haha, it was weird to land for the first time on a site with the same template
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Yeah Iāve noticed more and more sites that use Discourse (the forum tech that eroscripts runs on) lately. Iām happy about it since itās way better than the old-school BBS forum tech 
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BBS!!! I miss those days. Wildcat! FTW
Any of you in the 2400 baud club?
Iām so fucking old, I remember having to seat the phone receiver down into the acoustic coupler to get my 2400 baud, USENET was my favored method to gather the porn, and I shit you not, I had a full collection of nudey ASCII art centerfolds.
If I could just go back in time and say to him āHey young CLEO, thereās gonna come a time 40 years hence, when youāll be sticking your dick in a pringles can looking thing that is going to exactly mimic what happens on that porno youāre watching on that VHS machineā I can only imagine what young me would have said.
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Yeah, did all that too. When most people were jumping on the Kazaa bandwagon I was pulling prize content with a premium usenet account. My high school computer programming teacher let me print out one of those ASCII nudes from the IBM mid-range.
I was fascinated by the ASCII nudes. Some of them were incredibly well done, makes me wonder now how quickly people were able to generate those out of image programs and how much of it was designed by hand.
For monospaced fonts very quickly. For other fonts this was a lot more difficult as it now has to check a lot more details as alignment matters. And since / , | and \ are diffirent yet quite important nuances, its hard for computers to convert information towards such shapes as context aware conversions were expensive in time vs gain.
Ofcourse, the best images were human made, as even then, without such converter it isnt āthatā hard to do these things. You can do this in word: Set the image as background, and just type over it trying to follow the shapes. A good ascii artist knows the shapes he can use and by that can be quite quick as its effectively tracing the lines and shades. And the less mistakes they made, the less alignment issues would show up.
But they can still use a computer generated base for this, as in the end. most of the art still uses the same basic tricks.
Colors on that was something not to worry about anyway. As when you wanted to use colors, you could have converted it to a lower scaled image and even compress it to gif for 256 colors (which at that time was very good by using 1 byte per pixel, being more efficient than ascii). There was a reason gif became popular as it was very efficient at its time.
But ascii art had 1 advantage over images: zooming. If you zoom out, the misalignments dissapear, so the art becomes a very smooth image. And at qualities well exceeding anything that used pixels. So these images were often huge for that reason. And the larger the image, the easier it actualy was for the artist to align thigns.