Fifty to Infinity the ACiD news n e w s unsane -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - --- Issue No 13 An Official ACiD Productions(tm) Public Update September 1996 -- - - -- - - - -- - - - -- - - - - -- By Necromancer In this ever-turbulent sea of change that we call life there are very few stable points For some it is love For others it might be that they are financially stable In the underground computer art scene it s ACiD For six years piddly groups have come made their own niche in this land called cyberspace and then left it as unobtrusively as they entered But one has stayed Starting with just a few members and a vision ACiD has continued to expand it s horizons and all the while fulfilling the increasing demand for quality artwork And this month is no different with the exception of one small thing ACiD turns 50 And after all these years (the ratio of cyber-years to true years being 7 1) ACiD has been there We ve been there since the days of WWIV V-X Telegard THG INC the original iCE merging with ACiD and we will continue to be here long after you re gone By Cthulu Now that we re back to a more serious mentality about this whole art creation speil we decided to compliment the return of the elite attitude with some policy changes just to make everything run that much more like clockwork The first major change in the way ACiD is run now is that we have eliminated all Senior Staff and Coordinator positions How does that work ACiD is now functioning with an hierarchial Advisory Staff system As usual RaD Man looms over all He knows all and sees all Reporting to him is Beastie who aids various division advisors These advisors and their cooperative staff are mainly comprised of former Senior Staff and Coordinators Beneath them come sundry co-advisors secretaries pages execu- tive producers gaffers key grips and finally the artists Eight months later we show up on the big screen! No wait I forgot I m not supposed to mention ACiD s new Cinema di- vision until the NEXT newsletter Well anyway there are several mentions to be made relating to this whole shifting of positions and titles so I will attempt to make them as seamless and concise as possible To begin with Rocket Scientist a longtime ACiD core member retired and ascended into the Alumni with JED and ReDMaN Though he has been fairly low-profile in the past couple of years he was a major contributer through 1993 and has consistantly released loaders ever since He s such Tweed shows here the an institution in the ACiD family that even RaD Man similarities to his isn t sure how long he s been a part of ACiD so his cousin Oats n Hay stepping down (and hence stepping up) will provide an inspiration to us all while allowing new bureaucrats to cut their teeth on group relations which is no mean feat in itself Hey this is rocket science not brain surgery Rocket Scientist s departure left the Coordinator Staff of ACiD with only two members - Soultaker and Sinned Soul They ve both made grabs to more con- ventional titles so Soultaker stepped down to become another member of Telecom once he left for college while Sinned Soul redelegated down to ACiD Information Systems With that matter of Senior Staff resolved we d like to welcome these folks to the new Advisor hierarchy of ACiD The Chief Advisor behind RaD Man him- self is Beastie who looks over art (This comprises ANSI ASCII RIPscrip and high resolution artwork ) Other advisors respectively are Tasmaniac for coders Pinion for ACiD s pHluid music division Mindcrime for ACiDic BBS modding Wolfie for ACiD Information Systems and Mad Arab who is in charge of the new joint Telecom-Courier division All of these advisors have sundry co-advisors and people to help them in their own regard but those are the only names you ll really have to deal with at the moment Mad Arab has replaced Soultaker as leader of the telecom division He is a talented telecom member in his own right who has been with us for several months and is also a member of 200 Proof Since taking Soultaker s place he has recruited two new members to the Telecom-Courier division Tasmaniac will be helped in his advisory capacity by Shivan Bastard who has dropped all his art affiliations to come to ACiD as a coder and will continue from where Dark Emnity left working with Tasmaniac to create SPAM the scripting language for Oblivion 2 of which he has recently become in charge He codes in a plethora of languages notably C++ Asm and Perl In addition to his regular coding responsabilities he plans to continue assisting ACiDiC with mods for Obv 2 To coordinate ACiD-ASCII Necromancer has sprung from the ranks to fill the position of leadership needed To aid him with administrative duties comes award-winner Killa Hertz who surely knows the ins and outs of ASCII Reinstated as the coordinator of the ACiD ANSI logocluster that effervescent cluster of ACiD ansi logos is Unsane with aid from Tosh10 With efforts from both of them we will prove once again that ACiD logoclusters are the best logoclusters in the scene! The former ACiDiC PPE Team Leader Captain Hood was overthrown by members of his own department The new PPE Team Leader is Social Distortion who will work twice as well accounting for the fact that he has the use of both hands Editors Note This would have been a bit more humorous but his name isn t Captain Hook In supplementary news for ACiDiC this season comes the instatement of the Telegard Team to service the most used BBS software in the world! Hooch is team leader but he was unavailable to comment as he was busy filling in the 3000 strings of his newest creation In a striking blow felt to all The Grey Ranger was removed from the ACiD Memberlist from his position of Chauffeur due to some trouble with the driving comission and the trunkful of communist literature they found in the ACiD limo By RaD Man and Cthulu Though it may seem that we have now covered enough politics to fill an entire newsletter those were merely the changes dealing with advisors and ex-coordinators and Senior Staff We haven t even begun to deal with the artists roster which has changed so much since you last heard from us! To begin with then a co-secretary has been assigned to aid Cthulu with the seemingly endless task of writing newsletters web pages articles news releases documentation and naughty stories for the use of ACiD members in general His name is Hack and the sooner he starts the better in one secretary s opinion And no for once no one is going to complain about cheap literary hacks While those two above are big news on their own they are followed by giants The one the only Lord of Jazz (better known as Lord Jazz) has returned to ACiD after a sting running The Girl Scouts later Bleach He cites personal reasons for re-joining and we aren t complaining! For those of you who entered the scene last week he draws ANSI RIPScrip high Madness runs in resolution ASCII writes music and pornography What Madball s family alley more can you ask from a versatile young artist No one s heard much from Morbius since he left Nation two years ago Sure he s released the odd pic in ACiD one every few months and as he seems to be drawing again he wants his ANSI pictures to be released in the group which has been on top ever since Who can blame him Unsane quit the ANSI scene but this doesn t seem to have prevented him from joining ACiD and drawing ANSI logos for us Perhaps there was some confusion down the line He can quit whatever he likes if this is how he reacts to it Our friend Visigoth the two-time winner of the NAiD high resolution graphics competition has returned to ACiD after a terrifying stint in one of those number-two groups We ve managed to calm him down but the neurologist says that he ll have that nervious tic underneath his eye for the rest of his life Let that be a warning to the rest of you Though it s apparent that hundreds of artists have been through ACiD one way or another it seems that there are still a few of you who haven t had the fortune of being part of our family yet We ll soon remedy that but until the Lord Jazz starter kit is ready for release you ll just have to keep your pants on and try improving on your own Now I mentioned something earlier about MOP This marks the first time that we ve really merged with anybody since Saga more or less a year ago and it truely does give us a shot of fresh blood and adrenalin and hopefully our gestalt will produce better art than the two groups had seperately in the past Putting ANSI first a move many have said should have been done long ago we have gained several members Abnormal and Arrogance give our ANSI department an unusually uppity air to it but under their Sensei the brash untrained energy should be refined to a calm honed edge Liithn Mendator and Baltazar join the ranks of such ACiD members as Nitnatsnoc and Tomppa1 with handles which are completely impossible to elaborate on So instead we will simply let them express themselves through their art To date it looks like they have a lot to say Rounding off the ANSI acquisitions from the Mop merger comes Pushead an excellent pic artist and the former head of Mop s ANSI department Mop benefitted our ASCII and RIPScrip drawings peripherally but Haji (for ASCII) and Wildcat (for RIP) are still very welcomed into the group There s only two of them but we like to realize the old adage quality over quantity We re not sure what language Hydrocephalus uses but between the C that Leroy is adept with and Toxic403 s mastery of Pascal not to mention the Assembly with which they are both pretty handy we re confident that we ll be able to compile whatever code comes out of his twitching fingers Finishing the list of resources gained and friends forged through the alliance of two world-class groups come four outstanding high-resolution artists The first appropriately enough is named Blandest Two of the remaining three comprise Bob the Janitor and Tweed the co-founders of Mop and talented trippy surreal high-resolution artists who could stand alone The last one Tabaqui produces some of the best high-res we ve seen She s comparabale to Catbones so that deserves some sort of special mention Now while it is too late for Blandest to have founded the group there s nothing preventing him from trying to win then fair hand of another tattooist Has anyone heard of Newton s Third Law of ANSI Dynamics It goes like this what goes down must come back up That is the only way we can explain why former members of ACiD just keep coming back to the best group out there Perhaps I ve just answered my own question In any event we ll start off by welcoming back into ACiD two folks who we gained through a merger with the sensational Mop so we welcome back Bedlam and Icto with open arms as they wow us with RIPScrip high resolution art HTML design and mere high rez re- spectively Just when you thought it was over some 220 lines later we reveal to the masses all the people who have recently joined OUTSIDE of the Mop merger! Make these people stop joining or else this newsletter will never end! We found a peculiar individual wandering the streets a few months back He amazed us all by proving to be a master of old school ASCII Formerly of CIA we welcome in that enigma known only as EverLast We welcome Quisling an international trendsetter into our high resolution department this quarter What makes this VGA artist and photo manipu- lator so fashionable Formerly of Mop he proudly joined ACiD s ranks several weeks before the rest of his compatriots followed suit Coincidence or cons- piracy Jason (not to be confused with Jae or Sun in any combination) gives our high resolution department a boost with his great abstract style only Finns seem to have perfected We thought that we heard something when The Silent Killer left Fire but nothing reached our ears until we found the pile of ANSI logos on our central branch s desk Oh and the corpse Be warned ACiD is now high in Sodium So um you may want to consult your doctor before consuming any more of our art Blade s productions are free of the mineral now however so eat as much of it as you want From CiA come two great ANSI logo artists - Mad Ball and Spear Spear said that it was great to be in ACiD at last but Mad Ball was unavailable for comment until he finished seeing his psychiatrist about that Caught red-handed the awful dream where he s on that big green table Silent Killer muses over a quick escape Just to prove our appeal over vast denominations we now boast that ACiD has White Trash in it and that we re not going to do anything about it This wonderful ANSI picture artist really isn t a problem for us and he s even less of one for Legend now Two RIPScrip artists join the fray just in time - Satanic Sly from the late late Decades and PhazeOne from Teklordz to wow us with their anime and graffiti RIP stylings Cylus Mesonyx Nomex Nova and KX Mode join ACiD s pHluid music division proving truth to the old adage that all musicians have the letters y v or x in their handles In addition to that quality Cylus is also formerly the the coordinator of Blade s music division Also joining is Bejrutt who has a marginally more normal handle and Panther who has a substantially more normal one In addition to the coding escapades of Hydrocephalus Leroy and Toxic403 from Mop as were mentionned above ACiD s general coding team would love to announce our newest member Tyger who is bringing with him the ongoing support for The Tombstone Artist RIPscrip drawing utility version 2 0 From the infamous and respected PPE coding team of Pirates With Attitudes (PWA) comes Bad Spirit to ACiDic s PPE Team along with Chaos Warrior Though his handle is similarly unpredictable Chaotic Prisoner is busy creating art for ACiDic modifications Katt joins the Telegard team providing increasing support to a rising software and Onslaught joins ACiDic s Special Team a unique task force working on unannounced projects which will surely rock the scene once they re released Under the new management of Mad Arab ACiD s telecom division has welcomed in the services of Clover and Mirror Image who has worked previously with DOD and Amnesia (yes the Amnesia who is currently the number one couriering group ) We are suitably humbled By RaD Man and Cthulu To prove Newton s laws of ANSI dynamics true unfortunately some artists must otherwise find reason to leave that they might rejoin at a later date It is such that we bid the following people not a good-bye so much as an until we meet again We ve already mentioned the anachronistic qualities of the Chauffeur position In any event the only highway we re tearing down at the moment is the information one what with our new web page and all Some of them had the decency to at least resign formally when it became apparent that they wouldn t be creating much more a while such as Christopher Robin For others such as Sushi-X and Iczer-1 it seemed more of a problem with the work that they were submitting on those rare occasions that they submitted at all There even seemed a geographic turn of events when Plague and Sharp Edge both from Israel ceased to create art for us But this plague of apathy affects many artists for inscrutiable reasons claiming greats such as Somms and Bad Karma down to people like Surreal better known as Rendered Useless s phantom brother In passing it also cut short the ANSI drawing careers of Spellbinder Sinister X and Tripe Making formal resignations are several other loved and respected artists leaving their cherished hobby due to time constraints or outside pressures and influences Black Lightning Degenerit Final Descendant and Rotting Christ have gone off to pursue other hoobies such as basket-weaving or in the case of Rotting Christ synchronized swimming Crimeboss was removed completely from the annals of ACiD history for completely different and much less original reasons In addition Soul Assassin mistakenly thought that he could find a deeper sense of inner peace in iCE while Mage was last seen conspiring with members of his first big group Mistigris In some disharmonious news Vibrance was removed from pHluid by the advisor Pinion due to internal conflicts ACiDic grew a bit more base with the loss of Chronic Fatigue Redemption and Lil Elvis for reasons of inactivity The unanimous motion to replace Captain Hood has already been mentioned so we will only mention that he ran off muttering something about a crocodile who has my hand! and a flying boy On a final spurt of early-breaking news Anarchist is finally taken peacefully from among the ranks of ACiD s famous telecom division as he resigns and hangs up his beige box By Cthulu For those masochists out there who don t think that 370 lines is entirely long enough for a respectable newsletter information of all shapes sizes and flavours will be available for your discreet entertainment as presented in the upcoming release of the second ever issue of the official electronic magazine of ACiD The Product II Specifications for new software secrets will be discussed in it as well as much lively commentary on the state of the Art scene at large and how much it had changed (and remained the same) since the many many months between now and the release of the hallowed issue one By Cthulu In case you haven t noticed we re playing up the fact that this is the 50th release of the monthly Acquisition Update which ACiD has released since its inception way back when Despite the frantic efforts at Eclipse we are the first group to have released 50 packs and will hopefully maintain our steady schedule and be getting geared up for pack 100 within a few years That makes this pack a milestone of many deep meanings for many people - face it can you remember a time without ACiD (Well since you began modeming at least ) This momentous marker will denote a return to ACiD s tried-but-true tactics of kicking ass taking names lording over the scene and taking no prisoners So to paraphrase - if you think that the first fifty have been a weird wonderful trip - you ain t seen nothing yet As a fiftiricious update we d like to draw attention to a few special features in our momentous release ACiD View now features the only internal JPEG viewing of any viewer in the scene to date so you can all put away PV To add to our growing list of scene resources we re proud to be releasing new versions of Eyeing some punk going the Tombstone Art 2 0 RIPScrip creator and the for his bucket Bob Oblivion 2 bulletin board software Our new web page the Janitor readies complex is up running and awesome (to editorialize his trusty wooden MOP slightly) - so check it out at www acid org Finally we d like to display attention towards the amazing demo ACID-50 EXE contained within the 50th pack archives This demo was created by the German demogroup Simple specifically to celebrate our fiftieth update By Cthulu As we grow closer to dominating all aspects of the scene - graphically musically through the internet and through general data transmission - the relationship we share with our artists becomes ever more intense We provide them with the tools needed to do new things and test the limits of their imaginations We provide an inspiration to aspiring artists testing their first faltering footfalls in this turbulent sea of politics and buffoonery But most of all we remain steadily as number one as a mark for all other groups to gauge their successes (and failures) against to provoke and inspire higher levels of creative fervour in response And we love every minute of it ACiD 1996 - Have 50 packs gone by already I hadn t noticed the time ACiD Credits Writers Cthulu RaD Man Editor Necromancer ACiD ACiD Special Thanks Unsane Photographer Lord Jazz ACiD