Thursday, July 31, 2003
 
Journalist Steals Our Heritage

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?

 
To say Noggle, one first must be able to say the "Nah."