Ü Ü ÜÛ² Þ °±ÛÜ ÞÜ ²ÜÜß °ÛÜ°°ß ÜÛÜÜÛ     ÞÛÜ ßÛÜ°°° Ýßß ÜÜÛÛÛ°°Ü±± °ÜÜÛ  °ÛÛÜ ÜÞ°ÜÛÜÜ ßß ÜÛÜÜÛÜÞÛÜÜÜÛÜÜÜÛ °°Ûßß ÞÛ°Û ²±ÛÛ   ßßÛ  ÛÛÜßÛßÛ°ÛÛÜÜÜÜÛ ÛÛ°°ÛÛÛÛÛ°ßßÛÛ° ßß ÜÜÜ°± ÞÛÛÛ ß ÛÛÛÝ ÞÛÜÜÜÜ     ÛÛÛ  ßÛÛÛÛÛ°°ÛÛ ÛÛßÛ²Û±ÛÜÜÛÛßßßÜ°ÜÜ ßßÛÜ ßÛÛÛÜ Û°ÛÝ ßÛ °ßßÝ   Þ°ÛÝ ßßÛÛÛÛÛßß  Û°Û ÛÛÛÛÛ  ßßÛßÛÛÛÜÜ ß ßßÛÛÛÛÛÛ °Ûß ÜÜÜÜ   ÜÛÛ° Þ°ÛÝ °ÛÛÜÜÜÜ  ÛÛÛ ² Û °Ü ßßÛß°ÛÛÜÜ ß° Þ°ÛÛ    Ü °°ß ÜÜÜ°   ÛÝ°± ÞÛÛÝ Þ±ßÜÛÛ ÞÛÜ°ßÝ ÞÛÛݱ°°°ÛÝ ÜÛÛÜÜ ßßÛÛÜÜ°Ü ÞÛÛÝ ßß Þ°ßÝÝ ÛÜß²°ÛÝ   ÛßßÛ  Û°Û  Ûßßß ßÛß°Ý Þ°ÛÝ ÞÜ°ÛÝ ±Û°°ÛßÛß Üß°ßÛß Þ°ÛÝÜÜ  ÞÛ° Ý ßÛß±°ÛÝ  ÛßÛ Þ Ý ßßÛÜ  ßßß ±ÛÛÛ° ÞßßÛÛÛÛÛÜÛßÛÛÜ ßßß  ßßÛÛÝÛßÛÛ  ÜÜ ßßßßßÛÛ°ÜÜÛÜÜ  ßß ßßßßß mistigris - "who?" =) quip(mistigris) Congratulations for making it here. As this artpack's public release was initially obfuscated behind a series of devious riddles, either you have been exceedingly clever, intimately connected, sagely patient, or belatedly curious. Either way: well met! <[crowe]:#mist> we are here searching for the ever elusive Mist pack.  Shhhh. You don't want to startle it. It can get awfully ugly. Here we are, my friends, within visual range of the last of the unreleased computer art I'd been zealously guarding since late 1998, unable to for whatever variety of reasons release M-9808, unable to fold this material into that growing albatross, unable to maintain morale in my dwindling cadre of computer art comrades (ultimately, unable even to maintain contact with them with the BBS rug pulled out from under our feet!) but nonetheless planning and preparing to release some kind of post-artscene post-artpack. <tincat> forget the pack, release my goddamn mother! I never got around to it because without an artscene (well, there were vestiges, but without a local artscene BBS hub), I was lacking two important components: people to provide art to fill these hypothetical artpacks with, and an audience to share said artpacks with. As you've seen earlier this year, I tried with the Living Closet artdisk to share computer art with people in real life on floppy diskettes -- but you also saw that these were attempts which met with what could charitably be described as less than full success. But I persisted in my best artgroup-leader habits picked up on BBSes -- surreptitiously saving things that I liked in case their source became suddenly unavailable (, FOREVER), then asking permission from people to re-publish the works (and baffling their creators.) Photos, comics, poems... I recall courting the involvement of a British fellow who was really into his Game Boy camera -- we weren't quite sure how it would translate into computer art but we were confident that we'd find our way there in the end. You also see in the collection of works here the would-be fruits of breaking through the "real-world art" wall Mistigris never quite managed to achieve back while it was originally alive, being lapped, then made redundant by, the Mistigris expats in Hallucigenia (otherwise put: why is our t-shirt design in their artpack?) *** morale has left channel #mist - THIS IS IRONIC That wall was scheduled to be broken by M-9808, but we didn't count on that release breaking us instead. Here we have some quantity of stockpiled works in genres (photography, photomanipulation, collage, comic book/comic strip, spoken word, remapped MS-DOS system fonts, MS Paint minimalism) that we'd felt belonged in artpacks but that the artscene wouldn't accept of us -- and which we'd been inadequately bold to force upon them. Out with a whimper rather than a bang; and what we have now is the faint 16-years-later echo of the bang that might have been. <otnooishfoo> reviewers wouldn't know art if vincent himself threw his  ear at them. YOU CAN QUOTE ME ON THAT! That said, there is a lot here. (It's a hundred megs, I should hope there is!) Some genres and mediums are better-represented than others -- the textmode art is conspicuously meagre, our showpiece being a final masterwork from Happyfish we had to await Hallucigenia's death to claim (and then wait 16 years to remember having claimed 8) as well as the first time in a long time any stock TheDraw fonts must have been used in an artpack (and perhaps the first time ever for Figlet fonts! Wait, I am forgetting our 2014 April Fool's pack...) from Cthulu's 2001 winter solstice card, when he knew he still needed textmode artwork but no longer had access to anyone able to produce it. Demonstrating just what disarray things were in as the house of the artscene was crashing to the ground, we have a couple of fun FILE_ID.DIZ files to share with you representing complete collections we released -- the Tracker Fix music compo packs and the spontaneously-assembled 11th e-mag -- which have been completely lost to the ages, leaving no trace that they ever existed save these DIZ files. Finally, we have also folded in PRGRS4.ZIP, a lost installment of Quip's instructional Progress series, demonstrating how to draw a logo. Any kids just starting ANSI art in 2015 -- this is where you want to begin! But not all textmode artforms are thinly represented here -- raw text is textmode at perhaps its most primal, and we have always been pleased to present it in great quantities! We have the cream of Cthulu's college Creative Writing classes, the final great flourishing of his poetic demiurge -- unrhymed lits promoting no bulletin boards, actually intoned upon smokey poetry slam stages to pretentious people who snapped their fingers in place of applause! crowds that, even if they numbered only five or six, still represented an expanded audience from our artscene releases because, as we all knew, no one in the scene actually read lit. Ah, well. Here we feature some lost specimens from our unique verbal bonsai botanist Crowkeeper (author of the formerly- etext.org-hosted, then lost, recently-reprinted-by-us "Scarecrow Poetics" collection) as well as some guest pieces from Heretic of the oOze e-mag from Australia, an ingenious referer log poem by heyoka, liberated from everything2, and the last known writings by MIA Mist stalwarts Skrubly and Lady Blue and, oh yes... four hours of music. <DracoMage> i wish i had a firm grasp on music theory <haquisaq> but, well, a large part of tracking is also sheer musical  talent... <thext> I wish I had a firm grasp of draco's butt.. <thext> oops This mega-dose of tracked computer music is primarily accounted for by two titans of the form, folks who would dash off a couple of tracks every morning while filling out the crossword in the time between brushing their teeth and finishing their coffee. Thirteen of these songs (and quite a number of high-resolution illustrations to boot!) are from Obsidian Zero (aka "ozero", formerly Onyx), the white hole at the heart of Sonic Equinox, who just kept creating and creating and hoped against hope that someone would be able to put some of it to some kind of use. (And look out -- this is only a chunk of the Onyx Legacy music disbursement, so stay tuned.) But dwarfing that we also have an incredible bequeathment of 23 further tracks by Melodia of Empress Play (and formerly sole proprietor of Digitallusions -- speaking of which, we also share Admiral Skuttlebutt's very last song under that label), a few 20th-anniversary remasterings accompanying new arrangements circa 1999 of original songs -- some previously released in Mist packs, many not -- for use on the WebTV service (for which Melodia was never actually paid, in case anyone from Microsoft is listening.) Those aren't the only stories from our music department -- we also feature a few of the final seemingly effortless virtuoso compositions from Haquisaq before he transitioned along to his new identity as Bryface, plus the long-reserved "Beyond" from Quip, set aside as a cornerstone showpiece for the Mistigris music CD that never came together back in the days before he also assumed a new identity and ascended to drum and bass superstardom. Kindly, we were gifted a guest track by The Hitman of PMA, as well as one last tune by our own Dracomage. Cthulu's own tracking prowess burgeoned even as the scene was crumbling around him, and though the A-list of those songs were vented in ACID-100 back when the odds of this collection ever seeing daylight were evaluated to be ... remote, a handful of B-list curios remained to spice up these proceedings. |