Slashdot Mirror
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?"
This is just asking for the goatsecx trolls...
Banaaaana!
that and the quake mod done in all ascii for linux - has that been ported to windows yet?
She may not be the best, but she's darn good. And she has some cool nude self-portraits ;-).
http://www.asciimation.co.nz/ requires a java-enabled browser, though I'm pretty sure a telent version somewhere....
Be sure and check out asciipr0n for all you ascii pr0nography needs.
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
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
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.
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
Let's not forget this baby!
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?
Telnet to it at telnet://towel.blinkenlights.nl/
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/
Mplayer supports aalib output and can play many more formats including quicktime.
If you really want to be astounded with some ascii craziness...
asciiartfarts has to be one of the funniest sites on the internet. A little crude, but hilarious.
Here's a few recent favorites.
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."
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.
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!
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."
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."
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!
Does anyone else see the irony in 32-bit colour ASCII? Geez ...
----- rL
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.
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.
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!