Kithe - NicheInterests/mistfunk GitHub Wiki

Kithe was the house [e-mag] of [Mist Classic], reporting in place of a staid [infofile] the comings and going of the Mistigris membership and allowing readers to get a little taste for the culture of our computer art collective, as demonstrated in posts on our KiTSCHnet echomail network and from our friends in [TABnet]. A favorite recurring article in issues of Kithe was [ASCII Wars], and we also reported on local starts and stops in the [areacode 604] homebase of our core BBSes. (Early issues included fellow traveller content documenting the groups of [areacode 418] as well!)

The name "Kithe" was arrived at through the Dadaist exercise of randomly pulling words from a random page of the dictionary, and we felt that the word's definitions of "making known" (and "those who know") was a good fit for the application.

Most artgroups did not have their own e-mag to trumpet their accomplishments; initially including it was a bit of a flex demonstrating not just how many ANSI art resources we had at hand and how many writers, but also how many programmers. (See also: [PabloDraw].) Offered in place of infofiles, this arrangement worked provided the programmers were keen to continue revisiting their program and regularly issuing revisions on their past work with new data particulars Greeking it up. In practice, programmers tended to drift into the Kithe seat and then drift out, leaving it with no one at the wheel for months at a time -- with Mist packs releasing without infofiles to explain our trajectory.

In all, over the course of Mist Classic's four years, Kithe released a respectable 14 issues, including the Kithe Cookbook (Issue #11) anticipating the Imbibe e-mag we would release over a quarter-century later. Out of desperation, the 14th and (for the time being) final issue of Kithe was implemented as a text adventure game using the free and then long-in-the-tooth Adventure Game Toolkit (AGT) engine, yielding a very novel experience even by the experimental standards of electronic magazines.

Many issues of Kithe were adapted to once-working HTML at the Kithe Online Archive, only to break compatibility when consistent capitalization of filenames was required. Someday, they will be repaired.

Someday... there will be further issues of Kithe. After all, even with our now-indulgent infofiles, we still have a lot to discuss! Someday!