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Pack Name: MIST1020 5
Pack Theme: Halloween
Release Date: 10/20/2020
Before we begin... *AHEM*: BLENDER improvised art compo this weekend,
Saturday, October 24th, 2020, 7:30pm EST, blender on the EFNet IRC. Details
at mistigris.org/blender/blend.html
I was accused of burying the announcement too deep in the last Mist packs
infofiles, so this time around my critics will have to level subtly different
criticisms at me.
This time around... well, at times it felt almost as though strange forces
were attempting to intervene from beyond the veil in the production of this
months artpack. On the one hand, we started way ahead, courtesy of a nest
egg of scary art made too late to include in last years Halloween pack, plus
the free ride we get from the various October daily art challenges, but then
things started going wrong... for every step forward we took, we wound up two
steps behind. Picrotoxins networked Moebius ANSI art server at
psychosomatica.org went down, subject to the arbitrary and cruel whims of
some capricious daemon, and despite our numerous sacrifices to placate the
imp we couldnt get it back up and running in time to make a useful impact
on this collection! Then our WHQs scheduled move of house had its
Internet connection date bumped a week later than originally planned...
though it was turned off at the old site very punctually, leaving us
awkwardly with an offline hard drive full of art and no good way to share
it with the masses! Ive learned my lesson about trying to hand out
floppies out on street corners... Even the make-up date was cursed, the
technician unaware he was visiting for a 3-hour installation and not just a
20-minute activation. Unmoved by tears, threats of lying in front of his
van were needed to squeeze the sweet bandwidth of life out of his bones,
otherwise we might have needed to compel him using techniques out of
Misery...
Because our schedule is set by the drum beat of that calendar in the
cloud, it is very odd, incidentally, at this moment in history and at this
time of year to go from the 24/7 media firehose of dismay and suddenly
being plunged into radio silence when you just know that the dumpster fire
of the world is still burning full steam ahead on all cylinders. Its not
entirely unlike that moment in any number of horror movie screenplays where
the authorities trace the line and report that the disturbing and
threatening calls are coming from inside the house... just prior to the
line being cut.
Finally, in light of our having nonetheless overcome this series of
setbacks, literally on the eve of the scheduled artpack release some three
dozen files were revealed to have somehow become unprecedentedly corrupted
over the previous 48 hours, likely as a result of pack contents synching
from multiple sites on multiple devices. But its more fun to imagine a
young William Shatner looking into the server room via webcam and seeing a
gremlin tearing open computer enclosures! WTF, was this artgroup built on
an indigenous burial ground? Unceded First Nation territorial claims
being what they are, the answer is: almost certainly! We managed to
salvage everything, but the lost time is gone forever.
Fortunately, however, plenty of wiggle room was built in such that a delay
of a week and a day doesnt make us overdue for the target holiday were
aiming to coincide with. The first two years of our revival unfolded deep
in the quiet hours of November 1st and I can testify that there are funner
and less stressful ways to spend a Halloween night than feverishly missing
a deadline to a soundtrack of a fire at a munitions factory.
Anyhow, if youre reading this: we somehow made it! That or, like the
protagonist of a Lovecraft story, Ill have been eaten alive by the end of
this infofile. Technically, we celebrate our anniversary in October,
having released our first artpack in this month waaaay back in 1994, but
since our revival weve learned to devote October artpacks to spooky
Halloween artwork or else they have a way of simply inviting themselves in
and taking over regardless of your plans. Why not go with the flow? Well
be celebrating in grand style next month, in Novembers MIST1120 artpack
collection, and if youd like to help us represent and make a guest
submission, all channels are open!
But lets not skip over this artpack quite so quickly. As usual, we have a
handful of fresh new contributors to celebrate in these pages: David
Walford and Marco Varesio of Marcos Retrobits appear in an artpack for
the first time courtesy of the teletext communitys Monstober celebrations,
in which Illarterate and also especially Uglifruit took part.
Horsenburger and Blippypixel will just draw like demons every month
regardless of the theme, but artists whose stream of daily drawing
challenge works we tapped this time around include MigMoog, Bonemouse as
usual and especially Skonen Blades. The Elk, it turns out, has been
warming up for Halloween all year round because hes just that big of a
goth, and while waiting for our chance to really showcase the grim pixelart
of AFlamingoCup in its appropriate setting, they have retired their
separate brand for that style and you can be floored going forward looking
at their staggering consolidated art portfolio as ky.rar.
A week ago -- our initially planned release date -- we didnt have any
relevant iconography for this artpack, so a big thanks to 0DD and CoaXCable
for coming up with suitable art for the packaging of this collection and
its infofiles! Now enough of the self-congratulating, Ive got to somehow
stem my flow of turgid prose and share this art while its still relevant!
The eternal challenge. Catch you all in the next newsletter!
- Cthulu
Mistigris founder
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Ansi by: CoaXCable Cthulu MiSTiGRiS Arts Community 2020
pS, i wAITED uNTIL hE fINISHED wRITING tHE iNFOFILE tO eAT hIM, aLLOWING
hIM oNE fINAL oPPORTUNITY tO iNFLICT aN iNTERMINABLE iNFOFILE oN aLL oF yOU
iN oRDER tO mAXIMISE tHE sUFFERING aLL aROUND, bECAUSE tHATS jUST hOW wE
rOLL wHERE iM fROM. nOW iD bETTER gO uPLOAD tHE aRTPACK, fOR sIMILAR
rEASONS. i hOPE i rEMEMBER mY sIXTEEN cOLOUR lOGIN cREDENTIALS.
sINCERELY, tHE mONSTER.
ps, mONSTER wANTS yOU tO tAKE pART iN tHE bLENDER aS wELL.