Today’s Washington Post has a story about the New Zealish guy who’s doing a complete ASCII art remake of Star Wars. Unfortunately, the author makes the astonishing claim:
Anyone who’s ever come near a computer knows how to create little text “emoticons,” such as a sideways smiley face :-) or a winking face ;-), but Jansen has taken this idea to extravagant, or possibly insane, extremes. He’s tapped out whole “Star Wars” tableaux — hyper-driven spaceships, storming Storm Troopers, the famous bar scene — with nothing but dots, dashes, parentheses, asterisks and what-have-you.
Simon Jansen, the artist, is not taking emoticons to a whole new level. ASCII art is not an extension of AOL-inspired colonic stupidity. By making that claim, the author is denying we old-time geeks of our culture and heritage and represents a great deal of insensitivity duly worth of italics and sometimes bold!
After all, ASCII art has been around for much longer than AOL. Am I the only one who remembers Color 64 BBSes, with their medium res ASCII animations, and St. Louis’s own Dave Hartmann?
