Can I make Jabba cute?
idk
ZII
A little story about this packs infofile. Over the course of the day, in
spare moments on and off for hours, I described the state of the world. I
talked about the global pandemic, and how it made for rather shabby science
fiction -- the topic of this months artpack -- not because it was low-grade
dystopia but rather because it was derivative of creative material already
exhausted last year. Then I speculated that the variety of SF story we were
living might be of the Cause and Effect or Groundhog Day variety.
I groused that the year 2021 had inspired a lower-quality calibre of SF in
the popular consciousness, noting how in previous years wed caught up to and
surpassed such cultural touchstones as Blade Runner and Akira, while this
year all we had to measure ourselves against was William Gibsons Johnny
Mnemonic, which was a little too on the nose.
I complained that with the Skywalker saga wrapped and the MCU having a
small-screens fallow year, with the fragmentation of the streaming services
it was hard for there to even be a consistent SF canon for us nerds to all be
conversant with, with Netflix offering fake versions of Predator, Robocop and
Total Recall to lead newbies astray. I hypothesized that after this much
stifling lockdown in the midst of confusion and misinformation, it was
surprising we hadnt yet spontaneously broken out in Death Race 2000,
Rollerball, Death Tower or Running Man leagues.
I concluded that wed simply have to make our own SF art, clarifying that
what I meant by that was that wed all have to sit back eating popcorn while
watching Blippypixel mint literally hundreds of SF artworks, with more coming
in even as I was writing the infofile. I speculated whether we had cloned an
entire room of him, or outfitted him with illegally overdriven cybernetic
implants, or perhaps spliced his genes with that of a cheetah. There was a
throwaway gag about a notoriously crappy NES cartridge, and a sadly lost bit
of poetry about the similarities and differences between a fresh idea
emerging from an artists mind and a fresh chestburster emerging from a space
jockeys sternum.
Then having performed the requisite mastery of SF, I went on to actually
discuss the contents of this artpack. I asserted that it wasnt ENTIRELY
Blippypixel -- slightly under half of it is by old friends and new hands. I
pointed out that we covered the obligatory touchstones of Star Wars and Star
Trek and plenty of other fandoms besides, all the way down to a send-off to
Sean Connery in his greatest role as Zed the Exterminator. Really, if I can
recall enough of my gags, I can nearly reconstruct the entire newsletter, a
very niche species of stand-up comedy.
plz i can haz frog from jar?
ZII
I extended congratulations to Alpha and Veni, Vidi, ASCII for bringing their
textmode art creations to an artpack -- this one -- for the first time, and
thanked LDA and Zeus II for providing the Rather Whimsical illustrations
gracing this infofile, CoaXCable and Veni, Vidi, ASCII for illustrating the
memberlist, and littlebitspace for coming up with such a swell Blade Runner
FILEID.DIZ for our use. Then I descended into Mist Talk, evaluating our
progress in our New Direction, advised fans to look for us to release another
unthemed pack in July a month also featuring the next Blender compo Jul
17-18 and noted a few recent developments -- an MS-DOS PabloDraw fanpage,
the master memberlist of all post-revival Mistigris artpack contributors, our
ongoing campaign to bug TikTok users with brief video clips of vintage
computer art older than its users are, and ... I dont think I actually
fingered anything else, merely gestured vaguely toward more.
jabba with a hat habba
littlebitspace
Then instead of attaching this infofile to myself to finalise at home, I
somehow managed to mislabel the OTHER monthly newsletter I had also written
earlier today for the monthly virtual, in pandemic times get-together of my
local community of accordion and squeezebox enthusiasts, and sent that one --
possibly overwriting my artpack infofile -- instead. It seems there are a
lot of accordion videostreams going on this Friday, my artscene dudes, but
you may want to simply take my word for it.
In retrospect its a little hilarious -- probably more transparently
hilarious if you arent me -- but you have to take my word for it that it was
really a nice, action-packed infofile, well-balanced between pertinent
information, cunning thematically-apropos references, and genuinely funny
asides. Itll have to be my Jodorowskys Dune of infofiles, because Im not
going to delay the pack release in an attempt to recover it.
Enjoy the pack! Thanks to all the contributors -- Blippypixel, and the rest
of them -- and to our patient fans! Do keep your eyes on our social media,
because we should be sharing some worthwhile SF selections there that were
deemed unsuitable for various reasons for artpack inclusion.
Be seeing you!
lda