Dutch viditel had porn; stories with 'graphics' and BBSs I used had also porn stories with ascii art. It was what I could get with a 300 baud modem. At 9600 baud, I could download grainy msx 2 porn images finally. There were even 'movies' (usually 2 images swapping over)!
ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still everywhere (2019)
41–50 of 96 posts
Re: ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still everywhere (2019)
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
works pretty reliably
For whitespace and for the simplest ASCII sure, but for anything a bit more complex you might have problems with 1. HTML reserved characters like and \. 2. overflowing content 3. displaying ASCII made with special encodings and characters sets, like code page 437 4. displaying nonprintable (control) characters 5. displaying colors 6. text preprocessors messing up the formatting
the Virtual terminal[1] from Asciinema[2] is what I use but that is a lot more difficult than just including a video of it. I got CMS from a very expensive CMS to support Asciinema but it was actually too much effort to be worth it I had to recompile some components make a editor interface etc etc.
Re: ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still everywhere (2019)
#43Really brings to mind that thought about "tech being driven by porn as a first use case" ...
... rule 34.5? :)
Re: ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still everywhere (2019)
#44These are nudes, not porn. Is "The Birth of Venus" by Botticelli also porn?
Nudes are not always porn, but that doesn't mean they can't be porn either. Ultimately I would say it comes down to whether the intent is to titillate, but of course porn is notoriously hard to define.
"I'll know it when I see it [on a terminal]" :)
Re: ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still everywhere (2019)
#45It's kind of funny that every example the article shows is a screenshot or video. Not a single one was actual ASCII text in the HTML...
It's not trivial to display ASCII art as text in html. There's so many ways to mess it up that unless the site is dedicated to ASCII art, a simple image is really preferable.
Can you tell about some?
Re: ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still everywhere (2019)
#46These are nudes, not porn. Is "The Birth of Venus" by Botticelli also porn?
Nudes are not always porn, but that doesn't mean they can't be porn either. Ultimately I would say it comes down to whether the intent is to titillate, but of course porn is notoriously hard to define.
I would say that if there's no depiction of a sexual act, or any gestures or body poses suggesting an invitation to a sexual act, it's not pornography. While I can't necessarily pinpoint where the threshold lies, without certain ingredients like these, it's far from it.
Re: ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still everywhere (2019)
#47These are nudes, not porn. Is "The Birth of Venus" by Botticelli also porn?
Not in Italy.
Back in the days I used to help (for free, I was ~13 and nobody asked) moderating a big free-hosting Italian service.
It had a pretty smart business model: hosting was free, but any ads the webmaster wanted to show had to come from the hosting provider and the ad revenue would be shared between the webmaster and the hosting provider.
One of the terms of service was no porn. As you can imagine one of the webmasters made this very successful website, with ads, showing pictures of women and a lot of people thought it was indeed porn.
When the hosting provider closed his account the webmaster brought in lawyers to dispute his ban, and just like that we discovered that in Italy the rule is (ish) that there needs to be penetration to qualify, so the ban had to be reverted.
Re: ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still everywhere (2019)
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nudes are not always porn, but that doesn't mean they can't be porn either. Ultimately I would say it comes down to whether the intent is to titillate, but of course porn is notoriously hard to define.
I would say that if there's no depiction of a sexual act, or any gestures or body poses suggesting an invitation to a sexual act, it's not pornography. While I can't necessarily pinpoint where the threshold lies, without certain ingredients like these, it's far from it.
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Re: ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still everywhere (2019)
#49Re: ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still everywhere (2019)
#50I wish the article mentioned Computer Nude (1967) by Ken Knowlton. It isn't ASCII, but it is a text mosaic. It was widely circulated at the time, was the first full frontal nude printed in The New York Times, and was somewhat important in the development of computer graphics. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/24/technology/ken-knowlton-d...