cXc .
Rls Date 16/06/2020
In a period of global turmoil, this artpack has gone through quite a few
twists and turns. It began its journey nearly a year ago as a Pride
celebration artpack, complete with pixelart parade down Main Street. Last
year, everyone put their hand up to vouch that they thought it was an
excellent idea, but then when it came time to actually get the art together,
we found ourselves empty-handed. But thats fine, we have no lack of slush
in the slushpile -- and while we share works on popular themes with great
frequency, works that fall outside those popular themes that our artists
create for their own reasons -- arguably, the most personal and important art
they make -- would be pent up with no outlet if not for the occasional
unthemed artpack of glorious miscellany and sundry. For some reason, someone
interpreted this relaxation of our regimented thematic tyranny to mean that
it was time to draw cats -- we just did this six months ago, I interrupted,
to no avail, but I didnt interfere because if you disturb an artist while
theyre drawing, you run the risk that they may simply stop drawing. We
extended cats to dogs and other good boys, which further extended in turn to
other animals and plants and scenes from the natural world and ... well, we
got a great artpack together, but it was the furthest thing from unthemed,
and it would not do to make those works, on ice since February, wait still
longer in the queue. We retained the cats and if were lucky, maybe well
hit you with the rest of the grandeur of nature in August.
You can see for yourself which personal projects different artists have been
working on -- Horsenburger has recently shifted gears from two months of his
whimsical Space Misadventurer daily drawings to transition to daily
teletext Black Lives Matter portraits, arguably the biggest topic in todays
daily discourse. When we came looking for art about the demonstrations in
the streets, The Elk had been waiting for us. Off on the other end of the
relevance spectrum, Kalcha thought hed try his hand at adapting a Tarot deck
to ShiftJIS, a formidable feat that could also, perhaps, reveal to us our
destiny... better not try, just in case. Somewhere in the middle, we feature
more of ZXGuessers beloved rolling stock, Emme Dobles penchant for
depicting cute creatures as pixelart food items, and a few more pieces of
Coronavirus art that didnt quite fit the tone of our Fools or SF artpacks
engaging the topic... a couple of pieces celebrating demoparties that didnt
happen as expected this summer... and no fewer than two textmode
demonstrations of the Snake lemma!
Wed like to give a big welcome to Kurogao, who grandstands with a diverse
gallery of recreational activities you can illustrate using a combination of
ASCII art and emoji, and the anime ANSI art celebration of N1njaF1reman, both
of them, as best as I can tell, making their artpack debuts here this month!
And, uh, toward the alphabetically tail end of the pack you have probably
taken notice of the new reign of Polyducks Textmode Friends. I cant
remember the last time we had, like, 23 ANSIs in an artpack. Have we
ever? In addition to LDA youre welcome, Hobbit Empire! theyve been
chipping away in fervent private networked Moebius sessions in communion with
pixelart and indie gamedev colleagues, wildly drawing ANSI art from
fascinatingly outsider perspectives... their sessions have been held back by
the tyranny we previously alluded to, but this month we unleash them all in
all their nutty glory, featuring contributions not just by Polyducks regular
colleagues Rhoq, Retroshark and MigMoog, but also a cameo appearance by
Papercookies. Picrotoxin has similarly drafted her old MiRCart colleague
Zen to help arrange some characters.
Also worthy of note, as of this pack Moebius creator Andy Herbert has come
out of retirement in order to provide us -- ok, the artscene -- with a modern
SAUCE tool, github.com/andyherbert/textmode, with which this pack was
prepared. Can you taste the difference?
Last bits of infofile housekeeping for this artpack: thanks to the Odd Fire
Cat for the FILEID.DIZ, CoaXCable for the infofile artwork and LDA for the
logo atop the list of contributors and a thousand and one tiny nips and tucks
just prior to release!
Next month, our fate is less nebulous: this slush has long been fermenting,
and it has become impossible to resist unleashing upon the world an artpack
on the subject of comics: comic books, comic strips, underground comix,
webcomics, etc. I know, I know -- back in the classic period, comics were
basically the default artpack subject, and the contrarians at Mistigris
rarely stooped to engage the aesthetically captivating and seriously stupid
Image Comics that dominated the underground artscene agenda. Now of course,
the grown-ass adults reviving the artscene have moved on to more mature and
undoubtedly more interesting topics, leaving the contrarians to do a 180
degree turn and embrace the thing that used to be the most popular,
specifically because it no longer is. My advice to you is to not be a
contrarian, because coming up with rationales justifying your unexpected
twists can be exhausting!
Submissions and inquiries are always welcome! You can reach us all over
social media, on our Discord, or on e-mail via info@mistigris.org... and as
you can see, our networked Moebius server at psychosomatica.org is running