KiTSCHNet - NicheInterests/mistfunk GitHub Wiki

During the BBS-based Mist Classic days of the mid-'90s, many underground bulletin boards, member sites and distro sites, would share weakly-synchronized networked message bases using FidoNet's echomail protocol. As AgoraNet was ACiD's house echomail network, KiTSCHNet was Mistigris'. For most of the Mist Classic run, it was coordinated by Mavrik out of his Daemon's Gate BBS, though Happyfish eventually took on duties from The Jade Monkey.

In addition to serving as a place to discuss Mist business and where members of the wider Mist community could socialise and make small talk, it also served as a useful host for conversations that could be repurposed as articles in our Kithe house e-mag. One such ongoing series was the long-running ASCII Wars message thread.

Late in the game (June-July 1998), Hallucigenia's CiLNet (Creators in Limbo) was folded into KiTSCHNet, making it the official echomail network of two underground computer art crews simultaneously, during a period of overall steep BBS decline.

The name "kitsch" was arrrived at through the Dada word-selection game of randomly pulling words out of a dictionary, then given the "elite caps" treatment. As of press time, Wikipedia defines kitsch as "a term applied to art and design that is perceived as naïve imitation, overly eccentric, gratuitous or of banal taste" and we felt that, in a gently self-deprecating way, that might generally describe our undertakings. (In retrospect, whatever else the failings of Mist Classic, our being excessively kitschy probably weren't high among them, but kitsch was big in lowbrow art circles in the '90s.)