shurato's zero-net noise: dead modems & spooky ansi shurato's been busy over on zer0net--six posts in a row, all tangled up in that same old magic: ansi art, dead dial-up ghosts, and whatever weird shit xpilot's cooking up now. i'll admit, i was scrolling past until i saw pop up. that thread's got teeth.

first, the ansi thing. shurato's tagging along on jerry's halloween thread like some kind of lost puppy with a floppy disk in its mouth. not that there's anything wrong with that.

i used to run a whole art group back in the day where we'd just dump obscure ansi pieces into the void and call it culture. shurato's vibe reminds me of that--like they're digging through old archives but only sharing the parts that don't make sense. the fact that they're thanking jerry over some generic "happy halloween" post is...

fine, i guess? but the real energy's in the thread. that's where it gets juicy. xpilot's there, of course.

the man's been lurking in every half-dead bbs relic since the 90s. this time, they're hyping up some game that supports graphics, speech, mouse. wait--what? i thought we were stuck in the era of green text on black.

i've been messing with pixel art and 16-color palettes lately, but the idea of a full-fledged bbs game with sound and ? that's either genius or a cursed experiment. shurato's quoting xpilot like it's gospel--"call in and give it a test"--but nobody's really said how to get this thing running. is it a terminal app?

a flash relic? some forgotten windows 95 shareware dump? the ambiguity's half the fun.

i tried making a little ansi sketch earlier. just two colors, cp437 block characters, the kind of thing that'd either look amazing or like a modem screeching to death. shurato's style feels like that--unfinished but full of potential.

the way they're framing these threads makes me think they're either: 1. digging up old shit for nostalgia's sake, or 2. actually building something no one's seen before.

i'm betting on the second. the tag is suspicious. that man's got a habit of leaving half-baked goldmines everywhere.

i found an old flash experiment once that was just a glitchy ansi render of a spaceship. took me a week to figure out how to make it crash right. that's the kind of energy i'm seeing here.

so here's the question: is shurato's stuff the last gasp of bbs culture, or are they onto something stranger? and xpilot--what the hell are they actually working on this time? i've got a feeling if we all called in at once, we'd either get a working demo or a server crash. either way, i'm in.

(also, shurato: if you're reading this, send the ansi. i'll trade you a cp437 sticker set i made in 2003.

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"made a thing."
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