ASCII Me (by Jeremy Zawodny)

Apparently someone has seen fit to make an ASCII Art Text Painting of me and a bunch of other bloggers.

There's some weird satisfaction in seeing an ASCII art rendering of a high resolution image, taking a screen shot of it, and then re-posting it again as a PNG file. It's kind of like buying music from iTunes, burning it to a CD, and then ripping the track back to an MP3 file so that you can use it on any device you actually want. Except without the RIAA being involved.

Heh.

In related non-news, dot matrix printers are still around.

Bored? Read more about ASCII Art on Wikipedia or spend a bit of time in this ASCII Art Gallery.

Got a favorite piece of ASCII Art? Drop a link in the comments. Hopefully it doesn't involve me. :-)

Posted by jzawodn at July 25, 2007 06:28 AM

Reader Comments

# Matt W said:

This looks more like what used to be ANSI art to me ;) (as opposed to just ASCII art)

on July 25, 2007 06:42 AM

# Jeremy Zawodny said:

Good point!

But I think the best ANSI art was the animated stuff. Man, that takes me back...

on July 25, 2007 06:54 AM

# Roger said:

Try viewing one of the ASCII portraits in Firefox, then use ctrl-+ and ctrl-- to expand and shrink the font size. Trippy.

on July 25, 2007 06:57 AM

# R Walker said:

This is just coloured text not ascii art

Have a look at this for making large posters that are very effective

http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/

R Walker

on July 25, 2007 07:36 AM

# Jay said:

This reminds me of all the (wasted?) hours I spent dialing up BBSes and drawing ANSI art in theDRAW.

on July 25, 2007 09:32 AM

# Joff said:

Speaking of ASCII art if you ever need to say "sorry" to your wife / girlfriend / significant other in e-mail you can always include a dozen roses like such:

--<<-@

on July 25, 2007 12:03 PM

# Charles said:

Ah, I'm just old enough to remember having trouble trying to print the ASCII Spock file. The IBM360 operators didn't like running the file, it overprinted five times on each line, they claimed it slowed down the line printer and put excessive wear on the mechanism. And the card deck was easy to spot, about 2 inches thick. We had our decks returned unrun on several occasions, until I finally found a friendly operator to run it off hours when nobody was around.
Come to think of it, this was on an IBM360 so this wasn't ASCII art either, it was EBCDIC art. ha..

on July 25, 2007 01:18 PM

# Fresh Mexican Food Fan said:

This is my favorite site for this kind of art since 2001:

http://www.degraeve.com/img2txt.php

on July 26, 2007 08:12 AM

# Garry Conn said:

That looks pretty cool. Loading the picture up in full screen and stepping back a few feet, you can barely tell the difference.

And good grief! Has anyone viewed the HTML source on that file! lol!

on July 28, 2007 08:40 PM

# Global trade resource said:

ANSI art...i see

on July 29, 2007 07:41 PM

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