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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?"

50 of 241 comments (clear)

  1. Oh no... by Exiler · · Score: 3, Funny

    This is just asking for the goatsecx trolls...

    --
    Banaaaana!
  2. Only time I ever see ascii related stuff is by Rooked_One · · Score: 3, Funny
    usually when *one of my friends* has to look at the .nfo file to know how to *install* something.

    that and the quake mod done in all ascii for linux - has that been ported to windows yet?

    1. Re:Only time I ever see ascii related stuff is by phrogeeb · · Score: 2, Informative
      Wow, I thought I'd be the first to bring up Textmode Quake. Took me a couple of secs to figure out that Rooked One was talking about it already.

      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..."

      --

      ------

      "Will the highways on the Internet become more few?" --George W. Bush, in Jan. 2000

  3. the obligatory...... by xao+gypsie · · Score: 2, Funny

    ASCII pr0n!!!!......im sry, i had to..

    xao

    --


    xao
    http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
  4. 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 ;-).

  5. 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....

    1. Re:Don't forget ASCIIMATION STAR WARS by houseofmore · · Score: 5, Funny

      "....http://www.asciimation.co.nz/ requires a java-enabled browser"

      It's a sad sad day when you need to install java to view ascii :(

    2. Re:Don't forget ASCIIMATION STAR WARS by SweetAndSourJesus · · Score: 2, Funny

      this?

      --

      --
      the strongest word is still the word "free"
    3. Re:Don't forget ASCIIMATION STAR WARS by krogoth · · Score: 4, Informative

      telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

      --

      They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
  6. Ascii pr0n by _aa_ · · Score: 4, Funny

    Be sure and check out asciipr0n for all you ascii pr0nography needs.

    1. Re:Ascii pr0n by gangien · · Score: 3, Funny

      I'm not sure what is scarier, that this things exists or that slashdot moddes it informative.

  7. Just metamoderated an ASCII art comment by bubblegoose · · Score: 3, Funny

    While the goatse guy totally disgusts me, I just metamoderated a comment where someone made the goatse picture out of ASCII text.

    It was pretty funny, but the guy links to the real thing all over his comment.

    --
    I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
  8. that's not art by jedie · · Score: 4, Insightful

    that's just rendering a picture with ASCII chars, where's the human effort? it's like a robot-made-painting.
    and the flash movie? well, you can't just jiggle around with the chars. it defeats the whole purpose.

    --
    "The majority is always sane, Louis." -- Nessus
    http://slashdot.jp
    1. Re:that's not art by Erik+Fish · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Exactly! How can anyone mistake these automated conversions for "art" or even for "something that took more than ten minutes"? There was a time when people who tried to pass this shit off as the real thing were ridiculed and ostracised. Now it seems to be a big trend.

      Why not a /. story with links to JED's ansimations or an interview with Lord Jazz or something?

      There was a time when I wanted to see this genre make an impact on the art world, but after seeing that WIRED "illustration" (pasting photos inside text was one of the first things I learned in Photoshop) I think I'd rather it stayed obscure.

  9. 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.

  10. For those of you who can't read Polish by kisielk · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  11. Tux by houseofmore · · Score: 4, Funny

    Let's not forget this baby!

  12. Cool post, lame sites by ninjadroid · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

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

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

  14. 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 BitHive · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

    2. 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?

  15. MPlayer by KPU · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  16. UNICODE FOREVER by autopr0n · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Down with ascii and romantic elitism! Unicode for the web, Unicode for email, unicode FOREVER!

    Well, it would make things more convenient.

    --
    autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
  17. 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
  18. funny ascii - ascii art farts by Pilferer · · Score: 3, Informative

    asciiartfarts has to be one of the funniest sites on the internet. A little crude, but hilarious.

    Here's a few recent favorites.

    1. Re:funny ascii - ascii art farts by YinYang69 · · Score: 3, Funny
      I'm so very glad someone gave the link to asciiartfarts!!! The site rocks. And if someone out there happens to enjoy the asciiartfart sense of humor as much as I do, then you guys will also enjoy jerkcity [jerkcity.com].

      Jerkcity serves out black and white gif comic strips (thereby making this posting a bit off-topic, however given the context...). Hilarious if sometimes a bit hard to follow.

    2. Re:funny ascii - ascii art farts by perky · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Presumably you might want to try alt.ascii-art for daily posts by Tran (of ascii art fart fame), and other great new pictures. Note: these are hand crafted pictures, not those images made by running a jpeg through some program or other.

      --
      "The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
  19. /. effect by breon.halling · · Score: 4, Funny

    Holy crap! I think these site can withstand the Slashdot effect! All they're serving up are textfiles! =)

    --
    "Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
  20. 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.
  21. 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!

  22. 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.

  23. 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.

  24. ASCII Pr0n by Cyno01 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Reminds me of a keynote speach i heard by Jason Scott (the textfile.com guy) about how he got in trouble at school for selling ascii porn. His reply when called into the principals office and presented with the evidence was, "I dont know what you see sir, but all i see is a bunch of letters and numbers on the page."

    --
    "Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
  25. Some of the best artists... by WiKKeSH · · Score: 5, Informative

    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/

    --
    Downmix - The Artscene News Source!
  26. Ironic? by rlowe69 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Does anyone else see the irony in 32-bit colour ASCII? Geez ...

    --
    ----- rL
  27. Re:One of the great ASCII artists: - mod parent up by wal9000 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I agree. This is actual hand-crafted ASCII art, not merely running some JPG through a converter.

    The high-color conversions have a neat look, but as "art" it's underwhelming.

  28. The many faces of ascii by mkro · · Score: 5, Informative
    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).

    --
    I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
    1. Re:The many faces of ascii by j1mmy · · Score: 2, Informative

      You didn't even mention TheDraw. Goodness!

    2. Re:The many faces of ascii by mkro · · Score: 2, Informative
      I'm blushing, and I hope you can forgive me.

      While we're at it, we should also mention ACiDDraw, which some people prefer over TheDraw under DOS. Wanna draw under *nix? Try TetraDraw.
      For Win32 there's a promising little app called PabloDraw. The SourceForge page hasn't been updated for a while, but there's a newer, more stable version circulating. Ask around.

      The above mentioned are all fine and dandy for blockstyle, newschool and ansi, but if you want to draw oldschool (and don't have an Amiga with CygnusEd lying around), you might want to use something like UltraEdit for Windows (or some other editor with vertical block selection) with SAC-OS.FON, a modified (added pixels, doubled height to fix perspective) Topaz font.

      Are anyone drawing oldschool under Linux, and wanna share what tools they are using? Kwrite has block selection, but finding a descent (Well, familiar) font is pretty hard. Yes, courier can be used, but I'd rather wanna use SAC-OS. If anyone knows how to convert it (Windows bitmap font) to something that is usable under Linux, feel free to do so :)

      For more info on the ascii scene (Which still is alive, mind you), check out Acheron.org, or pop by #ascii or #sac on EFNet. People are also organizing oldschool ascii compos on #oscompo/EFNet on Sunday evenings, but I'm not sure if there has been any activity there lately.

      --
      I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
  29. First "Click Me!" translation (+5 Informative) by ashitaka · · Score: 2, Informative

    Click me!

    --
    If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
  30. asciiMac! by MotownAvi · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  31. 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!

  32. Re:Question by PyroX_Pro · · Score: 2, Informative

    ask and you shall receive... try here

  33. Re:NUDES ARE DUDES! by sahrss · · Score: 2, Informative

    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

  34. 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.
  35. The #musicdsp Adventures by kilraid · · Score: 2, Funny

    Need "quality" stuff? Here's a perverted ASCII comic, The #musicdsp Adventures , which I drew last year - stories from the music digital signal processing IRC channel. Each picture is only 3 lines long. A tiny sample:

    \õ/ Oh Bram! OH BRAM!!!
    |
    /\|\_o ..ah DJ Maus, DJ MAUS!!!

  36. ANSI Art by lordscarlet · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  37. ASCII Warehouses by radd0 · · Score: 2, Informative

    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
    http://www.thuglife.org

    Acheron.org Art/News Portal
    http://www.acheron.org

    Joan Stark's ASCII gallery
    More mainstream but rich in content regarding the different facets ASCII artscenes. Unfortunately this site is constantly plagued by Geocities bandwidth caps.

    -r