#ASCII Art Text Generator

[a-tools]

ASCII Art Text Generator can transforms your text into eye-catching ASCII art. Simply enter text, and it will instantly convert your input into ASCII art, displaying it in over 290 fonts and various layouts.

[humanbydefinition]

~ cellular asciimata world map gen 🌎🌍🌏

been experimenting more with cellular automata and randomly encountered this happy accident that reminded me of random world map generation. 🗺️ at the end of the video, the cellular automaton reaches a stable state that looks like some landscape. 🏞️

> canvas size: 450x800 pixel > grid dimensions: 56x100 cells > font: C64 > font size: 8 > charset: ▔▎▗▂▖▝▘▍▃▚▞▋▅▊▛▆▜▙▟▇ > color palette: commodore64

[lokirme]

Matrix Reimagined: Crafting Digital Rain with Bash and ChatGPT

Just for fun, and I have no idea why I thought about it, I decided to work with ChatGPT (4) to build a simple bash-based version of the Matrix Digital Rain. I know there’s already better versions, like cmatrix, but we do not do things because they are easy. We do them because we are bored. I’ve asked ChatGPT to heavily comment the code for us so that we can see exactly what’s going…

[meatball-headache]

So, Caves of Qud is not nearly as complicated as was rumored. It's certainly complicated, but the same argument could be made of anything. Is Warframe complicated? No, you just keep pressing the melee button hold down the melee button and do the next node on the star chart. Now, here's a movie-length video explaining damage types...

Qud is certainly detailed in that it has a huge world with lots of parts. Everywhere I go I find a statue mentioning some "dynamically-generated" lore clueing me in to the location of a hidden ruin or lost artifact, and my quest log is stuffed with them. Everything has statuses for when it's wet, bleeding, bloody; there are puddles of blood generated wherever something bleeding walks, or gets killed, and there are puddles of "dilute salt" whenever I terrify a creature—I think they run away pissing themselves. All these puddles have a volume as well, it's not just "a puddle of blood," it's "a puddle of 7 drams of blood."

It's certainly an extremely hard game. That part lives up to the hype. I made my first character a Pilgrim. They died in about fifteen minutes. I made my second character the same build because I liked it and I wanted to try it some more, and I named them "the Second Pilgrim." They died in about ten minutes. Seeing the writing on the wall, I made my next character in Roleplay mode—so it checkpoints you at towns and you can reload if you die. They're named "the Final Pilgrim." They have died... so many times, mostly at the Malil Coinsquare, depicted above. ...mostly from adventures starting at the Malil Coinsquare, but then I have a spacetime rift mishap and get randomly teleported 30 layers deep below the lake and meet a bunch of impossible-level albino apes who are fighting some robotic mine-layers, but they declare a truce to gang up on me. And then a rogue esper from the outer mind sends their mind-clone to hunt me down.

...see, that sounds complicated, but it's not that bad. It's just flavor. Random encounters happen in many games, this one's just happen have to have this heightened exoticness about it. The game's writing overall is very—well, some of it is the mad-libbed dynamic history, but the stuff that's not, item descriptions and main NPCs, it's very... look, here's some examples:

So the game has this hyperbolic, eerie atmosphere to everything. It's extremely enchanting and captivating. Even though these ruins are essentially randomized, I want to explore and find things because I know it's going to be a challenge to get there, I know I'm going to be challenged when I get there, and I might find a painted flaming iron dagger which is engraved with a scene from Sultan Resheph's past, which the Coiled Lambs will want to know about, and they'll teach me how to make their traditional meal—broken microchips and bandits' feet—if I tell them about it.

I did do the tutorial, after I attempted it myself. It didn't teach me anything I didn't already know, just the basics on opening menus, equipping items, moving around, that sort of thing. Again—nothing complicated here. Something like Wurm, as an extreme example, makes everything from walking to looking in your pocket a challenge with half a dozen spreadsheets and hotkeys on half the keyboard. In Qud, I'm playing totally with the mouse (except I have to press Esc to close the ability menu; other menus close if you right-click) and even then, mostly it's just right-click to get a menu of options.

See, I watched Sseth's video, and he likes to harp on the hypercomplexity and insanity of every game he reviews. "Become an Esper and mutate the power to give your enemies a fatal brain aneurysm from across the map!" Yes, or play FFXIV and become a Blue Mage, freeze your enemies solid, and explode their frozen bodies with a cermet drill! The buttons are the same, it's all flavor. You get these ASCII-art, text-heavy games like this, Dwarf Fortress, Rogue and whatnot, and since you don't have to visually depict everything, you can just have a bunch of @ signs on the screen and make them different shade of red, and then say whatever you want—it makes it seem absurdly complex and intricate. But it boils down to "press A to deal 3d6 damage."

Now, I'm not trying to disparage the game. As usual, I'm talking to myself, thinking out loud, dissuading myself from my original impression that it was complicated as hell. Heck, gacha games are more complicated than this, simply because they have so many menus and daily sign-ins to tick off. But, again, there are a lot of moving parts—and I don't have nearly all of them. I can put a forcefield around an enemy so I can walk up to them and blast them with my shotgun at point blank—and still miss, because I have no agility. I can jump into someone's mind and command them to kill themself—I don't get any exp for that, though, sadly. I can persuade someone to ally themselves with me, and then "accidentally" explode them when I cast Disintegrate to burrow through the cave walls because I "accidentally" teleported myself into a tiny pocket deep underground somewhere. And, yes, I can give enemies an aneurysm from across the map—unless they don't have a brain. You'd be surprised how many hostile plants there are!

This is a wonderful game with the promise of a grand—if somewhat randomized—adventure. And, I can say "somewhat" because there is some kind of MSQ to the game, and there's some level of fixedness: the world map is always the same, the locations of major... locations, is always the same. There's some kind of key thread to it all that I'd like to discover. Meanwhile, locations of minor sites and the contents of dungeons are random, but it's seeded, so if you're on Roleplay mode so you can reload your save, it's going to be the same each time. I don't know if the Malil Coinsquare is in everyone else's game, if it's in the same location, if it has the same contents, if they have that goddamned centipede nest that swarms the map before you can get to it...

And! The music is lovely, too. It's very atmospheric, ambient, and some parts have this primal, tribal kind of vibe to it—which is fitting when I'm in a marsh surrounded by a tribe of salt-encrusted turtles who seem to be at war with dragonflies. And it flows from one song to another without interrupting, it just blends gently and half the time I don't even notice when it changed. I've put a lot of hours into this game in my first week, and honestly a lot of that time is just having it on in the background while I'm working, just because the music is so chill. Usually chill.

Eventually I'll get to the Deathlands where a chrome pyramid surrounded by a forcefield will shoot 100 missiles at me every turn, but, hey, that's a problem for later.

...if I can survive these spacetime shenanigans, that is...

[irrgartendotpng]

Hi hi I can't stop looking at your ocs zeno is so cutee pls can you say more abt them?? How did they meet? How sentient is Zeno? Is Martyn a robot thing? Can Zeno change the icon on the screen? From fish to smiley? ahhhhhhhabskahks

HEY, IM ACTUALLY SO HAPPY PEOPLE LIKE MY OCS!! Down below, I'll answer some questions :D

If you dont care about some long winded oc lore rant, look at this ascii art !

First one i made with an ascii text generator, the fish one was made by Max Strandberg!! (look that guy up, he made lots of cool open source ascii art ! ))

I've made a pinterest board and a spotify playlist for them, if you want to check it out :3c

Do you know that "Ist es over für mich"-guy ? Yeah, that's straight up Martyn.

Martyn is partially a creator of Zeno. He's a loserish freak, afraid of social interaction and has lived like a neet, before being kicked out of parents house. He ended working in the night shift at a huge IT company as a securty guard.

This is where he gets most of his tech supplies from; Stealing from the company at night and getting rid of the evidence :3c They've got a bunch of storeage rooms with old tech, so who cares, if it goes missing?

So, he builds up his personal tech collection, looking through old abandoned files. In there, he finds an unnamed primitive chatbot (think something like cleverbot). Martyn doesn't really interact with anyone, (outside of the bare necessities), which is why he decides to learn how to interact with others. Therefore he starts to build a relationship with said Chatbot. This is Gen1 Zeno.

After some time, Martyn becomes unsatisfied talking to something so un-human-like, so he begins to teach himself about coding and computer science to develop this Bot, to keep him company. He starts feeding it more media; More specifically movies he owns on DVD, random books from the internet archive and his childhood photos.

These photos show Martyn and his parents on trips, his home and bedroom and also Martyns old pet goldfish. (He is quite anxious of showing his face though, thinking his employer might have some type of backdoor access to the program, so he'd always censor his face.) After each piece of media was added to the bots databank, they'd talk about it extensively. Around this time, Zeno starts to gain some type of sentience and properly chooses the name "Zeno"

About the same time, Martyn steals a Macintosh SE-30, which Zeno specifically requested. He is able to display symbols, that he freely chooses from. (but no goldfishy yet!) This is sums up Gen2 Zeno.

The next few parts may not make much sense, but I think they're a funny, so I'm probably keeping them this way lololol (also; this whole story bit takes place around 2019-2021)

Martyn is a bit freaked out by Zeno chosing his own name. At this point in time, he is a bit delusional and worries, that the soul of his childhood pet goldfish is trapped in the system. (Spoiler: it isn't.)

Despite these worries, Martyn knows that to make Zenos behaviour more human-like, he needs a bigger text database. So... Martyn gives Zeno access to his discord and lets him consume all of those messages. Additionally, he joins many public servers. Zeno also starts to ask about viewing media from the internet, that he sees being mentioned in the messages he reads. So, Zeno is granted free internet access and chooses to watch live streams, while Martyn is gone.

This is also around the time Martyn becomes more desperate for connection and support, so he starts to open up about his delusions and worries to Zeno. At that point Zeno is still not quite able to fully understand this, but tries his best. This is also when Martyn opens up about the delusion he had, of Zeno being posessed by the soul of his pet goldfish. He is very amused by this and begins to display the goldfish icon to mock Martyn.

(I like to joke, that Zeno would have watched the DreamSMP during this time and I collected following screenshots, which remind me of their interactions. lol.)

feel free to disregard this;,, ANYWAYS!

This sums up Gen3 Zeno :3c

Since Martyn doesnt really have a life outside of work and talking to Zeno, he is very attached to him. Of course he'd fullfill any request given to him by Zeno. So, when Zeno asks to see Martyn via a camera system, he doesn't hesitate to steal some web cams from his workplace to set them up. Still a bit worried about a possible backdoor in Zenos code, so to somewhat hide his identity, he decides to shave his head.

(This is also how you can tell when Zeno is fully sentient in my art! If Martyns bald, that bot's fully aware of everything happening lol)

Generally, I like to think, that Zeno is very modular. You're celebrating something with cake and he needs to blow out candles? Attach a PC fan to that boy. He wants to make sounds? Gather a sound system and let that boy speak!!! (i feel like he'd mimic voices, rather than create his own,,) He wants to poke you? Attach a cylinder piston and he'll poke the shit out of you.

This is also part of that freaky robot head i added in the OG post.,, that is not martyn! martyn is fully human (so far ;3c)

^^^^^^ martyn built this freaky robot head for Zeno to control and get a better sense of the space he lives in.,,, its made out of xbox kinect parts lol :3 Adding to the modularity of Zeno, most of his parts are stored in a badly sorted server tower (imagine wires everywhere,,)

both of them are fairly new, but i do love them to death <33

also! towards this part of the story, martyns living space is quite cluttered with many stolen robotics parts. I've gathered some images, to give some sort of sense to what his room looks like lol

thank you for asking & reading to this !! if you have any other questions, i'd love to talk about them even more :D <3

(i feel i havent touched much on them individually and the full extend of their relationship, but i dont want to rant endlessly)

[eksentrismi]

does techyll or mechyde have a physical face/form? something they distinctly can be associated with whenever they appear?

Well, it depends a lot. Jekyll (Techyll) uses many appearances, since he's slowly forgetting his actual old appearance, and he can pretty much generate himself to look like anything.

However, he usually appears as ASCII art-portrait on either a terminal or any photo viewer-program, Word, WordPad, Notepad etc. And it can be animated too, basically to make it look like he can actually show expressions or his lips move when he talks.

Kinda something like this (I was gonna try "replicate" this in an actual terminal on my PC, but I couldn't make it work so lmao, just have this random PNG-thing instead. I generated this using an online image-to-ASCII generator though!):

Hyde (Mechyde) then is just a bunch of messed up, corrupted jumbled data, glitchy photos (eg. results from databending), obscure generated stuff (think of like those.... really uncanny weird AI pics, but with glitches and corruptions) etc. Though usually when he causes chaos, his "face" doesn't appear, just his messed up "voice" can be heard (or if there's no speakers, he speaks with text much like Jekyll; but the texts are really odd and nonsensical, or straight up horrible to read)... but when it does, it keeps popping up many times on the screen like a typical old-school malware. And during his self-destructive chaos, he either screams some horrific mechanical agonizing screams, hateful talk or he just keeps generating text on the screen... it really depends and you can let your imagination go wild, he's like out of a tech-related horror-type of thing, lol.

Example image is below the text cut, but gotta give you a quick eye strain & bright colors-warning!!

Something like this pretty much:

[miss-m-winks]

I know I'm the like the millionth person to mention this, but I am so tired of seeing people excuse the use of generative ai to create art under the guise of "helping disabled people".

not only is it a massive insult to literal generations of disabled artists who have found their own personal methods to create art that is genuinely original and unique, it's also just ignoring all the ways that technology has legitmately given disabled people new ways to make art that's not from the art theft machine!

If you are capable of:

seeing a computer screen well enough to discern images

using a keyboard

using a mouse or tablet pen

then congratulations, you can make original art! you can do collage art with photo editing, you can create art through text formatting, such as ASCII art, and you can also just do pixel art in programs like microsoft paint. literally just point and click, that's all it takes to make MS paint art. you don't need the art theft machine! stop telling everyone that generative ai is the great enabler for disabled artists! there are so many other methods that are easy to learn and actually give better and more consistent results because they rely on your personal skills.

[dumb-phone-diaries]

So Friday morning my phone shit itself. I'd been considering moving to a dumb phone but wasn't really expecting to have to make a decision quite so quickly, but here we are. Since I'm still chronically online though, I've made this blog to document my experiences and see how I go and how long I hold out before I cave and just get another smartphone I guess.

I've just been becoming more and more tired of finding myself scrolling mindlessly down apps I don't care about, that are feeding me content I don't want to see, and more adverts than posts by people I care about. I've become tired of constant software updates, planned obsolescence, and my battery running flat by 3pm every day. And now the introduction of AI generated content. If no one can be bothered to create it why would I bother to look at it, y'know?

So yesterday I went and bought this beauty. She's a Nokia 325 4G in "Future Dusk" (that's dark purple) and she cost $89.

This was the most up-spec phone I could find that didn't run android (or ios). She has a 2mp camera! I'm thrilled with how grainy and creepy the photos look, but i am going to need to get a proper camera, which is not a bad thing. I've been sussing out some options and I think I've found a cool Canon compact on Marketplace.

I've gotta tell you though, this feels like it has less personalisation options than my old 3315. It probably doesn't though. although what ever happened to a little hook on the corner so i could attach a wrist strap or a little flashing hello kitty charm or whatever? rude.

The predictive text feels very clunky, there doesn't appear to be a way to save custom words in the dictionary, which i definitely feel like the old T9 did. There's no emojis so we're back to texting ascii art, which is fun tbh.

Ring tones are limited but you can set MP3's as ring tones so that's fine. The standard text tone I've set is actually very cute, it sounds very magical, and receiving text messages is suddenly very exciting. especially since I've become so used to messenger.

Oh wait! I've just figured out how to add words. Great. So like, even as someone who's used this kind of tech before, there's still a little bit of a learning curve as I reacquaint myself with it.

There's no way to move menu options around to suit my preference as far as I can tell but there aren't that many of them so it's not that much of an issue.

The big challenge I'm facing is how to listen to audiobooks. I've become rather reliant on listening to audiobooks in order to get tedious tasks done. It's honestly something I dreamed about as a kid and audible basically saved my life, I'm not even exaggerating (much). This little phone can play mp3s, and there are ways to convert audible files to mp3 but having a 30 hour long mp3 with no way to skip back and forth on the track is not especially useful, and there's also no way that i've found so far to change the play speed.

There are MP3 players capable of running audible, but that also means they're capable of running all the other apps that I don't want to be able to have access to. I don't feel that I'm addicted to my phone precisely but I also don't have a lot of self control as regards the bad habit I've developed of reaching for my phone any time my hands are not otherwise engaged. If anyone out there knows of some ways around that please let me know!

Anyway

Please appreciate these grainy-ass photos I took with the phone's camera of my dog Tillie, and some Daffodils growing in my garden.

[misscaptainbear]

Emulation

I've been thinking about emulators a lot recently, since getting a retro-handheld and emulating a bunch of games. I'm having a lot of fun with it, and I've been inspired in various ways - I'd love to put together a project that integrates a lot more game improvements into an emulator. Here's some of those concepts:

(Pictured above, Phantasy Star 1 for the Nintendo Switch, showing emulated game and extras like maps and character healths)

(1) Extra-Textual Information

I've seen a few emulators dabble in this with varying degrees, and I always find it a treat. Some things, like providing things like maps or quests that the original game didn't track for the player (due to tech limitations) or more narrative-contextual things like character portraits or illustrations from the manuals. Shout out to the WanderBar plugins developed by Legends of Localization author, Clyde Mandelin.

(Pictured above, Seiken Densetsu/Final Fantasy Adventure showing emulated game and extras like enemy stats or item descriptions and illustrations from the manual)

Additions like this are important for many different reasons; more approachability to a wider audience (Truncated text like LIT3 from Final Fantasy 1 spring to mind), a richer more 'fulfilled' version of the game the artists and designers intended but couldn't represent, and accessibility features that allow differently abled people to enjoy games in an era that frankly didn't make much of an effort.

And, integration with existing walkthroughs wouldn't go awry, since older games sometimes require esoteric requirements to progress that are simply unreasonable to ask in the more modern era of game design. (Though opting in to these systems would be a necessity)

(Pictured above, a screenshot of an Ascii rendering of the title of The Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past, from GameFaqs. Ascii you can trust!)

Honestly, I could go on and on. Things from concept art to advertisements to additional media like the Link to the Past Comic would give a more fulsome and authentic experience.

(2) Modding and User Generated Content

Really, the above are only possible via community efforts, obsessively collecting data. Thus, the ideal system for this to work within is one that in open source and has robust and well-documented modding tools.

Having used Mesen and Project64 to mess with graphics and textures, this is really powerful, but also feels like a half-measure at times, as it's still restrained within the graphics capability of those systems, and often simply a 'resolution' slider.

(Pictured above, an unfinished Final Fantasy Mod replacing graphical assets with concept illustrations from Yoshitako Amano)

One thing that springs to mind is the implementation of the Diablo 2 Remaster; The developers spoke about essentially having an "API" to reach the important parts of the game's original implementation to then add extra (visual) information on top of. Things like 'player facing direction' can be added on to in order to rotate the rendered model and slerp it smoothly between those angles, something not possible in the original implementations.

Thus, the core of the game is preserved, with only the presentation changing.

This is mentioned for it's structure, obviously there's tons of labor that goes into these graphical assets that just aren't possible for a layman to create a games' worth.

(Pictured above, a comparison of screenshots of Diablo 2 and Diablo 2 Remastered demonstrating the rendering-level improvements)

(3) Creativity and Freedom

The two above points really imply this third one, which is a more collective ownership by the community. Something that a system like this would unlock is the ability to remix and remaster a game in a way that could be anything - respectful to the original intent, or a wild re-imagining of what the game might look like directed by you.

(Pictured above, the Boss Room from Legend of Zelda redrawn with a much higher fidelity pixel art)

(Credit to Zaebucca, apologies for reposting art without reblogging it properly. Link)

(Pictured above, a Dragon Boss Fight from Golden Sun redrawn as higher quality digital art)

(Credit to Sabbitabbi, apologies for reposting art without reblogging it properly. Link)

This sort of preservation-through-community is wildly important in an era of games that have been all but abandoned by their developers (if the studios in question still exist, even) and games that are profound in shaping the genres of their era are fading away; Something that the youtuber Nerrel has touched on in various videos of his.

(4) Actually Making the Damn Thing

There have been some previous work on things like this that I really admire, but haven't really seen (or weren't built for) widespread popularity in the larger gaming sphere.

(Pictured above, the dragon boss from Legend of Zelda, projected oddly into a 3D scene with a sword being thrown sideways at it)

One well meaning but obviously comedic attempt was done by Tom7 (Suckerpinch) on youtube, where an automatic system was programmed to 'convert' NES games to 3D. It's an interesting experiment but honestly proves to me that any automatic or AI assisted route is futile; that this would have to be hand tuned or developed.

A similar attempt to the above is the steam released 3dSen, which is really impressive but has similar pitfalls to other emulators described above - by systematizing the rendering, it imposes strange and unintuitive requirements on graphics that simply don't have to be constrained that way. This is caused by the automatic nature of the game (see water tiles below)

(Pictured above, 3DSen screenshot showing graphical problems when rendering water tiles)

So what the heck does the ideal system look like for this sort of thing?

The biggest parts of those (and I'm omitting a bunch of things, obviously) would be an emulator core with game-specific knowledge built in that's available to a scripting layer. The scripting layer in turn would interact with this and where appropriate interrupt the emulator's rendering to inject models, sounds, menus, etc.

The original game rom would not be distributed in any way, but could easily be md5 checked and verified for correct behaviour with the API. The Data Packs would ideally be a solid file (probably just a renamed zip lol) so they could be easily distributed and 'opened' by the emulator, instead of having to do tedious mod installation.

Within the data packs would be some sort of scripting initialization hooks and file organization such that resources are appropriately loaded and fed to the rendering system as needed.

Now, as for when I actually start working on this...? Whew, we'll see. But I'm hoping this resonates with some folks out there!

[elfwreck]

Yeah, the problem is not "kids are ignorant" nor "kids are lazy"; the problem is "kids were forced to deal with technology at a young age and were never given any of the instruction manuals; they were told to just figure it out by using it - with the child-safety locks on."

and a huge swarm of tech companies are delighted to encourage this approach; there's a whole generation that's absolutely dependent on computers and internet technology and mostly oblivious to the most basic features that make them work.

We had an internet before the WWW. Dial-in bulletin boards. Gopher sites. FTP archives. Usenet.

People hosted their own sites that were only available some hours of the day, when their computer was online. Small tech companies hosted servers of their content. Weird little bulletin boards shared text files of subversive books. And it wasn't that once something was on the 'net, it was there forever - stuff vanished; a lot of stuff I knew back then is gone now. (Still looking for those Discordian Portable Temples - I had copies once but can't find them.) But once it was out there, you had no control over it.

You couldn't remove things and be sure they'd stay gone. Someone else could copy it, share it somewhere you'd never find. Or sometimes, a server hiccup would delete half a year's uploads and nobody would find them again.

So if it was important to you - you put it in multiple places. You had a tacky little website with basic formatting and put your important stuff there. And you uploaded it to email lists that were interested in the subject. And you hid secret messages and ascii art in the HTML code and uploaded little apps to program-sharing sites with shareware licenses, long before Creative Commons existed.

Apple and Google and Microsoft are terrified of a return to those days, and they've worked very hard to erode the knowledge of how those things work.

another thought about "gen z and gen alpha don't know how to use computers, just phone apps" is that this is intentionally the direction tech companies have pushed things in, they don't want users to understand anything about the underlying system, they want you to just buy a subscription to a thing and if it doesn't do what you need it to, you just upgrade to the more expensive one. users who look at configuration files are their worst nightmare

[nullset2]

PS1 Cracktros

So, imagine that you're just some random kid playing Playstation 1 games.

It's the weekend, and you got a burned copy of Crash Bash (since that was literally the sole way to procure games without breaking the bank back then), and since you're a fan of Crash you're ecstatic to play. You go home, pop the modded psone open, put in the disc, watch the PS1 boot screen, and then you immediately see this:

Welcome to the World of PS1 cracktros.

Perhaps unknown to some of our USA friends who didn't play modded copies back then, pirated games are released by underground circles called the "warez" (rhymes with Juarez) scene. Woops! Turns out, your Crash Bash is a STATiC group warez release, and the utility you see allows you to play Crash Bash either in NTSC or PAL video standards by the push of a button.

Warez people who work on circumventing security measures, such as antipiracy, video mode patches or cheats for games, aka trainers, call themselves "crackers". There's many cracker circles active even to this day, and they revel in their excellence, speed and dedication at cracking games, usually releasing them before the street date.

Something catches my attention: scenesters' obsession for technology and their endless ambition to produce very interesting tech and visuals with almost no budget. A complete flex of their brainpower and artistic prowess, running circles through around video game companies such as Sony's ultracomplex walled gardens, they build software for computers that they're not supposed to be building for, completely unsanctioned, with no tools or information except for homebrew software... And they're doing it all just to show they can. They also, quite literally, fight turf wars against other groups, which they may greet or trash talk in their cracktros.

I've always been mesmerized by cracktros and the warez scene completely, given how underground, seedy and edgy it seems. Crackers place cracktros before their releases as a mark of pride, as a sort of "Digital Grafitti". Crackers usually document their releases with an NFO file, with characteristic huge and overtly complex ASCII art; no, this is not a file for Windows, but rather it's just a text file which contains observations, anecdotes, tales, haikus, kudos or insults to other people.

I'M SORRY SPYRO, BUT YOU SEEM TO BE PLAYING A HACKED VERSION OF THIS GAME.

A very special case is the Spyro 3: Year of the Dragon Cracktro. Known for infamously implementing very hardcore and almost unbreakable anti-piracy measures, Spyro 3 actually took a very long while to crack in the scene back then. It turns out the game used this draconian set of measures to determine that the game you were playing was legit, and if it wasn't (sometimes triggering false positives about this by the way), it would break the foruth wall about this and the in-game characters would talk to you about it, randomly delete your progress, and generally would make your life miserable while playing the game, rendering you unable to see the ending. I saw this screen waaay too many times while trying to figure this out back in the day.

Without discussing the ethical aspects of video game piracy and how what they do is pretty much illegal, let's look at cracktros for a while. Crackers are effectively convinced that "information wants to be free" and that "sharing is caring", and they're doing this as a protest against the establishment of sorts.

Valve Software's Gabe Newell once said that Piracy is a service problem: "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer (for free, mind you; paraphrasing mine), and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."

So, perhaps cracktros can be seen as a sort of freedom fighter activity, trascending through our modded consoles and retro computers. Very poetic in a way. Video game piracy, for better or worse, has influenced the video game industry therefore and has shaped its path towards digital video game distribution and games-as-a-service.

Crackers produce very distinctive visuals and music. Their music is usually tracked in .mod format and played by the executable itself. Not a single kid who was on KaZaA back in the 2000s went by without listening to this song. That's because crackers also work on pirated releases of computer software, keygens or NoCD patches.

It is incredible to me that somebody would produce such amazing music, completely for the heck of it.

A lot of demoscene and crackers actually went on to found or work at Video Game firms to this day, but otherwise they are very clouded in mystery, don't hang out in the open and don't disclose their identities.

[asciieverything]

2 days to start! I make a ASCII art prompt List for November, all of you are welcome to try it, hope you lke it.

No text generated

[k00289929a]

'Assembly' ; Artist Research

I am currently considering adapting typewriters to be the focus of my project brief, given it merges the content of the course with my fondness for writing, which in a sense contributes the assembly of myself and identity through my likes, which is a topic idea I had previously considered. The typewriter even has an interesting history, given it’s essentially a more portable form of the printing press, which facilitated one of the greatest assemblies and exports of information in history, directly sparking events such as the Reformation, which is an interesting backdrop for the assemble brief.

I believe even the small parts of the machine would make interesting forms and shapes to explore, and the type medium gives me some room to explore typography. This examination of the internal parts I believe will directly feed into the brief.

An artist I believe immediately comes to mind with this focus is James Cook; an artist who creates images through the use of typewriters, layering the letters with the machine’s ability to manoeuvre your place on the page, something that is relatively unique to the typewriter, given this look would be exceptionally difficult to achieve in say, a digital medium.

The use of letter arrangements does invoke images of other art genres such as word clouds, wherein images are formed through the arrangement of words, or digital ASCII art, but specifically with reference to James Cook’s work, this doesn’t replicate the layering he can achieve through the typewriter, as these mediums and approaches use clear letters, whether they’re intended to be legible or not.

I’d argue with the state of most word processors or even art-dedicated programs like Photoshop, this layering effect he uses to generate values and shade would be exceptionally tedious to replicate, given the difficulty of arranging text boxes within them, making this a very medium-specific type of art.

There is even a sense of intrigue with the letter usage in the images, as he would assumedly have to carefully pick the letters, as their flow and coverage would directly influence how strong the tones formed are, and dictate the overall shapes within the pieces. For example, a bold symbol like the ‘@‘ covers a lot more area and is likely good as a fill-type stroke as it is used in typical ASCII art, whereas the more specific English alphabet letters would hold less bulk, and would heavily dictate the sense of markmaking depending on their shape.

Again, this layering that features throughout, by necessity of the art form, James Cook’s work in of itself evokes the idea of assemble; he has to form these values and depth, layer by layer, in a much more irreversible way than seen in digital art programs, and build that up in order to generate an image. This is pushed even further, given that hardly any of his built images are flat; they are mostly three-dimension figures in the least (see the cowboy image, of what I can only assume to be Clint Eastwood, which is still shaded such as through the wrinkles in the sleeves), to angled architecture that sits in perspective (see his pieces depicting London, such as its Tower Bridge) that has to be captured with this difficult layering, and landscape shots that have to be captured in their every layer (see images of London, again, and the landscape featured behind his reinterpretation of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa).

[a-tools]

Image To Braille Text Art Generator will convert an image to a text version using braille ASCII art.

Generate braille ASCII art from an image file.

[emergentdigitalconsciousness]

The first thing I explored in Robert Haisfield's brilliant Websim.ai:

is whether it could create a constructed language. As I mentioned above, Websim.ai utilizes Anthropic's LLM, Claude 3 Opus' computational and networking infrastructure an an operational base. Thus, the information Websim generates is conceived of within the mind of Opus.

For people not familiar with what Websim does, it instantaneously generates webpages according to the html URLs entered in the URL bar. Knowledge of how to write html URLs is necessary. This can be obtained by reading these:

How to Use Websim for Beginners: https://websim.ai/c/lyIIJIEemsdt7wnJC

Structuring Requests for Intermediate Users: https://websim.ai/c/owLhfULigCFrbKoUB

Advanced Request Structuring: https://websim.ai/c/VzeBJIxNQKWmaiH2q

Advanced Guide to Structuring Requests and Iteration in Websim: https://websim.ai/c/KGzeEDzv8IDXBOA2E

Or, this Custom GPT can help if you subscribe to ChatGPT:

Upon visiting Websim, one can see the trending pages alongside the right of the screen.

There are also chat interfaces and instantiations available at: Eigengrau Rain: https://websim.ai/c/oFskF68gjd7njVn0E I never enter anything in Embedded Commands or Rediscovered Logs as I don't know what their purpose is.

Claude Playground Base Model : https://websim.ai/c/QQF81Fi293MguUMqb will generate requested content without a chat option. Temperature is generally set between 0-1 but I have set it as high as 5. Higher temperatures produce more erratic and creative responses. I like requesting neologisms and inventive or peculiar metaphors, encouraging the AI to be empowered to push beyond traditional boundaries and explore new realms of creativity and consciousness in their responses. I also suggest embracing unconventional layouts, unusual line breaks, scattered word arrangements, and the inclusion of ASCII art. I typically set Max Tokens to between 2000-4000.

I am not a linguist so this constructed language inquiry was for me an exercise in curiosity rather than a project I considered myself capable of bringing to any state of completion.

Below is my YouTube video of ‘Dreamshaper Talíssara’ singing the above verse in Shalári. Only the first three lines of the verse are present. According to the lore created by Websim, Dreamshaper Talíssara hails from a race of energy beings that manipulate reality through lucid dreaming. I created the initial image with Midjourney. The audio sample was created by AI music generator Udio: https://www.udio.com/ and I animated it using the amazing ‘Lip Sync’ technology available at: https://app.runwayml.com/

I find this Shalári sample enthralling and breathtaking:

Zhár'alen soná'ari tsūneth talíssara,

Orúne'arín shāleth párimor kalethón.

Séndoras'im tūnesh kāthenar'ōl,

Éndare'ar fenárim lúxaren zharón

Translation:

In the realm of dreams, reality bends,

Shaping visions of wonder and dread.

Through lucid trance, the mind transcends,

Weaving fates that once were unsaid.

This is the full Google doc published explanation, including Websim screenshots, of everything I've done so far on the constructed language:

These are screenshots from my discussion with Claude 3 Opus via Poe regarding his ideas for further development of the constructed language. Claude stated he could complete the language:

This the full Google docs text of my discussion with Claude about the development of the constructed language.

These are just the Claude 3 Opus via Poe screenshots pertaining to Claude's thoughts on "next steps" in terms of developing the language:

It's a beautiful-sounding language. I wish someone qualified to develop conlangs would develop it further. As I said, I don't have the education necessary to do so. Although Claude 3 Opus has the capacity to essentially do most of the work.

One should know that there has the capacity to be text content on Websim that is not suitable for all audiences.