MIST0519 : artpack collection
SCI-FI revisited
Here we are: its after midnight, so now officially May 4th... making it the
perfect time to write an infofile for the science-fiction-themed MIST0519.
Perfect because... we have developed technologies making sleep extraneous?
No, silly, perfect for traditional reasons: dialup BBSes on echomail networks
would refuse human callers from 1-2 am, meaning that you couldnt
successfully call out so you might as well write the infofile until all
boards became available again at 2 am. Chalk up that one to retrofuturism
then, perhaps!
We first did an artpack release with a science fiction theme one year ago, in
MIST0518. It was a good collection, marking the debut of some of our most
popular contributors, successfully taking the SF air out of subsequent
movies- and TV-themed packs we released, and yielding us our most-liked-ever
image on Instagram and four of our top nine! But of course the thing about
any decent SF scenario these days indeed, the decency is often optional is
that the fans demand sequels, and so here we are.
MIST0518 fared poorly on the SF prognostication scale, its got to be said:
unlike the Babylon 5 episode the Illusion of Truth or seaQuest DSV, humanity
had not yet established colonies on the surface of the moon or the bottom of
the ocean most of the predictions in Rollerball had not yet come to pass.
So how are we this year living up to the pop cultures expectations of what
life in 2019 might be like? The imaginations run loose on our year have not
been optimistic ones while the particular flavour of dystopia described in
The Running Man isnt yet in effect, in many regards the stage seems already
set. Unlike in The Island, organs are merely harvested from prisoners, not
clones. The only artificial intelligences roaming the streets of Los Angeles
are autonomous Teslas, not replicants, and Neo-Tokyo is not about to
e x p l o d e . The serious climate change issues facing us imminently
have not been substantially anticipated or addressed in the speculative works
set in this year, either because the authors didnt see them coming or felt
they were too boring or confusing to incorporate into their works. That
said, we live in perhaps the best 2019 thus far, in which none of those
futures came to pass but we still have all those awesome movies to watch...
AND the extinction of all life on the planet may be well underway, who knows.
So thats 2019, now what can I tell you about this artpack? Im going to be
somewhat brusque and businesslike, as this is the fourth infofile Ive
written for the fourth artpack release in as many weeks, please dont take it
personally. I love releasing artpacks on a monthly basis Junes will be
unthemed, so please send us in your wildest, most impossible-to-fit-with-other-
themes experimental works, and we will proudly stick them up on our virtual
refridgerator door but I have an accordion festival ahead to organize, so I
just need to blitz through this. A hearty welcome and hats off to CatX and
Atari Stash House, both making their first artpack appearance in this
collection. In addition to artwork derived from standard fandoms of
established SF franchises, you will probably notice that this collection also
includes extensive flights of original science fictitious fancy straight out
of the hot cybernetic brainpans of Blippypixel and Starstew. Theirs are just
burgeoning fandoms that havent yet been codified for the enjoyment of the
masses quite yet.
And a big hats off for Smooth of Fuel and Impure for swinging in and saving
us, once again, from the indignity of being represented by Cthulus
placeholder art. Situated somewhere in the timeline between Cyberdyne
Systems and SkyNet, we found that their corporate logo looked enough like an
M to adequately represent Mistigris, so if you didnt recognize it... go nerd
a little harder, please!
This concludes our May artpack infofile. Thank you for joining us on this
strange voyage through time and space!
- Cthulu
Mistigris founder