this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Akchually πŸ€“ this style is called "kaomoji" and uses any Unicode characters, not just ASCII. Usually Japanese ones because it came from bulletin boards there and the computers could only be trusted to support the first few Unicode blocks (ASCII, Greek, math) and the Japanese scripts including halfwidth kana and fullwidth Latin. It uses specific fonts but not monospace ones, unlike ASCII art.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Not to be that guy, but couldn't this have been generated? I'm guessing

drawing/painting - > edge detection - > line scanning - > ASCII substitution

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago

Could be, but this type of ASCII art usually is hand-made. Diagonal lines are hard and look off, easily

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago

If that's the case, I'd still be impressed that someone could have programmed that

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

There were / are a myriad of tools to draw and convert to ascii art that were popularized on the Japanese internet.

I’d imagine this was done in a tool like that.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Checkout acerola on youtube, he has a video on that, that leads me to belive its hand made.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

I'm willing to bet it's hand made. To make sure those lines are exactly what can be represented with ASCII characters, you might as well do it by hand. If it were rendered to ASCII from a drawing you'd likely get tons of artifacts from that process. This is too clean.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That is what I am thinking. Looking at the larger perspective snowball–flakes, there are 4-5 variations of the same 90Β° arc going from bottom to middle rjght. I don't think there are that many of the same arcs at slightly different radii (radiuses?) in ASCII but I could be wrong. Or it could be the low res.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

It's not strictly ASCII--look at the cat's mouth. But outside of using non-ascii, it looks inline with what was on usenet's art.ascii.art in the 90s. I could believe this was made by hand, possibly with a character-art specific drawing tool.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I can't figure out what it's supposed to be

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 week ago

Cat looking out a sliding door to a balcony. Steep angle looking down on an house.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (2 children)

sir, I'd like to order some extra pixels

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

thank you!

is this really all ascii? some of those lines don't look like ASCII characters at all

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

It's probably unicode.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

But where is the code?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

gotta spend those dollars while they're still worth something