and then it just cuts off like hey dawg, is he like standing on a stool or what
Here we are again, the start of a new month which weve, sigh, already
ruined!, an august well, april occasion for which weve very sincerely and
seriously been saving up all of our very best, award-winning art all year...
by which we mean, of course, the most humorous artworks... by which,
naturally, we mean all the artworks that accord most with the Ancient Greek
theories of Aristotelian medicine, pertaining to the four humours -- phlegm,
bile, blood and ... more bile. Hork a loogie and vent your spleen! ...directly
on to the canvas, if your aim is good enough. Aaand now Im imagining a paint
program made using the interface of an h-game. What, you dont think that
bodily fluids are funny? All right then, perhaps April Fools is not the best
holiday for you to be celebrating. True story, I shit you not: earlier this
year, my household sideline of secondhand ebay resale shipped a back issue of
Mad Magazine to the creator of the Piss Christ. So clearly Im tapping into
some kind of deep collective subconscious wavelength here. But I digress.
What else do I have to tell you here? Were coming off of our artpack of love
in February -- did you know that in the sport of tennis, the word love is
used to indicate a score of zero? Profound implications, my dudes. And
speaking of dudes, last month we succeeded in pulling off er, let me rephrase
that a feat never before achieved due to never before being attempted -- an
artpack solely stocked by women artists. The closest youll get from anyone
else in the digital underground are the deceptive offerings from Duo Daughters
and our confused colleagues in Mistergirls. A couple of distinguished
individuals among our audience helpfully observed that they felt that the very
attempt of this undertaking, once in 30 years, ran the risk of upsetting a
fragile balance, and that wed be better off issuing a recall and refunding our
customers for accidentally issuing them cooties. Fear not, gents, all the men
are here again in full effect, now and likely forever more. In a month that
wasnt informed by the idiocy of April Fools I probably wouldnt characterise
a venerable but overwhelmingly gender-segregated community as a room full of
dudes huffing each others recycled farts for decades. Probably.
But enough about the past. As well as return visits from the usual empty
shells littering the floor of the peanut gallery, there are some artists making
their debut appearance in a Mistigris artpack this month: Justnlvsk, Lawnjart,
and TrashPossum... but sadly I cant even point you to their contributions
this time around as we dropped the box of punch cards and the artpack filenames
were scrambled after we painstakingly reassembled them. Go figure. This has
had an anonymizing side effect of protecting the innocent, for which they must
be grateful. But of course its not all terrible -- much of what you find
herein is merely perplexing, every bad joke countered with an excellent
specimen of the absurd. Some of the jokes are actually funny! ... and though
they dont much benefit from the treatment, in this collection you will find a
loving veneer of polish applied to some absolute turds.
OK, what else does one usually find in an infofile? Balls and nonsense! Here
are some of our very favorite balls: football, baseball, basketball, billiard
ball, golf ball, volley ball, rugby ball, bowling ball, cricket ball, water poloball, tennis ball, table tennis ball, medicine ball, soccer ball, beach ball,
squash ball, bocce ball, croquet ball, floor hockey ball, kickball, wiffle ball,tetherball, highball, slimeball, costume ball, hairball, moneyball, monKeyball,
murderball. And of course, our Foolish antecedents in wBalls.
As for the nonsense: this infofile is headed up by an ANSI art illustration
drawn by k-ThUlU++ for Jude Buffums blocktober2018 daily monster pixelart
challenge. That days assignment was to draw a harpy, and the idiot drew
Harpo Marx. Nonsense! Indeed, to fulfil the challenge he drew terrible
ANSI art every day for a month. Did he get any better at it, or just create
a substantial body of awful work? Yes! But because he also drew a portrait
of Groucho Marx for the FILEID.DIZ, he figured he may as well round up all
his other unreleased Marx Brothers ANSI art. His lavish portraits of Chico,
Gummo, Zeppo and Karl must have somehow gotten lost in the great punch card
shuffle described above. Say what you will about his sense of good taste,
but K-tHuLu+++ knows his limitations. Whatever inspired him to attempt to
take on such a subject under such constraints? It turns out that he just
wanted to draw some Groucho Marx glasses for the DIZ to semantically signify
humour, thereby alleviating him of the need to actually provide any, but he
just couldnt manage to draw the furry eyebrows and moustache critically
attached to the iconic costume prop in ANSI art. Researching the original
subject for better primary documents to adapt, he made the horrifying
discovery that Grouchos distinctive eyebrows and moustache were themselves
semantic signifiers, mere greasepaint smeared across his visage for the
benefit of feeble cameras exporting to grainy film. The better-quality
the resources we found to get more privileged reference to the moustache, the
clearer it became that the very thing was a fiction of the silver screen, a
colossal lie frivolously perpetrated across the generations. In other words,
nonsense! Worst of all, this increased the gap between Groucho Marxs face
and the representation of Groucho Marxs face in the toy disguise novelty
glasses: we were never going to discover how to better draw the glasses by
getting a good look at Grouchos face. k-THUlU+ had unwittingly already
approached this territory last October when he also drew a set of ICP Juggalo
greasepaint portraits for blocktober2018. Balls and nonsense! Everything is
a lie! ANSI art isnt even pixel art, nonsense, balls and nonsensical balls!
Ballsensical nons!
In conclusion, please join us in blender2019 on the EFNet IRC Saturday, April
13th for this years instalment of the annual improvised art competition
details at mistigris.org/blender/blend.html and keep your eyes open for
supplementary releases. Then well see you all again in May, when we will all
hopefully have gotten all this stupidity out of our system. Who am I kidding!
Well, all of this particular variety of stupidity, at the least. Until then,
stay tuned!
MiSTiGRiS 2019: phlegm, bile, blood and ... more bile