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His partner gave him an ultimatum: to focus on one of his creative gifts rather than splitting focus between them. So Ozero (aka Onyx, aka NinjaDude of (CORRECTION: fellow TPOE traveller to) HFR, aka Joseph Picard, onetime SysOp of The Crimson Helm) set aside his visual art (see Mist-released examples attached; apparently he also kept on keeping on for some time) and the tracks which filled Sonic Equinox music disks, and focused on his current creative mainstay as a purveyor of ebooks.

Then he suffered a long hospital stay, and in the tedium of medicalized confinement, looking for some small way for the spark of human whimsy to express itself in a wholy institutionalized environment, the drawings (well, doodles) crept back in.

Because nothing is wasted, after being released from the hospital these doodles were compiled into an ebook, and as periodically happens – this weekend it is being given away for free. Avail yourself! It is almost certainly the best collection of work ever produced on its subject: linguistical curiosities found on hospital meal menus.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWyvoKzQn78?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]

blocktronics:

Texmode art demo “New.Txt” with graphics by Blocktronics artists The Textorcistand and Nail got 1st. place at TMDC 2015 event!

Congrats, buddies!

Link to results page:
http://www.pouet.net/party_results.php?which=167&when=2015&font=1

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

[wpvideo mzXApRFJ]

We have provided a great testament to the “when it’s ready” mentality, the idea that some works of art are like fine wines, losing nothing if bottled up and left to ferment in a basement for a decade or so. Indeed, the audience for our 2014 re-release of the 1994 Bells of Yule music disk was undoubtedly larger – if we had been ahead of our time, perhaps popular tastes had finally caught up to our vanguardism. (Popular ears still aren’t quite ready for the modern 1930s sounds of Kurt Weill– being ahead of the pack doesn’t always pay off, but as it turns out, nothing we were doing is quite that avant-garde 8)

There is one thing that instantly freezes a piece into a moment in time, associating the two permanently like a stapler, and that is: including a date or year on it. This is why we had to use the Pablo jam ANSI in our MIST1015 memberlist (awesome though it was regardless) despite the fact that it was arguably incomplete (through several release tweaks and revisions, completion of Frankenstein’s shading was promise, but never delivered) – because at no point in the future would there ever be a better moment to release an ANSI that read “MISTIGRIS 1015”.

Dutch computer artist Freddy43, whose astounding work you got a chance to hear and see in MIST1015, presented us with a demo of some compelling technology – a sine-bouncing scrolly bar working its way across a pair of HTC smartphones. (It’s a trick, making fiddly work that is somewhat obvious in retrospect look easy and seamless. Parting the curtains and revealing the magician’s ruse: “i have to videocapture the sine scrolling text, then make 2 splitted video’s of it, and film it again when playing back at the phones..so it’s not some script running on both phone’s together or whatsoever..it takes a bit of time and patience to make it..”) We agreed that it would be a good fit for our vintage affectations and felt that we could totally incorporate that into our new run of artpack-promotional video imagery. But it wasn’t ready to roll prior to the pack’s launch, and though it eventually did come through the pipe in a complete form, it didn’t fit in with any of the year’s remaining (Christmas music video 8) releases, so it went unused.

No problem – we can just sit on it and use it later, right? BZZT! Sadly, we will never again be Mistigris 2015. Our proclamation of what computer art is and isn’t in 2015 is instantly stale here in the bold new world of 2016. Alas! And here is the downside of the great trick that is actually just hard work: due to the pain-in-the-ass factor of making so trivial an alteration as changing two instances of “2015” to read “2016” – basically, redoing all of the hard work over again in its entirety – instead it gets left, wasted, by the roadside, and we think to ourselves: “Too bad we stamped it with an expiration date, because it was a pretty cool trick!”

At least today we can say: it will never again be as close to 2015 as it is now, and squeak it out the gate to impress with what it does rather than just what it says 8)

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MIST2000, our final compilation of works collected and never released, now has – following some extensive use as the carrot in our treasure hunt – at long last been made available to the general public. Here. Right here. Click the link already!

This pack basically represents materials that began piling up right from the assembly of M-9808 that were too inconvenient to late-breakingly incorporate into its bespoke HTML framework. We hadn’t determined yet that we wouldn’t be releasing any more artpacks until 2014, so potential submissions just kept on piling up. (Not from the textmode artists who go largely unrepresented here, they were always an antsy and impatient bunch, but in 1998 that was the most hastily-dwindling sub-specialization of the rapidly-diminishing artpack tradition anyhow… we were all looking ahead to what the hot new thing would be. If you’d told us that in 2015 it would be ANSI art, we’d have dumped our open cans of J0lt Cola on your head.)

This artpack contains a few specialty sub-collections, including a couple of bodies of work that we simply couldn’t figure out how to include in an artpack in 1998 (photographs? sketches? paper collages? THE SKY WILL FALL! In all fairness, releasing a 100-meg artpack in 1998 would have turned us into pariahs.) These include a complete story from the Dream Factory comic book that artists related to Mistigris actually published a single issue of (after we spent a few years talking it up), remastered versions of Digitallusions songs Melodia prepared for use on the WebTV service (and which did end up using them – though never paying her for them!), a complete playthrough of the “Eat Poop You Cat” game of telephone pictionary, unreleased tracks from our never-launched Mistigris music CD, Ice Cream Emperor’s suite of MS Paint works in an abstract expressionistic style, and the collaborative “Shakespeare’s Pen” comic book – up to the point where the narrative spiralled out of coherence. And – the only documentary existence suggesting that the Tracker Fix parties or 11th E-mag ever happened! Also: nearly 4 hours of music.

All that and many other interesting qualities which are expounded upon, at great length, in the artpack’s infofile. We hope that you enjoy this last great flourishing of historical Mistigris! After this, the vaults are looking positively vacant!

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The MIST2000 Treasure Hunt: Puzzle #9, explained!

This is it. I’ve held your hand through every contentious piece of show-stopping material along this path, standing between you, the avid vintage computer art enthusiast, and me, the gatekeeper of the jam-packed MIST2000 archive. If you had any aspiration to figure out any of the treasure hunt’s puzzles, this is the last unspoiled territory for you to try your hand at – the final speed bump.

So here we go. bit.ly/planesofHell brought you to a web page, joker.html – the group name “Mistigris” carries a few meanings, but despite the early emphasis on “a variation of poker in which the joker is wild”, largely we ended up celebrating the “French for alleycat” interpretation instead. But here we have a couple of vintage Mist jokers harrassing you, because … not everything here is entirely as it seems. It is the final puzzle – again, not much of one, but a little drag factor at least. Both ANSIs depict jester heads and – is that a clock around the neck of the first one? Mid-‘90s Menace, Flava Flav is a hype man, not a jester.

Now, where were we? Oh yes, there’s the link – you click it, and … what? 404? Is nothing in this accursed world as straightforward as it pretends to be? (OK, an invalid complaint: this has all along pretended nothing less than to be a puzzle.) There are no hints on the 404 page. It really does want you to go back. (If I’d been in a crueller mood, I would have made the 404 page’s link redirect to a different “joker” page that looked the same and whose URL read the same – some lowercase-“l” / numeral “1” / capital-“I” ambiguity perhaps – whose “step across the finish line” link was now valid. But that would have been cruel. The finish line was, it turns out, right in front of you all along: it was just, as in puzzle #3, hiding in plain sight. Hit Ctrl-A or whatever your system understands to invoke the “Select All” command, and marvel in amazement as additional text is revealed beneath the bogus hyperlink:

There are no lines in nature, only areas of colour, one against another. – Edouard Manet
__________

(I bet that’s probably the only time Edouard Manet has ever been referenced in artscene history! But it’s a nice quote, seemingly applicable to ANSI art – perhaps a mantra for practitioners of pHUNK.)

Anyhow: THAT line of underscores is the “finish line” described above. Anyhow, if it is clicked upon, the computer user will skip to the very end of the merry chase and see the eye-bleeding congratulatory extravaganza you never earned, on which we blew our entire VFX budget. (Also, next time you run The Secret of Monkey Island in SCUMMVM, try “Ctrl-W” to Win the Game. It will bring with it a parallel thrill.) It really is worth seeing, words will only take you so far, but before you go here, you need to have been given a Pokemon epileptic seizure warning. Warning! OK, now go knock yourselves out.

That’s it! No more puzzles! Go home already!

The MIST2000 Treasure Hunt: Puzzle #8, explained!

OK, so you jumped through the hoops. bit.ly/spiderlegs delivered you a file, isenough.rar, which contained a very brief text file that just read “examine not the contents but the container”, plus some SAUCE metadata, fingering this file as: the contents. Finally, an actual puzzle! It’s not much of one, but it requires you to do a little more than sit, wait and watch.

In a perfect world, you scrutinize the .RAR archive itself (“the container”) for the SAUCE with which it has been invisibly enriched using SPOON – but in a pinch, you can just open it in a text editor and take a peek seeking out text strings at the end. Here, so close to the end, it sends you further along, to bit.ly/planesofHell. Could the end of our epic quest be within reach? Very nearly so, I think!

Sudden Death opened a joint networked PabloDraw session, that’s the important part – on intermittently on a regular basis (from now on?) at stolen-archives.us port 9600. Could I resist popping in? Don’t be daft! And who do I see there but none other than wi of Mist, who had popped in of his own volition without the heavy-handed invitation usually required of largely-retired historical ANSI-ists… well, maybe I had put him in the mood earlier in the day with my late-‘90s Al’s House of Meats ANSI art quilt Tweet:

@icicle I already made a quilt, back in 1999! It, uh, was made of ANSI art. Sorry, what were we discussing again? pic.twitter.com/geEGn80eLd

— Rowan Lipkovits (@UnwashedMass) December 31, 2015

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Anyhow, despite his friendliness with us, Sudden Death was never really part of the Mist crew; co-founder of CiA, at present he opportunistically just tries to light textmode sparks wherever a chance of a flame is present. So this wasn’t explicitly intended as a Mistigris joint (unlike the last one) and indeed it did contain other material by Mist-unrelated artists that I cropped out after following up on a suggestion in the PabloDraw chatroom and coming up with a bit of spontaneous lit rhapsodizing on the occasion of Hogmanay, laid out according to certain concrete poetry conventions last explored in ANSI back in an improvised illustrated poem from the 1999 installment of the (still-running!) Evoke demoparty in Germany. With wi and Cthulu of Mistigris both representing, we had a real Mistigris production together, and so here we share it with you. Will it end up in an artpack? Who cares! Happy New Year!

(And to enhance your fresh start, don’t forget the 1995 New Year tune – and its remix – we blogged about here a year ago. They’re not getting any older, just more and more classic!)