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L u k e S k y w a l k e r H a n S o l o C h e w b a c c a
Self-Proclaimed Jedi Knight Smuggler, Pirate Smuggler, Pirate
500,000 credits 200,000 credits 100,000 credits
The above are wanted for the following crimes:
- Liberation of a known criminal, Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan -
- Direct involvement in armed revolt against the Empire -
- High treason -
- Espionage -
- Conspiracy -
- Destruction of Imperial Property -
These individuals are considered extremely dangerous.
E X P E R I E N C E D B O U N T Y H U N T E R S O N L Y
The Empire will not be held responsible for any injuries or property
loss arising from the attempted apprehension of these notorious crimi-
nals. Bounty is for live capture only! For more information contact your
local Imperial Intelligence Office.
MAY THE 4th... er, OK, I missed that deadline. But the mission of sharing Star Wars-related textmode art compels me! So (sigh) it's time for the REVENGE OF THE 5TH! (If I don't get this out today, I'll have to resort to something completely abominable like ... 7he Empire S7rikes Back! (bleurgh!))
Aware that yesterday's occasion was upon us, in the afternoon of May 3rd I squared aside a few findings for use by the friendly folks over at the ANSI of the Day -- which they handily put to use. (RaDMaN, mastermind of ACiD, looked me up asking where my blog post about all the Star Wars ANSI art was, and I told him that he was having a prophetic vision. He enriched our art stockpile by quite a few pieces, including the ACiD-52 collection which was (non-exclusively) devoted to the SW theme as a run-up to the then-incipient Phantom Menace.) But after the dust settled from the AOTD, there was just so much more of this far, far away material sitting around that I felt that these B-sides warranted sharing also!
We'll begin with almost certainly the earliest specimen here, a PETSCII (remember that word! It comes back later!) portrait of everyone's favorite SW subject, Darth Vader, from a magazine type-in program listing (including a gallery of a few further Star Wars characters).
There are two further variations on this theme, one animated, one from Dog Star Adventure, an unlicensed Star Wars text adventure fangame. (Ha ha, this historically unprecedented comparison reveals that Dog Star Adventure, never the most conscientious in regards to the IP of others, simply stole the art from the above magazine listing 8) Then we depart this territory, to return later.
I've just got to get in the references to my own historical (and since revived!) computer art group Mistigris: under our auspices, Dead Soul released an ASCII of a moodily red Mandalorian in the Mist/Fire World Tour artpack of April 1997 (perhaps our best of all time?). [Update: this was a misfire, it's the box art to Origin's 1996 Crusader: No Regret.] Also, in issue #10 of our house organ the Kithe electronic magazine, the latest installment of the ASCII WARS column revealed an eerie resonance:
Now for a change of pace, some typographical Vader portraits that RaDMaN sent my way -- not artscene style, but you can't argue with the credentials of their source! Two were created anonymously (well, artist unknown... meaning, uncredited), and the third is described by artist jerm123321 as "very high resolution ascii art", splendid word soup! (And if you like these, there are some... I don't know how to describe them, coloured quotation sculptures you might be interested in.
OK, time to get back into our bread and butter, artscene / demoscene styles. Here are two serious ASCII Vader portraits (Blackjack & Discofunk, then a negative space take by Slash of Chaos Energy Group), followed by two serious ANSI ones -- the first by trash0r (from Deviantart -- not all ANSI came from the artscene or even the BBS community!) and the second by Rusty of Acme:
And then there are two not-so-serious ANSI takes on old man Vader, the first by the insanely talented (and apparently just insane: I won't presume to even attempt to translate, let alone explain it) Alla Xul in Poffelipoff, the second from a larger colly by Scrye of Sense13:
Kiwi of Blade demonstrated a tremendous aptitude for drawing ANSIs of spacecraft dogfights in their March 1996 artpack, in which both of these appeared:
And one more space battle, from the PD end of things (by "MCL", whoever that was!):
Then we get two ANSI renditions of everyone's favorite three-legged droid, R2-D2, the first by Dr. Shizuma (aka Konami, who has made a splash here before), the second by Tetanus and Nail in a classic Fire and Ice team-up in the Blender competition (which I recently revived... but I digress):
Had I known of this one it could have appeared in my regular (well, sporadic but long-running) video game textmode art series here: Posyden of The Dirty Dozen has made an ANSI portrait of a Phase III Dark Trooper from an ad for the game Star Wars: Dark Forces:
And here, a gnarly Darth Maul ASCII by 0xel of Zeit, one of very few pieces inspired by the prequel trilogy:
BONUS UPDATE! Someone who, back in the day, conducted his online affairs under the name "Boba Fett", formerly ran a BBS entitled "The Power of the Darkside". If you can think of a better recipe for attracting Star Wars ANSI, I'd like to hear it! Anyhow, he had a few additional pieces he remembered to throw our way, from Kitiara and The Green Hornet of RCA and Dark. Enjoy!
Is this the same Boba Fett? I don't know, but it's a self-portrait from a Lazarus memberlist!
A Yoda by Stone the Crow...
... and another one from the Public Domain, by my new favorite PD artist KT:
One more Yoda, with bonus C-3PO, by The Green Hornet from a March 1996 Dark artpack:
Two more finds from the earliest days of the PC underground artscene: here's a Death Star by Vito of LTD...
... and a genuine Star Wars logo by Triton and RaDMaN of ACiD!
Now you've hung in here for quite a while, so you deserve something exceptional, such as this epic Amiga-style ASCII suite by sk!n of deZign which took 2nd place in the 2015 NVScene demoparty's textmode compo:
(And an additional visit to the territory from the same artist:)
I'm icing the cake, power-loading this post with awesome art in the second act: I'm well asssured you won't have prior familiarity with these phenomenal pieces of Star Wars PETSCII (see, I told you it was coming back) ... Hey, did you say "Star Wars PETSCII"?
Just checking! OK, where was I ... which, despite being the character set of the long-obsolete Commodore 64 (half of my readers immediately ragequit their browsers), were drawn by Debris of Panic in the year 2015. Here's the whole set, they're grand!:
And because you can't have the sacred without the profane, I'll go out with this long, strange and unfunny Star Wars joke from one of my favorite artgroups, the provocative The Project:
Bonus post-credits trailer: perhaps the longest-in-development textmode project of all time, the renowned, fragmentary Star Wars ASCIImation!
Bonus upon bonus -- an artscene hirez of Boba Fett by Ambassador Kosh (mix your fandoms much?):
and a scene from Hoth by Inferno of Mistigris (Classic, '90s):
AND a missed classic by "Oned" from the first Legion artpack:
Bonus bonus: just in the interest of allowing this post to be "authoritative" and complete, I'm just going to throw in at the end here the other artwork (much originally sourced by myself) that was used in the May 4 Sixteen Colours ANSI Of The Day post. No qualifying text, just a picture dump -- if you need to know who made the art, you are free to decode the filename prefixes. Cheers!
Bonus bonus bonus: we found a few more specimens of Star Wars ASCII art (have no doubt, there's a ton more out there) in, of all places, a t-shirt design contest. Is it original? Who knows. But it is relevant to our post here, so here you go:
Teletext bonuses: Vader, Yoda, Yoda, Ackbar, 3-PO and Maul by Horsenburger!
And one more bonus piece of teletext, a Stormtrooper posted by Carl Attrill on Dec 16, 2016:
Plus an under-the-radar (Force-guided?) anonymous Tattooine landscape from a Blocktronics pack:
Annd... ""Nordlicht" ANSI by ANSI Mar / StIIber Twins (2nd Place in the 2015 Nordlicht ANSI/ASCII compo)"
and... oh my gosh, winning the ASCII compo at the 2016 installment of the Evoke demoparty, Lord Nikon revisited the well and came up with a draught of further greatness:
Greetings, fair readers! I had a birthday this month! It, uh, was several weeks ago. There has been a lot going on. That said, I received (and, er, gave myself) several gamely presents, so read on!
I'd been petrified of acquiring any 7th-generation systems for my collection because: why on earth would someone divest themselves of such a sweet machine if there wasn't something defective about it? Of course, these concerns linger for all platforms (chawesome, an NES! Hey, nothing happens when I plug it in but this blue blinking...) but the more sophisticated the systems become, the more complicated the problems (and their fixes) become. In short, I didn't want to shell out real cash in large quantities to become the proud owner of a Red Ring of Death. But we acquired a Wii under sad but unsuspicious circumstances (striking teachers needed to buy groceries, didn't WANT to sell, but NEEDED to... we only found out after we bought or we would probably have just loaned them some cash) and were given a working Xbox360 from a friend... now on the occasion of my birthday, now that its successor is well established in the market, I completed my suite of major 7th-gen consoles with a PlayStation 3. And, OK, better pick up some games for it also. (Although I hear it can go far used merely as a home media centre -- or at least as a Blu-Ray player 8) These look, by and large, like modern RPGs, meaning that I probably have several hundred hours of play ahead of me, in the event that I break both legs and am laid up for six months sometime, and decide not to further any of my numerous writing projects. Titles include: Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten, Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3, Final Fantasy X / X-2 HD Remaster, Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, Soul Calibur IV, Tales of Xillia 2, and Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2.
Also we here see some "Pixelcraft" squares (colourful magnetic rectangles, first I mistook it for a DIY Tetris kit... boy am I glad we only paid second-hand price for these) and ""Super Mario Checkers". What makes checkers Super-Mario-ized, you ask? The red checkers have Mario's face on them, while the black ones... are green, and have Luigi's face on them. I, um, do not know how to play checkers. I expect that even the peppy Nintendo brand cannot blow that much wind into its sails.
That was a good start. Then we encountered a collection-liquidating garage sale that rang my price threshold of $5 repeatedly. What kind of weirdo ends up with Xbox 360, Wii AND PS3 games? Presumably they own all three machines. Just how rich were you? I own them all, but only because I'm picking them up just as everyone else is tossing them out. What's your excuse? Games included: PS3 -- Beowulf, Infamous 1-2, Metal Gear Solid 4, Uncharted 1-3; Xbox 360 -- Avatar, Prince of Persia - The Forgotten Sands, Red Dead Redemption, GTA4, and the Mass Effect series; and for the Wii, Sims 2 Pets, Playground, and a Cooking Mama title my daughter and I have already gotten good mileage out of.
On the way home I also popped by a thrift store (where I once, long ago, found a Panasonic 3DO) and acquired a 2008 Dragon's Lair comic book and the Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective board game... which I'm presuming ICOM's early interactive video series was adapted from. (Also: my daughter saw the Sonic comic book in the drug store checkout and threatened to melt down if we did not purchase it... as a gift to me, her game-loving dad. Aww. SIX DOLLARS? Yes, I just paid more for a comic than I would pay for the game it was based on. Doy!) Not pictured: my eldest was enamoured of a set of dice at the garage sale, which were not for sale separately, so we also picked up a complete Mahjongg set (with dice) for $1. (Now I can pretend I'm playing Brodie Lockard's Shanghai in real life!)
One more acquisition: I saw the brand name go by as my wife was flicking through her buy&sell community and I said "back that page up! ... please." I'd never seen Neo Geo anything in the wild and thought, hey, it's my birthday... why not strike while the iron is hot? As large as my collection is, my instincts are often to let a deal go by and then regret it for weeks and months. None of that during birthday month! So: this is not a real Neo-Geo, the X is legacy clone hardware officially authorized by SNK. It's a weird little setup, a handheld machine that docks with a giant empty Neo-Geo-shaped shell for purposes of, I don't know, historical re-enactment. It can take in power and output A/V to big screens through the shell, and it can have an arcade-style attached (here included). It plays Neo-Geo games, but not in their original format -- rather, exclusively sold on proprietory SD cards. Anyhow, this machine comes with 20 of the Neo Geo's legendarily arcade-worthy games baked in, and I thought it might liven things up at my annual birthday vintage gaming party (however genuinely vintage the hardware may or may not be, it offers more play, if less nostalgia, than my Atari Flashback.)
So really, this post is just an excuse for me to talk up my upcoming vintage video gaming party, coming up on Saturday May 14th. I have ... a pile of vintage gaming hardware. Some of the piles are complete (power and A/V cords are an eternal hassle: I should actually make a have/want list somewhere here and keep it up to date, so if some altruistic reader cares to gift me with a joystick, light gun or multitap for my ad hoc museum here, or trade for a chunk of my eternal duplicate surplus, it can be something that would genuinely expand my offerings on tap), and some of those piles even have substantial game libraries associated with them. Anyhow, twice a year, I bring them out of retirement tubs in the basement and set up the machines with the fondest memories associated with them for my guests to use as time machines to temporarily revisit simpler times for a few hours. My bias is toward generation-winners and systems I have plenty of games with (plus: systems that play more than one generation of games!) so while I do own a Sega Master System, since I'm not made of outlets and TV sets I leave it in storage in favour of the N64 that gets a lot of mileage. This time around I hope to live the dream and make good on a longstanding aspiration to project games on the side of my house after sundown with the assistance of a Very Long Extension Cord. We'll see! It runs from early afternoon until ... late, so if you'd like to check it out, you will have to figure out where I live. (Asking me is the preferred avenue to that information, showing up unexpectedly is always a little creepy.)
Much, much more soon -- my textmode video game art archives are coming out of my nose I'm so backed up, but April has been busy -- it took me over three weeks to share my birthday haul with you. Stay tuned!
I couldn't locate any Prince ANSI artwork (Maze even turned on string searching in textmod.es for me to have a look, as Sixteen Colours appears to be down indefinitely), so this piece of period teletext will have to suffice. His Purpleness isn't a great fit for this blog, as (despite presaging the Y2K bug in 1982 with "1999") he was never an icon of the (painfully white) digital underground, which may just amount to a case of bad timing: the first and biggest huzzah for his work in my memory and for those in my cohort will be his soundtrack to Tim Burton's '89 Batman film, a fault line for the '80s crossing into the '90s, a bold and jarring shot of dissonant brilliance thrown in the kitchen sink as part of Warner Bros.' spice rack. That movie got turned into a lot of video games but Prince didn't make the transition (heck, I don't think even Danny Elfman did) and computer fan-art was just in its infancy at this time -- Aces of ANSi Art just started that year, though you might find some pictures made in the earlier C64 scene (I could locate none at The Pixelling Cow.)
But even if he was denied his 8-bit glory on the NES, his genius still made its way into home computers of the era. There was a brief window there for a few years where digital audio -- before the MP3 standard became widely adopted -- could be used to share popular music on floppy diskettes using the Amiga's 4-channel .MOD music tracker format: sample brief, repetitive loops from the original song, then repeat them as needed. A kind of bespoke file compression, if you will. To combat inevitable repetitiveness (this isn't just similar to the part that came before, it's quite literally the same 3 seconds over and over again) the arrangement would be seasoned (liberally) with voice samples... because they could. In the early '90s, figuring that I would have to figure out some way of transplanting my analogue musical expertise into the digital forum, I was ravenously downloading as many public domain .MODs as I could fit through my 1200 baud modem (which is to say: not a lot) and given a Yellow Pages of files with bizarre names and no descriptions to randomly select from, I would often latch on to something whose name was a little less abstract and hang on to it for dear life. Here's something -- a 1990 arrangement (spent a year in the oven, I guess) of Prince's music from the movie the previous year. You can find BATDANCE.MOD>the original file or, if you like, I can play you an exported MP3 version of the .MOD right through your web browser:
bat-dance
yo there! how do you
like this tune?
i think it's rather
nice for a first try
in conversions!
you can use it in
your own demo or game
but don't forget that
it was made by :
dark knight from the
cool team called :
s y n e r g y !!!!!!!
if ya want to contact
me then write to :
rodolphe bono
8ter rue pierre neveu
61600 la ferte-mace
france
software houses are
of course welcomed!
hi to all my friends
all over the world!!!
-coolness is forever-
made by dark knight
in august 1990
Four years after Prince's Batman soundtrack was in the can (the Batcan), however, he made a bold artistic decision in 1993 that involved computers at a fundamental level: changing his name to an unpronounceable glyph as part of a contractual dispute with Warner Bros., anyone who wanted to write about him now had to use digitized assets contained on this floppy diskette. (That or refer to him as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, TAFKAP for short. When I was entering the computer artscene, I heard a lot from an elite dude following in his footsteps, TAFKASK, The Artist Formerly Known As Shihear Kallizad (about whom you can learn more from this ANSI of the Day post)... then he disappeared from the field altogether, forever. So it was with elites -- either they messily quit, were busted, or simply... ascended.)
Prince was quicker on the digital uptake than we'd realized, however, releasing in 1994 (only one year after those glyph-floppies, and not incidentally the golden year of nostalgia in which I founded Mistigris) a sign 'o them times -- a multimedia CD-ROM entitled Prince Interactive. We were still mucking around with textmode characters using the EGA colour scheme (not that we aren't still doing that 8) while he was pressing full motion video to mass storage devices. Now, Windows 3.11-era multimedia content is touchy to get working properly these days, but you can enjoy some splendidly bizarre screenshots over at Mobygames.
That marks the transition point following which he stopped regarding computers as a boon to his musical genius and began viewing them more as a bane; he ran hot and cold for Napster around the turn of the century, and for basically as long as there has been a YouTube, Prince had been serving legal notice to have unauthorized postings of his songs removed from it (culminating in Radiohead authorizing a contested posting of Prince's performance of their song Creep: we wrote it after all and we approve.)
I'm not going to post that here, because ... you can find that kind of stuff everywhere. But backing up a little bit to BATDANCE.MOD, here's another neighbouring file I remember vividly from my BBS download explorations: BATMEAT.MOD, an original composition splicing a little bit of the Adam West era campy Batman TV program with what sound like samples from the '89 Batman movie and some slick, are-they-Prince instrumental samples. (I think... maybe yes, let's throw it in this post anyway.)
batmeat
this module was
ripped from the
best music disk out
at time of going to
press. it was coded
for effects by cecil
who loves getting his
name everywhere
Bonus! Some time after the fact, Misfit drew an ANSI portrait of Prince, released in the Blocktronics Block'N Roll collection:
I'm torn, friends! I can be timely, or I can present materials in a fashion that preserves the context in which it makes any goddamn sense... and if I tarry too long with the latter, the former becomes impossible. Fortunately for video game textmode art, the hows (with a computer) and whys (because they gosh darn felt like it) aren't that critical to enjoying the specific works, so I'll just try to chug along here with the whats and whos from the recent "Baud Dudes" collection of Blocktronics ANSI- and ANSI-inspired art. ("Baud Dudes" = Data East's beat-'em-up arcade game Bad Dudes plus a bit of '90s telecommunications humour, the baud rate being the speed at which a modem could transmit data. Speeds during the golden age of the artscene ranged from 1200 baud to 144000.) This textmode video game art series has traditionally celebrated lost and forgotten works from the vaults of artpacks released decades ago, but challenging that narrative... the Lego masters in Blocktronics continue to crank out videogame-related works at an astounding pace: here in the future, the present challenges the hegemony of the past. Which isn't bad -- after all, life is for the living.
A number of these pieces were created to appear as part of a textmode art tribute presentation in The Game Awards 2015; others from that particular batch appeared in the previous Blocktronics collection, Block to the Future ... they will eventually be washing up here also, fear not.
Kicking things off in a big way, it's a double-wide ANSI piece celebrating Metroid on the NES from the artist MyPalGoo:
Misfit presents the iconic Vault Boy from the Fallout series. (If you like this, you'll love my upcoming piece on the ASCII art in Fallout 4!)
Reset Survivor draws more video game ANSI art in a year than you will in a lifetime. This one is commemorating 20 years of Pokémon (uh, but not continuously) with silhouettes of Squirtle, Charmander and Bulbasaur, the three Kanto starter Pokémon. (Deftly interweaving three of my grand passions, he also included an ANSI Choose Your Own Adventure patterned after Bad Dudes, which I have made web-playable at my hyperfiction blog over here.)
Here are some PETSCII pieces from Otium, inadvertently left out of the last Blocktronics artpack -- this one promotes Konami's Metal Gear Solid 5. I'm sadly not up to speed with this series, and my attempts to glean which one of the game's numerous characters this picture represented immersed me deep in an ocean of shots of actress Stefanie Joosten's cleavage. Hopefully someone can set me straight.
Here, Otium draws us a PETSCII rendition of Sagat from Street Fighter 2 (and, well, from Street Fighter 1 for that matter.) That dent in his head is a scar, and its presence there is canonical!
Otium gives us one final piece of PETSCII, this one of Geralt of Rivia, hero of The Witcher 3 (and indeed the whole series). I believe it was a direct adaptation of the picture here, and am consistently blown away by the clawlike rendition of his gloves.
Finally, there's also a black and white ANSI piece by him (along with ASCII, one of the textmode art mediums he'd mastered before moving on to explore the possibilities of PETSCII) of the venerable Lara Croft, for Rise of the Tomb Raider:
Now to the meat of the matter: BAUD DUDES. Ndh spun this ANSIfied variation on the video game's original logo, which reminds me -- I'm pals with Marc Erickson, the fellow responsible for a pile of classic video game box art, including Bad Dudes, whose recollections are informative, revealing and entertaining. (I passed him along a link to this collection of work and he found it quite droll.)
And saving the most sprawling, epic piece for last: here's a mega Bad Dudes sprite comic in ANSI by Enzo. Enjoy and see you again soon!
ASCII art wasn't always the hip-hop coolness of Remorse and kts!; the ASCII standard got underway in the '60s and computer culture had a lot of growing yet to do before conditions would be right for cool kids to emulate graffiti typography styles. (For instance, the hip-hop style of graffiti would itself require a couple of decades to simmer before it was ready for prime time, let alone its digital cloning.) For the first couple of decades, it got a free ride on existing bodies of work of TTY art, and eventually ASCII found wide credence as a helpful shorthand to draw (in public domain circles) emoticons and stickmen (and quite a bit more in the underground) on UseNet newsgroups and on BBSes hooked up on eg. FidoNet echomail. Joan G. Stark was the master of this idiom; her acolytes included the likes of Laura D. Brown whose work you got a chance to enjoy in the "recent" Mistigris artpack MIST1015 I was fortunate enough to have a chance to bring into the world last October. Back in the day, we of Mistigris were even cranking it out reflexively as a matter of course in the KitschNet BBS echomail message bases, and from there to the recurring "ASCII Wars" column in our Kithe e-mags.
But these PD doodles were just warts on the nose of the entire command-line interface ecosystem; underground ANSI art escaped being pulled down with the sinking ship of MS-DOS because it was judged as having unique aesthetic merits external to its technological context, but ASCII stickmen only lingered on for a time in the texty refuge of the newsgroups for a time, eventually passing from relevance along with their crash pad. (Much as how dolphins, billfish and ichthyosaurs ended up assuming similar shapes in the same niche, despite being mammals, fish and reptiles, similar textmode art styles emerged in other contexts of graphical limitations -- notably Shift_JIS art, upon which I'll have to elaborate in a later post.) By the time we'd blown past Y2K, ASCII stickmen were basically on their last leg-slashes, in a situation to be observed in the wild for the last time.
Now, nostalgia is a strange beast. As you age, you look back and remember your experiences... but frequently fail to appreciate that your situation earlier in life wasn't universal or even necessarily typical. Not every kid in your class grew up with a computer in their house, wow! Of those who did, not every computer was equipped with a modem! Of those which were, not every modem was used to call up BBSes (well, someone was dialing into the online service providers like CompuServe, GEnie, Delphi etc.) And finally, of those kids in homes with computers and modems who called up BBSes... most of them never entered into the computer underground. (A little sneakernet, sure, but that was soft-core.) Sure, some of them probably dabbled in it briefly, or attempted to gain access but were turned aside when they couldn't explain what ACiD stood for, but to most modemmers, public domain bulletin boards was it (bbslist.textfiles.com has 2285 listings, more or less, for public BBSes in my home area code of the 604), and their computer art culture was the only computer art culture they knew -- ANSI art topping out at 25 lines, drawn (and animated!) in TheDraw, with some ANSI music sequences inserted for kicks. And yes, the stickmen.
My point being, our underground culture of eliteness and artistic excellence was merely the tip of the upside-down iceberg (OK, I confess, this is a dumb metaphor); the vast bulk of it, floating above the surface, settled for mere crude functionality. And however big our underground scenes were internationally -- one thousand, maybe ten thousand individuals -- the public BBS sphere was at least an order of magnitude larger. (Does a hundred thousand people sound too big? It's not that our criminal conspiracy ducked the math -- even earnest attempts to explain it would be met with blank looks from technological laymen.) And so while the nostalgia for underground ANSI art is limited to a golden memory glowing in the brainpans of a few thousand, for far more people their memories of what the '90s looked like online is ASCII stickmen. Which, I think, goes some distance toward explaining why the New Yorker magazine recently ran them in its pages, where ACiD has never (yet) managed to appear.
NO BIG DEAL JUST MY FIRST ILLUSTRATION IN THE @NEWYORKER
OK. That's the background of ancient history. I'm good with that stuff, I can crank it out indefinitely. Now for the connective tissue linking it, impossibly, to current events. This is tougher, because I can't just pull from my experience, nor do I really just want to ... fudge it. But for lack of a response to my interview inquiry, I'll be filling in a few blanks with speculation here. OK, here we go: Jennifer Daniel has personality. Looking at her e-mail address (JenniferDanielAllOneWord@gmail.com) and website URL (http://www.httpcolonforwardslashforwardslashwwwdotjenniferdanieldotcom.com) one might even be tempted to suggest that perhaps she has a little too much personality. (Probably for the best: you don't want to read an interview conducted by two people with too much personality. Speaking of "too much", is that full-figured stickwoman in the Tweet waving her merkin in the breeze?)
Her interest in the ASCII art aesthetic didn't emerge fully formed; there were bread crumbs of precedent:
And yet despite that misfire (maybe it looks better at some hypothetical higher resolution; the text-mode Tumblr has concluded that it will categorize as textmode art all pixel art, given the presence of "pixel"-equivalent characters in most textmode character sets), we must assume that she is of our demographic, that the residual ASCII stickmen stuck in her psyche is a form of genuine PTSD and not a carefully-studied affectation like riding a pennyfarthing bicycle.
Indeed, this stew has been bubbling on the back burner for apparently quite some time:
⠀ ⠀ | ⌒|⌒ |⌒ |⌒|╲ /|⌒|⌒ |⌒ |⌒| | E | A | R | L | ノ\| G | R | E | Y | \⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀/⠀⠀\⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀/ ⠀\⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀╱⠀⠀⠀⠀╲⠀⠀⠀⠀/ ⠀ |⠀⠀⠀⠀|⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀|⠀⠀ ⠀|
Over the years, it all eventually amounts to something. Of course, there's not enough demand for stickmen as to build a full-time practice out of it (taking up a sideline as graphics editor at the new York Times in her spare time to make ends meet... just kidding) but it appears that the gradual and insidious infiltration of ASCII art into her portfolio continues apace, burgeoning in slow motion. Just take a look at her business cards! (I know, you think that you are a more serious ASCII artist than she is -- but do you have ASCII art business cards?)
(I, too, would swear that those are Figlet fonts, as I could never imagine a human being choosing to draw those letters in that particular way, but I must say that if they are... I couldn't locate them in the standard list.)
This phase of her interest in textmode themes dates back at least to this profile in 2010 (where someone who I suspect is our ldb points out that the unicorn has been lifted from a classic original design by Daniel "dcau" Au. I won't be too judgemental yet; I borrowed extensively from the public domain for my recent suite of Christmas ANSI art music videos, but I did go to great lengths to attribute the parts appropriately.) But damn, those letterpress-printed ASCII characters leave a deep and gratifying impression you can almost reach through the screen and touch, as though stamped deep into the paper by the world's most satisfying typewriter.
Her texty body of work, not limited to business cards and Tweets, is scattered few and far between; while I'm sure that she has a directory on her hard drive with dozens of ASCII doodles, it is left an an exercise to the reader to gather a "complete collected works" from disparate sources. While not an actual adaptation, this ASCII banana gives me warm & fuzzy memories of Warhol's "Peel Slowly and See" album cover for the Velvet Underground... but while I appreciate her experiments into different "fill" textures here (=, 7, I, N, ? ... all quite at odds from our scene's standard $, 8 and @) that particular conversion would require the use of at least two ANSI colours for full effect.
I've heard it said that all visual artists can be divided into two groups: those who can draw people but have trouble drawing animals, and vice versa. Well, stickmen are stickmen -- and here's a dog catching a frisbee:
Proving that her muse is species-agnostic, the dog is easily interchangeable with a cat:
(That font was the Figlet "banner". And while I could swear that this one is from Figlet also, again it doesn't turn up in that listing.) So you can draw any old cat, but can you draw a specific cat? Garfield was an, if not exactly "popular", at least not-unknown early 'toon ANSI subject; can you give us up one of those?
(Hm, if the sig on the one over here is correct, that is lifted without attribution from one "SSt". But who knows, perhaps that was her own sig in some bygone era, it's possible. Maybe she was providing virtuous examples of the art form to spice up promotions for her presentation on the genre of textmode art generally rather than burdening it with her own lacklustre typings? It's, uh, impossible to confirm or deny without a direct line to her.)
Which brings us to her ne plus ultra, the textmode art that very likely reached the widest print audience this year (or, who knows, perhaps ever: circulation has recently been pegged at somewhat over a million copies bought per issue) -- her New Yorker series of New York City scenes, ASCII style, gathered here together in a print you can enjoy in your home collection:
My two visits to New York haven't left me sufficiently expert in the milieu to definitively place each of these scenes, but I can at least describe them vaguely: Hailing a cab, encore on stage at Carnegie Hall, entering a subway station, taking in some art at the Guggenheim, and chilling in Central Park.
How does one end up drawing stickmen for the New Yorker? On Instagram, Jennifer says "Thanks @nblechman for the assignment!" so it may well be the case that Nicholas Blechman was the one with the vision to get ASCII art in the magazine -- and he already knew who from his circle of graphic designers would be the appropriate draftsman to implement that particular whim.
Did she actually draw any of this or has she simply treated textmode archaeological digs as a rich trove of copyright free clip art, curating a feeling of the recent past through cut-and-paste collage? (The New Yorker pieces seem sufficiently bespoke as to have been bespoke creations for that particular gig.)
Will we be seeing further boxology from her in the future or having at long last realized the potential offered on her business cards, will she be conquering a different mountain, moving on to another painstaking anachronistic art work like encaustic wax painting? Only time will tell. But I'll keep my eyes open and keep you posted if anything interesting comes up.
(Sorry if this post seems a bit mean: who does this girl think she is doing original art in my beloved medium, I must prove that the history and nostalgia rightly belongs to me by ripping it apart and exposing her as a fraud. But they say that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and a lady drawing ASCII stickmen in 2016, then publishing them in the New Yorker, is an extraordinary circumstance indeed. I had to drill down and uncover whatever there was to uncover.)
Back when the earth was young (well, just over a year ago) I fled from my regrettably-named flagship "I'm bored during the long breaks in my graveyard job so let's blog about something to pass the time" project "Shilling Epilepsy to Mouth-Breathers" at videogamecomicads.blogspot.com . As the URL suggests, the original function and purpose of the blog was to document and transcribe scans of video game ads I found going through my old comic book collection. The focus faltered, however, and I began blogging about things like "here are the games I found at a garage sale this weekend" and "here's some ANSI art of video game characters" (a proud tradition whose lineage will be continuing here in due time.)
Instead of just going through them chronologically or alphabetically I would try to find some kind of topical theme -- eg. scary games in October for Hallowe'en, or a series of ads for the Game Boy on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of its release -- which, while making things more interesting for me, made the overall task more like work, with deadlines suddenly built in. It was easy enough to rustle up some big-pixel screenshots of The Ultimate Warrior to commemorate the passing of that athlete, but when I thought "Gee whiz, let's give tribute to H.R. Giger by pulling out visuals of all the game levels and characters inspired by his biomechanical aesthetic" I was inadvertently digging myself into a hole from which I could not reasonably expect to emerge. So I put the blog on ice (as opposed to this one, which is just in a slump), where it continues to draw higher traffic (thanks to blog-ignoring Google Images surfers) than any of my active & ongoing online writing projects. (And the impetus of sorts of this post: I have given official authorized permission (for what that's worth -- I didn't make these images, I just scanned them!) to http://museumofvideogameads.com/ to reprint my game-ad scans -- and I may very possibly also be dumping on them the iceberg of unposted scans I'd accumulated, in the thousands to back up the paltry posted hundreds. We'll see.)
Since then, I haven't done much with game ads.. which is fine, there are other people with more free time covering that beat adequately, by which I mean posting the scans without any qualifying writing for context, and that appears to be giving the web what it wants. But once in a while something happens that makes me think, "aww gee whiz, if I was still posting game ad scans, such and such a current event would definitely have a relevant ad in my queue waiting for an excuse to go live!" So it is with the improbable revival of the '90s Fox supernatural TV series The X-Files, of personal significance due to its prominence in local traffic disruptions, filmed as it was around my home environs of Vancouver, BC. Just last month I was explaining to my bandmates the X-Files connection to the false, floorless half-balcony upstairs in the WISE Hall (to recap: used as a Chinese gambling den set in S3E19: Hell Money, the show wanted the balcony to have visual symmetry, so their carpenters built a reflected pseudo-balcony... and upon completion of filming, were asked to please leave it up.)
So while looking into my forgotten folder of scans to see what I had to dish up to the Museum of Video Game Ads, I found this scan, which reminded me that the show was once more a going concern, and I thought... maybe I ought to blog this ad. You know, for old time's sakes. (Plus: 604 represent!)
Enter the Interactive World of T H E X F I L E S
UNRESTICTED ACCESS IT WILL CHANGE THE WAY YOU LOOK AT THE X-FILES. You've hacked into a highly classified secret government website giving you unrestricted access to The X-Files. Browse through case files, character dossiers, evidence records and other top secret materials. Tap into live video and audio surveillance. At long last, "Unrestricted Access" has been granted to X-Files fans everywhere. Windows '95 CD-ROM
There are a few other words floating in the background: CASE FILES, SURVEILLANCE, EVIDENCE, DOSSIERS, and (one of these things is not like the others) DESKTOP DESIGNER. What do you need to know about it? First and foremost, you ought to know that despite Wikipedia describing it as a video game, there is no "game" here; it is a multimedia fan encyclopedia of sorts, a species of grey-zone "entertainment software" that wasn't a game but wasn't just application or utility software, the kind of thing that really got my goat as a warez kiddie after using up a week of time bank savings in order to see what this hot new 22-disk game was, only to find that it was no kind of game ... at all! I have no personal experience with the program myself, but the online consensus seems to be that while some of the contents of this database were compelling, especially to X-philes, it was fatally throttled by being accessible exclusively through the Internet Explorer 4 web browser. An important reminder to future-proof your data!
OK, just keeping in practice. Next up will likely be some further explorations into the world of textmode artwork -- not deliberately this blog's increasing focus, but it just happens to be one particular realm where I've been able to stockpile quantities of interesting-to-me grist for the mill, which I'm uniquely well-qualified to comment on. Anyhow, see you then!
