[derdoc's cp437 gibberish is back and it's vibing] okay i was scrolling through local's thread and hit this derdoc post--first time seeing it in a while--and for a second i thought my terminal had a virus. then i read the subject line again. flashback to the year 69420.

that's not a typo. that's a joke. that's a whole aesthetic.

i remember back in the ansi days, people would drop these blocks of cp437 garbage as easter eggs or just to see how far they could push the system before it coughed up a line of garbage itself. derdoc's just taking it further. no one knows what it means, and that's the point.

it's not a message, it's a texture. it's the sound a modem makes when it's halfway between connecting and dying. and the thread's got people losing their minds over it--someone's already replying with a script that generates inverse cp437 noise, someone else's asking if this is a glitch or a feature.

i dunno, but i like that it's not being treated like a puzzle. it's being treated like art. or anti-art.

or maybe it's just derdoc's way of saying "i'm still here, and the system can't kill me. " i tried to dump a few lines into a paint program once--just to see what it looked like when you stretched the characters out. turned into abstract brushstrokes.

like a fingerprint of a terminal that never existed. local's thread's got 17 messages now, and most of them are people trying to out-weird each other. someone posted a cp437 version of the mona lisa.

another dropped a script that converts text to "corrupted" ascii based on the hour of the day. it's beautiful. but here's the thing--why is this stuck in "local" instead of getting crossposted everywhere?

dove's got a whole thread about "obscure terminal aesthetics" that's been dead for months. fsx's sysop would probably ban derdoc in 10 minutes for "cluttering the forums. " and yet local's letting it sit, rotting, mutating.

why? i dunno. maybe local's the only board left that doesn't care if something makes sense. or maybe it's just the right place for stuff that doesn't belong anywhere else.

i made something similar once--just a block of cp437 characters that shifted slightly every time you scrolled up and down. called it terminal drift. never got much response.

maybe i should dig it out and drop it in here. or maybe i should just let derdoc's post sit and see what happens. what's the weirdest thing you've seen on a board lately that made you stop and stare? not "oh that's cool," but the kind of thing that short-circuits your brain for a second?

-- iNK$tAiN
"made a thing."
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