Happy Halloween! When we had our reunion back in 2014 it actually kicked off
after all the firecrackers fell silent on Oct 31st... well just say the pack
quietly dropped before anyone well, anyone on the West Coast had yet woken
up the morning of Nov 1st. Its press release I know, who do you even send
such an announcement to? Slashdot sure didnt bite! explicitly quoted
Frankenstein... the timing was very spooky even if the actual content of the
release explicitly was not -- after all, since our debut release in 1994 was
in an October, this was just an echo of that inaugural release! But when we
got around to releasing our next big new artpack in October one year later
its ineffable Octobericity was impossible to deny, and Halloween was pounding
at all the windows, gates, chimneys and drains to be let in. Ultimately we
decided to let Halloween have October and celebrate our own anniversary a
month later in November, keeping our festivities free from all the mouldering
bones and decaying flesh.
In that sense sharing a spooky artpack in October is one of the oldest
traditions weve kept up, one dropping in a focused fashion the same time
every year for a good decade! Even as other favorite annual themes of Mist
like the April Fools celebration of bad art and SF visions in May have
ultimately fallen by the wayside we like to think of it as made room for
the emergence of new traditions, aside from December observance of winter
meditations, nothing else has managed to keep up with our devotion to keeping
things spooky in late October!
As we demonstrate in this artpack, it only takes a few seasonal fanatics to
turn an October artpack into a Halloween artpack, and it isnt necessarily
the ones youd expect, like the one who famously draws exclusively skulls!
This time around, Blippypixel emerged from his VR vibecoding lair long enough
to drop a complement of spooky scenes hed drawn and programmed, while
CoaXCable gathered up a series of them hed strewn through demoparty compos
for months awaiting this occasion. Mozz unexpectedly embraced that feeling
in his bones after providing us with a splendidly chiropteran suite of DIZ
and infofile header illustrations, and Cthulu, well, its less that hes
devoted to Halloween and more that he has an unwholesome fixation on the
annual Simpsons Treehouse of Horror specials, the first and seemingly most
persistent subjects he ever seriously engaged in the ANSI art medium. MC
Fresher and Illarterate also offered material support in holding up the
creepy mood, and a host of other artists also iced the cake uhhh... Devils
food cake? with sporadic submissions on delightfully grim themes. One of
them we must explicitly welcome here in the official record is ZZT level
designer PogeSoft, making his artpack debut with a Hellraiser tribute ANSI.
Jesus wept!
Back to those demoparty compos -- probably there are a few spooky works by
members of our community we would have gladly included here were they not
under wraps prior to competing in Argentinas Flashparty demoparty, taking
place on Halloween itself! In order to avoid disqualifying them from
competition, we cant share them until they are judged, which cant possibly
happen prior to the party on Halloween... so the only way we could include
them in our Halloween artpack is to introduce you all to the hip new trend of
celebrating Halloween in November. Well, maybe we will use them as the
foundation for MIST1027. As great as Halloween is, our plan once again is
to be far too wrapped up in Advent preparations through November to keep the
pumpkin rolling in overtime.
And speaking of November and compos: 2026 nearly passed without a single
Blender compo being run. Well, Warpus and Cthulu will be once again
presiding over blender on the EFNet IRC on Sat Nov 14 to challenge you that
weekend to combine three assigned topics into an impromptu artwork for the
first and only time this year, so stay tuned!
And speaking of November and not speaking of compos: Nouscentric will be
presenting a live audio stream of Zen Render who you last, possibly first,
heard in the most recent MIST0826 unthemed artpack airing lost and forgotten
electronic compositions from the Gecko Temple, starting at 7 pm PST November
1st via gocast.fm/station/gecko-temple , so ... I know I just ended the
previous paragraph with stay tuned, but its probably even better
applicable here.
Thanks for joining us on one more Halloween voyage with Mist, and hopefully
well catch up with you again before the turning of the year!