I am speechless.

July 27, 2000 6:08 AM

I am speechless. I can't imagine the time and effort it took to create this. Unless of course there is some program out there that will do it for you. If there is, then it is just "kewl."
posted by da5id (13 comments total)

This kind of work is routinely farmed out to Ascii data mills in the Phillipines. It's inhumane and something needs to be done about it.
posted by mecran01 at 6:16 AM on July 27, 2000

There are utilities "out there" that will output ascii text based on an image file. Very Cool indeed.

A quick google search for "ascii art" returned this faq with links to a couple of generators.

Caveat: I've never used them, I have no idea if they're any good or even still there.
posted by cCranium at 6:30 AM on July 27, 2000

It doesn't look exactly like the one that was posted, but Thinkgeek offers the ASCII penguin on a poster. They even explained how they did it: "[we] whipped up a little Perl script that will..."

There are also places on the Web where you can d/l apps that will convert pictures to ASCII.
posted by jkottke at 6:31 AM on July 27, 2000

And it would seem to me, at least, that it could be done fairly easily with a bit of cutting, pasting and colour changes. But perhaps I'm just ignorant of the hours of painstaking work put in by premier ASCII artists worldwide and have just diminished their talents and special abilities in a most cavalier fashion.

Not that I care, or anything.
posted by Dreama at 6:41 AM on July 27, 2000

Coloured ASCII art doesn't impress me nearly as much as Plain Jane ASCII Art that uses the shaping of letters to provide shading and 'texture'.

I think it's mostly because when I see a piece of coloured art, I immediately think it was generated using a gif->ASCII utility, which just seems like cheating.
posted by cCranium at 6:56 AM on July 27, 2000

Well, if you think THAT's nice ASCII art...try playing Quake in TEXTMODE! It amazes me that people actually make stuff like this.
posted by Succa at 7:20 AM on July 27, 2000

Ah, the text mode Quake is nothing more than a quick hack of an already-existing piece of software. There's a VGA driver that utilizes a graphics->ASCII conversion, and if you hook that into some Quake support libraries, you're done.

My favorite is the colored, animated ASCII art that you can create with the appropriate VT100 command codes. We used to toss those around the UNIX box back in college.
posted by daveadams at 7:56 AM on July 27, 2000

And of course there's the asciiMac hack from MacHack 98, which "filters all display output and turns it into ASCII art in real time."

posted by sudama at 8:30 AM on July 27, 2000

We had a discussion on this a while back on perlmonks. Check out this link for more info. In short, they'll release the code they used for it under the GPL soon.
posted by ar0n at 8:50 AM on July 27, 2000

Here's how it was done:

#1 First check this out:

#2 It was created using this:

It was created from a PNG file and the code above.
To use #2 this link or this one this one might be helpful:

Perhaps some benevolent individual with the know-how could bring these together in an easy-to-use format for Mac/Win folks all over the world.
posted by ooklah at 9:15 AM on July 27, 2000

Static ascii pictures are so 1980's, Asciimation rocks!
posted by Markb at 9:21 AM on July 27, 2000

What I wanna know is:

What happens when I feed it to gcc.

And can I enter it in the IOCCC?
posted by baylink at 8:10 PM on July 27, 2000

It might have been done with this also. That's pretty cross-platform... And easy way to replace the default perlscript which makes up the ascii text is with Dreamweaver's search and replace function. I assume that similar products have similar features you could use; I'm only familiar with Dreamweaver though.
posted by kidsplateusa at 10:45 PM on July 30, 2000