Saturday February 09, 2002

Starting

Scale

When I started to draw Chickenman, I didn't have a fixed idea about what kind of scale I'd draw him to. With the restrictions of Ascii, it's quite interesting what kind of scales you can draw in. There seem to be various defined scales you can draw in: I'll try to clarify my thoughts on this.

+-------------------------------------------------+
|                                                 |
| The ASCent of Man...                       MM   |
| ====================               mm      o~   |
| (c)2002                    mm      oo        >  |
| hakim@earthling.net        oo        >     \-   |
|                              >     `-      /^\  |
|                      oo    / \     /^\    : C : |
|                oo      >  8 c 8   8 c 8   8===8 |
|           O    --   8  8   \ /     \^/     |^|  |
|      O   -+-  8  8  |||.   |||.    |||.    |||. |
|  *   X   / \   bb   ----   -~-~    -~-~    -~-~ |
|                                                 |
+-------------------------------------------------+ 

The following is rambling, may be obvious/trivial, and probably needs a complete rewrite...

1. Single character: e.g. like in roguelikes like Nethack, a figure might be represented by a relevant character ('d' for dog), or by a character that superficially looks like it ('~' for a snake)
2. Small figure: Usually have Main features like head, body, limbs, represented by a character that looks like them. ('O' for a head, '/' for a leg)
3. Larger figure: For the head, main features like eyes, nose, mouth will be represented by a character that looks like them (or more than one). For example, eyes: 'oo', nose: '<' etc.
   The body then appears to be difficult, because you have a choice of keeping in this scale, or moving to the next larger scale. That is... it's hard to think of a representative and witty character to represent features like 'shoulder', 'shin', 'chest', 'abdomen', though obviously, 'hands', 'feet', and maybe 'knees' may be easier.
   On the other hand, you could do the body as more of an artistic scale...
4. Artistic scale: This is where the focus is less on characters that cleverly look like features. Rather it's on characters that, when positioned together look like lines, shades, curves etc. i.e. the individual brush strokes that are used to draw a figure. This is where all those algorithms and rules of thumb for drawing and anti-aliasing in Ascii come in. JavE includes more algorithms than you can shake a stick at, though of course manual interacton is needed too.

+------------------------------------------------------+
|                    MM                                |
|                    oo                                |
|                   <                                  |
|  Chickenman        -/        Red Ted          ^ ^    |
|                   /^\                         @ @    |
|                  : C :                       ( o )   |
|            M     8===8                ,,      `+'    |
|           <"      |^|                 OO     O-X-O   |
|      <    8C8     |||           @    o><o     /^\    |
|   #  #    dd     ~-~-        8  8     oo      O O    |
|                                                      |
|     1      2       3           1       2       3     |
+------------------------------------------------------+

Chickenman is drawn (mainly) between scales 3 and 4.
Nerdboy appears to be between 2 and 3, with occasional large structures in scale 4.

I think that maybe having as much as possible in scale 3 will make the art more comprehensible (e.g. to the type of person that doesn't find a geeky relish in decoding images made up of Ascii characters)... (certainly my experience in showing to non-geeks).
However all scales are valid for particular audiences or purposes...

Timing

It's too early with Chickenman to say there are any FAQ's, but the one repeated problem people seem to have is that it's too fast.

And I agree. JavE lets each scene have a duration. The default is 66 milliseconds. As I continue, I keep adding to this. I've worked out the the following scale

• 66 ms: Only for very fine work, e.g. intricate moving characters.
• 150 ms: Normal rate of animation, regular animations (e.g. the movements of the car in the forthcoming episode 2), the appearance of text (dialogue / narrative text - used to by 66ms but I'm slowing it down)
• 300 - 500 ms: A pause, e.g. in dialogue. Or an evident, but not very important action like a blink.
• 1000 - 2000 ms: Hold: every text item (dialogue/narration) is held on screen for at least this length. Also I try to keep a pause like this after an incident or dialogue.
• 4000 ms: End / start etc. hold

Of course sometimes you can't hold (e.g. while animating the car, the wheels still have to keep turning), so you have to try to get up to the same length of time, but in smaller chunks.

Everything seems to conspire to make sure that

• The audience wants the action to be less quick.
• For you, the animator, it's much easier if you can get it over and done with quicker...

In fact, even in the table above, I think I'll need to add longer and longer pauses, though while you are actually testing the animation they are such a pain to go through.

Constraints

I think that many people look at Ascii art and think that it's a pointless irrelevance, done by people with too much time on their hands. This is probably true, but I'd say that even skeptics' natural reactions to a really clever bit of Ascii art would be the same as anyone's. "Oh so that bracket character is a nose, and that colon is two eyes turned on their side!" It's a human urge to look for patterns, and I think that anyone could enjoy some Ascii art, though I'd perfectly understand if they point out that computer graphics have considerably improved over the last 30 years and they'd rather spend most of their time looking at something else.

But I think the condition of wanting to create Ascii art must be slightly odder, or even pathological. I've been messing around with it for a little while now, and have got slightly obsessed. I think that the pattern finding urge as above must have something to do with it. But if I'm suffering from a disorder where I want to look at all the printable characters in every combination just to see if certain ones look like a cow, say, or a penguin, then I think I should be worried.

I think that, for the 'Ascii artist', the pleasure is the setting of an arbitrary constraint, and following it. This theme - the self-imposed 'constraint' - is well known in the field of literature, for example. There was the French novel (~Perec?~) which is written entirely without using the letter 'e' (the most common letter in French also). Calvino, who was part of one of the highly intellectual groups that played with constraints, the Oulipo, wrote If on a Winter's Night a Traveller which is a fantastic novel based on lots of constraints: locations, characters, incidents etc. are all played out according to a number of very academic rules. Yet the novel itself doesn't (mostly) feel stilted or boring because of this.

Hmmm, the above is a bit rambling, but I do think that the constraint relates to Ascii art:

Draw a picture, using only the letters of the (completely arbitrary) ASCII convention, using only a fixed space font.

Sunday February 10, 2002

Episode 2 - or animating two things at once

      O
    {
  
       MM
  O    oo
  ~   <
  8~,  -/
   '.`~^~.  O
     \ C ^'~8
      ===
      |^|
     .|||
     ~-~-
	

Have more or less finished the reworked version of Episode 2. This one was quite tricky/tedious to animate, because Chickenman and Red Ted are driving while they talk. This means lots of transitional scenes, and trying to keep all the sections (wheels, exhaust, speech, mouth, eyes) updated in sync...
I think I could write a tutorial on this if anyone was interested: the basic technique I used included the following steps / tools in JavE.
NB:Not to say that this is necessarily the best technique...

• Selection - Export to clipart: Before starting the animation, I created a background animation with the various frames of the moving car, and added just that section into clips named 1, 2, 3... etc. in a new catagory I created called chickenmobile.
• Clipart: Create the basic framework using the first recorded clipart. Tweak and add other details as appropriate.
• Duplicate frame: Leave all graphics and text built up on the frame and duplicate.
• Eraser: Delete just the moving sections of the image. (wheels, exhaust)
• Clipart - insert: I then add the next numbered clip. This is quite easy to keep track of in JavE, as the clip editor remains open with the last inserted clip selected, so just move one up (and cycle...)

  There are a number of selection insertion options (Foreground, Background, Difference, Normal). In this case I used Background because that way any changes I've made (eyes, mouth, text that overlaps onto the rectangular space of the clip) aren't overwritten. Of course if I've moved the characters significantly, I'd have to edit manually or keep track of two sets of clips for example

• The text tool: The only tool that you couldn't do without. Not only does it insert text, but is flexible enough to delete large areas (select & press DELETE), or move/copy blocks (e.g. acts the same as the selection tool).
  One feature which I haven't yet found useful is the double-click to select area (great idea... however the way my characters are drawn, it never seems to select all of them properly...)

  At this point, I'll tweak areas manually if necessary. This is also the time that I'll add another word or so to the text being built up, or remove some of the text around a speech bubble that is disintegrating.

So... the technique I used to keep track of animating two things at the same time was to organise one track (using Clipart), and do the other manually (adding text myself).

If you don't have an editor with clipart, might be worth keeping a working document with all the parts of cells to add, and then doing cut & paste, but I found clipart very convenient.

I think that the difficulty of animating will increase exponentially the more tracks(threads?) of animation are ongoing at the same time. At some point might need to keep a text file with information about each track, which template is being used for each character etc.

Episode 3 - or animating three... er... two things at once

At some point I will remember that I have a life (for some definition of life). But right now I am inspired by this project and have even done some significant work in advance on animating Episode 3.

      O  
 #phew# }  
  
    MM  
    @@    O  
      >   ~  
    \-  ,~8  
O  .~^~'.`  
8~`^ C /  
    ===  
    |^|  
    |||.  
    -~-~  
	

This is the most complicated animation work I've done: the subject is exalted, the execution is artfully crafted. I present... Chickenman getting out of the car.

This time, I animated Chickenman getting out of the car first, and then added the text. This is the opposite of what I did above. That's because there aren't just 6 repeated actions, but a whole sequence of unique ones. So for each new slide, I'd copy the text of the previous slide, and paste it in the same location. I don't think JavE has a tool to remember where you want to paste a block, but I memorized the coordinates (displayed on the status bar) and did it manually.

The subject - getting out of a car, was tricky to animate, because I had the door opening (in '3D'), Chickenman moving down and turning forwards at the same time, and his hand pushing the car door. Lots of cutting and pasting, lots of manual editing, and some soul searching: What is that semicolon doing there? Is it part of Chickenman's leg? No, it's from five frames back when I forgot to delete it from his arm.

So I chickened (no pun intended) out of animating Red Ted at the same time and decided to leave him in the car.

Comic strip

Through the entirely noble and selfless purpose of wanting to post a notice about Chickenman to the alt.ascii-art group (as well as the less frequented alt.ascii-art.animation), I thought I should present something in plain text format that qualifies me to post there.

         |.
         | \
         |  `.        _,.-;
         |    `__.,--'   /  __
  --------__             \ / /
   `-.  | _ \_____ __ __  Y /
     |  |  _/ _ \ V  V / /_A
      | |_| \___/\_/\_/ (_) \
    ,'         __     _______\
   /_...----'''  \  ,'
                  .'
	

Obviously, I can (and will) post studies and original artwork about Chickenman, but having read some of the fantastic Nerdboy, I thought to myself "I can do that", and am starting to do it.

It's not as easy as it looks. (Though a lot easier than animation - well, I would say that ;->) The paradigm is different. You can get away with some things, but not others. The way that your eyes flow over the text is different, also just how do you draw movement? I'm not yet good enough an Ascii artist to do this well I think - I've now done the intro, and I'm not 100% convinced but it's a start.

Technical details: I exported the movie using the "One text file with all frames" option. This literally dumps every frame onto a document. Because I have so many intervening frames, it would be a pain to delete the unwanted lines and then still have to move the next used frame up to the top. So I opened up a copy of my favourite (other) text editor, Vim, deleted frames with wild abandon, and then moved back to JavE to place the animations.

There are some differences: circle around Chickenman in the first scene, NARRATION IN CAPITALS, the "Is it a bird?" section has been moved after the Chickenman logo at the end. I think that these were all needed to make sense, but it's my first go at an Ascii cartoon strip: I'll look back at them later and maybe make some changes.

JavE Wishlist

 \-/  
J|a|v|E  
 /-\  
	

[11th Feb:Markus has replied]

I'll pass these on to Markus of course, but I think it's interesting just to note what I think I need now, and see if I've developed techniques to get around the problems later. Apologies if any of these seem critical - if JavE didn't already have so much functionality and coherence I wouldn't even know that I was missing more! (If I've missed a feature and it already exists, please let me know asap...)

• Movie Editor - navigation: When you are at the beginning of a 200 frame animation, the only way to get to the end is to click on "Next >>" 200 times. I've emailed Markus Gebhard with this as my number 1 problem: he says it's due to be fixed in the next release!

  Ideally single or groups of frames could be duplicated, deleted or moved by dragging and dropping!
  Also, you should be able to move copied frames from one movie to another...

• Export to HTML: i.e. turn an Ascii still into HTML ready text (in <PRE> tags and with angle-brackets escaped). I wrote a quick perl script to do this but I think it'd be useful built-in.
• Movie titles: The .jmov format contains meta data for the Movie Editor program, date, and Creator name and email. But it's missing a 'Title' field. If this existed, then the "Export - to Compressed Javascript" option would title the .html with that title rather than the annoyingly generic "Javascript Animation".
• Clip editor: I'd like to be able to rename or delete clips (or move them from category to category. Hey ho, I suppose I can manually edit the clipart file till then ;->
  (and would it be possible/useful to have hierarchies of clip categories?)
• Delete line: i.e. delete a line and shift the rest up (see my notes on the comic strip above).
• Scripting: OK now maybe I'm being silly... but... JavE is already advertised as being 'part Emacs', and what would Emacs be without Lisp powering it? Admittedly for 99% of uses it's irrelevant, but I think that a simple macro use should be easy to implement (probably an extension of the multiple level undo/redo - also the Movie file records which tool performed each action, so I think that there's already some sort of scripting driving it.

  What would I want scripting for? Consider the transition in Chickenman Episode 1 (and later, when they're released) to the episode. There is a wipe right to black (using the brush tool), then and erase right to the starting frame. To create this I have to

  1. Make a copy of the starting frame.
  2. Using the brush tool, start a wipe left...
  3. ...which I continue in further copies of the frame.
  4. When I've finally wiped to black, I'm there, except it's the reverse (i.e. I've wiped left to black, rather than erasing right to start).
  5. So I then have to move these frames the right way round.
  Some sort of scripting support would (in theory) make this simpler to apply to whatever new starting frame I have in each episode.

  (Even more bizarrely, scripting support might allow you to write a presentation - like those funky Microsoft Powerpoint ones - that advanced on mouseclicks etc..)

Monday February 11, 2002

The good fairy...

  ~
{ * }     sSs.    Yes Cinderella,  
  ~\      ""SS.    you SHALL go
    \    (   Ss    to the ball!
     8    -/ Ss.
     `\__/^\_/Ss,s
      `-,  .-``SS'
         ) /
        / (_ _
       (   (=V
        .__(=V 

My wishes have been answered! Well, responded to at any rate. Markus Gebhard has written a very detailed email in response to my questions. I'd like to post the relevant section, and will do so if this is OK with him.
[12th Feb 2002 OK, Markus agrees, here's the email.]

But until then, here are some highlights.

• Movie Editor - navigation: The main problem is apparently already fixed: I'll be testing it soon hopefully. Duplication etc. of multiple frames looks like it will be dialogue based for now, rather than drag and drop but that's OK with me (in fact, may give a finer degree of control?)
• Export to HTML

  +-------+ |.--, | |. | \ `------+ `. | / ,------+ .' |'--` | |' +-------+ Export Result

  Already exists! Of course, it's just hidden in the toolbar rather than in the File menu bar (like in the Movie Editor). It's called Export Result.
• Delete line: Already exists! Quoth Markus, "Using the text tool: switch the cursor to insert-mode and hit ] backspace at the first character of the line you want to have deleted."
• Movie titles: The .jmov format will now include a title metadata specified by "!:" in the file. Which reminds me, I will ask for a specification of the format... [12th Feb: spec is online here]

International man of mystery

  who
   am
   I?
  ___  
 |   |  
 |o o|  
 |   |  
 `._,'  
  /^\  
 : ? :  
 8===8  
  |^|  
 .|||  
 ~-~-   

In response to my announcement on alt.ascii-art, Phydeaux made this post speculating on my secret identity...

Which gets me thinking about Chickenman's secret identity: I think that a future plot will have someone discovering his identity. And just think of the fun asciimating Chickenman's change of costume !

Episode 2 - Comic strip

Chickenmail

                          MM
           __________     oo
          |         #|   <         Get information about
          | ~~~~~   o8    -/       new Chickenman art &
          | ~~~~~    '`,_.^\              asciimations
          |__________|`-. C :       delivered express
______________   _     __===8                   _ __
 _____/ ___/ /  (_)___/ /_||__ ___  __ _  ___ _(_) /
  ___/ /__/ _ \/ / __/  '_/ -_) _ \/  ' \/ _ `/ / /
   __\___/_//_/_/\__/_/\_\\__/_//_/_/_/_/\_,_/_/_/
       http://osfameron.perlmonk.org/chickenman/

Tuesday February 12, 2002

    Herring
  
    <o|||><
  
    a small
  fish made
Vlaardingen
     famous

A new toy

Markus has kindly let me have a preview of JavE4.0 which will hopefully make it possible to work easily with longer animations. Unfortunately, I won't get to play much with my new toy for a few days, as I will be on a work trip to Vlaardingen, the home of fine herring. But I'll update as soon as I get a chance to road test it!

Thursday February 14, 2002

  MM  
  oo  
    >  
  \-  
  /^\  
 : C.\  
 8=== 8  
  |^|    
  |||.  
  -~-~  

     $$,
     oo$
    <  $
     -/$
    /^\ 
   /,  ;
  8 ) 8 
   /___\
    ||| 
   ~-~- 

Saturday February 16, 2002

  MM  
  oo  
 C  
  e  
 YuY  
I A I  
BeeeB  
 IxI  
 III  
eded  

Alphaman

Chickenman is offline

[17th Feb 2002 Chickenman has returned. Speakeasy still list the Atlanta POP move as being unresolved though.]
I released episode 2, posted a note on alt.ascii-art, and since then, the Chickenman site has been offline, due to a problem with DNS...

Our kind host, jcwren, of perlmonk.org has explained that "Speakeasy physically moved the Atlanta POP. They are currently in the process of working with their upstream provider to get the routing tables straightened out."

Chickenman appeal for shoes.

      OO     OO     (_|  O
     ((     -||-    [__]_.)_|
jg   b b     bb     |   |d| |

        <OO>
          \\p
mjp       d

Now that's what I call economy of expression! His feet are very simple, made up the characters 'b' and 'd' usually. But look how Ascii allows such simple (yet effective) effects as the 'p' to represent his raised foot when he's running!

MM oo 8======< =======8 ==== - ==== ======= === ===

When I first drew Chickenman, I started off with the head, in what I've clumsily called 'Larger figure scale' below. (See Crawford's tutorial, for example the section on 'sig' style for an excellent discussion about the differences between styles/scales.)

[18th Feb 2002: added] The body I first drew as just an area of '=' characters (I thought they looked a bit like wings) and '8' for the hands. (see also the draft versions of old episodes from the main page). My girlfriend commented that it looked a little odd, Chickenman not really having a body, and so the need for version 2 was conceived.

By Egg! These feel MM a bit tight. oo \ < I usually >/ take size 2. /^\ : C : 8===8 |^| ||| d d

I noted that it got harder as you filled in the rest of the body to think of witty characters to represent features. ('8' for the hands, '^' for his crotch, and err... that's it). By the time I got to the feet I diddled through a number of possibilities. Nerdboy's elegant 'bd' style feet didn't seem to go (too small?) though now that I look at it again I suppose maybe it'd do?

So I finally hit upon the fairly simple "-~" style shoes that he wears today. These work OK: They don't really look like shoes of course, but in the context of it they suggest them just enough for it not to jar.

So what's my problem? Now that I'm experimenting with other scenarios and scenes, I've realised that some characters (Red Ted, and Chickenman's shadowy nemesis, the Hooded Crow) have feet that extend to the bottom of the square, while "-~" sit in the middle. This could give the impression that Chickenman is floating just a few centimetres in the air above the ground, which looks a bit odd.

I'll be taking Chickenman to the shoeshop to get fitted as soon as I can, but if anyone has a suggestion (or a pair that they are willing to donate) we'd be very grateful.

Sunday February 17, 2002

A small world

Monday February 18, 2002

No more black and white

Confused identity

Tuesday February 19, 2002

Asciimation Links

• Star Wars : The only asciimation that has so far gone mainstream. Linked to from hundreds of pages usually with the description "Created by a Kiwi with waaay too much time on his hands".
• Caribouteries : A French language website, but don't let that put you off. Using whatever you learnt from school (Le singe est dans l'arbre) head straight towards Les MangaRibous which are the animated ones. I found the site layout a little confusing, but each ascii thumbnail has 2 links, the top one views the animation (Java applet), while the bottom link allows you to download all of it as a text file. Some of these are incredibly well done: the adventures of Supercaribou (also in English) was cinematographic in its execution. Most impressive, definitely deserves more linkage!
• Around midnight - Ascii theatre : Some fairly short, but rather nicely executed, gory little animations. The whole site is very simple, consistent and well designed.
• b'ger's ascii art gallery : b'ger is an excellent ascii artist with his own style, somewhere between fine-art and cartoon. Only a few short animations, but I think they are exceptionally beautiful.
• gnv: 'simple and not so simple animations' : Spanish language website. Very nicely done short animations. Also like the original artwork ("Mi propio ascii art").
• Dan Hunt's gargoyle : Possibly the first ascii animation I ever saw.
• mbp99's Asciimations : Nice, short, narrative animations.
• Clint's ascii animation gallery. : A slow, banner infested tripod site. But though the sub-pr0n 'perverted' animations are childish in the extreme, these are 'narrative', and there's a lot of humour and enthusiasm.

Episode 3 - the countdown

1. The new frame scrollbar in the Jave 4.0 alpha that I'm roadtesting. As the name implies, it meant that I could move from frame 1 to frame 130 without having to click past every frame in turn. Very handy.
2. A better understanding of the .jmov file format. The format is very simple, and though (currently) the frame manipulation options within the editor are still fairly basic, and there is no way of moving multiple frames between movies, it's fairly easy to open up your text-editor of choice and cut and paste frames that way. So I copied the whole standard intro to the beginning of the work in progress in a matter of seconds.

   _ | | | | |_| _ Ahaaa! |_| MM oo ` < o/ /^\ : C : 8===8 |^| .||| ~-~-

3. A brainwave. To do the transition from 'black' (a screen full of a dark character, usually '8') to the opening frame, I used a simple procedure.

   Then

   1. Start with the opening frame
   2. duplicate the current frame
   3. add some black to it
   4. repeat steps 2 and 3 until all black.
   5. Now all the frames are in the wrong order, so manually click "Move Left" and "Move Right" to sort the frames into the right order.
   This, as I realise now, was stupid. I should have.

   Now

   1. Start with the opening frame
   2. duplicate the current frame
   3. Move to the Previous frame
   4. add some black to it
   5. repeat steps 2,3,4 until all black
   Obviously as and when JavE includes the functionality to reverse sequences of frames, it may well be quicker to use the first technique.

I still need to create the static comic strip version, but I think this will be an even quicker job using the techniques described in a previous article.

Wednesday February 20, 2002

Web logs

I've spent a little time looking over the web logs for the site. As I've never run a website before, I was quite surprised at the information that gets onto this - type of machine, language, the referring page address etc.

So I can track how many hits I got (not very many yet...), and to some extent where people heard about it (from alt.ascii-art on Usenet, the JavE website etc.) Also, a quick scan today gave me a hunch that some people are clicking on the .jmov links from the main page rather than the Javascript. Obviously they might want to do that, but in most cases, when this has happened there are fewer documents requested from that machine. So to try to improve usability, I've reorganised the way that the episode list is presented. Comments welcomed.

Chickenmail

Really not something that the world desperately needs I suppose, but I have now 'launched' the Chickenmail mailing list. That is to say, I've posted a link to a page with the logo, and an email address to request subscription. The format of the mail is undefined: I think that it will include some sort of digest of the week's diary entries as well.

The list will be hand-maintained, unless ravening hordes of Chickenman fans eager to subscribe make this impossible. (Well, we live in hope). It will go out at an absolute maximum of once a week.

Sunday February 24, 2002

Episode 3

I posted Episode 3 on Friday 22nd (well actually the evening of Thursday 21st... I don't want to waste work time maintaining my site, and know that I won't be able to get up early enough of a morning to do it then). Almost as soon as I did this, the server disappeared again...

Of those of you that did get to see it when the server came up, I've had one comment so far: The intricate "Chickenman gets out of the car" sequence that I'm so proud of, happens at the same time as Chickenman is talking. This means that you are struggling to look at both of them at the same time.

Funnily enough, I wrestled with this when I animated it. I think I liked the idea of this being a sort of bravura show-off animation that's just lightly turned out at the same time as the action is going on. Maybe that was the wrong idea. Or maybe, as ever, it's just that I need to work on my timing. More comments welcomed.

Fame at last

Caribou, where are you?

  touriste!
      \         ?        \ V\ /  
                          V__V  
             \ V \/       |oo  
              V__V        <  
              |oo|        \_/  
   __________/ \_/        /v\  
  /           / v        : C :  
  \||________||          8===8  
   |||      |||           |^|  
   |||      |||          .|||  
    --       --          ~-~-  
   B Bram                osfa

The prehistory of asciimation

[10th Mar 2002 more news on viewing ANSImations in Windows]

I've finally downloaded some vt100 ansi escape animations from textfiles.com - there seem to be a handful of examples of vt animations, which you will also find replicated elsewhere, like the legendary bambi.vt (Bambi versus Godzilla).

These ancient animations were designed for vt100 terminals which were used to connect to servers. They used ANSI escapes, which are sequences of control characters to control how text is written to your screen. For example <ESC>[5;10H would start writing Ascii text at line 5, column 10. Other codes would change colour, clear the screen etc. These ANSI escapes have survived past vt100 (most terminal emulators, like telnet and ssh clients will emulate vt100 mode) and you should still be able to view the animations by just typeing or cating the files containing these escapes from your command line.

However, though most Unix/Linux distributions, DOS, and Windows 3.1/95/98/ME have ANSI support, my Operating systems, WinNT and Win2K do not have inbuilt ANSI support. There is a circuitous way of tweaking it but, perhaps because it's so much quicker to read a file on a local system than over a network, the animations run much too fast to be viewed.

So I copied some vt animations to the web server, and ran them from a Unix session on there. Some of them are very good, and the wonder of it is that (as far as I know) they were written by hand without the aid of any sort of Asciimation (ansimation?) program.

If I have time (and if I had better programming skills...) I would like to write an ansimation -> .jmov converter.

Episode 4 - light and dark

1. Chickenman and Red Ted are in the warehouse that Hooded Crow has led them to.
2. Red Ted is worried.
3. They hear a creaking sound, and move towards it.
4. They hear a creaking sound in another part of the room, and move towards it. ("By Egg! The Hooded Crow is leading us a merry chase!")
5. Repeat a few times till...
6. They are led offscreen.
7. A new, longer, louder creak is heard onscreen and...
8. "Bored now!"

As this probably isn't even particularly funny, I should really spend time working on the farce/comedy aspect, but I got sidetracked animating the door opening...

8888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888
8888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888
888888888888888\             |8888888888888888888
8888888888888888.  MM        |8888888888888888888
88888888888888888. oo        |8888888888888888888
88888888888888888\<          |8888888888888888888
888888888888888888\-/   ^ ^  |8888888888888888888
8888888888888888888|\   @ @  |8888888888888888888
8888888888888888888| : ( o ) |8888888888888888888
8888888888888888888|=8  `+'  |8888888888888888888
8888888888888888888||  O-X-O |8888888888888888888
8888888888888888888||   /^\  |8888888888888888888
8888888888888888888|-___O O__|8888888888888888888
8888888888888888888|   ,888   8888888888888888888
8888888888888888888|  8888'   8888888888888888888
8888888888888888888|  `888   ;8888888888888888888
8888888888888888888|  8888   d8888888888888888888
8888888888888888888| ,888'   88888888888888888888
8888888888888888888  8'8'    88888888888888888888 

How exactly does perspective work anyway? I haven't taken an art class since I was 14 or so, and wasn't much good at it then. And I know it's mainly common sense, but I have very little of that...

I defined an origin for the light source at the top of the screen. Using the handy Auxhiliary lines button in JavE I could draw lines from the light source to add shadows. Doing the shadows for the characters is the hardest as I don't really understand the 'rules' of what I'm doing so it's pretty much a guess. The characters' shadows are antialised by JavE, whereas most of the rest (e.g. of shadows) is done manually, because I wanted the edges to fit along the line of the light-source, which the program doesn't know...

The door moves in a circular motion. (I drew an ellipse on a blank page, and cross-referenced every slide to see where I should move it to.) When the door reaches past half-way some light hits it so I use a gradient shading (HKQXS6YJtci= etc...) which I'd observed seemed to be the technique used by the Render 3D tool when rotating an object. By the way, I should really have just used the 3D tool but I was too scared to use it... maybe next time.

Like many sequences seem to be, this was drawn in reverse: I start with the door open and Chickenman and Red Ted standing in the threshold. Then bit by bit I close the door and add shading. I forgot to reverse as I was going along (d'oh!), and changing the order was a real pain.

And I have a technical problem.

The exported Javascript animations are always a little slower than shown in the JavE movie player. That's OK, I actually prefer them that way. However: for this movie, the Javascript animator is VEEEERRRRRYYYY slow indeed. I imagine that this is because I have so many characters on screen at the same time. The algorithm used by the Javascript refreshes all characters at the same time rather than just changes. Most of my animations are line based rather than shading based, and so they have very small amounts of text on screen at any one time, which is why they haven't had the same problem.

(Now, I don't know enough about Javascript/DOM to know if the Text widget allows text ranges to be changed: Tk does though! If it does, a Javascript animator could be optimised for adding just the differences each time, which would also reduce file size in some cases.)

Obviously I will post the .jmov as normal, but not everyone will want to download a new piece of software just to play the files. I can also use the JavE player applet embedded in the web page, but I have an impression that Javascript is still more widespread/robust than Java in many browsers. The other option of course is to release it in 'flick-book' style (e.g. a big text file that you put in your text editor and press the Page Down key to view. JavE does export to a text file, but I think it doesn't insert multiple copies of a frame (e.g. one that you want to hold for longer). I'll check that out.

I've also considered doing a version of the animation without shadows for people without a JavE player. I suppose someone with a faster computer than I do would also see the shaded animation quicker!

!$%&@*?

Wednesday February 27, 2002

3 minutes of excellence

Timing on my computer, viewing the animations in Javascript format, episodes 1-3 plus the trailer come to 175 seconds of Chickenman viewing. Add in the credits and drafts and you have well over 3 minutes of groundbreaking asciimation excellence!

(This may not seem like a lot: but if you're not convinced, try it and find out how much time it actually takes!)

Chickenman FAQ

         Ww    I hate
   ,-.   oo   bad hair
  (   ) <      days!
   `+'   ./
    8 _,.^\
    '`-, C :
        ===6,
        |^| Y,
       .|||
       ~-~-

1. Are those MM characters part of Chickenman's head?

   Yes. That's his hair!

   This is all part of the fun of Ascii art... The C on his chest however, represents an actual 'C' (the logo on his superhero suit).

2. The animation goes too fast: Why? Because slowing down an animation is hard (or can be). I'm learning a lot about timing: right now, I think this is one of the hardest/most important things to learn about animation.
   • Sometimes it's very easy to just hold frames for longer. For example, at the end of every 'speech bubble' or important action, I tend to hold the action for between 1000ms - 5000ms. Obviously, when you are constantly viewing an animation while designing it, and you know the plot, there is a big temptation to speed up to get it over and done with. You have to pull yourself back and slow it right down. Sometimes I forget to do this...
   • At other times you can't just pause: something else is moving (for example: the wheels of the car in Ep2), or you want to create a sense of urgency by starting a move then. This means that you need to create in between frames, and that means more drawing and more design. This takes time.
   • Sometimes I've experimented with having more than one thing happening at once (like Chickenman talking while getting out of the car). I don't think that this is bad in itself - The Simpsons has all kinds of things going on all the time. One difference is that the people who create the Simpsons are better writers and animators, and have better timing... (The other difference is, I think, that, until you get used to decoding Ascii images, your brain is actively working on making these strings of characters into pictures, while reading other strings - the speech bubbles - as plain text. This takes longer to change your attention to another part of the screen. Unlike a conventional cartoon, where the speech is naturally represented by real sound...)

Episode 4 update

Episode 4 is coming along nicely. Since my last entry about it, I've simplified the shading for the swinging of the door, and pruned some scenes. It looks less fussy now: probably it's less accurate in its rendering of light and dark, but this is a cartoon, not high art, so I'll let it pass...

But I'm not sure that it will be ready for Friday. (But I have a backup plan, so it's still worth checking back then!) Firstly because I'm not 100% sure about the script (second half), and secondly because working with large quantities of shadow presents some new technical issues.

For example, in drawing speech bubbles, you have to add some whitespace to let the text stand out against the 'dark' background (e.g. of 8s.)

+---------------------------------------+
|                    8888888888888888888|
|                    8888888888888888888|
|                    8888888888888888888|
|                    888888P     Y888888|
|     Hello          888888 Hello 888888|
|     World          888888 World 888888|
|                    888888b     d888888|
|                    8888888888888888888|
|                    8888888888888888888|
|                    8888888888888888888|
+---------------------------------------+

Notice the corner characters: P Y b d which give the dark box the impression that it is curved around the text. This is a classic Ascii art 'anti-aliasing' technique.

Obviously, to animate text appearing and disappearing, as I do with Chickenman, will also be more work against a dark background. Here's a quick example of animating the above text (.gif and Javascript formats).

The other fun task is adding the shadows to the characters. I really don't know how to do this realistically, so I'm using the auxhiliary lines and pretty much guessing where to draw the shadows... I start by animating the movements of Chickenman and Red Ted, and go back to adding the shadows after. (Otherwise it would get complicated cutting and pasting and having to remember to delete the shadows).

All in all, I think it looks OK - but if any kind Ascii-artist would care to either diddle the scenes, or give me a lesson in perspective drawing, I'd welcome it!

Thursday February 28, 2002

Changing sites

Episode 4 out

Saturday March 02, 2002

The original chickenman

Someone, who is possibly called Gary, Helen, or even Huckleberry Hoshimoto, pointed me to an .mp3 of the original 60s-70s Chickenman radio show. I had already discovered that this existed (after creating the first episode), but had never heard it. Very amusingly done: funnily enough this Chickenman goes to choose his costume, and chooses the chicken suit over a bunny costume and, interestingly, a cute teddy bear outfit. Of course I didn't know this when creating Red Ted!

Get the party started

Big in Germany

Well certainly 3 of the... 3? websites that link to Chickenman are now German... The rather eccentric, minimalist weblog at http://www.soy.de/ now proclaims Chickenman as "THE NEW HERO". Many thanks! This site also provides a handy translation feature, which produces interesting results on Chickenman's hair.

Redesign: phase 1

1. The header image (defaulting to the basic Chickenman banner)
2. The navigation bar on the left
3. The main section: intro, diary, episode list etc.

So far the only real gain is that it's easier to maintain the look and feel for the main pages. The next step, I think, is to reorganise the way that the episodes are presented: I'm thinking of having a page per episode. This page will then lead to the current animation in various formats, the draft version and preliminary sketches, overview and background notes etc. After that, I'll see about automating the diary entries with templates.

Comments and suggestions welcomed.

Sunday March 03, 2002

Redesign: phase 1 complete

  I feel       MM
  seasick      oo
           `  <         __
               >/   ,-''  `.
     ,----.   /^\ /'        \
  /''     `.8',C :           \
  \....     | ===8            \
     ,/     |/  \\             \_
    /'           \\             `\
    |            ~-               .
    `|                             \
     \                              |
      \                         /". |
       `\   ,               ^   | | ;
         '-'|   .\     ^   | \  `||/
            |   ||    / |  |  \  |'
            /  .|/   ,  |  |  |  |
            \  | \  <   |  /  |  |
             | |  \ '| / /'    | |
             |,|   '\ " |     .| |
            ,|/     ;    \    |  |
            | |   .X__,_ J   /'  |
          [__,|              L___'

The first phase of the redesign is complete. I think the site looks consistent and clean, and should be easier to navigate. I'd welcome opinions and suggestions from everyone - websurfer or professional designer - on how to make it better.

The whole thing is powered by 2 scripts (I provide links so that the curious or foolhardy can see, and maybe give me some code advice on the scripts...)

1. the relatively elegant gen.pl script which generates the html for the main pages. This makes sure that the navigation links to the left are consistent. Template toolkit is used to add things like the standard header and footer, and to piece together the navigation bar, the section artwork/banner and the main text.
2. epgen.pl (episode generator) is a horrible hack based on the same code. If I get around to it I'd probably rewrite the original script and just run it with different parameters to achive the same effect.

(NB: The use of a camel image in association with Perl is a trademark of O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. Used with permission.
This particular camel is of course diddled from Erudil's famous Camel Code.
The use of a camel image in association with Chickenman is a trademark of CSI Productions. Used with permission :-> )

Thursday March 07, 2002

A health warning

There should be a warning on HTML editors and all tools used for web publishing: running a website is bad for your health. The paranoia it induces is incredible:

why don't I get more feedback?
why haven't more people replied to my announcements on Usenet?
why hasn't Google indexed me yet?

At least the original obsession - with creating ascii animations in the first place - was a self-determining one. Now I have to rely on 'my public' for approval, and it hurts. But both narcissism and the gruelling act of animation itself cause hours of extra mental exertion when I probably ought to be doing what other people do - chilling, watching television, hanging out, doing exercise, cooking, cleaning, etc...

I'm currently getting over a nasty (well, at least long-lived) sore throat, and I have decided that sleep, rest, and relaxation in the aim of getting well takes precedence. So I've allowed myself an hour or so tonight to post the announcement about Episode 5, but I'm going to try to curtail my obsession for a little while.

So... apologies if I'm slightly less regular with the updates for some time: I'd still love to hear comments, experiences from other site editors on getting their sites indexed, or suggestions on how to get rid of this !*$%&*?! cold.

Sunday March 10, 2002

The continuing history of the prehistory of animation

After my entry on the ancient vt100 animations, Markus Gebhard, the author of JavE has taken up the challenge of creating a viewer for vt100 animations. I'm quite glad that he has, because from our correspondance, it's clear that I haven't even understood all the issues in playing all the different types of ansimation... I'll update on his progress as I hear.

In the mean-time, you can use Meph's AnsiViewer for Windows, which is a fine piece of work, but fails or clucks error messages on many of them.

Monday March 11, 2002

New drawings

  1                                       ,,,,
 20                                      ,,``,,
  9                                )      oo ,,
  8                                      <   @
  7                 sSSs         (        - ,+
  6                sSsSss                  \|  _
  5                .. SSSs        )     .,'V `' .
  4               <   .}ss       (     /(  (  |) }
  3                \- $ss       ,-.  _; ;`.^  || |
  2   !            _||_ _       |^|8|__'  |   || ;
  1       Help!   ; V  ( ;      `-'       ==@=='/
 10   MM         (  (  |\:                mMMMm8
  9   oo   ,      ` ^ '| })              mMMMMMm
  8     >        ((|___|//               MMMMMMM
  7   \<          .}=@={,                 \ | /
  6   /^\          ; ^ :                   |||
  5  : C :        | ; : |                  |||
  4  8===8       ; /   \ :                 |||
  3   |^|        | |    | |                8+8
  2   |||.      /__|    |__\              d8|8b
  1   -~-~    < _._:    ;_._`,          ,d8/|\8b.
     12345    1234567890123456     123456789012345
     10x5     17x16                21x15 (not inc. cuppa)

I'm really not as good an Ascii artist as I am an animator. I think that this is because art requires inspiration and a good eye for detail. Animation does as well, but more than this, it needs patience, attention to detail (this is different, I think), and some technical skills. Certainly, at least from what I have found on the Web (see Links page) there are only two other sites offering comparable (in the sense of being longer, narratives) works. But there are many great Ascii artists: I'm not trying to 'compete', as my talents don't lie in that direction, but I think it's valid to try to gain inspiration and see where I can make improvements in the quality of my drawings. So I've been trying some studies on just a slightly larger scale than Chickenman.

Given that this isn't my forte, I'd be a little ashamed to post these non-animated, non-Chickenman pictures here, but they are still clearly influenced/limited by the Chickenman style: it's interesting to see how moving to just a slightly larger scale raises the possibilities on one hand, but limits them on the other. I was surprised to find that I could still use the same facial characteristics - the difference seems to be that you can slightly space them apart, and you need to draw the hair and head in more detail.

And, with JavE's handy Export making of feature, you can see me in action, creating one of these characters. This reminds me of the classic videos of Picasso doing pen drawings, filmed from behind the canvas. (erm, in concept, not necessarily in talent). It's fascinating to see the continuous diddling (an Ascii art technical term - meaning, as far as I understand it, this process of improvement to an artwork) happening in real time (actually, faster... JavE doesn't remember how long you spent agonising over the next character ;-< ). I find these making-ofs fascinating to watch, I wish I'd exported them for earlier studies.

See the study and making-of here

Further diddles welcomed (with making-ofs if you are a JavE user... I may even post them here.)

Tuesday March 12, 2002

JavE 4 beta

Sunday March 17, 2002

Re-organised the diary

             MM
             oo
    phew!   <
           ` >/
           ,-^-,
          /, C  ;
      ____\.___8._______
     /     8----,      /
    /     / \~ /      /|
   /     /~~ ~/      /||
  /_____/_~_~/______/ ||
  ||  |||~~~~|    ||  ||
  ||    | ~~ |    ||
  ||    |~~ ~|    ||
  ||     \~ ~ \   ||
  ||      ) ~~~)  ||
         /~~~~/
        /~~ ~/
       / ~~ /
      /~~ ~/
  .----,.~/
 (    (@)/
  `-----'

As part of the redesign, I'd planned to reorganise the way that the diary is presented. This has become a little more important, as the diary grows, the single page used for all the entries was getting long and therefore taking longer to load. Also, as it was in reverse order it could get a little confusing to read. Yet I wanted to have the most recent date's entries at the top to show quickly what's new.

So the redone version defaults to showing entries for a date at a time: but you still have the possibility of viewing in one long file if you prefer. The most complicated thing was dealing with routing internal links: (like the one above) to a separate document or to an anchor on the same page. All links should hopefully work, but if there are any problems, please let me know...

Wednesday March 20, 2002

Asterix

Apologies for lack of updates here. I'm working (slowly) on Episode 5, but I'm concentrating on getting well. Oh, and a kind of ridiculously busy patch at work.

I've still drawn a little ascii art, but the idea of sitting down and animating something (especially as Episode 5 will start off in the dark where we left off in Ep 4) just seems to give me a headache at the moment.

So here is my most recent work:

          ===.
      =====.==`.               __,------._
         ===`.8=);   _/)    .-'           ``-.
         _ (G^ @@__ / '.  .' By Toutatis, the `.
   ,._,-'_`-/,-^( _).__: .' druid's potion has :
  (    / .MMm.Y_)/      ,'   turned me into    |
   `'(|.oMMMM       __,',-'`._  ascii art!   ,'
   d88:'mOom[=O     `--'      `-..______,--''
   88::(::\d88b
   Y88  ':88888
_________888P__________________________________________________osfa
|                                                                  |
|  Asterix, le heros de ces aventures.  Petit guerrier a l'esprit  |
|  malin, a l'intelligence vive, toutes les missions  perilleuses  |
|  lui sont confiees sans hesitation.  Asterix tire sa force sur-  |
|  humaine de la potion magique du druide Panoramix...             |
|__________________________________________________________________|

See the 'making-of' here.

Missing shadows

Friday March 22, 2002

Backgrounds

Just done a little work on Episode 5. Not much as I have a hectic 2 weeks ahead of me and need to get focus, but I've had some more thoughts about it.

Animating one figure in its own space is (relatively) easy. But as soon as you add backgrounds it gets much more complicated. For example:

1. dark background (it's night-time)
2. a building
3. Chickenman (walking in front of the building)
4. another character (possibly walking in front of Chickenman)

• Episode 3: Chickenman getting out of the car
• Episode 4: Dark background
• Announcement: Chickenman standing in front of the stage curtain

you can see that I have dealt with at least 2 sets of objects trying to occupy the same space on the canvass...

On alt.ascii-art, someone has (half-jokingly) suggested that JavE should have 'layers', the way that professional art editors like Photoshop do. Layers allow you to think of your final image as being composed of several layers of transparencies (background, near background, foreground 1, foreground 2 etc.). This allows you to edit and position each of them individually, preview what they look like merged (as if you'd placed the transparencies on top of each other) and then finally creating a text file. I think that Markus liked the idea, but it was too complicated to implement with the current way JavE works. And really, for ascii artwork, I think that you can live without it, but for animation it's difficult...

There are other possibilities that wouldn't require full layers functionality (merging files, scripting copy-and-pastes etc.) but in the mean time, I had a thought about animating against a dark background:

When animating Episode 4, I started with the background, then moved the characters against that. Every time they moved, I'd have to redraw the shadow (888888) around them. But... I think that it might be easier to start by just drawing the frames with the foreground, and then later filling the dark background. Obviously that would be harder with a patterned background (like in the Announcement) or impossible with a non-repeating background (like the car in Ep3).

+----------------------------+----------------------------+
|                            |8888888888888888888888888888|
|               888888888    |8888888888888888888888888888|
|              P         Y   |88888888888888P         Y888|
|             8 Let's try 8  |88888888888888 Let's try 888|
|     oo       b to find  Y  |88888oo8888888b to find  Y88|
|              8 the door! 8 |888888888888888 the door! 88|
|          @@  8.        ,d  |8888888888@@888.        ,d88|
|                888888888   |8888888888888888888888888888|
+----------------------------+----------------------------+

The asciimation collaboration

Tuesday April 09, 2002

Holidays

         It's good to  
        be on holiday.  
   MM   No  cares,  no    So why  
   oo , responsibility!   do you   !  
     >                     still  
   \<                  have your  ^ ^  
   /^\ `             costume on?  @ @  
  : C :   Well, you            ` ( o )  
  8===8  know: eternal            `+'  
   |^|   vigilance and           O-X-O  
   |||    all that..              /^\  
   ~-~-                           O O  

Wednesday April 24, 2002

         Use the 
        blog, 
     .,  Luke!  /. 
    (..)       // 
    |  >      // 
    \$$/     // 
   /  & \   // 
  (     .`-/8 
   8   ( `^' 
   )    \ 
  /      \ 
.'_.-,__,_\ 

Back

I'm also trying to learn how to paint in watercolours, and sketch. Of course, this isn't ascii, but on the other hand I think it's good to stretch my (limited) artistic talents...

Self promotion

This looks like a useful web tool: selfpromotion.com. I'll feedback on the results.

A new blog

Friday May 03, 2002

Links

• llizard's animations : Some excellent small-scale animations: my favourite is the basketball one - the sprites are basic stick figures but their movements are so accurate and evocative.
• mikechat's collection of JMOVs : I particularly like Road Trip (short, but the first "realistic" perspective asciimation I've seen), and the fish animations.
• The JJS ASCII-Art Internment Camp : A few excellent animations: Snow Dancers, and some Lara Croft ones.

Thursday May 09, 2002

Voodoo king

Walking down Bourbon Street I noticed a huge sign: Chickenman's House of Voodoo. I walked inside. A young woman asked me if she could help me. I told her, "I'm looking for voodoo." She replied, "You came to the right place. This is the Chickenman's House of Voodoo." I asked, "Who is the Chickenman?" She answered, "My God, man, you don't know who the Chickenman is? He's only the oldest and the greatest of the Voodoo Kings."

Saturday May 11, 2002

The Asciimation Community

As you can see from the links section, there are other people crazy enough to get involved in making animations out of punctuation characters. There is even a Usenet newsgroup (alt.ascii-art.animation), but this mainly consists of Spam, and off-topic posts about Flash animation.

Phydeaux tried to mobilise the 'community' to create a collaborative asciimation project. This got a fair bit of support, but the project appears to be on hold. I think in the mean time it would be nice to have a community page to present and discuss works of any size and theme, and I'm going to code this into the Chickenman site as soon as I get time.

The idea is that any Asciimator would be able to register for an 'account' here. This would give them a page to describe their interests, home page, email etc., and also a hierarchy of sub-pages where they could upload .jmov files to this server. Anyone could then browse to those asciimators' animations. I'd probably also want to add a guestbook/chat script that can handle discussions on any of these animations. (I have the bare bones of this, but needs some more work...)

The steps:

1. Create the 'register' script that creates the animator's main page and directory structure.
2. Create the upload script that uploads the .jmov, checks that it's valid, and creates the view page.
3. Update the guestbook/chat script so that it handles each animation separately.
4. Create administrative scripts that allow the animator to edit the information provided (both on main page, and the individual animations)
5. Create a what's new script.

As .jmov can be quite happily zipped, I think I can set the maximum limit for each movie quite low (none of mine zip to more than 10K, but I could set it to 25K to start off with), so this shouldn't be too much load on the server even in the unlikely event that it turns out to be a popular service...

I'd imagine that the coding would take about a week of weeknights, which right now isn't going to happen, as it isn't my main priority. I'd guess I might be able to spend a night a week, and possibly release this in a month or two.

Comments welcome.

Sunday May 12, 2002

More Community

I've had a few more thoughts on the idea of the community ascii animation pages I mentioned above: I think this could really work, but I don't think that the simple implementation I discussed will be enough.

+----+ MM | M | oo | <"6| < | 8 )\ -/ | dd |8. /^\ +----+ `::' C :,-. | | | ===8 O \ | | | |^|\# *| | | | ||| `-' | | -~-~

To make it robust, scalable, and easy to maintain I think I'd write it as a 'proper' application with a real database behind it (probably MySQL). The scary thing is that, when I jotted down a few notes, the overview looked worryingly like a Content Management System (and these tend to be big and complicated - not to mention expensive). So this might take some more time than planned, though on the other hand, it's a much simpler design than most.

Illustrated?

Monday May 13, 2002

Disgruntled, from Madrid

can you just get on with doing another episode. All us non-geeks of the world aren't interested in all the bollocks of links and how to's and community stuff. we jusy want to see the man in action and were getting bored of waiting. Do you want to talk about doing it, or do it?

I'm going to stop coming to the site if there isn't some action soon.

disgruntled.

Saturday November 02, 2002

No news is good news?

                           )       )
                          (     )
                             ) !  (
           It's getting    )
           a little hot       MM
           in here.       (   oo )
                         `   <
                            _ >/_
           ____          +<:_/_,,>+
        od888888o.       |::::::::|
      ,88888888888b    ,8|::::::::|b
      8888888888888b   88|::::::::|8b
      Y888888888888'   Y8+'..::;;;+8'
       `Y88888888P      `Y88888888P
     ____ `""""'      ____ `""""'
  od888888o.       od888888o.
,88888888888b    ,88888888888b
8888888888888b   8888888888888b
Y888888888888'   Y888888888888'
 `Y88888888P      `Y88888888P
    `""""'           `""""'

I'm going to post the 'Work in Progress' versions of later episodes. If anyone cares to edit these (download JavE and the movie files), I'd be delighted.

(Oh, the community pages idea is also on hold. There are too many ideas to fit into the time available, but I may eventually go back and look at this).

Entrance

Ascii art magazine

The current idea is for the magazine to be published quarterly in HTML and PDF formats. The first issue would be published End Jan 2003.

I'm creating a homepage for the project at http://osfameron.perlmonk.org/textart/ This will include information about the project, and how to get involved. [UPDATE: have created this page and posted a note to alt.ascii-art].

Wednesday November 06, 2002

Link buttons

Wednesday November 27, 2002

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The Good Soldier Svejk

RSS feed

I finally got around to creating an RSS feed for this diary. RSS is basically a standard way of sharing information about diaries, weblogs, and news pages. More information here and here for example.

The feed will be at http://osfameron.perlmonk.org/chickenman/diary/cm_blog.rdf.