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Appreciation For All Things ASCII

Posted by timothy on from the what's-wrong-with-chunky dept.

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?"

14 of 241 comments (clear)

  1. One of the great ASCII artists: by Peeing+Calvin · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Veronica Karlsson

    She may not be the best, but she's darn good. And she has some cool nude self-portraits ;-).

  2. Don't forget ASCIIMATION STAR WARS by CyberSlugGump · · Score: 5, Interesting

    http://www.asciimation.co.nz/ requires a java-enabled browser, though I'm pretty sure a telent version somewhere....

  3. If you like ascii prepare to be blown away... by MrLint · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Apple has a little known utility that will play qucktime movies thru an ascii renderer (or something) and into the terminal app. Its only on monochrome, but watching movie trailers thru it is just wild.

  4. Re:ASCII Movies by EatHam · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Telnet to it at telnet://towel.blinkenlights.nl/

  5. I got the prefect anti-slashdot idea... by skermit · · Score: 5, Interesting

    PHP protect all your pages so if a counter increments by a certain count within a certain amount of time (say 30 mins or an hour) for the next 2 hours, it will remove all of the inline images, run them through an ascii-art converter, and replace it, so you're transferring at most a couple kilobytes of text which is gzip compressable through most browsers now and checks every 2 hours until the slashdot (or fark, or k5, or memebutt) effect subsides... Any techheads wanna get crackin'?

    --
    -Christopher Wu
    http://www.christopherwu.net/
    1. Re:I got the prefect anti-slashdot idea... by Bald+Wookie · · Score: 2, Interesting

      That's funny. I just cooked up a PHP script that reads a 24bit color BMP and converts it to HTML. Since the RGB color values in the BMP map directly to RGB color entites in the HTML it's mainly a matter of keeping track of the rows. I didn't bother with any of the cool tricks like selecting characters for asciialiasing curves and edges though.

      Unfortunately, the technique I used for the HTML crashed Mozilla when I fed it bitmaps bigger than about 128x128. There must be something about rendering over a thousand span tags with different colored inline styles that makes the browser choke ;) Also, the file size was larger than the original by a significant margin. Even plain ASCII is effectively 8 bits a 'pixel' so you probably wouldn't save much.

      Nice idea about the 'anti slashdot' script, but I think I'd go with redirects instead. While the load is high dump everyone from the most popular referrer to a low bandwidth version of the page. Heh. Maybe send them to 127.0.0.1 instead?

  6. Great waste of 10 minutes by L3WKW4RM · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If you really want to be astounded with some ascii craziness...

    $> apt-get install bb
  7. Really cool... by Shamashmuddamiq · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Don't forget the TextNES emulator-- a NES emulator that uses ASCII text output in a DOS windows for the graphics. Really cool! I'd like to find the source code to this thing and port it to Linux/ncurses. If anyone knows who wrote this, let me know.

    --
    ...just my 2 gil.
  8. The power apps... by EverStoned · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you're wondering how loads of those ascii-pictures are made, check out BG_ASCII. It's a wonderful program (Yes, it can convert JPG to ASCII), and by the looks of things, this is what they used. If you're loooking to do original ASCII art, check out Email Effects, and check out #SAC on EFNET for the Superior Art Creations!

  9. ASCII 3d Bob, by Mike Jittlov by Xtifr · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I just had to take this opportunity to point out what I consider to be one of the most amazing pieces of ASCII art ever done -- from the Church of the Subgenius website, a 3d stereogram picture of JR "Bob" Dobbs, by Mike Jittlov, director of the low-budget cult classic, The Wizard of Speed and Time.

  10. anyone know where to get this famous 'spock' ? by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 5, Interesting

    this is an actual line (chain?) printer printout from the early 80's. you can see its yellowing and I'd like to reprint it on a modern printer.

    but I don't have the source. it was on an old DECsystem-10 or -20 many years ago:

    spock ascii poster

    any pointers to this multi over-print goodie?

    --

    --
    "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
    1. Re:anyone know where to get this famous 'spock' ? by phr2 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      That Spock pic and several others were done by Sam Harbison at the Princeton University computer center in the early 70's. He scanned the photos with a digital densitometer (a big deal back then), did some clever image processing (another big deal back then) to convert the greyscale into patterns of light and dark dots, and finally did more cleverness to map the light and dark dots into overstrike patterns. I don't know if he ever published anything detailed about it or whether he released any of the tools. However, the actual printer files were available and many people printed out the pictures for their walls.

  11. Simpsons EBCDIC Art by jms · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ASCII art was my brief claim to fame back in 1990, as it seemed that half of the sig files on usenet incorporated part of my ASCII depiction of The Simpsons

    The ironic part was that I "drew" it on a 3270, so it was actually EBCDIC art until it hit the BITNET/USENET gateway!

  12. if this actually took skill it might be cool... by httpamphibio.us · · Score: 2, Interesting

    the ascii artists of the day, and ones that still draw now, actually had SKILL, they worked by hand... all these ascii's here are just lame pixel art to ascii conversions, which is just stupid, unskilled, and hardly ascii at all. bleh!

    --
    sig.