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Appreciation For All Things ASCII
AsciiRock writes "Sick of seeing those chunky pixel art logos everywhere? Check out AsciiBlog, Contemporary ASCII, and Ascii Disko (no relation to me) for examples of artists inspired by plain text. ...and also click me! and click me! which made their way around the net some time back.
Wonder how many other examples of BBS design sensibility there'll be this year. There's already Wired illustrators.
2002, year of ASCII design?"
The big Ascii banner on ascii.blog.pl "Robimy ASCII By Podryvac Laski" loosely translates to "We make ASCII to pick up chicks". If only I had known this was possible I'm sure I would have spent more of my BBS days making ASCII art :p
Well, I couldn't really evaluate the blog, as it was in a non-english language, or the sites requiring Flash and/or Java, as I have neither. That said, the sites I could peruse weren't all that great. Contemporary Ascii was nothing but a bunch of links to a medical site (?), and Ascii Disko was some dude's music site.
Really, what the hell? Where's all the kick-ass Ascii art?
Mplayer supports aalib output and can play many more formats including quicktime.
But since I already put the effort in (clicking on bookmarks is hard donchaknow), I'll put in a plug for my favorite Quake mod ever - check out ascii-quake at: http://webpages.onvoy.com/bobz/ttyquake/ .
Like they say on the site ... "people are starving to death in this world... and somebody had time for this..."
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"Will the highways on the Internet become more few?" --George W. Bush, in Jan. 2000
asciiartfarts has to be one of the funniest sites on the internet. A little crude, but hilarious.
Here's a few recent favorites.
Some of the best artists can be found at:. ice.org (mostly ansi). org
http://www.chemical-reaction.org
http://www
http://www.acheron.org
http://www.remorse
http://www.wasted.nu/woe/01/ascii/
Downmix - The Artscene News Source!
The Amiga ascii scene (Now often refered to as the "oldschool scene"): :) If you really want to have a closer look, though, check out the works of e.g. Mark Ryder, Grimlock, and... no, too many to mention. All collections should be viewed with CygnusEd in Topaz 8, even though your browser could do the trick.
From the early 90's people made "collections" - large textfiles - with logos (file_id.diz, bbs adverts, demo group names, etc), and later rants, poems and other forms of self expression. Tools of the trade: Slash, backslash, underscore, pipe, you get the idea.
Freshpla.net has a pretty good (though not updated) archive. Yes, I know, this might be look like madness to, hm, laymen
The blockstyle scene
These are the nice people that make most of those NFO files. Uses the blocks in the MS-DOS charset. Two of the biggest groups are Superior Art Creations (SAC) and Chemical Reaction (CRO). Get the Damn NFO Viewer (Win32).
The newschool scene :)
Seems to be the part of the group-based ascii scene that stays furthest away from the warez scene. Uses e.g. $$$$$$ to fill shapes, and various other characters to make their outline smooth. Only active examples I can remember at the moment are Mimic and Remorse. Ansi happens
The Ansi scene
Ascii is ascii and ansi is ansi, but these scenes are closely connected. Colourized art using the MS-DOS font. There can only be one: ACID. Viewers available for most platforms, just use Google.
...and then, of course, there are those other forms of ascii art, as the hilarious The Adventures of the Boy with Immovable Hair and this wonderful flash anim synced to an Offspring song (Might be from the same author as that flash link in the parent post).
I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
Click me!
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
On April Fools Day a few years ago, www.starwars.com changed their site to an all ascii, BBS style format for a day. The date on the site was April 1, 1980. The lead stories were about Star Wars soon coming to VHS and Beta, the upcoming release of The Empire Strikes Back, and lot of other cool retro touches.
Unfortunately, I never saw it. I learned about it after, and have never found a mirror.
It would be VERY cool if somebody knew where a copy of this one day tribute to ASCII BBS sites could be seen.
That would only work for pages with large images. Many sites use images (or worse--Flash) heavily as part of their logo and navigation. These will likely still get crushed by the /. effect.
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
Miro Jurisic and Alexandra Ellwood wrote an extension called asciiMac for the MacHack '98 Hack Contest, and it won first place. It turned your screen, real-time, into a full-color ascii-art display. I was there. It was amazing and the crowd went wild.
ask and you shall receive... try here
Oh, did you mean this?
ascii gallery
You have to look harder!
On the Sorted by Subject page, go to the anchors Self Portraits and Naughty.
For those who are extremely lazy (or not as desperate?):
ASCII1.HTML#VK1
ASCII2.HTML#portrait
ASCII2.HTML#knifeswordmotorsaw
ASCII7.HTML#VK
ASCII4.HTML#VKmermaid
ASCII5.HTML#Nothing
ASCII6.HTML#hotdogs
ASCII8.HTML#threelegs
ASCII8.HTML#witchdick
If this actually gets clicked by many people it will crash quickly, but for the few that make it to the site before it's completely bogged down, Idle Dreams has a massive ANSI Art Library (thousands of art packs). I'm working on a new version, but this one is functional at least. Not the greatest bit of work, but the artwork is there.
Granted some of these links are now repetitive, but many of the largest warehouses of ASCII art have yet to be mentioned. Listed in order of magnitude:
TEXTFILES.COM Computer Art Collection
Features a wide range of computer-oriented text-based artwork beginning with teletype (RTTY) art which predates ASCII. An archive of archives. http://www.textfiles.com/artscene/
The ACiD Artpacks Archive
Index and sorted by year. Hosts a collection of over 13 years of ASCII, ANSI, RIPscrip and other digital artwork. ftp://artpacks.acid.org/pub/artpacks/
The CHRIST Ascii Archives
Indexed and sorted by artgroup. The authoritative archive of IBM-PC and Amiga ASCII art. ftp://ftp.mimic.ca/pub/ascii/
Thuglife ASCII Art/News Portal
Acheron.org Art/News Portalhttp://www.thuglife.org
http://www.acheron.org
Joan Stark's ASCII gallery
-rMore mainstream but rich in content regarding the different facets ASCII artscenes. Unfortunately this site is constantly plagued by Geocities bandwidth caps.