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mistigris ÞÜÞ Þ
nov  2018  ßÛ Þ
 XXIV annis    ß











I've never written an "it's been four years since..." infofile before, as Mist
Classic stalled out at three years and two thirds!  (I only just squeaked
through a four-year tenure at everything2.com ... then again, my monthly open
stage series lasted for five years, and my weekly community radio program and
its associated spin-offs have all been grinding away for over a decade, so
maybe I've just mellowed to the point where my projects are undertaken in a
more sustainable fashion, who knows?)  Way to go, parenthetical aside, you cut
all the wind out of my sails one sentence into the infofile!  How about we try
that again?

(It's not my fault you simply can't manage to kill your darlings, but if you
think you can resist the compulsion to trip yourself up again, be my guest.)

In many ways this is the fourth birthday that Mist Classic never got to have,
conking out along the road to that milestone.  By any metric we had a good run
by underground artscene standards, but as you should all well know by now, it
left me all seized up inside with ... unfinished business.  Well, now it's been
four years since our reunion-cum-revival, and though it took us a couple of
years to wind up picking up the pace to the monthly schedule we'd always
aspired to, I'm pleased to report that though we're still a few releases shy of
our Mist Classic total, the number of individual artworks included within our
releases has exceeded our '90s sum.  Otherwise simply put, we've managed to
distribute and circulate more discrete pieces of art, surely to larger and
wider audiences, since returning to active duty.  Other vital metrics are way
down -- hours spent idling on the IRC, redialed attempts to connect to the WHQ,
formal resignations -- so they also are a good way of charting the overall
health of our collective undertaking.  (Instances of my flipping out on public
forums have remained steady, demonstrating that in this world some things are
simply eternal constants.)  (I was curious whether the amount of lit we publish
has increased or decreased, but that's tricky to calculate.  It's not
impossible that Crowkeeper is now singlehandedly producing more Tweet-poems
than the entire classic lit department working together could compete with.)

More to the point, were I to be hit by a bus and left in a persistent
vegetative state tomorrow, immobile in the body cast laid up in traction I'd
have fewer regrets about my unfinished artscene business.  (And, sure, more
regrets about my fatherless children.)  I've been finishing business like it's
going out of style, and let me tell you business is good for business.  I mean
sure, I have a dozen further artpacks-in-progress queued up that the world
would be sadly denied (only no, a handful of you do have access to that shared
Dropbox folder: you've gotta promise me you'd put it to use!  Don't worry, no
infofiles necessary, no one reads them anyway) but no one can claim that I
haven't been stuffing as much into our releases as I possibly can.  (Many could
claim that I've arguably stuffing them overfull with the wrong kind of stuff,
but again as you well know, I heard that for the four years of Mist Classic
also.  That's just part of what we do here.)

This weird "Diving Bell and the Butterfly" tangent is a curious distraction
since as you can all well imagine, I have no intention of stopping releasing
artpacks (whether or not they ultimately bear any resemblance to the artpacks
of the '90s), so that said, let's proceed with the info that makes the
infofile.  All this hypothetical speculation is just a way of generating some
rhetorical filler to pad things out.  I'll share a curious anecdote and then
get down to the hard facts: after spending most of a year compiling material
for this collection, not just curating but trimming and polishing its contents
(renaming files for consistency, cropping images, reversing damage caused by
careless use of JPG compression, fortifying with metadata), earlier this week I
accidentally slipped on the mouse and inadvertently deleted the entire
directory, all nearly-300 artworks ready to go.  Whoopsie!  Back in the classic
era I would have had a few options at that point: restore from floppy or tape
backup, revisit the incoming directory on the WHQ, announce my colossal error
on the echomail network and invite artists to re-submit their works... oh yeah,
if I was running MS-DOS 5.0 or later, I could give UNDELETE a try.  Now a
little older and a little wiser, with more resources at my disposal and a more
cynical expectation of Murphy's Law, I have anticipated this eventuality and
planned around it.  Visiting Dropbox, the free cloud storage provider that
helps me sync artpack submissions between different devices, I was able to
employ its strong version control features to restore the directory.  (It
worked a little too well, and gave me a directory full of old as well as recent
versions of all of the files, so I got to do a little weeding before the state
of the directory had returned to its current configuration.)  My point is?  My
point is I'm an idiot, but if you expect idiocy, this collection proves that
you can still arrange to work around it and achieve great things.  Like this
artpack collection!  While there is no overarching theme for the works this
month, for the anniversary collections I do like to get meta and prioritize
pieces that evoke themes of technology and cyberspace, so for instance you will
see a whole series of portraits Horsenburger drew of YouTube personalities and
PiquANSI fanart of podcasts; cyberspace doesn't have to be some hazy Gibsonian
dystopic future -- cyberspace is here (and, arguably, the dystopic future also)
NOW, so there you have it.

Some pieces in this artpack originally appeared as entries in demoparties;
overall, the past calendar year has been our most active in that forum, seeing
I believe more involvement in demoparty compos than in all the previous 23
years combined.  Not bad!  (And I'm sure that the demoparty crews think we're
absolute nutters.  But we're not, generally speaking, coming in dead last in
the competitions, so we must be doing something right to at least surpass most
of the joke entries.)  We feature a piece by Sassafras that was in competition
at Layer One in May; Zeus II gives us a guest submission that claims to have
been made for Evoke 2018 in August (though I could swear I saw it turn up at a
different compo, but I'm willing to entertain the possibility of my
fallibility, I did after all delete the artpack); a whole cadre of Mistigris
members flooded the Flash Party compos remotely in September, including pieces
by Illarterate (who placed 1st), Horsenburger (2nd and 4th), Jellica Jake (3rd
and 3rd in different compos), Polyducks (1st, outstanding in his solo field)
and Snake Petsken (formerly known as Manuel Vio, placing 5th and 6th.)  October
saw the Bloktoberfest teletext summit, where the masters of the medium --
Horsenburger, Illarterate and TeletextR -- cleaned up much as you might expect
they would.  And most recently, Snake Petsken again (placing 9th in the ANSI
art compo with a PETSCII submission, go figure) and CCCfire (11th) rated at
Demosplash earlier this month.  So there you have it -- other people enjoyed
their work, so therefore logically you ought to as well.  For our next trick,
the computer will calculate pi to the last digit!

Things have been up outside of the demoparties also (and I'm not talking about
Boozembly) -- you all just missed my semiannual Big Pixels vintage gaming
party, but The Mythical Man's art is likely still up at the Eastside Culture
Crawl.  Horsenburger has been taking on a key role assisting his old friend Mr.
Biffo (who is unrepresented in this collection, alas, with bigger fish to fry
than teletext -- can you imagine we might ever acknowledge the existence of
such a thing here?) in getting Digitizer up and running as a crowdfunded web
video series.  For those who didn't get their heart's desire on Christmas Day
(what?  a Master System?  All my friends got NESes!) the Vancouver Chipmusic
Society presents another instalment of Overflow Dec 27th at the Fox Cinema.
Speaking of Christmas, I should see if I can get another gift guide post up
this year in time to be useful.  But I digress, you shall see for yourself on
social media how useful I manage to be!  (Spoiler warning: nothing on social
media is ever useful.)

This isn't our biggest artpack ever -- that dubious honour likely belongs to
MIST1116, but that represented the primary output of a year that saw relatively
few outlets.  We're releasing artpacks on a monthly basis here, as you well
know, and were still able to strain the seams here with what is technically
likely only our second-biggest artpack release of all time.  (Not filesize-
biggest, a distinction held by a collection containing a good deal more music
than this one, but instead number of files-biggest.) My point is, well, I'm
getting to it: there are 60 participants this time around.  Thanks, everyone,
for taking part!  I know, I make it a very low-impact affair for most of you.
What I'm leading toward is that among those five dozens of contributors, a
number of them are on this occasion making their first appearances in a
Mistigris artpack (or indeed in an artpack of any kind): welcome and hats off
to ASCIIdent developer Andrey Fomin, BBC micro visionary Blippypixel, type-in
textmode historian Brownpapercowgirl, web developer Garann, artscene fifth
column Grobo, lifestyle vintage computing enthusiast my_life_computerized, and
superfan Simon Schaffert.  I'm sure that some of you we'll never see again, and
others of you have no chance but to keep haunting our collections for months
yet to come.  That is simply how it is meant to be!

Those of you who will continue haunting our collections may find themselves
doing it rather soon: we have two more releases planned for this calendar year,
so stay tuned everybody!

A special thanks to Misfit at 16 Colours for helping us to maintain
representation among enthusiasts of, ahem, blocky art, and to Burps of Fuel for
so successfully relieving Maze of the textmod.es burden with 16colo.rs, the
web's newest and most happening artpack web gallery.  (And one more to Nail,
who never imagined we might wait so long to put to work the FILE_ID.DIZ he
graciously sent our way.)  Now everybody get out there and make some computer
art!

Mistigris: 24 years of resisting the compulsion to trip yourself up
SAUCE00mistigris nov 2018 infofile        nail                blocktronics        20180302Ä/

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