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We handed him a bottle of his favorite beverage, Jílt! Cola, to settle his nerves, got him a chair and put him to work preparing the latest project we were then prioritizing: a print manuscript being laid out. After a short time attending to this task, he became very agitated, drawing our attention to a peculiar error message he'd managed to bring up in Scribus, describing a text anomaly. Shortly afterward, all the equipment started malfunctioning and we had to halt work after sudden^C  It was the wildest thing: immediately following an unexpected power outage in the area, a second Cthulu showed up at the computer lab in his basement, disoriented and alarmed, but committed to advancing the next Mistigris release. We handed him a bottle of his favorite beverage, Jílt! Cola, to settle his nerves, got him a chair and put him to work preparing the latest project we were then prioritizing: a collection of popular melodies arranged in ANSI music. After a short time attending to this task, he became very agitated, drawing our attention to a peculiar error message he'd managed to bring up in ANSIplay, describing an audio anomaly. Shortly afterward, all the equipment started malfunctioning and we had to halt work after sudden^C  It was the wildest thing: immediately following an unexpected power outage in the area, a second Cthulu showed up at the computer lab in his basement, disoriented and alarmed, but committed to advancing the next Mistigris release. We handed him a bottle of his favorite beverage, Jílt! Cola, to settle his nerves, got him a chair and put him to work preparing the latest project we were then prioritizing: an e-mag about food and recipes. After a short time attending to this task, he became very agitated, drawing our attention to a peculiar error message he'd managed to bring up in Browser, describing a flavour anomaly. Shortly afterward, all the equipment started malfunctioning and we had to halt work after sudden^C  It was the wildest thing: immediately following an unexpected power outage in the area, a second Cthulu showed up at the computer lab in his basement, disoriented and alarmed, but committed to advancing the next Mistigris release. We handed him a bottle of his favorite beverage, Jílt! Cola, to settle his nerves, got him a chair and put him to work preparing the latest project we were then prioritizing: finishing off a giant networked ANSI art collaboration. After a short time attending to this task, he became very agitated, drawing our attention to a peculiar error message he'd managed to bring up in Moebius, describing a palette anomaly. Shortly afterward, all the equipment started malfunctioning and we had to halt work after sudden^C  It was the wildest thing: immediately following an unexpected power outage in the area, a second Cthulu showed up at the computer lab in his basement, disoriented and alarmed, but committed to advancing the next Mistigris release. We handed him a bottle of his favorite beverage, Jílt! Cola, to settle his nerves, got him a chair and put him to work preparing the latest project we were then prioritizing: packaging computer art on science fiction themes to share in the month of May, as we had done that month for the previous five years. After a short time attending to this task... he calmed noticeably. Putting the finishing touches on an infofile, he got up and stretched before proclaiming that he had to head back to "his timeline" (?!) and finish watching some old STTNG episodes. ... OK, looks like we managed to duck that malfunction, so perhaps this is the prime universe after all, not the ruined 2023 of Perfect Dark, Gunbuster or The Tomorrow War. The more years we do these SF artpacks and the further we get into "the future", the more milquetoast what we get measures up compared to what we were hoping (hello, flying cars?) or dreading ("a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies!"), as though existence itself is subject to the law of diminishing returns... and even our approaching dystopian visions are diminished compared to earlier, bolder conceptions of potential futures now behind us. Well, it all helps us to better cultivate our finely-attuned appreciation for retrofuturism. Days of Future Past, then! But enough wallowing in our theme. Thanks to LDA for this artpack's nicely moody FILE_ID.DIZ art and ... ok, are you sure we aren't in a parallel universe? You're telling me Cthulu drew both infofile headers? (Well, Frank Drake and Carl Sagan designed the Arecibo message; Cthu merely transcribed it -- and that only because its diagram of the Arecibo Radio Telescope bore a superficial resemblance to Mistigris' leading letter M, talk about grasping at straws! The telescope itself was decommissioned, "rapid unplanned disassembly" Space-X style, back in 2020 now, while we're on the topic of retrofuturism... but I digress.) I would like to acknowledge a few firsts: this artpack marks the first time Nitron's colleague Alterra has appeared in a Mist pack, bringing some geometrical ASCII space station designs along with him; San_Tagoy has work appearing in this collection, only previously seen participating in the recent Blender compo (next up July 22-23 btw!); and The Green Herring, explicitly repudiating Shi-Akuma's AI excesses that soured MIST0223, steps out from the ZZT realm and into an artpack for the first time here. Welcome to all of you! We started doing these SF artpacks specifically because artists were feverish to manufacture Star Wars fanart, but perhaps after the hangover of "somehow, Palpatine returned" and Disney(+)'s carpet-bombing oversaturation of that market with five movies and seven streaming series -- I mean, I like the baby Yoda as much as the next guy, but keeping up with this stuff is a full-time job. The galaxy far, far away is distinctly a supporting player here in this artpack, positioned somewhere between Darkman Almighty's dominant Star Trek tributes (it looks like Q has reversed whatever he did to Worf over the holidays, but otherwise his lens has turned to DS9) and Blippypixel's nods to foundational classics of the SF genre from the '50s, '60s and '70s. Granted, all of the fanart combined goes in the backseat -- or possibly the trunk -- with Blippy's fantastic original SF fever dreams storming the helm by the dozens and setting the controls for the heart of the sun. If we can eventually manage to collectively get all this Star Wars mania out of our system we might finally take a break from SF artpacks in May of 2024, but we likely still could release a Blippypixel solo pack on SF subjects... any month of the year! But enough about Blippy -- sure, 75 of these artworks may be his, but we still pulled together 50 more from other parties. The unaffiliated Nitron endows us with a lordly guesting spree here, revelling in War Games and early anime nostalgia. (And don't get started asking him about MASK!) We also take the opportunity to revisit the humorous paintings of Nick Lakowski, whose work appeared regularly in our post-revival artpacks for some five years. Also, Dosdoc has just made a bold lateral move from block ASCII logos to colour ANSI illustration (provided it's still literary in nature: he has his standards!) and just had to put in a special appearance at the very last minute to demonstrate his new approach -- still outsider by artscene standards, but we look forward to seeing where it evolves to. Thanks to all of these individuals and the rest of our contributors -- also to our colleagues who took a breather this month and are cheering from the side-lines, and the extended members of our community out there in the audience, so cheers and greetings to all of the cannibal clones, cyborg gladiators, howling mutants, mad scientists, rogue AIs, surly Roombas, street samurai with indigestion, literate grey goo and renegade Boston Dynamics dogs out there reading this infofile from a bunker somewhere in the glowing, irradiated wasteland. We did it all for you! ^Z SAUCE00MIST0523 infofile Cthulu Mistigris 20230509ŒMPÁIBM VGA