Talk is Cheap the ACiD news n e w s unsane -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - --- Issue No 15 An Official ACiD Productions(tm) Public Update April 1997 -- - - -- - - - -- - - - -- - - - - -- by Cthulu Cherry blossoms open to the sun after a harsh winter of discontent and the pale buds express their approval to the world by exposing their faces to the light of the sun and the chance of the elements Mao Tse-Tung used the opening of the cherry blossom as an opportunity for all negative energy to be released and vented and since the last newsletter that has certainly been the case for us here at ACiD Productions If there has been anything not quite up to snuff from the temporary downtime of the vital website to the quantity of our released art itself we have heard about it from every set of typing fingers under the sun Your comments have not been ignored Springtime is a time for rebirth the reinvigouration after the icy wastes of winter and an awakening after convalescent hibernation A yawn a stretch or two and we will be emerging to survey over the dominion over all before our gaze The greening trees will bow in the wind towards us the sun will shine his radiant salute and the animals of the world will express their approval in celebration of a more intimate manner Though the very forces of nature itself are evidently under our influence we will illustrate below as well how the actions of mortal men can fall under our sway and be played to our advantage in the cosmic card game of life by Hack As part of ACiD s continuing attempt to keep you the public informed of what ACiD is doing we proudly announce Acid!Press This new division will give new direction to how you find out about ACiD doings With Mindcrime as it s advisor the new wing will be involved with the newsletter press releases via the acid-public mailing list and the new artpacks archive newsletter as well as a few other things New recruits have been called in to provide for the task at hand Cthulu Striker Sodium and Hack will be leading the way writing the informative tidbits and Shrike will be maintaining the artpacks archive newsletter Ever since John Lennon died it just With all this free hasn t been right says Eggman who information and cheap talk along with Walrus became immortalized you should soon be in the chorus of a song by the Beatles swimming in a sea of ACiD Knowledge by Mindcrime In our increasing efforts to decentralize and form a more independant union of subdivisions ACiD s ANSI department has recently joined forces with a new ANSI upstart to form Avenge the new ACiD ANSI department Following in the same tradition of previous subsidiaries Avenge will be releasing it s own artpacks seperate from the ACiD Acquisition and observing it s own schedule Heading up this division is White Trash who has vowed to avenge the apathy and increasing immaturity that lies within the present ANSI community With this limb completely severed from the main ACiD body all monthly Acquisitions after 56 will consist of pure high resolution artwork Avenge will debut on May 1st 1997 by Mindcrime In the time honored tradition of spring cleaning ACiD productions does a little of that out-with-the-old in-with-the-new kind of thing this month Swept out under the twisted fibers of the ACiD broom is Wolfie who has been replaced with a new improved sysadmin with more synapse bandwidth Bob the Janitor was no where to be found when we needed him for this cleaning so he gets a taste of his own medicine Burps in a bold effort to enhance the effect downed a litre of Jolt Cola with a mouthful of PopRocks and subsequently died With the heat of the coming spring Cool-T melted leaving only a puddle of grey water behind Cyber and his buddy Cypher (Hex that is) skipped off hand in hand to a better place Endless Nameless found out the hard way that nothing is endless Forge took up a new profession as a locksmith Piromaniak acting through the smoky mind of his strange disease gathered up his Infernal Flames and headed down south Liithn tried too hard to pronounce his name and his face stuck like that Madball was last seen trying to get Unsane to give in to his demented ways Raider Sensei and Shaolin were called into action to defend an ancient Mongolian tribe Alien friends of Sargon came down and took him off to fight in the Telurian wars on planet Zarnac The Silent Killer snuck up on Stone The Crow and jabbed him with a Spear Not realizing that Stone The Crow was actually made of stone TSK ran screaming when his Spear broke in half and STC flew after him Wonder Monkey got tossed into a new exhibit at the Museum of Natural History where he ll only be able to interact with his ACiD buddies every once in a while Intensity was trying so intensely to courier every pack he could that he suffered an aneurysm and died Polymorph got caught in an infinite loop and kept changing into Elvis And finally Deep after being told by his mother not to go so far out got caught in the tide and was swept out to sea by Mindcrime No ACiD acquisition would be complete without the addition of new recruits those who dare to defy the normalcy of simple art with the creativity and originality that it takes to join the unique team of highly talented ACiD artists Honing their skills in their medium of choice these men and women have become the future of the digital art world The wife of RCA s Starlord and an extremely talented artist Kitiara joins us to provide a female s take on the ansi medium Perplexer thought hard and long about which group to join but finally decided to draw ansi with the big boys of ACiD Productions Also joining our ansi team is Mongi who not only enjoys his time in ACiDDraw but also likes to fiddle with the tools of the high resolution artist providing us with quality vga work Eggman proving once again that the egg s have it also joins our team of high resolution artists along with Mainline who displays his skills with more than just the line tool Joining the amazingly popular Acid Ascii division Remorse are seven of today s finest manipulators of the age old ASCII character set Cannabis brings us his laid back style but often eats us out of house and home Gravedancer pranced around in the ACiD graveyard to bring back Spirit of Illusion Pariah forced his way Kitiara a new female artist into our ranks using a Phaser X was seen chased around by some and an Atom Bomb he picked up of ACiD s friskier members She while in exile And although was heard yelling Stop staring we re not sure what he s reverting and grow your own! on occasion to Revert joins up to round out the new Remorse Recruits Last but most certainly not least Macaw flies into our highly talented programming division to provide us with some spirited intros and loaders Although not new to the group three members have shifted internally and are just getting comfortable in their new positions Catbones has been promoted to overall Art Director He will be presiding over the happenings of all art related divisions Bad Spirit has been shifted to Information Services where he is busy helping us with providing constant attention to the oft updated ACiD Web Page And finally retiring from active service this month Beastie slides up a chair with the other members who have gained ACiD Alumni status over the years We thank him for his dedication and support over the many years he was with ACiD Productions By Striker Catbones gets a new alias Daddy This just in On April 5 at 2 45am central time Tabaqui (aka Mrs Catbones) gave birth to a beautiful 7 lbs 10 oz baby girl The infant s name is Elspeth Shhh If you listen you can hear Cat s hard drive come to a screeching halt as he floods it with digital photographs of their newborn Congratulations to our new acid!parents Acid org gets bigger better and faster ACiD s official web domain was upgraded recently in order to increase transfer rates and accessibility www acid org which used to run on a t1 connection now boasts three impressive t3 connections The improved domain now runs at an amazing speed of over 100mbps Due to these changes users do not wait as long for art to draw out while online and the domain no longer becomes lagged due to heavy traffic Another improvement in our web presence is the new member profiles section which shows several ACiD member histories pictures and hobbies This new section is a great way to get to know ACiD members better The profile section can be accessed at http www acid org members profiles This new area will be added to as members send their information to Bedlam who is responsible for maintaining the area New Remorseview promises improved ASCII ANSI viewing The latest development in the Remorse ascii division of ACiD is a viewer coded by Mr Kite Mr Kite stated that Remorseview s main purpose is to make viewing ansis and asciis REALLY easy without a lot of overhead The viewer is capable of viewing any length ascii or ansi and has unique features such as a mid-viewing mode The main feature of Remorseview is it s ability to view asciis and ansis in 25 43 50 line modes with a choice of the IBM PC or AFS Amiga font for all modes The viewer is conveniently small as well taking up a mere 20k Necromancer head of Remorse said that we hope to have a full release by May We also will have options for selecting a different interface ASCII our second being a newschool interface Java Viewer offers wide compatibility ACiD View Java currently in beta testing will be the most versatile viewer that ACiD has ever released Because it is coded in Java it can be run on any computer that has a Java Interpreter such as Java Development Kit (JDK) from Sun states Mr Kite who coded the viewer The viewer is able to view ANSIs and ASCIIs of moderate lengths and also views GIFS and JPEGS Also planned for the program is full XBIN support scalable functions screen capture capability and more ACiD View Java has been successfully tested under both Windows 95 and Linux s Xwindows Mr Kite also plans to release an Applet version of ACiD View Java which will be available to the public and allow web page authors to display ansis on their pages by Mindcrime Congratulations go to the following winners in our Tommpa1 Post Card Contest Some of the entries were quite entertaining and others were just laughable Randomly drawn from the entries recieved these are the winners They are awarded with eight original hand drawn cells by our very own Tommpa1 - Izzy from Alamogordo NM USA - KRL from Balwyn Victoria Australia KRL sent us a great postcard -- a self made collage of pen graffiti newspaper clippings and beer bottle labels! - Lauren from Cupertino CA USA - Sadistic Nightmare from Southbury CT USA - The Speed Racer from Plantation FL USA - Tabaqui from Rolla MO USA Tabaqui inundated us with almost a dozen cards featuring scenic down home pictures of Kansas and Missouri - Tonic from Ilmenau Germany Tonic sent us a killer anime postcard of Plastic Little! - Vince Scheib from Chesterland OH USA Thanks to all who participated and made this a contest worth having Due to the massive response this drawing of drawings received we look forward to holding more of these events in the future! Introduction by Mindcrime The debate over which of two popular artistic mediums High Resolution VGA and Low Resolution ANSI is the better has been brought into the spotlight recently by the gradual shifting of scene art groups from ANSI to VGA as their primary art form ACiD Productions has recruited two artists one prefering high resolution and one prefering low to debate this topic for the information and entertainment of our audience We re hoping this may open the eyes of both sides and help bring this debate to a healthy closure The VGA Point of View The ANSI Point of View Written by Wildcat ACiD!VGA Written by Akairo ACiD!Press ANSI is dying VGA is king A lot High resolution graphic art of people in the scene have tried to commonly called hi-rez is fight this I ve heard endless becoming an extremely popular complaints about the lack of ansi in computer art form Many excellent packs the fading of the BBS scene arguments as to how and why high and the ballooning of pack sizes resolution graphics should replace However all of this amounts to the ANSI (American National Standard petty complaints of the people who Institute) have been presented to are being left behind us However the pros of ANSI and the cons of hi-rez are frequently VGA is a far superior medium where overlooked almost anything can be achieved - you dream it up and you can put it Many people believe that hi-rez is on the screen There are countless always associated with quality art programs from freeware to and artists Obviously it is much professional graphics suites that easier to create a pleasing work of can help you create magnificent art when you can scan in freehand pieces of art So while the whole drawings or simply render three scene as well as the rest of the dimensional objects There are very world is moving to high-rez high few pixel-by-pixel hi-rez artists color graphics why is a large while EVERY ANSI artist is required portion of the scene still sitting to plot pixel-by-pixel Veteran in front of ACiDdraw trying to make pixel-by-pixel ANSI artists are a coherent comic-rip in 80 by 25 obviously capable of creating fresher more moving pieces than a One reason may be nostalgia True novice mouse scanner artist ANSI had it s day but that day has passed VGA is by far superior in Just because you can do simple every aspect higher resolution commands with Photoshop or figure more colors better tools and a out how to use a color scanner broader following of artists If we doesn t make you an experienced can t improve ourselves as new artist capable of creating works technologies present themselves then with elements such as strong value we are destined to remain a group of contrast spacing or principles like immature 14 year olds hanging out in gradation proportion or balance #ANSI saying eYE DReW mUH FIRst Just because you can make drawings ANSI t0D4y with better resolution and more colors doesn t mean that the layout Perhaps another reason for this is and composition will automatically just plain stupidity There are be superior to that of an ANSI several obvious advantages to VGA artist Alot more goes into creating that people seem to have overlooked art than just the medium Are oils First real money can be made from so much better than acrylics Do it I m not talking about the 10$ pastels far surpass charcoal Of you picked up for doing a little course not It s not the medium logo for some sucker I m talking it s the artist serious commercial projects Many freelance artists in the scene are It is a common misconception that making anywhere from 25-50$ an hour all or most ANSI artist only draw - not bad for a kid with a hobby fonts or rip comic books Well I beg Also there is a strong artistic to differ ANSI as an art form may advantage You can do so much more have had it s roots in comic rips with VGA I m not saying that all and cheap fonts but it is obvious ANSI artists are 13 year olds with that original art has become more no originality but how many ANSIs common in the ansi scene now than have you seen lately that have not ever Just because you are a hi-rez been ripped out of Spawn #15 or artist doesn t automatically mean X-men #112 It is rare that you will that you have a creative imagination find a VGA that has been ripped the or you know how to layout a piece of fact is that as a whole the High-Rez art without copying someone else s scene is trying ALOT harder to be style or influence original and change the scene for the better Each VGA artist has his In addition to the artistic own distinct style When a VGA elements and principles which are artist does a logo he doesn t do a vastly more important than lord-jazz style (in my opinion resolution or amount of colors doing a logo in this-or-that style there are the file size and hardware is just come cheap way of saying I m differences Any average Joe can ripping someone) A true artist tell you that he would rather be in would do it in HIS OWN style His possession of a pack filled with style would be influenced by other ANSI screens displaying wonderful artists of course but as a whole movement correct proportion and it would be his and clearly striking contrast over poorly distinguishable from others Many composed or laid out hi-rez ANSI logos tend to run together pictures with no movement no often it is hard to say if someone pleasing balance and just three did this or if someone did this in dimensional rendered fonts with imitation of another person s style boring backgrounds It s true that or if it s just a plain rip With a there are artists that create MIND VGA I can immediately identify the BLOWING high resolution graphics but artist by their distinct style how many are there in comparison to amateur novice artists And is it Clearly the VGA scene is trying worth downloading an extra two megs harder to improve themselves and just to see these mediocre works of develop unique works of art Even art For only a quarter of the size artists who use only filters (which you can view pictures done by has become a bad word in the art veteran ANSI artists which are scene even though they are valuable obviously drawn with better tools) must start with a blank page craftsmanship and create a picture that is pleasing and interesting I have In order to run most high tremendous respect for anyone who resolution paint programs you need a can start with nothing and create a pretty fast computer with alot of pleasing picture solely by relying memory Typical ANSI drawing on their tools and talent utilities such as TheDraw or ACiDDraw require a little under a Style imitation and comic ripping megabyte of memory and work on a have long been used as crutches of common 386 processor Perhaps with the ANSI community If we are ever all the money that you might get as to make the scene a place where a freelance high resolution artist serious artists can meet and improve you might be able to pay for the themselves and others we must not extra speed and memory but if you allow ourselves to be ruled by the are like me you can t ANSI allows people that depend on these crutches you to create art with as much In order to meet our bright future chance as being wonderful vibrant we must cast aside our past and moving as high resolution limitations Can you see yourself graphics with extremely cheap and drawing ANSI in 2 years 3 years barebones systems 10 years ANSI WILL die out just like RIP has died Not because it is So high resolution graphics when a bad standard not because the done correctly by a veteran or people who draw it are not good professional can surpass an ansi enough But because it is outdated graphic done by a veteran But what and outmatched The future is upon is the ratio of veterans to us but how many of us are even in amateurs in the hi-rez scene High the present resolution is still very young ANSI was developed in the late seventies High Resolution peaked into super vga in the early nineties Because it is fairly new it tends to excite us and make us look at possible careers and fame But only a very small percentage of us in any of the scenes (demo tracking hi-rez or ansi) will ever go onto a regular job using the skills we developed in our youth in this scene Is ANSI a dying medium No it s impossible Just because there aren t any bulletin board systems around anymore to draw for doesn t mean we can t enjoy the art form for what it has become It started as a basic character set for early communications terminals and has Disadvantage #1 for ANSI we exploded into a whole art form As don t see one billion VGA pics long as there are more quality of Calvin in old art packs artists in the ANSI scene than the hi-rez scene wonderful ansi art will be produced No novice hi-rez artist can truly surpass a veteran ansi artist s correct display of art elements and principles no matter Note The views expressed in this how hi-tech his medium might be debate are that of the individual Charcoal was one of the first art author and have no relation to forms drawn on cave walls by our that of ACiD Productions ACiD is primitive ancestors Charcoal an ART group first and foremost today is still a major medium ANSI and supports all artistic mediums has a solid foundation beneath it so let s not be so hasty to throw it out by Mindcrime and Shrike As many of you already know ACiD Productions hosts an art scene file archive artpacks acid org which provides a storage and archiving service to all members of the art scene This site was put in place not only to ensure a lasting and efficient archive for scene related material but also to provide an easy to use not to mention powerful interface for both scene members and worldwide computer art fans to find and aquire their favorite art packs This new section of the ACiD newsletter has been put in place to inform you of current happenings and facts about this exciting new file archive The archive has recently aquired many mirror sites to hopefully accomadate for the heavy traffic the site may experience during peak online times Our hope is that you will be able to use these mirrors to your advantage when the main artpacks site gets bogged down or appears slow You can link to several of these mirrors from the main page Another helpful service provided by the artpacks administration is a detailed breakdown of the top downloaded files from the site Statistics are provided for electronic magazines programs artpacks and a combination of all three These pages can be found at http artpacks acid org www html top_day html http artpacks acid org www html top_month html Virus scanning has now been implemented into the archive Individual files are scanned several times a day with McAffee s Viruscan However we still recommend that you cross scan all files locally for your own safety Pipe code support has also been implemented This system allows file ACiD s new motto is If sheep can be descriptions to contain cloned ACiD members can be as well colors using the standard Look for a bigger memberlist next pack pipe code set of 00 for black to 15 for white Thanks to Mr Kite we now offer online viewing of ANSI files! Using his newly developed Java ansi viewer applet it is possible to view ansi files contained within the individual archives If you have any questions about the archive be sure to email either Shrike at fare@ionet net or RaD Man at radman@acid org Be sure to re-load often new services are being added all the time as we strive to better serve the computer artscene community by Cthulu Refreshed and ready to tackle new challenges ACiD Productions is assured that one way or another it s lead will soon grow more parallel with trends in the art scene as a whole Our approach may no longer seem as groundbreaking but our toned-down method will offend less the sensibilities of the average art enthusiast while continuing to provide the guidance and inspiration you have all come to grow and love and even perpetuate The time of the opening of the cherry blossoms comes to a close - complaints have been met and answered The time of rebirth is almost passed and nary a sighting of Saga Union or Legend has been noted Social Darwinism assures that those who are strong will persevere while all others will eventually peter out and fade into their doom of obscurity Looking strong after seven years in a scene where the average group lifespan is two months our place on top is secure thanks to our award-winning art but even more to our broad fan base We thank you for allowing us to occupy the pinnacle of this hierarchy and promise to thrill you for many seasons to come - ACiD Productions 1997 - - A rose by any other name would not smell so sweet - ACiD Credits Writers ACiD!Press Editor Mindcrime ACiD ACiD Special Thanks RaD Man and Wildcat Photographer Nitnatsnoc ACiD COMNT