Forums / Discussion / Meme Research

Would this qualify as a meme?
I'll do more research if you think it is worthy of a post.

The most recent use of these drawings that I have personally encountered are from trolls on omegle, see the picture below.

Not really. ASCII art has existed long before the internet, as well as ANSI. Certain ASCII images could be counted as memes, such as LUEshi, but I wouldn't lump all of them together.

ASCII/ANSI/Shift-JIS art etc. predates the "World Wide Web", but from my understanding what we think of as "The Internet" started with ARPAnet back in 1958. So I imagine BBS, teletype, etc where ASCII art came from certainly a certainly part of "Internet" culture

You knew what I meant. <_<

I love the one of Dwight off of the Office! Btw, I'm a might behind on the abbreviations.

:D

I'm gung-ho for an entry on this, I imagine there's a lot to cover!

I also wasn't aware there were really famous individual pieces of ASCII art, do you guys have other examples?

I was planning on making an entry about ASCII art, the origin on printers, that kind of thing, but I thought that you were working on this and that you were waiting… for not opening the "floodgate" too much, as Chris said to me.
There more than tons of example of diverses art that came up from ASCII.

I've already previewed this in another forum, but it's pretty awesome.

And here's an amazing gif.

I've found:

There's even a ED link pointing to a porn video made in ASCII.
That's just… plain… wow…

My brain just asplode…

/` `.__ 
\_ _., `'-._ _.--. 
_`_ ) | / _ \ 
/ `/ /'---./ / \ \--.___ 
\__./ /--.. /``-\ '-.___`\ 
'-' `--` `--` \/

Some pretty cool looking old-skool BBS ASCII and ANSII splash screens here
http://www.roysac.com/roy_ansidetail.asp?f=ayl-SWE.asc&src=oa

So, you think this is memetic or not?

It's better than memetic. It's a full-scale art form.
I'm thinking we need one good parent article that covers the full history, and probably a bunch of sub-memes as well.

good call, neviazsky!

@ Tomberry…Rule 34 – no exceptions
@ Cooper Smith Thanks (insert awesome smiley face)
Looks like it's gonna be a tough one to research fully, but I can make an attempt

Perhaps it's best to separate autogenerated ANSI/ASCII-art from manually made.

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I think devadatta's idea would be great, perhaps having just a small part of the entry talking about autogenerated art.

I've been attempting to research this to make an entry. But, perhaps due to me just being a fool, I can't find any information about the history of ASCII art. With wikipedia being basically the only source I can find; perhaps it is also due to ASCII predating the internet…but I really don't know.

ASCII Art at it's core starts with emoticons.

Emoticons began on typewriters.
Here's a good primer on the history of emoticons from Urlesque. http://www.urlesque.com/2009/05/19/10-things-you-didnt-know-about-emoticons/

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction Chris. I'm just starting a history of ASCII art as we know it, due to your earlier suggestion, now that I have a bit more information to work with.

Would ACSII art include rofl copter?

i would think so

simplistic ASCII art, but art using keyboard characters nonetheless.

I agree with Provie. The ASCII entry, if any of you will ever make it, will be a father meme for sub-memes such as ROFLcopter and the British Tyrannosaurus Rex (aka B-Rex).

Appologies for lack of article so far, but it appears life got in the way of writing. Will hopefully finish in the near future.