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text-mode:

From Granny’s Garden, a C64-game from 1987.

Aha, I submitted these screenshots to Mobygames, and now here they are!

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Not long after Mistigris’ first big slumber around the turn of the century, I wrote my friend Suzie (hi, Suzie! You are, er, totally not reading this blog) about incidents through my adolescence growing up in Vancouver where my story intertwined with those of 604-local Neuromancer author (and cyberspace visionary) William Gibson (… a correspondence I really ought to reproduce here someday, as somewhat relevant to computer art in the 604. But I digress.) The e-mail client glitched up and, brain fresh with the aftershock of a well written e-mail that failed to launch, I re-wrote the whole thing from memory – beat for beat, fact for fact, joke for joke… it would have been impossible to reproduce the message exactly, but in terms of semantic content the second draft was congruent to the first, and both being written in my voice, the apple was only ever going to fall so far from the tree. Unbeknownst to me, the first e-mail sent, so Suzie wrote back reporting how she got to enjoy the peculiar experience of reading the same thing, twice, two different ways. In short, given identical tasks in the same contexts, we may reasonably conclude that a given brain will approach them identically.

This must be why the only work of textmode art from our MIST1015 collection to be featured in the Sixteen Colours ANSI of the Day back on November 22nd… was just featured again on April 16th, this time under the texty auspices of Blocktronics. The same brain surveyed the same pack as before and the one work that jumped out at the same pair of eyes was, unsurprisingly, the same piece as before.

Just as well! It’s an exceptional piece, it warrants celebration outside of the scrum kudos of the previous post, and due to ongoing disruptions with 16 Colours, this time it’s touted before fans of Blocktronics – the most sophisticated textmode art enthusiasts on the planet!

There were other textmode pieces in that collection deserving of some spotlight (especially the videos – they rightfully touted Whazzit’s “Dead Man’s Pants”, but that was only one of three!), but I can’t argue that this one’s appeal is very immediate and obvious. I enjoy every part of it – the green seaweed on top, the floppy disks in the “total” font, the groovy textures in the “DOS”, the shaded IBM PC typeface for “collection”… nothing is more iconic of MS-DOS gaming than a cacodaemon from Doom (neatly cropped from the front cover of the “Manual of the Planes” AD&D sourcebook), the crunching of the cartoonish TDC letters is apt, “release” is radically written… and I don’t even mind that the purple swirlies at the bottom are just the green ones of the top, inverted.

The AOTD authorities adopted a canonical position of bafflement as to what “the Total DOS Collection” might be, but if I had to speculate, I’d imagine that it hearkens to the roots of the underground computer art scene (and the demoscene before it) and would be some kind of encyclopediac platform-complete compilation for purposes of “curation and preservation”.

People have all kinds of reasons for wanting to maintain their privacy, and so I don’t have that much more to tell you about the celebrated artist VileR here – but here’s what I’ve been able to glean: He’s the only computer artist I’ve been able to lure out of the background through my long association documenting games of the gloriously obscure over at MobyGames, the video & computer game database founded by onetime Hornet archive FTP maintainer (and notorious artscene antagonist – keep your warez-scene-tainted ANSI art away from our totally-not-directly-descended-from-game-cracking demoscene works, it’s attracting heat from the feds!) Trixter… and the two of them have worked together as part of a team, most notably on the latest of the retro-demos written for the original IBM PC (with PC Speaker sound and CGA graphics card), the gob-smacking 8088 MPH.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y&w=560&h=315]

He maintains a fascinating blog of the same name where he explains tricks and and tips pursues mysteries of ancient lore pertaining to early home computers, including his recent Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack project (as billed). Also he has some textmode works waiting in the eaves using the Macrocom “ANSI from hell” technique (including another amazing cacodaemon) which will someday blow you all away … once they are made public.

In the meantime, we wait. Impatiently.

(Speaking of waiting impatiently, stay tuned for the annoucement of our call for submissions for MISt1016! This… is only the announcement of the announcement.)

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text-mode:

PETSCII-animations by Ailadi.

dashsharon:

In animation

Watercolour and watercolour pencil on watercolour paper

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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.

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I know, you were worried, we were running out of time. Well fear no longer, in the closing minutes of April 1st, Mistigris was able to make good on their strange tradition (their traditional strangeness?) and release their very serious April Fool’s artpack. Filled with strange sights and even stranger sounds, you can’t get anything else like it anywhere else (, and why would you want to?)

Duo Daughters, the gauntlet is cast. Sure, you have more ANSI lying around the cutting room floor, but can you come up with a more bombastic arrangement of Bohemian Rhapsody?

All right, my droggiewogs and krattiwats, it’s been a while but you can’t
keep a good man down, or us either! It’s MIS to TI GRIS, because MISEUPHRATES
would be a little too strange even for us. We’re back in effect in 2016 –
down but not out, out but not up, up but not in, in but not inverted.
Inverted, but not upside-down! OK, I give up, keeping track of all of these
lies is too much for me: Mistigris – in effect in 2016, upside-down, with the
former contents of our collective pockets all over the floor. There, are you
vultures happy?

We have been hard at work pushing at the boundaries of computer art:
there have been several intriguing developments since our ‘90s heyday. Did
you know that there science has discovered a 17th colour? Drilling down, our
researchers discovered several more, and we look forward into harnessing their
powers in artworks of the so-called “higher resolutions”. There is, um,
potential for a marijuana joke there, but I can’t quite make it happen.

Moving right along, there are plenty of other things we can’t quite make
happen, but do we let that stop us? Hells no! And we aim to prove it,
painfully and repeatedly! There’s a lot of nasty stuff (where by nasty I mean
wicked, and by wicked, I mean terrible, and by terrible, I mean downright awful
and unpleasant and overall time-wasting) in our April artpack, always the very
apex of our annual art production schedule, with block-cocking music beats
(including a masterful rendition of an eternal classic by the manly and very
heterosexual Freddie Mercury and a song sung entirely in Klingon! mamI’
DaneH'a’? nItebHa’ mamI’ DaneH'a’?), award-winning ANSI art, textmode art
portraits of our guiding lights, our heroes, mentors and idols, epic lits of
awesome emotionality plumbing the very depths and most darkest most innermost
recesses of the insides of (ok, it’s a colonoscopy), FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER IN
AN ARTPACK ANYWHERE a choreographed dance routine that’s totally infectious (so
don’t forget your facemask, rubber gloves, and a dental dam!), and totally
gnarly photography. Oh yes, and hirez pieces fortified with dad jokes.

THUS demonstrating that unlike a one-trick pony like, oh, I don’t know,
the petulant upstarts at Duo Daughters (have they ever even heard of the
animated GIF? if they have, they probably pronounce it like “JIF” huh) we are
at least a two-trick… two or three… we are a tricky pony, a radical little
Shetland pony with the shaggy hooves, doing Tony Hawk moves on a little
skateboard. Go on, ask us about our Cutie mark.

In conclusion: computer art will never die! And even if it does, we at
Mistigris will never move on! And, uh, if for some reason we do, we will
always feel bad about neglecting it, in the middle of the night, pursued by
little phantom F1-4 blocks floating just outside the window. We will
castigate them publicly in the harshest terms, even though no one else will
be able to see them at all. We will be institutionalized due to what appear
to be untreated mental health issues. It will not end well for us!

- Mistigris 2016: It Will Not End Well For Us!

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prostheticknowledge:

artnet

Project by
Casey Rodarmor produces abstract ANSI / ASCII art using neural networks:

I trained a bunch of neural networks on artscene art, and after much
tweaking and sifting through the output, this is what it produced.

More Here