of including a text file as a sample, and that text file will tell you everything you might have ever wanted to know about the etymology of the phrase “red herring”. A message in morse code? Sure. What you get when you decode the message? You can probably guess the species and colour of the fish. We even include one sample of noise that reveals a picture of a fish when run through a spectroscope… all different paths that lead to the same, unuseful, lack of progress. So how do we progress? What here is not a red herring?

In the first of my “no-puzzle puzzles” all you have to do here is play through the whole song, in its entirety, from within a tracker program that displays the names of the samples currently triggered. After listening to a great deal (well, a minute and 57 seconds) of creepy uselessnes, near the end of the playback, you will see a message silently display on the screen, assembled letter-by-letter, inspired by our longago insertion of ASCII stickmen dancing the YMCA in a tracked rendition of that Village People song for a Blender competition. And that message will tell you where to go. (And… where to go next, for puzzle number 5, is: bit.ly/fifthBeatle … maybe you can solve it before I get around to spoiling the puzzle, though for my sake I sure hope you don’t as I’ve really got to start dashing these off if I want to get MIST2000 into the public’s hands before New Year!)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9kjKwrUTqc?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]
So while we came to the conclusion of our “original” re-heated Christmas content on Christmas Eve, we still have our spree of similar proportions from last year. We dug up a pile of seasonal loaders, lits and works of ANSI art from our own ‘90s artpacks in chronological order, but the secret was that it was all in the service of drawing more attention to the re-release of the never-heard-much-in-its-original-format music disk The Bells Of Yule, which finally in 2014 found the audience it so richly deserved.

This was the same motivation behind our cooking up these five ten-minute music videos we shared with you this year, an enormous promotional effort (with, I think, lesser primary success) behind spreading the word about old tunes from 1994, but fortunately it was an interesting exercise regardless.

And now we have ten artefacts to use to promote its enjoyment for Christmas 2016! Two more and we can do a genuine “12 Days of Christmas” run-up! (Sit down, Catholics, I know that the 12 Days actually come AFTER.)

So if we’ve worn down your resistance to hearing new things (or, actually, incredibly old things), know that you can enjoy listening to all five movements of the Bells of Yule suite right here!

[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/177307886" params="auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%" height="450" iframe="true" /]

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

prostheticknowledge:

Little Drummer Toy

Online musical sequencer from Ableton lets you create musical tracks with a minimalist seasonal arrangement.

Make a festive jingle out of the available shapes.
Some of these might be played by someone else – a collaborator from around the world.
For the best musical experience, use the latest desktop versions of Chrome, Firefox or Safari.
     

Try it out for yourself here

H/T: @notational

In time for Christmas, here’s a cute and fun seasonal musical sequencer!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU266CumO7E?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]
Happy holidays, friends! Here it is, just in time for Christmas, the final instalment of our 5-part music video series for the 5 movements of the Bells of Yule suite of computer music, composed way back in 1994 as 4-channel .MODs on an Atari ST! (Remastered in 2014.) To provide period visuals, we’ve dug deep into the annals of seasonal computer artwork from the public domain and the computer art underground! Suiting the extraordinary dark tone of this fifth and final movement (suitable for the darkest time of the year – at least, here in the northern hemisphere), we saved all of the grimmest “bad Santa” pieces (boozing, smoking, six-shooting, tripping balls) popular in underground circles… but it proved inadequate even scrolling at modem speeds to fill the song’s runtime, so we also drew on a wealth of hitherto-untapped RIPscrip vector graphics, nearly all by the astounding Outworld Arts, as well as a tremendous selection of whimsical teletext advent calendar works by Illarterate (who you saw in MIST1015) as well as a handful by Raquel Meyers (ditto) and Simon Ferre, among others.

This suite of video experiments has been our main project since MIST1015 was released, diverting most of our discretionary time and energies from such competing activities as blogging the compelling contents of MIST1015 and telling you just why it was all so fascinating, but rest assured we’ll be getting back on that horse at our earliest opportunity… after a brief respite and resolution of a couple of remaining loose ends for 2015. Until then – happy holidays and Merry Mist'mas!

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

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fApZFio-aTo?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]
Now you’ve had a chance to enjoy Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 … we’re definitely rounding the bend of the old candy cane here, and approaching the fifth and final movement of our 2015 music videos for our composed-in-1994-remastered-in-2014 Christmas music disk The Bells of Yule.

The thing about these music videos, you may have noticed, is that they draw on period textmode visuals from the ‘90s computer art scene to illustrate what the sights would have been when the sounds were also like this. Helps to establish the context for an overall computer art milieu, if you will. Every video has had its own themes for the visuals – finally here in part 4 we begin exploring longer-form works of wintry ANSI art from the computer art underground – less ancient history, however much most of it may still be ancient history … just, y'know, less ancient. At this point, some of the pieces may even date to last year or even last week! But regardless of the actual age of the pieces, they still reflect an antiquated art practice. You can still find people weaving tapestries and smithing horseshoes, but … y'know, historical re-enactment in the present doens’t cease to be historical just because it manifests now.

This concludes our confused pseudo-philosophical digression into the nature of time. Now enjoy our music video and stay tuned for the final movement tomorrow, just in time for Christmas Eve! Merry Mist'mas – share and enjoy!

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