Intro
This post is 100% power up.
I grew up with somewhat of a limited access to what people my age would consider technology. Living in central america ( Belize to be exact ) from when I was about the age of seven until around sixteen. I was born in 1985 so the time I spent in Belize which is a third world country. Most my age would likely have had access to some form of gaming console.
I had my 486 which my Dad helped me build when I was around eleven years old. I installed redhat onto it and would spend most of my time playing a game called Cybersphere.
Cybersphere is actually still running to this day but the reason I loved it so much then was that it was like reading my books but with the added depth of being fully interactive. Cybersphere is what is referred to as a MUSH that is a multi user shared hallucination all conferred in text specifically through a beefed out telnet client.
My tastes in telnet games eventually grew and somewhat broadened. I still play a couple from time to time. One of the most fantastic ideas in my mind in relation to these games however was and remains ASCII art. One of the earliest to my knowledge at least to play with this idea in any real depth was Nethack which would render maps for your roguelike adventure graphically using only the ASCII character set.
Simplicity
Why the ASCII character set you ask? Why not voxels? or html? or any other form that we use to communicate from pictograms to the english written language to sanscrit...
Simplicity, ASCII to my knowledge is the closest human usable form to binary, the one and the zero that make up our technological leaps into the digital age. ASCII was first ratified in 1963 and is an adaptation from telegraph code.
Source
With ASCII I not only have the ability to write any character (almost) within the english language, I can also use these character to represent things that they look like. The emoji for the example is a deeply watered down derivation of ASCII art i.e. ---> :P the cologne and capital P when flipped 90 degrees clock wise resemble a face with its tongue out and is now used to communicate any number of different emotions although most commonly to communicate a sense of amusement.
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Fantastic creations can be made with this medium and I feel to this day that it has not felt the true limits of its possibilities.
Follow for more like this next time I will be talking about ANSI!
Hahah, brings back memories from the old days... stumbling on some ASCII art now is really rare. Things have really changed since as now it is as easy as running a tool on a photo to generate an ASCII version for you automatically.
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Very good point. I guess the cost to entry is alot lower now because of generators. But there are little hints you can look for to see if it was generated or not.
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Cool post , brought back some memories of awesome ascii art tucked around BBS systems back in the day - played a few MUSH type games too :)
The art at the end is awesome too, I really love Alex Grey's artwork and im surprised it translated to ascii so well - heres the original linked to his website for more :)
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Yea its a tool cover work too but I am fairly confident that an ASCII art generator was not used to convert it, I think it was actually done manually by an artist, I just could not find the original artist. What telnet games did you play Ausbit?
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Its been so long, but I remember getting pretty hooked on what I guess looking back must have been an early version of nethack , hooked up to a BBS with a shared score table and mission log.. It blew my mind at the time, having such detailed adventures in just text shared with people from all over the world (also, it was a whole adventure in itself to figure out how to connect to an international BBS in the first place, without paying int fees ;)
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Thats awesome man, I still log onto materiamagica every once in a while and it is still very nostalgic for me.
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I think ASCII art is perfect fit for cyberpunk themes. And the medium is not limiting when the work is designed specifically for it, as is evident from best examples.
For example, very smooth contour here.
My favorite ASCII art group is Galza, here's one of their iconic works. And here's another.
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Excellent beautiful pieces thank you @killerstorm
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