Re: Text Art Plus (plus thoughts about ascii searching)

Hayley Jane Wakenshaw wrote:
> 
> >> In the past few weeks, I developed a new way of drawing my
> >> cartoons for which I coined the term Text Art Plus.
> 
> >Is it just me or does anybody else feel that this does not belong >here?
> >(and why bother using text characters at all, why not just _draw_ >the cartoons?)
> 
> Actually, I think this _does_ belong here. I've been to
> Pete's site, and had a look at the TAP stuff, and it's
> still ascii in essence as far as I'm concerned. 

As far as I am concerned ascii art is about facing the challenge of
using the very limited ascii table to create pictures that will be
viewable on all computers and that are "memory efficient" (i.e. takes up
little memory space in relation to their "physical size" on a screen).

Pc's pictures have left the challenging limitations by allowing any kind
of graphical items to be a part of them, they are no longer viewable on
all computers and they take up much more memory than ascii pictures do. 

Another thing that is special about ascii art is that it is easy to copy
and change without the changes looking weird and sticking out.

If I were to copy PC's pictures and try to change them I would probably
have some trouble getting the characters to look the same since I most
likely don't have the same programs and fonts as he has. If for example
I were to take one of Joan's ascii pictures and change some details it
might not even be obvious to that eagle-eyed lady what changes had been
made...

> I know
> it's in gif format and some of the elements aren't ascii
> at all, but it's based on and inspired by ascii as far
> as I can tell - I doubt that Frogstein and Birdstein
> would be the same if they were drawn, hence they are
> still in ascii form.

Then there is always the technical part where you take away the fancy
window environment and look at the individual ones and zeros in the
memory of the computer.... On that level it would be more or less
impossible for a computer to "see" that an ascii picture and one of PC's
"TAP" creations even slightly resemble each other. 


<***leave subject***>
<***start wild and unrelated association***>


This may seem like uninteresting nonsense to you but just think a
little, it can have some interesting practical consequences.... For
example if you have an ascii picture that you like and want to find more
of the same kind you can take a line, or part of a line, stuff it into
alta vista and find other places on the net where that picture exists,
you can't do that with a gif (ok, you might get lucky if you search on
the file name but the same gif image may appear under different names
while ascii pictures can't change too drastically and still be the
"same" pictures....).

An example:

1.

I tried to search in Alta Vista for a line from good old "Meriday's"
feet...

Here's the line:

"MMMM MM::::m:m:MM"

And this is what I got in return:

http://mediafilter.org/ZK/Conf/Conf_Email/May.17.1996.15.49.51
	(unfortunately unrelated to the lovely lady)
http://lalaland.cl.msu.edu/~vanhoose/ascii/flatmap.vt
	(not her, but a nice ascii find)
http://think.ucdavis.edu/~campb/jokes/pics.asc
	a hit!
http://futures.gold.ac.uk/IdeaBase/gorilla.html
	hmmm... a hit, but hideously disfigured to "save the children"
http://www.vrx.net/NET.SCANDAL/asci
	a hit!
http://www.sjoki.uta.fi/~kotkkrla/perustuslaki.text
	a hit!
(plus a couple of no longer working addresses)


2.

Then I tried the line:

"meriday in the morning"

(since I seem to recall that somebody called the picture that)

From which I got this result:

http://www.cli.di.unipi.it/~aldinic/original.html
with a link to this page:
http://www.cli.di.unipi.it/~aldinic/Meriday.html
(and that one isn't even complete)


3.

Then I tried to search for just the name "meriday".... I got 20 replies.
I found the cut-off version again (twice!), an instruction to finger
mbk...@remarque.berkeley.edu (it works, but you have to look fast
because it just flashes by... or see it one piece at a time by telling
the computer to list the results one page at a time). 

BUT - in order to find these I had to wade through piles of "rubbish" (
=nice stuff, but not what I was looking for), including a bunch of
pictures of - lizards and snakes! (and of course the usual bunch of dead
ends... "404 Not Found" is not what I was looking for...).

[I know this is not exactly what this discussion was about but it just
popped up in my mind right now and I thought I'd tell the rest of you
about this searching method....]


<***end wild and unrelated association***>
<***go back to subject***>


> 
> I don't think Pete is claiming that this is strictly
> ascii,

No, and I agree with that, but if it is not ascii, does it belong
here???

> but *I* like what he's done, and I think

And I don't, but the argument is not about _taste_. I personally think
those disgusting little animals should go to hell, but as long as they
are made in ASCII they are on-topic and welcome to the group and I will
not argue about that, it is when they take the form of PC's new
invention "TAP" that I say - this is not ascii and does not belong here.

> announcing the TAP stuff is relevant to this group;
> without ascii, the TAP stuff wouldn't be there anyway! :)

No, but I think that with this he has passed the border out of
ascii-land (this place may be where he started, but it is now where he
is now).

-- 
:)
Veronica Karlsson
( e93...@sm.luth.se  http://www.ludd.luth.se/~vk/ )