!2S
Happy Halloween to all of you lost souls out there! Weve made an obligatory
dedicated annual observance of this holiday since 2016, and it always makes
for a festering, putrid pile of rotting, unwholesome fun art. October
also marks the anniversary of our establishment in 1994, so happy 29th to us!
I guess next year we ought to pull out some stops to celebrate our 30th, and
an entire decade since reviving. If we start preparing now, we just might
make it there! Me, I didnt realise that we were leaving any of the stops
in. Time for a more focused organ inspection!
no dick joke intended, it just worked out that way.
This artpack features lots of fun spooky artwork by some of our Halloween
heavy hitters who always make sure the occasion is well observed, including
AtonalOsprey, Horsenburger who at his peak might make a hundred Halloween
screens in a month... fortunately his pace is a little more sustainable these
days, and littlebitspace, who might hold up his hands and argue that his work
is not actually informed by the season at all, skulls and skeletons simply
being his preferred subjects, which he draws all year round. Presenting him
in that light is simply a trick perpetrated on you, the viewer, by the artpack
curator. Well, for this time of year, I think they are a special treat.
There is of course something else going on at this time of year -- the
Flashparty demoparty was recently underway in Argentina, and a number of the
artworks included in this artpack were up for consideration in the
competitions hosted there. Consequently the packs release has been delayed
until the very threshold of Halloween proper, allowing their entries to be
eligible for competition by debuting there shortly before also appearing in
this pack. We didnt even wait long enough to learn how well their entries
performed in the competitions, but hats off to our communitys Flashparty
competitors -- AtonalOsprey, CoaXCable, TeletextR, whose entries do not appear
in this pack, unlike those of Darokin, DosDoc, Illarterate, littlebitspace,
Mavenmob, Zeus II Polyducks -- with El Hombre Ombre, making his first artpack
appearance collaborating with Polyducks. ANSIspoon, who did not compete in
Flashparty, also makes his Mist pack debut in this collection with a screen
featuring Maddison, one of his original characters... and we are also only too
pleased to present diabolical ANSI work by 2Stoned, who also appears in an
artpack for the first time here.
Flashparty certainly isnt the only demoparty on the calendar -- there are so
many of them sometimes you need to choose which one youre going to attend
when theyre in conflict -- but one compo we often give special focus on here
in Mist pack infofiles is The Blender: the recent Blender compo previously
announced in our pages as planned to take part in October had to be postponed,
but we have make-up dates for it -- Nov 4-5.
There was nowhere to elegantly interweave this note, but big thanks are of
course due to littlebitspace for the appropriately haunting FILEID.DIZ
iconography associated with this artpack release, and to Zeus II and 2Stoned
for the header artworks you see atop the infofiles.
In addition to its traditional distribution hubs, for kicks this artpack will
for the first time be being offered via bittorrent. Its hard to imagine the
use case for this means of artpack distribution, but why not explore all the
angles? If it goes smoothly, we may expand our torrent offerings.
Speaking of exploring all the angles: no, hes not segueing into our new
pornography division, though hmmm, mistigris.org/y ? the first publication
from our Misprint Manuscripts imprint, Crowkeepers Scarecrow Poetics
chapbook, is now available for poetry fans to order a copy of to populate
their bookshelves with. Coming right up behind it is the print edition of
Cthulus surreal Guide of Identification of Musical the Instruments of
Frobnia gamebook, to fill your October with melody, dissonance, death and
confusion. More titles are on their way!
Finally: you want to talk scary for Halloween, heres a regular Picture of
Dorian Gray story: all three of the artpacks-in-progress mentioned in the
final paragraph of the MIST1022 artpacks infofile from one year ago are still
simmering away on the back burner. Weve still managed to release five other
artpacks since then, so its not like weve been bound up in stalemate since
then though some of those files may be getting pretty stale, mate! j/k, some
of it has been fermenting since the 90s, youll see! but it just goes to
show that its always worth exploring what lateral moves are possible when
forward progress isnt for whatever reason happening, because potentially
interesting side excursions can be well worthwhile unto themselves!
And I know, that isnt an especially spooky note to end this newsletter on, so
well try on this milestone of encroaching mortality and the passage of time
for size: the July 1984 publication date of William Gibsons novel
Neuromancer is now closer to the end of WWII than to today. Yikes!