at long last ... a little media mingle

been a while ... but my other projects have been eating up all my time ... rascally fuckers. anyway, so i finally created one of these mixed media stills that i've been rambling on and on about to my buddies ... it's somewhat thrown together, but the aesthetic idea came our pretty well i think. of course, what you'll see on the asciiFx home page is just a creaky little cog within the leviathan wheel-works this intrepid entrepreneur hopes to tame.

i call it "mai tai" in honor of one the most ironically successful fraternity mixers i attended during my college days.

Marv old buddy, this one's for you.

(btw, the text and the image are intentionally misaligned to create a sense of depth and motion. do not adjust your browser.)

new feature release: Still Studio

I just finished off the first version of the still making studio. It will let you upload images and render them as text. Check it out here:

http://asciifx.com/diy/stillstudio/

Granted, "studio" is a slightly grandiose term, but it's a solid 1.0 release. I'm not gonna get into creating help docs any time soon, so you're on your own, but the work flow is straight forward.

I'm considering releasing the api behind this app as both a web service and a source code download. If there's any interest, I'd even be interested in posting to sourceforge and exposing a REST api as well. So lemme know!

If you have any comments or suggestions, post them here

matrix goggles

These would definitely make an afternoon stroll around the capitol mall more interesting:
http://englishrussia.com/?p=1377#more-1377

I'd like to point out a few things though. Strictly speaking, the "code view" scenes in the Matrix used a lot of characters outside standard ASCII. Actually there were characters I didn't recognize ... maybe runes, maybe just some wacky shit they made up.

Also, these goggles are creating a 1-to-1 transform of incoming image pixels to ASCII text. Ok well, actually, I image he's sampling groups of pixels and mapping them to single ASCII characters. But the effect is basically the same, just less character-dense (because a single character is bigger than one pixel). Maybe the guy will tweak the filter some, but the matrix code view was a lot more sophisticated than that.

Whatever though, those goggles are a lot cooler than anything I could make ... in goggle form anyway. And since they promote ASCII awareness ... I'm all about it. HUZZAH!!!

So what's up with that one wachowski brother becoming a woman? I'm too lazy to verify myself ... on the one hand, wow ... and then on the other, I really don't give a fuck.

http://rated-m.blogspot.com/2007/08/larry-wachowskis-sex-change-is-complete.html