__  \_/  ( )_ --(_)-- (_  ( _) / \  (__)/ \  /   \  /\ .----/_____\-----.___/__\ /_______\n m/______\__|""| | [] [] |m w| [][] |w |""| | [] [] |m w| [][] |m |""| ..--''"''"''"''"''"''''"''"''"''--.. _ _ (\_/)_ (\_/) (-(_)-) (\_/) (-(_)-) (/_\) (-(_)-) (/_\)|(/_\) |(\|/)| |/) \|/(\| |/ | \|  "''"''"''"''''"''"''"''"'' ldb Welcome to our latest artpack collection! Through automatic social media insights and exhaustive manual analysis (spreadsheets: I'm not just joking about them) we now know more than ever about our audience and what they like to see in our collections, and with sixteencolors seemingly joined by textmod.es in the paralysis that perhaps acts as a prelude to decrepitude, the path forward for artpacks has never been more in question. (Given the apparent frailty of the online artpack galleries -- though artpacks.org is still with us and updating -- we'll try to ensure that everything in our collections going forward is easily accessible to casual human web browser investigators on our website at mistigris.org/packs ... ANSI art will be converted to PNG, tracked music to MP3, infofiles to raw text.) But existential questions have been Mist's bread and butter since our inception in 1994, so let's not dwell on them overly long: we know that we'll never think or strategize our way to a correct answer, the only way to find out what happens next is to continue existing. Very well then! (Note: just in time for the end of May, Maze came out of hiding... or back from vacation, or whatever it is he was up to... and began making updates to textmod.es. Doom averted -- this time! But moving forward, we will be a little more careful and paranoid.) Though this is our infofile, I must confess that there is but little news to report on this month: most curiously, we participated in a celebration of Pinguino's birthday at NinjaPenguin 12 with an ASCII art ticker tape parade of sorts -- Burps of Fuel set up remote access to a thermal paper printer, which allowed off-site well-wishers to send in their regards in the form of ASCII art. We sent off a time-travelling greeting from Mist Classic, scouring the back archives for penguin appearances. If you keep your eyes open you should be able to find a collection of the celebratory missives, including ours, circulating. Errata? A teletext piece by TeletextR last month was falsely credited to Alistair Cree. Even though the artists' styles are like night and day, the mistake obvious to anyone who takes a second to consider it, it is inevitable that these things happen -- given however many months we've been releasing 100+ pieces now, it's perhaps surprising that this doesn't happen more often. Even with a 1% metadata failure rate, we ought to be hitting at least one every month! Oh well. All we can do is try our best. And... oh yes! Just in time for the second Living Closet revival art party at Claire Roberts' house (you can now call her Nouscentric), we released MIST-LC-ARTDISK-2, a sequel to our "best of Mistigris" floppy diskette distributed at one of their 1999 art parties. This collection includes the Venn diagram of our favorite small-file-size works released under the Mistigris banner between the previous art disk's 1999 release and the art party revival in May 2017... plus some documents of that art party, released a year later in May 2018. It's a little complicated to wrap your brain around, but the Mistigris connection is nonetheless indisputable, you may just have to take my word for it. Following our very successful science fiction May 2018 artpack (and the more dubious but distinctly successful-on-its-own-terms April Fool's artpack preceding it), there is officially no explicit theme this time around, though where possible in deference to the season I have tapped the wellspring of works on themes of warm-weather recreation and the splendor of natural landscapes (welcome back, Pixel Art For The Heart, the two of us haven't crossed paths since you iced (as in icing a cake, not just run of the mill winter ice) our winter MIST1217 collection!) and their denizens. (No, after that mega doubly-parenthetical aside, it's simply not fair to expect people to still be able to handle that closing clause!) Fear not, we'll have another pile of pop culture references for you next time around! Stay tuned! (That's a hint.) Making their first appearances here with us this month you'll find pieces from the following artists making their artpack debuts with Mistigris: Connexicon, Etana's partner and Tilted Windmills colleague; Italian architecture student Involtino; English typewriter artist Jamie Graham; Italian digital artist nbreakfast; Korean computer science student Nelumbotus; and German fusion bead pixelartist Webersso.n. As well, other artists have been with us for a while now but are only just now getting the opportunity to really open up during our window of leaving dopey themes behind. Items to keep your eyes open for include Daniel Wickert's return to kaleidoscopic imagery, now in suitably low resolution thanks to the Lego company! Also you can find an eerily period-appropriate lit by Cranksy laid out as ANSI art, bizarrely resonant with something you would have found in our first collections of the early '90s. Arielle Olivier shares a whole suite of a baker's dozen thought-provoking collages, Illarterate takes us on a whirlwind tour of alternate teletext history, and Max Mouse -- who has returned from the wilderness -- has an entire gallery of ANSI art interface and illustrations from one of his MUD (multi-user dungeon) online game projects. (And all that's just scraping the surface! There's a ton we've been holding back waiting for a chance to share with you!) This concludes this month's typical bait-and-switch Mistigris infofile. (Oh, we have nothing to say. Here, allow me to demonstrate for several pages.) Many thanks to Nail for the FILE_ID.DIZ, without which... this wouldn't really be an artpack. (Well it would be, it would be an artpack with a woefully amateurish Cthulu DIZ.) Thanks to our audiences and our new contributors -- we are always looking for submissions! We share well over a hundred pieces monthly on social media, a mill that demands grist by the pound! And greetz to our colleagues at fuel.wtf, blocktronics.org, impure.nl, Fire Dream, Break, galza.org, pungas.space, paleotronic.com, soundcloud.com/bitcouver, vanchipmusic.ca, and TABNet!  \_/  --(_)-- .n.  / \ /___\ | |o| IIIIIII | /| | / | |/ | | /| | / | |/ |q\ _ | /|___ _ _ /| \ ('> | / |___\ <') ('>/ | \  q\ (/)_..|/__|_[]|..(\) (/)  /__|___\ /| \  ,|"||"|'.|"| .,'.__,'., / | \ .' |:||:| |:|/__|___\ .....| |..............| |..| |'.,,.,.'.__,'..,  ldb