I have literally never seen ASCII porn, and I've been on the net since 1994.
ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still everywhere (2019)
61–70 of 96 posts
Re: ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still everywhere (2019)
#62Predates the web but not the internet.
ARPANET was established in 1969. In 1966 Ken Knowles at Bell Labs created the "Computer Nude" which "by scanning a photograph with a camera and converting the analog voltages to binary numbers, which were assigned typographic symbols based on halftone densities. It was printed in The New York Times on October 11, 1967". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Knowlton
Re: ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still everywhere (2019)
#63Re: ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still everywhere (2019)
#64It'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.
How is that non trivial? You just need to use a monospace font and control for width
Re: ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still everywhere (2019)
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How is that non trivial? You just need to use a monospace font and control for width
You also need to preprocess the text to deal with HTML reserved characters like Getting an individual piece of ASCII art to work is often possible reasonably quickly, but the more examples you want to include the more odd edge cases you find.
Re: ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still everywhere (2019)
#66I understand why, but still feel it's a missed opportunity, for them to have not referenced libcaca/aalib in the "for more information" sections. https://aa-project.sourceforge.net/aalib/ http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca
I don't understand why. One has a name that includes "poop" in Spanish, is that why? Vice usually doesn't shy away from things so not sure why they'd do it here.
Thanks for sharing them here at least.
Re: ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still everywhere (2019)
#67Earlier 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
Most of those are solved with wrapping it in both
and , and #5 I don't think is even part of "ASCII art" anymore as it wouldn't be just ASCII anymore, but rich-text.
Re: ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still everywhere (2019)
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
works pretty reliably
Pre differs browser to browser
Sure, they might not be pixel-perfect, but if you're doing ASCII art you aren't really aiming for pixel-perfectness anyways, then you'd chose a different medium. It's inherently a medium for the clients to render how they see fit.
Re: ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still everywhere (2019)
#69> "People seem to assume any ASCII art is up for grabs, for free. But it is art, like any other image photographed, painted, etc." ...and my personal take is the opposite - it's the other types of art that should be as distributable as ASCII artists should be payed for creation, not for access to the works - that's how commissions work, and that's why AI pictures prospered and problem of "reselling of someone else's…
> artists should be payed for creation, not for access to the works - that's how commissions work, and that's why AI pictures prospered
Looking through 1929s art that just entered public domain now in 2025, that's something that surprised me, how much of that stuff was commissioned by some wealthy individual who paid up front. Lots of popular stuff was created that way it seems, while I don't think that's nearly as popular to do today.
Re: ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still everywhere (2019)
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where in the world is a clip of a woman "sucking off an enormous penis" not considered pornography? I'm European and I can't really believe that
I think you're missing the heavy sarcasm there
Then what is the point, that Americans aren't really prudish at all and that other people are silly for saying that certain things aren't porn? If it's sarcasm I don't really get the point it's trying to portray