DA's ASCII and ANSI galleries are dead and buried thanks to completely incompetent admins, but I know there are still some great ASCII artists here who are frustrated about the lack of attention their community receives.

I've held three ASCII/textmode art contests on DA before (in 2004, 2005 and 2007), the last of which was an official DA contest. I had already decided not to ever hold one again but ha, I changed my mind. What provoked this was me winning a second copy of the Dark Domain DVD by ACiD Productions, which contains over four megabytes of demoscene/artscene artpacks, diskmags and other stuff. As I don't need two of them, I decided that it would be fun to hold another contest. So, this one has just one prize:

1. Dark Domain DVD (mailed to your home anywhere in the world). I might add some surprise stuff to the parcel, but it's not guaranteed. Please note that you must give me your address in order to receive the prize!

Of course I accept prize donations, with one exception: no DA subs. If I do get prize donations, I will announce them in comments of this news article (because AFAIK one still can't edit news articles).

The objective of the contest is similar to my ASCII art revolutions contest: draw something in ASCII that I haven't seen before, something creative in technique, style, concept and/or subject matter. So no kittens, Pikachus, roses or Santa Claus, unless you can make them stand out somehow. You could make something surreal, abstract, political, dadaistic or otherwise strange. No pornographic entries or anything that would violate the U.S. law, pretty much everything else goes.

Limitations:

The entry must be an ASCII picture, of at least 10x10 and at most 80x200 characters (that's 80 characters per line and 200 lines). The entry must be drawn in a fixed-width font. Sorry, no extended characters (8-bit), colored ASCII or ANSI this time. If you don't know what this means, make sure you only use characters included in the green part of this table.

The entry must be original and created by hand. Entries made with an image to ASCII converter are not taken into account. If your image looks converted or ripped, you will need to present a proof that you made it (ie. so called "step files", save the picture into several different files while drawing it).

You can enter at most three pictures. You don't have to be a DA member to enter. I will also post about this contest on alt.ascii-art, for example.

Please submit a link to your entry via note or email. Don't post the picture in the email but a link to a web page/text file. If you don't have a DA account or any web space, you may post the actual picture as an attachment and I will put it on the web so that I can show it to others when the contest is finished.

The deadline of the contest is 7/7/2008 (easy to remember, huh?). If you get the entry to me when it's stil 7th of July in some part of the world, it will be accepted.

The entries will be judged by me and possibly ~jSepia. The winners will be announced some time afterwards in my DA journal, in a DA newsarticle, on my website and on alt.ascii-art. Depending on the number of entries I will showcase all the entries or just the winners.

You are free to post this announcement and the results announcement (or summarize it in your own words) in your blog, journal, website, suicide note or any other place.

P.S. Even if you have never drawn ASCII art before, don't be discouraged. Many of the winners of my previous contests were complete novices to the genre. See also my tutorial.