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The idea came up that it might be fun to tap our community of teletext artists to do a fancomic in homage to Turner  the Worm, hero of Digitiser's serial illustrated adventure stories, but getting the wheels rolling took quite some doing among all the other monthly releases we had lined up at that time. Our initial push did inspire  Blippypixel to do a handful of stylistically divergent "what mundane things has Turner been getting up to these days now that he's all grown up?" single-panel illustrations. "Turner has been furloughed at home. He is watching a program about the economy and doesn't understand it. He doesn't want to go back to work." Pretty heady stuff, as far as dry humour goes. But I thought we could take it further. Maybe we could amp up the humour by sending today's washed-up Turner back in time, out of his washed-up era and back to the millennial age of titans when he was in his virile prime? Juxtapose the zeroes with the heroes! Once I cooked up the time travel premise the rest of it practically wrote itself. (I had a hard time reining  things in during the call-in segment with the soothsayer, the gag-filled  heart of the narrative, which could easily have run twice as long. "Will the future of sport continue to be represented by the fair conduct & human decency of such star athletes as Lance Armstrong and Tiger Woods?" "Those cheating tossers? Thank God, no!" "This year Roman Polanski won the Oscar for the Pianist and as we speak crowds are lined up around the block for copies of JK Rowling's Order of the Phoenix. In future, will these creators still be mainly recognized for the quality of their creative work?" "If I were to tell you what they're most known for in 2020 this service would be sued off the air!") Once the script was finalised (and given a substantial, much-needed edit -- turns out a page of teletext can only contain so many words, as ZXguesser demonstrated) the artists got down to work -- and once they got rolling, the project zoomed along at quite a clip, sometimes feeling like new pages were rolling out on a daily basis. Momentum trailed off, as it does with these things, and getting the final few screens wrapped up was a bit of a chore, but what was the hurry? The cake was iced by wrapping the story on a screen drawn by the historical Turner writer/artist, the celebrated Mr. Biffo himself! It was put online on one of the browser teletext services and people asked -- what's next, let's do another one of these! But I felt like we weren't quite done with it yet. They needed to go in an artpack. But before that, we needed to share it with a demoparty! A rare, teletext- positive demoparty. But even so... how do you share 40 panels of sequential visual narrative with a demoparty? Wild compo it is (ask me about Crash  '97!), and I guess we'll present it as an animatic of sorts, a slideshow, if you will. Still, seems like it might be kind of slow watching in silence, maybe keep things moving with some kind of soundtrack. I barked up a couple of wrong trees exploring the history of Ceephax music before realising that I had been sitting on a body of tracker music that had gone unreleased and unheard since being created in the late '90s, close to the 2003 setting of our story, and thinking that tapping them might succeed in producing a suitable nostalgic vibe to move the story along. Onyx (later Ozero) of SONiC EQUiNOX, formerly NinjaDude of Happy Fetus Records, had embodied a kind of musical Tourette's syndrome, lashing out with reflexive musical compositions at a tremendous clip for years at a go, having picked up just enough of the ropes to be able to find his musical voice and compose in it basically in realtime. (He pumped out tracks at such a pace that, as you  will see, he repeatedly changed the punctuation mark following his ONX  filename suffix designation because the namespace for the remaining four  characters kept running out. Some of these files are named with hyphens,  some with underscores, and one with a tilde! Basically he was the living  embodiment of late '90s telephone exchange expansion, always opening up new area codes in his own way.) I understand he presented an audiocassette tape of his best work to the Burnaby front desk of Electronic Arts in the late '90s, but failing to get a callback, helped out with a couple of Delphic  Oracle edutainment productions before pivoting to focus on his fiction, an avenue he continues pursuing today. Different moments in our animatic evoked different emotional moods, so a list of cues was drawn up, mapping the emotional arcs to stirring themes in his songs... which sometimes only get heard in the animatic for a few seconds before the reader turns to the next page and another cue is heard. So here in this archive, we include all of the tracker songs the animatic sampled from -- but present in their entirety, in case anyone wanted to hear "where was he going with that one? It was just getting good!" (And to ice the cake, due to a shallow thematic similarity  with Turner, we're including the original, never-heard mix of his  NIN-inspired song "Worm", previously only circulated in its "Blue Gloom"  remix.) So the script was written, the pictures were drawn, the musical cues assembled... all the pieces were arranged in iMovie and rendered down. We had our sights set on a target demoparty, one that appreciated teletext, had a wild compo and allowed remote entries. (In retrospect it might have made  sense to target a UK demoparty, whose patrons would have... ever heard of  Turner the Worm before, but perhaps it was time for him to win over new  audiences!) No matter, we had our plan and we were going to see it through! In preparation for the unveiling of the animatic, we posted the entire comic day by day in our regular social media posts. Flashparty 2021, look out! As we were rendering the final version of the animatic the night before the submission deadline we opened up the submission link to see if we could pre-fill any parts of the form, when we learned we had made a horrible miscalculation. (A real risk of demoparty participation!) To be fair, time zone calculations are quite a bit more complicated than lay people anticipate. We were trying to submit the file 45 minutes after submissions had closed, Argentina time, and since the process was entirely automatic, there was no human authority we could go and appeal to. OK then... Flashparty 2022, here we come! Anyway, the extra year we had to get the submission in ... well, it's not like the state-of-the-art cutting-edge teletext graphics were going to be getting any more dated in the intervening time. It's not like our theme of feeling decrepit following the passage of long periods of time would be felt any less pointedly after an additional year went by! Anyway, we could take advantage of the extra time to enhance the animatic further by voicing the characters! (Spoiler warning:  no characters were voiced 8) So: we tightened up the animatic, slimmed it down by a couple of minutes (overall duration is critical when you imagine an audience of impatient  demoparty patrons contemplating whether to start a riot waiting for your  production to wrap up), figured out how to export it in higher quality (which  really made the crapulence of the pre-rendered two-frame flashing screens  stand out), learned that we had to submit a low-quality render to the party anyway... and it entered the competition, was budded off from the "anything goes" wild category (I don't know where else you would file a webcomic  animatic) to the animation category, where we took third place and must have confused the hell out of the creators of the three genuinely animated entries that we managed to beat with our collection of 40 still images... and, OK, now that it's been presented, it's time to throw all the pages into a zipfile, officially release it and move on. We started working on this comic in 2020 and now we're in the closing months of 2022. This will finally be behind us if only Cthulu can stop protracting the infofile and bring it all on home! (Sadly, this is Cthulu's house speciality. "Protract the infofile" is his personal brand.) But all good things must come to an end. The final necessary bit of data I need to recount here is that the Turner teletext screens did eventually make their way to a teletext carousel on a garage server, which you can enjoy in a form closer to their native element at: http://teastop.plus.com:8080/?service=turner  and of course the animatic itself, which is too large to include in this artpack, can be found at https://youtu.be/VdI8MpUaEvs or, if you prefer, https://mistigris.org/packs/MTURNER1/ Mistigris%20-%20Turn%20Turn%20Turn%20-%20Flashparty%20-%20large.mov  (Beware, that filename doesn't lie.) This must be close to the end of the line for this particular project, though it would be fun to do a small print run of the comic for diehard Turner fans. And as the closing screen suggests, there is interest in keeping to the serial tradition and ... making another one. So stay tuned... if we started working on the next installment now, supposing it unfolded at the pace that this one did, we just might have something to show you in 2025 8) In the meantime, the remainder of the Mistigris submissions to FlashParty 2022 will appear in our next unthemed artpack -- which, who knows, might be dropping sometime around January or February 2023. That may seem like a long time, but do keep in mind that some of the Onyx songs included here haven't been heard by another living soul since 1995. We are in possession of quite a bit more of his music that has never come to light (or... tickled an  eardrum, I don't know what would be the audio equivalent, come up with your  own metaphor here), and we have plans to finally get the rest of it out there into circulation in the near future. Heck, depending on its reception, we just might be able to lean on him to make some new tracker tunes for the first time in the last 20 years! So stay tuned. (We will forego the standard "memberlist" file because the sequence of  teletext screens already explicitly names and thanks all participants, but  thanks again to all of them! Writing a comics script was a fun exercise and  seeing it come to life with illustrations was a real thrill.) (Imagining it  being inflicted on a room full of confused Argentinians is just the icing on  the cake!) (Aw, who am I kidding. How can I ever refrain from extending credit or  elongating an infofile? A big hearty three cheers and thanks to: Uglifruit, Illarterate, TitaniumDave, Nikki, Mr. Biffo, Horsenburger, AtonalOsprey and Onyx for their roles in the main comic; Blippypixel for inspiring it and  ZXGuesser for the gentle nudge toward the editor's desk.) SAUCE00MTURNER1 newsletter Uglifruit and CthuluMistigris 20221016JPеIBM VGA