ASCII FacePalm | Hacker News Reader

ASCII FacePalm

asciifacepalm.com

34 pointssaltysalt18 comments

Additional ̶A̶S̶C̶I̶I̶ Unicode fun:

I think using characters to make pictures started with teletype machines - maybe even on typewriters! It was common with ham operators in the 60s (RTTY & Teletype machines) and it surely must have been popular before that.

On the IBM 1401 (1959) "Edith" is legendary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtlrITxB5qg

Here's something from 1893: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Smileys_1893_from_...

Yep, an early example of how computers are always repurposed for porn, despite original intended use.

Could at least credit the original authors of the ASCII arts.

Reminds me of copyshrug when it was trendy https://www.copyshrug.com/

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

...why is #1 bald? this probably sounds like a weird observation but we don't generally draw the generic guy as bald so it seems intentional.

I always thought it was based on Captain Picard's iconic facepalm, i.e

https://blog.trekcore.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/facepal...

If you don't know the story... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok

ahh never saw that but explains it. thanks

That’s captain picard’s facepalm, a popular “reaction image” converted to ascii.

https://blog.trekcore.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/facepal...

It’s Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

https://youtu.be/6rYhRqf757I?si=5wt-K686FH6WqGZy

what's the purpose of padding with the "." instead of spaces?

also, the "dirty" chars where they are not all "." chars. is this just a quirk of the sketch to ascii code base? it's like the first prompt to an image generation, but the second modified prompt starts to clean up the image. only, they stopped and accepted the results of the first output.???

Some systems & software treats rendering of spaces/whitespace as a special case. Can lead to messed up rendering.

IRC clients in particular were notorious for collapsing spaces

That said, I found it wasn’t super common until it was used on the web more, with htmls collapsing spaces.

Some chat applications used to strip leading and trailing spaces in messages, or even replace consecutive spaces with a single one, padding ASCII art with printable characters allows you to just copy paste them as-is.