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I would be moved to make some pithy observation about special relativity were the rest of our community not also moving at our languid pace, suggesting that the realm of retrocomputing, on a journey in this time capsule along with us, is continuing at one speed along one trajectory, even as the rest of the world spirals away into chaos and disruption. (Or, otherwise put: our controls are locked in to 1994, while outside this sphere things seem to be plotting a course for 1942. Maybe sometime soon we'll feature our first artworks designed for Bombe machines and Colossus computers!) As is customary, we like to look back toward the canon of uchronia or alternate histories to see how this year measures up to the speculation by decades of writers, and ... well, it could be better and it could be worse. In any event, we are definitely drifting into the realm of b-list speculative futures: not many people cared all that much about the year 2025 (at least, not outside of Asia), the highest-profile of which is probably the book The Running Man... not a variety of Futuresport that we're watching quite yet, something to be thankful for. Titles such as Twilight's Last Gleaming, A Friend of the Earth, and The Lake At The End Of The World don't beggar the imagination, but it's not yet too late to change the path to them. It looks like we did manage to duck the bullet leading to The Peshawar Lancers, but all the same why couldn't get a future-present that's just kind of fun, you know, like Segagaga? In conclusion, here in the year of the inescapable AI, perhaps Spike Jonze's Her is the best fit for our current stop on the death spiral. On that happy note, we change our focus to the contents of this artpack. It feels like every year now, we're emphasising how diminished a role the Star Wars franchise is playing (no one took my "Where's all the Andor fanart?" bait from a year ago) -- it's not yet entirely absent from this milieu but it definitely is now just another colour in the SF spectrum along with Star Trek, Babylon 5, Judge Dredd, 2001 and Ghost in the Shell. For starters, I should draw your attention to AtonalOsprey's modelbots series, inspired by impossible scantily-clad inventions he keeps being contacted by on social media. (Less SF than contemporary slop, but truly we are living in a dystopia and here in cyberspace we have front row seats!) This artpack includes a couple of artworks drawn for demoparties, including one from Zeus II (among many other ANSI illustrations here) for Horizon BBS, which placed 10th in last year's Evoke ANSI compo, and a very recent joint by Kirkman and LDA drawn with the (unfulfilled) intention of competing in LayerOne's ANSI compo last week. Undoubtedly MC Fresher's Unicode work in Durdraw will catch your attention (we're just priming the pump here for next month's unthemed collection, which will feature quite a bit more of his distinctive work), and The Green Herring demonstrates the triumph of the human imagination over genAI by bringing you along on a journey of pulling polished, finished screens out of a trio of random shapes and squiggles. We'd like to give a warm welcome to y4my4m, whose Blender experiment looked enough like a movie poster that he decided to mock it up in full. All that can be found here plus distinctive work by esteemed guests and regular contributors 2Stoned, Blippypixel, Codefenix, Consolejockey, Darkman Almighty, Discgator, Hortau, ldb, Nick Lakowski, Nitron, Nouscentric and Teletextr! A big thanks to Zeus II for furnishing this artpack with all of its livery (the FILE_ID.DIZ and that gorgeous logo atop this infofile), and to you fine folks for choosing to spend a little of your screen time with us. Stay tuned for another artpack out of us next month (which really isn't as far away as it sounds), where anything goes! SAUCE00MIST0525 infofile Cthulu / Zeus II Mistigris 20250531K!P^IBM VGA