.:.MiSTiGRiS.:.
Life is What Happens To You While Youre Busy Making Other Plans, a quote
famously attributed to the late John Lennon of the Beatles due to the phrase
appearing as a lyric in his 1981 song Beautiful Boy Darling Boy for Sean
Lennon, actually first appeared in print in a 1957 issue of Readers Digest,
quoting Allen Saunders, writer of the serial Mary Worth comic strip.
Thats certainly been our experience putting together this unthemed artpack
collection including the wild rabbit hole of digression -- we had scheduled
projects and Gantt charts well in actuality no, but if you know what they are
you get the idea -- but theyre not all progressing at the anticipated pace
and in the meantime the artists in our community which is to say: virtually
everyone here have been pursuing personal passion projects or satisfying
their curiosity with experiments or... basically, cooking up computer art
external to the stated goalposts were officially moving towards. Thats
fine, thats great! We really dont care what creative work youre
undertaking as long as youre working on something! This is just by way of
explaining why the artpack were sharing at this particular moment may not
bear a strong resemblance to upcoming releases we may have been talking up in
the recent past. Theyre still on their way! This one just pulled into the
station first.
Not only is this artpack focused on the unexpected, accidental art that
happened along the way, but also on what we deem to be eminently worthwhile
work that we somehow overlooked while cranking out the artpacks over the past
couple of years. While much of the work here is rather recent, some of it
dates back to 2022 hey, Illarterate represented us with another ATASCII
screen in a compo! or even 2021 How did we fail to include Polyducks
fantastic PETSCII pirates the first time around? I think we didnt even know
about their existence until quite a bit after the fact! Littlebitspace and
AtonalOsprey are making strong work on a regular basis and if you stop to
catch your breath and gather your bearings, youre going to miss out on some
of it! Well, weve circled round and gathered it back up for you.
Icing the cake, this very infofile opens with an ASCII art logo drawn for us
presumably? by one Spawn 28 years ago, released in the third Remorse artpack
and then, again, in a GRiP pack the following month for good measure. Sorry
for the delay in getting to it, Spawn, but better late than never! Thanks to
Zylone for the ANSI art logo used in the memberlist and littlebitspace for the
quick-turnaround FILEID.DIZ iconography representing this grab-bag of an
artpack.
Other highlights in this collection include the artpack debut of textmode
artist discGator -- welcome! -- and rare appearances by VileR and axb who
appears in collaboration with Abstrakt of Fire, thanks for representing!
MavenMob opens up with a suite of experimental screens, while CodeFenix
explores some unusual themes of his own. Shi-Akuma deepens his mystery by
sharing an ANSI art screen based on AI-generated imagery, and Zeus II fills us
in on all the piece work hes been quietly cranking out in the background all
this time.
All of which is to say, to paraphrase Whitman -- we are vast, we contain
multitudes. While you wont ever mistake a Mistigris artpack for one issued
by our colleagues in other artscene crews, hopefully theres something here
for everyone.
Stay tuned -- ideally via social media or mistigris.org, since it doesnt all
wind up on the 16 Colors frontpage -- for further, more focused releases
coming from us throughout the year. We have a lot going on -- even more than
the last time you heard us make that claim -- so it promises to be a
fascinating and exciting year. But maybe we can help to make it so by
spending less time talking up how great it will be, and instead devoting
ourselves to renewing our focus on actually making it so. Until then... well
OK, until the next Blender improvised art compo running April 22-23 well
catch you in cyberspace!