Today, Happyfish – again of Mistigris (after a detour to Hallucigenia and many, many years off for good behavior) – found out how her Mist-representing contribution to the ANSI art competition at the NVScene 2015 demoparty in San Jose, California placed, in the presence of God and RaDMaN (supposing the two don’t cancel each other out.)  It’s the first time we’ve fielded an entry at a demoparty in … quite some time … and it’s a peculiar, polarized time to be competing in that particular category.

The demo folks who thought that making fireworks by speaking directly to their CPU in 640 bytes of assembler was an excellent passtime in 1995 have only honed their already-narrow focus in the interim, optimising their algorithms down to 16 bytes and throwing in phong shading!  Their concern has matured from vintage to classic.  The ranks of the textmode enthusiasts, on the other hand, have withered and been almost totally dispersed since the glory days of textmode being the natural environment of the dominant operating stystem (or the desktop computer being the dominant computing device, for that matter!) and the only ones left standing are basically cast-iron titans of visual art who could take an atomic bomb hit and still come out the other end of the mushroom cloud crafting heartbreaking pixelated portraiture with no equal across the entire history of the artform.  At the 2014 instalment of the long-running Evoke German demoparty, Blocktronics – basically the Serpentor of the ANSI scene, constituted of the DNA of all its cruellest despots – released the WTF4 megajoint, a 4636-line (!) ANSI created as a collaboration between 24 artists from 10 different countries, scrolling as tall as a 7-story house.

Happyfish, conversely, picked up an unfinished work-in-progress from 1998 and polished it off in an afternoon for kicks after 17 years of getting rusty.  But maybe Blocktronics would still be recovering from St. Patrick’s overindulgence and wouldn’t bring their A-game to the competition?  It was anyone’s guess.  Happyfish took the ANSI gold at Crash 1997, as the only serious entrant.  Here, six of the eight contenders are unfeeling Blocktronics ANSIbots, more machine than men, guaranteed statistically to dominate no less than 72% of the competition by weight.  Cut them, and they bleed a stream of red F10 characters at a steady rate.

…

It was a foregone conclusion: her nostalgic piece (even by 1998 standards!) placed last, but only by a margin of four votes.  In a field such as this, it was an honour simply to be a contender!  The top three places were all roundly well-earned, and as for the remainder, it was simply down to a matter of taste.  If you like, you can ruin your appetite on the whole sumptuous menu, or if you can find it in you to contain yourself, wait for Happyfish’s plucky-yet-underperforming contest entry (we just show its FILE_ID.DIZ, silly!) to appear in our second annual revival collection in October of 2015… but there is much to release and much to analyse here before then!

(Coming “soon”: an overview of historical Mistigris demoparty performance.)

           Here’s a post for St. Patrick’s Day.  There can’t be much explicitly Irish-themed ANSI artwork out there, but this must be the strangest item atop that small pile.  It’s an early work (from MIST0195, our 4th artpack) from Nitnatsnoc, SysOp of our WHQ The Screaming Tomato BBS (an eventual post subject of its own, in progress), who got Cthulu into the local small-press minicomics of eg. Ian Boothby (and moving on himself, so we could never discuss them!) and whose sister serendipitously ended up being a comics professional (creating Yokaiden and putting in some art duties on The Simpsons Comics.)

           Nitty (the full handle, an inversion of “Constantin” from a French Immersion social studies word-jumble, was such a mouthful of apparent gibberish that a cutesy shorthand was inevitable) was a scene outsider, always his own agent even when holding membership in (reverse chronology) Avenge, ACiD, Integrity, Mistigris, or the local no-pack-released Sensation.  He wouldn’t do anything merely because it was popular (well, I can’t really account for his interest in the Image comics of the early ‘90s) and while able to play well with others, always acted with independent motivations.

           From time to time, this led to some peculiar choices for the subject matter of his visual art creations.  This one speaks for itself: Lucky, perennially hounded leprechaun mascot of Lucky Charms cereal, in vampire form, intoning the unforgettable caption: “Just try an’ bite me ya wee bastards!”  It’s an odd piece: every element of it is serviceable – a decent font, a well-proportioned freehand embellishment of an established character – but at the same time everything is a bit “off”: where’s the background?  Why no flat ‘toon” shading for a context clearly calling for it?  The transitions from header to pic to font are a bit abrupt… the BBS advertised was by now an also-ran (run by the onetime Op of my first warez board, the 9th Plane of Hell, who rebranded himself “Nosferatu” – who pranked me at the end of my very first “meet people from modem-land” adventure by dropping me off at a SkyTrain station which was not yet in operation – who jumped into the artscene affiliated with PAiN, putting prefab fonts on scans from White Wolf RPG illustrations… but I digress) and, of course… what’s with that picture?  

           We may never really know for sure.

          (Edited to add: the first half of the header text is worth repeating, and may be displayed too tiny to be easily readable:

“Helter (the sysop of Salem’s Lot) claims that this pic should have been drawn for his board.  Apparently, Salem’s Lot is a book about green vampires attacking a town.  Plus, he’s Irish.  Well, he wanted me to mention that.”

Anne Rice was really a ‘90s thing, wasn’t it? Also, for an obsessive Queen fan, that’s a hilarious typo at the end of the header.)

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Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone!  Admittedly it’s hard to draw ANYTHING in the ANSI medium – and it’s hard to draw as abstract a concept as “love” in any medium!  So how do you draw an ANSI of love?  (No, Tumblr, that’s a rhetorical question, not a poll I want to include in this post!)  Plasticised Rob Liefeld Image Comics combat dolls there are a-plenty, but in a sense that’s nearly as far from the heart of the matter as one can get!

Here are a few takes on related topics from the period 1994-1998.  We open with a collaboration between Tincat (illustration) and Lady Blue (poetry): so there wasn’t a lot of visual art we released about love, but there sure were a ton of love poems!  (I had one entire wall of my bedroom plastered with ones I’d written over the course of this period.  Each one was encoded with a simple message immediately apparent to its recipient: warning, do not engage.)  This one could have used a bit more proofreading, but between the words and the image, it suggests an intriguing enough point of ambiguous emotional intensity: if love is right, then why does this feel so wrong?

A bit less ambiguously is Mr. Flibbles’ unabashedly adolescent celebration below: we, the men (and lesbians) of the ANSI artscene, don’t love a specific woman in particular – we just cherish their entire class.  As embodied by signage iconography from public washrooms.  How romantic!  Well no, but still… awesomely punk rock.  No apologies!

The next two pieces enshrine the perversely personal as embodied by the French expression “vive la différence!”  The monstrous hand-holding was a guest piece by DJ Moses Risin’ of Happy Fetus Records, SysOp of The Pelvis of Elvis BBS, while the following piece – the ones whose cups runneth over – was a witty take on excess and objectification by Etana.  How deep is your love?

One more punk rock kick to the teeth – hey, this was the ‘90s, heydays of eg. seeing L7 playing the annual Rock for Choice festival – is an explosive chance meeting between a sperm and an egg in a restaurant, a loaded visual metaphor by Haquisaq.  Love and consequences!

Finally, I’ve embarrassed everyone else with their juvenilia, so it’s time to rake some of mine across the coals.  You never saw this one in a Mistigris artpack, as it only ever appeared in INT-0496.ZIP – as the header suggests, a release of our local arch-nemesis group Integrity.  Their policy was to release ANSI art only, which meant that instead of merging profitably they would just periodically skim the talent off of one of our departments.  Consequently it was a bit of a coup to have a lit appear in one of their packs.  The house style was pictures of “babes” (I believe this is Vampirella?) and through chats between myself and Darkforce on their WHQs the House of Style and the Ho-Zone (keep it classy, guys), we negotiated the illustration and release of this piece in their artpack.  (A pity it’s so middling!)

N.B. – “The Girl With Electric Fingers” kissed me once over the course of our 10-month relationship, then went on to be a sex and sexuality columnist at her university newspaper.  Gentlemen may not kiss and tell, but poets take inspiration wherever they can find it, and are prone to making mountains out of molehills.

Happy New Year’s Day!  This illustration is a cheap trick, I confess – I reversed the direction and palette of Tzeentch’s “Sunrise in Cyberspace” used to illustrate the previous post’s remastered recording of “1995: A Rave”, to illustrate that song’s January 1995 remix by Marauder of EuphoniX, taking the huge leap from Atari ST to Amiga!  (Us MS-DOS listeners could only stroke our chins and scratch our heads.)  The remix has also been 2014-remastered by Melodia, the original composer of the original version of the song, formerly of Mistigris and Digitallusions and now releasing music under the Empress Play imprint.

[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/183951581" params="auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%" height="450" iframe="true" /]

As with the previous song, please allow me to reiterate – these are remastered re-releases of New Year’s-themed electronic music we initially released in the MIST0195.ZIP artpack archive back in January of 1995. And with this, our spree of holiday-themed re-releases necessarily must draw to a close for a time. We have more data archaeology to conduct, and vast realms of unreleased, unseen and unheard computer art of the 1990s to package, present and release in 2015. Who knows – we just might even make some new computer art, too!

Happy New Year’s Eve!  We made it through Christmas 2014 serving up literally hundreds of downloads for the re-release of our long-thought-lost December 1994 music disk The Bells of Yule, and as we approach the end of this year’s winter holiday season (12 Days of Christmas nonwithstanding) it’s apropos to draw things to a close with “1995 - A Rave”, a song released the month after (01/95) the original launch of the Bells of Yule music disk – before it was lost.

The song found itself remastered as part of Melodia’s push to release, well, the “Skeletons In My Closet” we already told you about in an earlier post, and as it was used back in 1995 to welcome the arrival of a New Year, we will be using it today for much the same purpose.

[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/152160455" params="color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false" width="100%" height="166" iframe="true" /]

(Pictured: “Sunrise in Cyberspace” by Tzeentch, representing a different kind of new beginning, included in the same archive as the song, MIST0195.ZIP)

[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/)