"Best-of Mistigris artdisk", originally released on floppy at a Living Closet Jul 23 '99

[reluctance]

... and re-released Nov 30th 2014 digitally. I put the infofile to MIST1014 up here, so I thought that it might be worthwhile to stow this archive's infofile somewhere a Google spider might be able to actually read it as well. Also, it's a way of being accountable to you readers: you know that we released a Mist pack in October, and that we had

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[reluctance]

Tracked music began as .MODs; everything before then was generally just sequenced and synthesized, but the .MOD-trackers allowed the (ab)use of samples, up to four channels of them. That was a good start for Amiga folks, but no less august an entity than Future Crew upped the state of the art with their music creation program Scream Tracker, which produced .S3M files -- basically .MODs on steroids. The door thus opened, two more variant standards followed, building on the achievements of the .S3M: the .XM music files produced by FastTracker 2 and the .IT files resulting from the use of Impulse Tracker. (Theoretically you may have seen *.669 floating around as well, a kind of fortified .MOD, but in practice it was basically never used.) We only need to discuss .S3M files here because sampled songs were relatively large in file-size, so the only song we included was a "chip" tune using square waves etc. for samples, resulting in a very small footprint.

.LITs were more a case of identity politics: they were always either just raw text files, might as well be suffixed with .TXT, or ANSI-coloured words, best interpreted as .ANS files. But no, we had to be special and do our own thing. (Also, we wanted our creative works to be distinguished from instructions, configuration files, infofiles, and other sundry which might be included in raw text.)

Really you knew about RIPscrip but had never heard of S3Ms? You must know more of this world than you're letting on!

[glowing_fish]

I actually didn't know about RIPscrip either. But the file extensions just jumped out at me, since it was once my job to know file extensions.

And since it is a long Saturday afternoon, with not much else to do, let me talk about file extensions!

File extensions come from a time when computers were more mythical, both easier and harder to understand. Someone growing up with computers now probably sees computers as a matter of agents and entities: programs that have an identifiable task, and go beyond that to have their own aesthetic and personality. Instagram isn't just a "program" that processes "data", it is an entity that seemingly has its own drives. The fact that underpining this is a series of discrete files is more and more masked, both culturally and technically (finding the actual .jpg file behind an instagram post can be a challenge).

When I first started learning about file extensions (starting when I was working dial-up tech support, and of course continuing when I worked at Free Geek), it was a surge of wizardry! The simple experience of "surfing the net", in 1999 only starting to gain cultural currency, could be broken down into these discrete units called "fiiles". Of course, in UNIX, "everything is a file", and that was my basic way of looking at computers for a long time. And something that people who grew up with "there is an app for that" would probably not understand.