Running on the last memories of fumes, Cthulu, founder of the 604-based
computer artgroup Mistigris, released a "best-of" compilation floppy diskette
of his group's four years of activity, Oct 1994-July 1998, at the Living 
Closet event held at the Church of Pointless Hysteria on July 23, 1999, in
some hazy and nebulous attempt to bridge past glories with new avenues... an
effort that was ultimately a failure.  By 1999, anyone who still /had/ a
floppy diskette drive in their computer (as the trendsetting iMac launched in
1998 without one) would be wary, to say the least, of taking home a diskette
of unknown provenance and loading it up into their machine, and only two of
the ten (collectible limited edition!) disks prepared ended up being taken
home.

The work curating the collection was not entirely a waste, as it was 
circulated online to what remained of its traditional audience, and 
represented the first release of several distinguished artworks Cthulu had 
been sitting on through (and past, ultimately) Mist Classic's lifespan. 
Pointing to the future, the collection was also (painstakingly) manually
converted into a web gallery of sorts, demonstrating what Mist had attempted
(and failed) in the M-9808 artpack / website slow-motion car crash.

The Living Closet itself boomed and bustd, following the pattern established by 
Mistigris, and for a long time Cthulu had neither of them in his life.  Then, 
on the occasion of Mist's 20th anniversary, he found himself releasing 
artpacks again.  Two years later, he found himself releasing them on a 
monthly basis!

Because one good nostalgia deserves another, by 2017 the time was found ripe 
to celebrate the Living Closet's past glories again (looking at the 20th 
anniversary of its own establishment the following year which, uh, here we are!), and for a private and personal synergy, Cthulu thought that it felt
right to release a second artdisk on this occasion -- again distributed on
floppy diskette -- consisting of a highlights reel of the leanest, meanest
works of computer art that had been included in Mistigris artpacks since its
revival in 2014, consisting of potential pickings from the following
collections:

      MIST1014
      M-9808
      MIST1015
      MIST2000
      MIST1016
      MIST1116
      MIST1216
      MIST0117
      MIST0217
      MIST0317
      MIST0517

They're likely not all represented, but there are nonetheless included 
some 73 artworks culled from their ranks, by the following local artists:

Arielle Olivier, bryface, cjb, Cthulu, Hailey, Happyfish, Ice Cream Emperor, 
the Mythical Man, Pannekoekologist, Publius Emeritus II, Phatal, Quip, and 
Tincat...

plus supporting works from remote guests Matt Matthew (Hawaii), CCCFire, 
Creonix (Poland), Enzo (Brazil), Heyoka (UK), Horsenburger (UK), Ideath
(Oregon), Illarterate (UK), jeepee (Quebec), Jim Munroe (Toronto), Kalcha
(Japan), Kyo (Hawaii), Lauren Martin (Alberta), LDA, LDB (Ontario), Maeve Wolf 
(Australia), Nail (Germany), Polyducks (UK), Raquel Meyers (Sweden), Skavi, 
Starstew (Oregon), Stu (UK), TeletextR (UK), Theresa Oborn (Seattle) and
VileR (Israel).

36 of them, all told!  More people representing in this little floppy disk
than we would be seeing in person at the Living Closet art party!  Strange but 
true.  Artforms represented include the traditional artscene staples of ANSI 
art, ASCII art, RIPscrip vector art and high resolution bitmapped artwork as 
well as tracker music and "lit"(erature) saved as raw text.  Representing the 
contemporary, expanded scope of Mistigris, we're also seeing a great deal of 
"3-bit" teletext artwork, some Shift_JIS and PETSCII representing the 
retrocomputing textmode traditions of the UK, Japan and ... territories in 
which the Commodore 64 was dominant, respectively.  If you have difficulty 
opening the files, some old hacker will no doubt be thrilled to take on the 
challenge.

The necessary disclaimer is that of course not all our favourite pieces of the
past four years are in this collection -- works included here had to pass 
/two/ criteria: first, we had to consider them the cream of the crop, and 
second, of course they had to have small enough filesizes to fit in great 
abundance on a floppy disk.  (After packaging the disk, we ran the files
through some optimizers, making for even more unused space available on the 
floppy we didn't have time to pursue filling.  But to make up for it, in this 
archive, we have bundled in some documentary artefacts from the May 2017 art 
party at which these floppies were distributed, just in time for its May 2018 
follow-up.)

Thanks for your continued interest in computer art: our tradition isn't 
getting older and more irrelevant, it's growing vintage and classic!  Hats 
off from Mistigris to the Living Closet -- may your highly improbable revival 
prove as fruitful as ours did.

      Cthulu, May 19, 2017
      www.mistigris.org

(Then we sat on the collection for a year, too wrapped up in the business of 
releasing monthly artpacks to actually get around to sharing this.  Whoops!

	  Cthulu, May 2018)