QC (quality control)

QC is an initialism with an edge. Wielded bluntly, "quality control" is often a way of saying "your work isn't good enough for inclusion, we're rejecting this piece". (Not "here's what we can do to salvage this...") Some people may find the experience to be motivating, but after hearing it enough, they will stop sending in submissions and find another hobby. Unless your name was ACiD or iCE, most underground artscene crews were talent incubator farm teams where the cultivation and nurturing of emerging artists was done through constructive feedback and mentorship, but overenthusiastic application of QC standards (or even empty talk about it, to excess) can undermine that creative growth and poison the relationship between the artist and the crew. (Really, if you don't think you're going to be accepting their submissions in your releases, it's a little cruel to approve their application for membership in the first place!) For instance, QC matters absolutely served as a wedge contributing to the exodus of Mist Classic membership and their establishment of Hallucigenia.

QC can be used more loosely, to suggest "this is done well for what it is, but including material in that dated / unfashionable style or genre would reflect poorly on us", by which point what is being controlled isn't specifically quality but a broader sense of branding. You might hear QC bandied around in the '90s to explain why artpacks were including less and less lit and [tracker music]. Sturgeon's Law was always in effect everywhere, but if the existence of inferior lit prevented you from considering superior lit for inclusion, then what you were doing was again, a different kind of C than the Q variety. (Gee whiz, Cthulu, that was an awfully specific example you pulled out of thin air!)

QC could also be used in tandem with [slushpile] management, not necessarily to indicate "this work is unreleasable" but a more nuanced "we have too much of this kind of thing allocated to the current artpack, so we will decline to release it at this time " This explains the story of how ACiD ripped GD-VOS!.ANS from MIST0196 and released it as GD-SPYDR.ANS in ACDU0896 seven months later: Grateful Dead initially submitted it to ACiD, they failed to release it, and he thought "those rascals don't know a good thing when they see it, but if they don't want it I know someone who will: my ANSI-starved homies in Mist Classic!" Naturally the elites in ACiD totally failed to even observe it quietly slinking out of MIST0196 but when the time came and they were populating ACDU0896, they thought: "there's an absence here of something with a certain je ne sais quoi, that could be addressed if we released that old submission from jail that Grateful Dead sent in six months ago, I think this pack has a need for something just like that!" All I can say is if you're going to manage your slush that way, you need to have good communication with your artists (something that, despite all the telephony, could be in short supply in the '90s underground) or you may wind up in an embarrassing situation.

QC doesn't have to be a sadistic kind of torture! Cthulu, despite still clearly carrying trauma from memories of QC invocation 30 years ago, regularly QCs many, sometimes dozens, of artworks from Mist artpacks, on the grounds that sometimes an artpack is simply big enough and it might be sufficient to include the best 12 of a specific kind of work rather than the entire series of 75 that an artist made in a mad frenzy. (Historically, when we had situations where there was just too much of good but same-y work, we would stack them together in collies, but that doesn't really work with hirez and teletext screens.) Skimming the cream is also a kind of QC, and when you start working with hyperproducers such as Horsenburger and Blippypixel, it may prove to be a survival technique. All the same, when Cthulu finds himself populating a new artpack on a given theme, the first thing he does is take a look at the QC subfolder from the previous artpack on that theme, to see if the time is ripe for any of those meritorious but formerly-excessive works to finally enjoy their moment in the sun. (I believe we were just discussing "slushpile management"?)