:MiSTiGRiS: . . .
Welcome everyone to this years October Mistigris artpack collection. Hm...
MiST in October -- its now been 28 years since our first release! We debuted
in an October and we revived in an October, but I gotta say, spooky stuff was
the furthest thing from our mind when we dropped our first October artpack.
Now, its impossible to imagine going without!
If you havent seen us since MIST0822 then you need to know that you missed
our fabulous MTURNER1 collection earlier this month, comprising all of the
constituent screens making up our amazing Turner the Worm fancomic, PLUS the
quarter-century-old never-heard tracker tunes by Onyx of SONiC EQUiNOX that
we used to punch up its animatic... that just won 3rd place in the animation
compo at this years Flashparty demoparty. In short, well, you can usually
find the goods on our homepage at mistigris.org. I know, with so many
releases it can be hard keeping up with them, but we appreciate your interest.
Turning to the present collection, we have to announce that we feature here,
appearing in a Mistigris artpack for the first time: glyph sculptor Minhoca2s
and a fabulous ANSI logo by Randers that you can probably still see looming
overhead. An extra-wide logo translates to a newsletter with wild margins.
Segueing into crediting the creators of our requisite iconography: thanks
again to Randers for that wild infofile header art, DW for the spooky little
guys frolicking throughout said wild margins, and CoaXCable also for his
bookends to our memberlist file. Adel Faure went beyond the call in
developing the worlds first ANSImated FILEID that, probably, is ahead of
its time. Hopefully we wont have to give it another 30 years.
Hats off to some of our members earning kudos for us at demoparties -- the
Turner the Worm fancomic animatic wasnt our only visit to the Flashparty
podium in Argentina, with strong work in competition by littlebitspace, Zeus
II, AtonalOsprey and Illarterate, none of which for thematic purposes appear
in this artpack but which we will be getting around to sharing with you
likely in the Spring ... and CoaXCables 3rd place win in their PC ASCII
compo, which you in fact can enjoy here! It was definitely the best beast
they had in competition. And did we neglect to note that his No War Has
Style in MIST0822 tied for 3rd place in the Nova 2022 ANSI/ASCII compo?
Well, now you know!
Illarterate does have two pieces in this artpack that competed in other
compos, both in unusual text art formats. His mummy entry represents in all
likelihood the first time Amstrad CPC text art has ever been included in an
artpack, while his return to the Max Headroom signal hijack incident of Nov
22, 1987, is only the second such time artpacks have featured ATASCII, the
character set of Ataris 8-bit home computer line. We would have been
first, but after 30 years without ever appearing in an artpack, the trail was
blazed by HPM just a matter of weeks ago! And while were speaking of
compos, I should extend a hats off to LDA for winning the Blender we ran last
weekend with work again not appearing in this collection -- and for the
rest of you, do please note: the next Blender is coming up Jan 21-22 2023!
If you think Halloween when you see a skull, then in many regards, this
artpack is really the proper and complete domain of Littlebitspace, and were
all just visiting the house he made and which Andyh ensured the textiness
of. His recent ascii art acolyte AtonalOsprey has definitely been carrying
along in a similar vein! I was the one who tirelessly adapted his UTF-8
works to ASCII, but it was well worthwhile! But in addition to their
muscular work and strong representation from LDA we also feature work by
some of the humbler artists who only poke their heads out of their virtual
hidey-holes when they feel a current of inspiration motivating them -- SysOps
Codefenix, Darkman Almighty, and DW, and even your humble narrator, moved by
memories of my catastrophic ANSI-a-day Blocktober 2018 drawing challenge to
crudely adapt a pile of iconic screens from Simpsons Treehouse of Horror TV
specials. OK, boomer! Theyre nothing if not seasonal and their nostalgic
element hearkens back to the emergent period of underground computer
artpacks.
Aw gee whiz, stop the presses! After this infofile had been written, we
learned that an authentic Textmode Friends jam was scheduled for surprise
last-minute inclusion in this artpack, for the first time since MIST0721,
which definitely warrants going back in to a completed infofile for an
update! Starting a year later, they them being Polyducks, Rhoq, LDA,
Batfeula -- appearing in a Mist pack for the first time -- and our own Adel
Faure have brought all their monster friends just in time for Halloween!
to their response to MIST0221s The Big Piranha, seeing just how lively they
can make a 25-row ANSI art screen of excessive width. The answer is, of
course: eXtReMeLy.
Coming up next we will have a collection of computer art pertinent to food
being served, as we have been threatening, featuring ingredients both fresh
and long-forgotten in the back of the root cellar. Settling further
unfinished business, we look forward to sharing the rest of the tracker music
Onyx made at the turn of the century that no one ever got a chance to hear,
possibly in conjunction with other musical creativity. And of course we
still have to polish off and present the experiment we have been tinkering
with in our networked Moebius server. In short, people are going to continue
making art and we are going to continue sharing it. Theres your tldr for
the whole newsletter if you like. See you around!