ASCII Art (AA)

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ASCII art refers to text arranged to look like pictures. Historically, it has been used to communicate graphically over channels that only support ASCII-encoded text. ASCII art is generally intended to be viewed using a monospaced font.

      * g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x *
      g                                               g
      o /     \             \            /    \       o
      a|       |             \          |      |      a
      t|       `.             |         |       :     t
      s`        |             |        \|       |     s
      e \       | /       /  \\\   --__ \\       :    e
      x  \      \/   _--~~          ~--__| \     |    x
      *   \      \_-~                    ~-_\    |    *
      g    \_     \        _.--------.______\|   |    g
      o      \     \______// _ ___ _ (_(__>  \   |    o
      a       \   .  C ___)  ______ (_(____>  |  /    a
      t       /\ |   C ____)/      \ (_____>  |_/     t
      s      / /\|   C_____)       |  (___>   /  \    s
      e     |   (   _C_____)\______/  // _/ /     \   e
      x     |    \  |__   \\_________// (__/       |  x
      *    | \    \____)   `----   --'             |  *
      g    |  \_          ___\       /_          _/ | g
      o   |              /    |     |  \            | o
      a   |             |    /       \  \           | a
      t   |          / /    |         |  \           |t
      s   |         / /      \__/\___/    |          |s
      e  |           /        |    |       |         |e
      x  |          |         |    |       |         |x
      * g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x *

Shift JIS Art

How Shift JIS art should look on Strange World when your fonts are correctly configured.

OH NOES, only half of all Heyurians have Shift JIS fonts correctly configured!

Shift JIS art is closely related to ASCII art but refers to text encoded in Shift JIS. It is popular on Japanese bulletin board systems (where they incorrectly refer to it as ｢ＡＳＣＩＩ　Ａｒｔ｣ or ｢ＡＡ｣) and consequently on Heyuri. Because of the greater diversity of characters available in that encoding—including English, Japanese, Greek, and Cyrillic characters as well as special characters such as punctuation, symbols, or various box-drawing characters—Shift JIS art tends to have more of a 'line art' character than ASCII art.

Most Shift JIS art is intended to be viewed using a proportionally spaced font such as MS PGothic or Mona. The art on /sjis/ and /lounge/, taken from Japanese discussion boards such as 2channel, is as such. Some Shift JIS art is intended to be viewed using a font such as MS Gothic that, while not monospace, only allots either a half width rectangle or full width square of space to characters. The kaomoji on Strange World and most other art posted there, taken from Ayashii World, is as such. Shift JIS art intended for one font family will not display properly when viewed in other font families.

In modern times, both ASCII and Shift JIS encodings has subsided in use and have been largely replaced by the UTF-8 encoding. It is not straightforward to configure a modern computer and internet browser to properly display Shift JIS art. Refer to this copypasta to determine whether your font configuration is correct to view Shift JIS art on Strange World.