Textmode Friends - NicheInterests/mistfunk GitHub Wiki

The [Textmode] Friends were, by and large, a loose cadre of text-art-curious colleagues of Polyducks from the indie gamedev and pixelart communities, who he was, for a couple of fun years, able to lure into co-creating truly bizarre and expansive joint collaborative ANSI art canvases in networked [Moebius] sessions -- initially, on Picrotoxin's early Mistfunk server, and later on a private PDX-hosted one.

The early Textmode Friends core in 2020 included Mig_Moog, Polyducks, Retroshark and Rhoq, but over the next two years it expanded to include guest Friends Adel Faure, Batfeula, Eldrencake, Gabs, LDA, Nolithius, Oddfirefox, Papercookies, Tatapnhob, and Zeus II. With a couple of exceptions, the Textmode Friends were not particularly integrated into the Mistigris community, and were basically sporadic or one-off guests participating in Polyducks' private virtual art parties, whose contributions would be delivered to us to release by their host. We can assume that many if not most of them knew nothing of Mist.

The (as of press time) final two Textmode Friends collabs broke new ground, picking up a challenge cast by Epimundo in a video review -- of drawing epic ANSI canvases of sprawling width, as opposed to the long tradition of Very Vertical scrollers, and yielding what must be the widest ANSI art scenes ever drawn. The penultimate one, [The Big Piranha], features in the artscene episode of Back to the BBS, and viewers can enjoy watching Polyducks live-drawing portions of it.

Cthulu attempted to tap into some of the carefree Textmode Friends zeitgeist in establishing our [The Big Dig] scroller, but... inspiring people to draw ANSI art has never been his personal strong suit. We got an incredible joint out of it after years of pulling teeth, whereas genuine Textmode Friends productions felt more like shark jaws automatically cycling through teeth in an effortless process of natural renewal.