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?"

Comments

For those of you who can't read Polish

[kisielk]

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

Cool post, lame sites

[ninjadroid]

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

[KPU]

Mplayer supports aalib output and can play many more formats including quicktime.

Some of the best artists...

[WiKKeSH]

Some of the best artists can be found at:
http://www.chemical-reaction.org
http://www. ice.org (mostly ansi)
http://www.acheron.org
http://www.remorse. org
http://www.wasted.nu/woe/01/ascii/

The many faces of ascii

[mkro]

Obviously, there's more than one ASCII art scene. In some of them, the artists even are organized into groups, cooperating and releasing regular "packs" under the same label. Some people might not agree on these categories (and there are some overlapping), but I'll try to list them:

The Amiga ascii scene (Now often refered to as the "oldschool scene"):
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 :) 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.

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).

Re:Don't forget ASCIIMATION STAR WARS

[krogoth]

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