The Return of ASCII Ari

For those of you who did not use computer bulletin boards in the 1980s with 300 baud modems, ASCII Art is pictures made up of ASCII characters. ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is used to represent the stuff you can type on your keyboard. Looking at ASCII Art is a bit like looking at an abstract painting or an ultrasound picture. You have to have a little bit of imagination to “see” what you can see.

People have gone all out, using sequences of VT100 codes to “animate” a variety of things. Perhaps one of the more well-known ones was a ASCII-animation of the movie Star Wars.

While I’m sure the first ASCII art files were done painstakingly by-hand, there are a ton of ASCII Art programs that will convert conventional GIF or JPG files to ASCII text representations.

What made me think about ASCII Art after all these years? Well, due to the fact I’m switching to DSPAM as my spam filter, I’m having to look a bit more of my spam while I train DSPAM. This evening, I ran across an ad for some male impotence drugs. I gotta give the spammer who came up with the idea to do it in ASCII art some points for extreme cleverness. For posterity sake, I will post a portion of the picture here. The ASCII Art did contain a fully-nude women, which I figure might offend someone so I sliced the picture off at about the shoulders.

   #    # #   ##    ####  #####    ##                ####  #   ##   #      #  ####                               #    # #  #  #  #    # #    #  #  #              #    # #  #  #  #      # #                                   #    # # #    # #      #    # #    #    #####    #      # #    # #      #  ####                               #    # # ###### #  ### #####  ######             #      # ###### #      #      #                               #  #  # #    # #    # #   #  #    #             #    # # #    # #      # #    #                                ##   # #    #  ####  #    # #    #              ####  # #    # ###### #  ####                            

[ url to spammer removed ]

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