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Kids are generally excited to celebrate a birthday, on into their teens when the occasion not only yields presents but new freedoms.  At some point in adulthood the shine sometimes wears off and people may get a little more secretive about the celebration of their birth -- some actively avoid the topic, as though by failing to acknowledge the passage of time they could hold back their descent over the hill, down its slope and into the grave.  While we're not trying to hide from our birthday in this fashion -- we've been actively hyping it up in our infofiles since May -- we have wound up scheduling its observance at a particularly inconvenient time of year, sandwiched uncomfortably between big annual celebrations of Halloween and Christmas.  Do we really need to throw ourselves a birthday party?  Can't our continuing to make and share art be festivity enough, a rolling celebration of our ongoing creativity?  Well... sure.  But this year's was a little special, marking not just one more trip around the sun, but ten holes punched on our ticket since holding our most improbable reunion in 2014, itself on the 20th anniversary of our first release.  30 years!  It's a milestone that warrants some kind of acknowledgement.  (Mist XXX!  Well, we already anticipated that eventuality with mistigris.org/y so let's find a different angle.) (No, put away the wedge pillow!)

We knew it was coming, as surely as it came for our colleagues in Fire earlier this year, as inevitable as it strikes our old fellow travellers in Fuel next year and Lazarus the following year.  We've just collectively reached 30 years since the boom and bust of the original underground PC computer artscene, and all of these crews by all rights ought to be shopping around for 30th anniversary party hats.  But when you're still hatching schemes for releases on a month by month basis, a 30th birthday party can seem a little abstract and challenging to concretely plot out plans for.  So it is that we got to October, made things really scary, pulled off another full advent calendar before Dec 1st, and then realised that we'd short-changed our own decaversary.  Well, who cares if there's not a lot of opportunity between Christmas and New Year, as for three years between 2018 and 2020 we released "bonus" artpacks (on top of wild monthly runs!) during this little rest period after the holidays but before the return to the office -- so we've already established that there's enough space in there to squeeze in one more holiday celebration... right?  Well, we're going to give it the college try.  (Actually, we're going to attempt to cram in two more, but I digress.)

Something nostalgic must have been vibrating through cyberspace, as a number of our old colleagues looked us up unexpectedly over the last little while.  The TABNet colleagues who formed the core of Mist Classic's lit division were enshrined by Misprint Manuscripts for their own 30th anniversary in November of 2023, even if they haven't found out about it yet.  We crossed paths on our Discord with the Pablo creator Minus this year for literally the first time since 1994, and his successor Eto also wanted everyone to know that even though we couldn't get a new version of PabloDraw together in time to bundle with this release, he's still tinkering away on it in his spare time (even if its Wikipedia entry was mulched by the donation-courting Philistines steering that ship off the edge of the world!)  Thanatos emerged from retirement long enough to add a tiny design to MIST0524, and we've also lately heard from Kestrel, Tincat, Maeve Wolf, Bryface, Mage, The Extremist, Publius Enigma, White Insanity and Hacker Joe -- who is busy putting to rest the final delicious slice of unresolved Mist Classic business, to be shared early in the New Year.  None of these casual encounters have had a whit of impact on the contents of this artpack, granted, but it's still nice to learn that the old gang are still hanging in there.  None of us have died!* *except for those of us who have, see below

Despite all this, a few oldschoolers who were here in the early days and even right at the beginning did manage to represent 30 years down the line, and this collection features: a poem by Crowkeeper, artworks by Etana and Onyx (celebrating our first WHQ BBS!), and music by Sentience and Melodia just like you would have found in any Mist pack circa 1994-1996.  Furthermore, we achieve some additional oldschool representation through Cthulu's bizarre solicitation for our current crop of digital artists to remix works from old Mist packs on this occasion, so we get a fresh teletext take on an Eerie doodle by AtonalOsprey, new light being shone on hirez screens by Grim Reaper and the late Silent Knight for surely the first time this century by The Green Herring, and a return to an amazing AFlamingoCup piece by The War on Christmas.  For a different kind of call-and-response theme-and-variations, check out the handful of versions of ConsoleJockey's Mistfunk logo done "in your own style" by an assortment of respondents!

I had to circle around to insert this paragraph after writing the entire rest of the infofile, to thank the artists who provided us with our iconography related to this release.  (I had to circle around to do so because we hadn't initially figured out which logos we were going to be using, some of them only turning up very late in the artpack packaging process. The FILE_ID.DIZ was drawn by Grymmjack, initially intended for use quite a bit earlier this year but we liked it so much we reserved it for our big blowout!  The header and footer art for this infofile are by Littlebitspace and Cthulu, respectively, and similarly the header and footer on the memberlist are by Zeus II and LDA, variations on a magnificent theme.

Now, where were we?  This collection also features a little representation by some folks who never stopped making art but who we stopped shaking down in our renewed focus on purely digital computer art, including a painting by Nick Lakowski and a sketch by Starstew, folks who have certainly earned seats at the table at any celebration of Mistigris activities.  While we're keeping things analogue, this collection also features two chalk designs of Mistigris logos, by Teleko and Skrubly (that latter reproducing Banzo9420's skinning of j33p33's logo design from our 25th anniversary celebrations, yow, an incredible chain!)  And while we're looking at analogue art here, in homage to the completely unexpected materials that have sometimes (OK, often) washed up in Mist packs, we also include an airbrush illustration by Robert Evans, box artist for the 7th Guest, that he was commissioned to make by Broderbund circa 1982 that has possibly gone unseen by any human soul since then.

Several special guests responded to our call to celebrate, so we're very happy to be sharing with you in this collection art by AdeptApril of Monoceros, Darokin, goto80, Hortau, Andrew "Ne7" Lemon, Nitron, Otium of Galza, and another visitation from Amy, Jackey and Momo of Pizzatoe.  Also we are happy to be sharing a suite of ANSI art logos by Venom, who is apparently releasing this stuff for the first time ever in an artpack despite having been in the artscene sphere in the '90s and just never getting around to getting more involved.  It's never too late!  (Delukz also has sent work in to an artpack for the first time!  ANSI, what's that?  I colour it in Python!)  (Thus providing one more reason why the art anarchists at Mist are surely so beloved in the wider artscene.)  (Was I just saying "it's never too late"?  We also had late-breaking inaugural Mist pack appearances of some animated Unicode pieces by MC Fresher and IndyJoenz, made in his Durdraw text art editor.)

This collection also features works by some of our more sporadic contributors, such as a_mouse, axb, discGator, Chris De Wil, CoaXCable, the Godfather, Joninscii, ldb, Mozz, Polyducks, the60ftatomicman, VileR and XTComics, some of which were submitted to demoparty competitions over the past year.  And, huh, since it's kind of weird to highlight the rare contributors but not the regular ones doing the heavy lifting year-round, do keep your eyes open for work by Illarterate, littlebitspace, Mavenmob and Zeus II, who I don't need to name... it's impossible to view this collection without their work making an impression on you.  And Moth's comic... well, you just need to compare and constrast the files.  Aaaaand that's all of us!  At least, unless someone gets their submission in so late-breakingly that I'm actually unable to incorporate their name into the infofile.  Thanks to all of our contributors as well as, you know, the ones who didn't manage to take part this time, plus everyone who sent art in over the past year, the past 10 years or indeed the past 30!  (I cast a wide net for my thanks, just call me Mr. Gratitude.)

I could provide a fuller accounting for the year in review, or indeed of the long, strange trip the past decade has been for us from our reunion to where we are now, but ... isn't this infofile long enough?  I'll put it in our 2024 coffee table book.  In the meantime, please feel free to join us in voice chat on our Discord Dec 31st to review and discuss the art in this collection and our 2024 advent calendar, and maybe broadcast a little Unsilent Night at each other while playing Eat Poop You Cat.  Stay tuned for one further incredible, impossible Mist release in association with BreakIntoChat.com before 2024 wraps, and we'll be seeing you in the New Year with our first e-mag this century, a collection of art about food, and a Blender compo currently scheduled Jan 18-19.

One final thanks to anyone out there reading this thing... anyone wandering down the garden path of a Mistigris infofile in 2024 is definitely a glutton for something, but by this point you should pretty much know what you're in for.  We get a lot of mileage out of pushing our art to subscribers over social media, but there's still something magical about the unspoken and implicit arrangement of collecting art in artpacks, releasing it out into "the scene" and having people quietly enjoy it privately from the comfort of their local systems.  In a world of tracking cookies and software as a service, it's a nice exercise in hope and trust to send these archives out there into the world and understand that somehow, against all odds, they will be found, viewed and enjoyed.  Thanks for holding up your end of the equation!