Matching Nude ASCII Art Pieces with Playboy Centerfolds

I posted earlier this month the article ASCII Art Nudes versus Original Playboy Centerfolds where I show for several ASCII Nude pictures of my ASCII Nudes collection the original photograph that was used by the text artist.

I updated the original article, which showed the originals for 29 40 ASCII pieces, and added one more match that I found afterwards. Since then I even found two more matches, which I did not add to the article yet.

The obvious matches are taking care of and also the ones where the file name or content of the ASCII itself had useful and correct hints about the original photograph. I were also able to match a number of ASCII's to photographs where the ASCII had completely incorrect information, such as the wrong name of the girl.

Now it's tougher to find corresponding photographs and I could use some help with it. It is not such a bad job actually. You get to watch a lot of beautiful girls naked hehe.

I also ran into cases where I am not 100% sure, if I matched the ASCII with the right photograph. Like this one.

The arm position is right, the pose is the same. The breast size is about the same and the hair resembles also the photograph. I am pretty sure that I found the right photograph, but a second opinion would increase my confidence even more.

If you want to help matching ASCII pictures to Playboy photographs, then you will need in addition to the ASCII pictures from my gallery, also the Playboy Magazine photographs from all issues, right?

Guess what, I happen to have a collection of those :). I zipped the photographs up into one file for each decade of Magazine publications.

Playboy Magazine Centerfolds Photographs (Complete) and additional Photographs from the Mag:

• 50's (93 MB) http://www.mediafire.com/?jjnzwynyeyq
• 60's (92 MB) http://www.mediafire.com/?nyzmmwzgi2m
• 70's (111 MB) http://www.mediafire.com/?fjylwngwgjn
• 80's (110 MB) http://www.mediafire.com/?k1zmwfihqtz
• 90's (69 MB) http://www.mediafire.com/?tkgnnzi25ot
• 00's (269 MB) http://www.mediafire.com/?nnwdtzd5mod

Here is also a zip file with the collection of my work files. It includes PNG versions of all the ASCII art pictures and the already matched photographs. I also sorted the pictures where I did not find a match yet by the pose of the girl in the picture. I found out that this helps with finding a matching photograph. Poses like kneeling, sitting, lying and standing and "standing" broken down even further into "front", "behind", "left side" and "right side".

ASCII Nudes work Images
Zipped 38 MB* http://www.mediafire.com/?he22vyjndtj (Updated 04/2009)

*The 38 MB Zip file contains the photographs of the already matched pictures, the side by side pictures from my blog post, the original ASCII art pieces in text and PNG format, thumbnails and notes that might help with uncovering more original source photographs that were used by the text artists.

If you find matches, please post them in the comments section of this post. Post the PNG image file name of the ASCII picture and the image file name of the photograph that you believe to be the original.

Update: Including the picture above, I now have matched 40 ASCII art pieces and updated my original blog post with those matches. I matched "Anna", "Ingrid", "Kelly", "Susan", "nude330", "nude342", "nude353", "nude357", "nude1312" and "nude1317". I noticed that some of the originals used are not the Centerfolds itself, but other photographs from within the magazine as well (I am not surprised, but thought that I will mention it). My image collections contain some of those other images but by far not all of them. Also not included are the pictorials, which were also used for some of the ASCII art pieces.

Promo Video for ASCII Nude Collection

I also created a short promotional video for my ASCII Nudes collection and for my article about the match-up with Playboy Centerfolds. YouTube and MySpace made already a fuss out of it, because the video shows some nipples. It's not pornography for Christ's sake and the YouTube account warning for violation of their community guidelines was a bit too strong of a response for my taste.

 

So I created a censored version for YouTube and MySpace where all nipples are covered, even the ASCII nipples.

That makes the stuff look even more funny than I wanted. You can see for yourself what I mean by that.

I put the uncensored version up on Vimeo.com, which I used to embed the video into this blog post as well. You can download the uncensored natural version of this video in 720x480 pixels resolution and .AVI format (XVID) at Mediafire.com as always. Backup link to video on Vimeo.com. Enjoy!

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Cirque du Soleil in Lecce, Italy - KA Show Videos

Cirque du Soleil gave a special acrobatic performance on December 5, 2008 during the Notte Bianca street festival in Lecce, Italy that consisted of multiple parts, involving dozens of artists.

Acts like Russian Bars, Spanish Web and other Aerial performances, Cyr Wheel, Wheel of Death and general dancers, singers and musicians as well as light projection and other special effects.

My 28 minutes video of these performances is based on the footage of several home made videos that I found on the web. The visual quality differs from good to poor, but I hope that I was able to capture the essence of the show. I replaced the audio almost entirely, but tried to be true to the actual music as good as possible. The original videos are still out there, if you want to see the true live recordings of the event.

Here is the 28 minutes video that I created about this special performance by Cirque du Soleil in Lecce, Italy.

 Backup Link to Video on Google Video

Cirque du Soleil - KA - Video Recording of the Entire Show

I was talking about the issue that non of the Vegas Cirque du Soleil shows are available on DVD and that video footage will leak out over time to cover the whole show, like in the case of Cirque du Soleil's epic show KA, which is performed live at the MGM Grand hotel and casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The raw videos of the show are available via torrent downloads, such as here (German Intro Narration, XVID, .AVI) and also here (French Intro Narration, MPEG-2 Format).

So I decided to lean myself a bit out of the window and sliced the video up into 9 pieces and put it up on my YouTube channel for Cirque du Soleil related videos of mine. Here is the link to part one. To find the remaining 8 videos, check out the play list that I created for this video series.

The Intro narration is in German (that's the version that I used for YouTube) and translates to:

On the way to a pageant to their honor, the imperial twins put their skills in the traditional art of sword fighting to the test. They have no idea on that day, about the real threats that lay ahead of them. About the great thunder that will soon put an end to the innocent lives that they were used to. About destruction and devastation that will drive an entire nation into exile and about the chaos of war that will soon separate the brave brother from his beloved sister. This is the story about the journey to self discovery of a young man and a young woman through their experiences with love, conflicts and the duality of KA, the fire that has the power to combine or to separate and the power to destroy or to enlighten.

Fast Facts about KA

• Length of the show: about 90 minutes
• Venue: The "KA Theatre" at the MGM Grand hotel & casino in Las Vegas, NV
• Premiere(s): 26.November 2004/03.February 2005, in Las Vegas, Nevada
• Official Show Homepage on the Web: http://www.cirquedusoleil.com/KA
• People: 80 artists from around the world perform the show twice per day, 5 days per week and about 50 weeks per year
• Show times: Tuesdays to Saturdays, one at 7:00 pm and a second show at 9:30 pm local time, No show performances on Mondays and Sundays
• Over 100 crew members are working for the show in 8 or more technical and artist support departments, including wardrobe, make-up and wig personal.
• The music is played live, by human-beings, every time, only about 2 minutes of pre-recorded audio is used throughout the whole performance
• The total number of cast and crew for the show is about 266 people
• The production cost for KA were higher than the combined cost of all Broadway productions that were released in the same year as KA
• The custom build venue for the show inside the MGM has 1,951 seats
• Every seat is equipped with its own loud speakers for optimal sound experience
• The main stage of KA is called a "Gantry" made of 2 decks, one that can slide forward and backward and the other one which can be rotated and moved 360 degrees.
• The main deck is 25x50 feet (8x16 meters) in diameter, weighs 300,000 lbs, which is more than a fully booked, loaded and gassed-up average-size jet airliner
• If fully erected to its maximum height, artists perform their act 100 ft above the ground
• Ticket prices for the show range from about $75 to $165 per seat and are available at the MGM box offices at MGM properties, via toll free phone # at (800) 929-1111 and on the web at http://mgm-cds.admission.com/ or http://www.cirquedusolei.com/CirqueDuSoleil/en/showtickets/ka/tickets/

The Creators of the Show KA

• Show Director: Robert LePage
• Director of Creation: Guy Caron
• Music Composer: Rene Dupere
• Set Designer: Mark Fisher
• Costumes Designer: Marie-Chantale Vaillancourt
• Props Designer: Patricia Ruel
• Lighting Director: Luc Lafortune
• Sound Designer: Jonathan Deans
• Trainer for Aerial Performances: Andre Simard
• Choreographer: Jacques Heim
• Puppets Creation & Choreography: Michael Curry

For more Cirque du Soleil visit http://www.roysac.com/cirque

Regardless of the video, you should go and see it live, if you get to Vegas, because no video can substitute the live theatre experience. However, I do hope that this incident will cause MGM and Cirque du Soleil to rethink their policy about DVD releases of Vegas Cirque du Soleil shows and release those shows on DVD for people to buy legally. Not everybody can make it to Vegas and/or afford the ticket price to see the shows live. And also people like me, who saw the shows already, several of them even more than once, would like to have the DVD and watch it to refresh some of the good memories from the live experience.

Note: Cirque du Soleil had some of the 9 KA videos taken down by YouTube, so the play list is not complete anymore. However, the 9 segments can still be downloaded in AVI format from my file share at Mediafire.com

Part 1: http://www.mediafire.com/?znt5qzlwtdz
Part 2: http://www.mediafire.com/?wynyauglmzu
Part 3: http://www.mediafire.com/?jmomynjfzdk
Part 4: http://www.mediafire.com/?nzynximlmzt
Part 5: http://www.mediafire.com/?ymqyygvzy0t
Part 6: http://www.mediafire.com/?zdmzyynwymy
Part 7: http://www.mediafire.com/?mzjnjybytex
Part 8: http://www.mediafire.com/?molzthhyozw
Part 9: http://www.mediafire.com/?ojmlzummzyq

Enjoy and Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

ASCII Art Nudes versus Original Playboy Centerfolds

I put up last year a collection of 100 ASCII Art pictures that have nude girls as motive. Most of them originate from the pre-computer/ASCII art era, when teletype and its text art, RTTY art (pronounced "ritty"), where predominant and popular among hobby ham radio operators. Some of them are even older than that and might even date back to the time of keyboard art.

After I watched once more the video of RaD Man/ACiD and his presentation at the Assembly 2004 demo party in Helsinki, Finland about the history of text  art where he showed an example of nude teletype text art and then the original centerfold photograph from Playboy Magazine, I started doing some digging myself. So credits for the initiator and cause of this must go to him :).

As of today (update 08/2009), I was able to find the original photograph for 29 30 40 50 of the 100 ASCII nude images from my collection. I wanted to integrate them somehow into that page, but could not figure out a good way to do it yet. Big thanks to Brian who helped identifying a number of the latest additions and posted his findings at my blog, where I am asking for help with this.

To avoid holding things back forever, I decided now to write a blog post about it and show my findings that way.

I will show the original photographs of the old Playboy Magazine Issues next to the Image of the ASCII art version of it. I converted the original text images to PNG, because it makes it easier for this purpose. You can still find the originals in my collection to verify that those pictures really originate from text and are not some kind of Photoshop trick or something like that. I also flipped some of the ASCII images, if the centerfold was in landscape format instead of the usual "letter" style format.

I also was concerned about copyright issues that this might cause with Playboy Magazine, but old school RTTY (teletype) enthusiast and collector of teletype text art, John Sheetz (K2AGI), mentioned in an interview for the BBS Documentary with Jason Scott Sadofsky that Playboy Magazine actually embraced this stuff and even published one of Don Royer's (WA6PIR) centerfold creations in text in one of their print issues.

I hope that Playboy still has this attitude today and will see this publication as free promotion and advertisement for their current print magazine.

I found out during my research that there are sometimes multiple ASCII art versions of the same photograph, which is pretty interesting, because it shows the different styles and quality of the text artists who created those ASCII images. Let's get started! Click the thumbnails to watch the larger versions of the images below.

The Link of the thumbnail version of the ASCII links to the PNG image version of the ASCII. I added links to the original ASCII text files below each ASCII thumbnail. I also added a link there to an image where it shows the photograph and the ASCII side by side (JPG). Please note that the “side by side” images are not proportional to the originals they are merely meant for illustration purposes.

The Centerfold Miss March 1964, Nancy Scott, for example was used for three ASCII images in my collection.

	original ASCII – side by side	org ASCII – side-by-side	org ASCII – side-by-side

Miss May 1970, Jennifer Liano was used for two ASCII images. One of them used the wrong name for the girl and called it "Kathy" instead of "Jennifer".

	original ASCII – side by side	original ASCII – side by side

Miss January 1970, Jill Taylor

	original ASCII – side by side	original ASCII – side by side

Miss February 1969, Lorrie Menconi

	original ASCII – side by side	original ASCII – side by side

Miss October 1964 - Rosemarie Hillcrest

Noticed that the two ASCII images are a “mirror” of the photograph? This cannot be coincidence. I assume that there is another photograph that is virtually the same, but matching the pose in the ASCIIs. I had the same with the image of Marianne Gravatte. The used photograph was a mirror of the widely popular centerfold picture, but I was able to dig up the not so popular photograph. I hope that I will find the one for Rosemarie Hillcrest too. However, I decided to show them, even though it is not EXACTLY the source photograph, but it is coming close enough to it for all intents and purposes here :).

	original ASCII – side by side	original ASCII – side by side

Now the single match gallery for the cases where I only have one ASCII  matching one original photographs.

Miss January 1966, Judy Tyler original ASCII – side by side	Miss December 1966, Susan Bernard original ASCII – side by side	Miss November 1968, Paige Young original ASCII – side by side
Miss December 1968, Cynthia Myers original ASCII – side by side	Miss October 1969, Jean Bell original ASCII – side by side	Miss November 1969, Claudia Jennings original ASCII – side by side
Miss October 1970, Mary & Madeleine Collinson original ASCII – side by side	Miss October 1971, Claire Rambeau original ASCII – side by side	Miss March 1972, Ellen Michaels original ASCII – side by side
Miss January 1973, Miki Garcia original ASCII – side by side	Miss December 1973, Christine Maddox original ASCII – side by side	Miss April 1978, Pamela Jean Bryant original ASCII – side by side
Miss July 1978, Karen Morton original ASCII – side by side	Miss January 1980, Gig Gangel original ASCII – side by side	Miss July 1980, Teri Peterson original ASCII – side by side
Miss August 1982, Cathy St. George original ASCII – side by side	Miss July 1983, Ruth Guerri original ASCII – side by side	Miss March 1984, Dona Speir original ASCII – side by side
Miss April 1984, Lesa Ann Pedriana original ASCII – side by side	Miss June 1984, Tricia Lange original ASCII – side by side	Miss March 1971, Cynthia Hall original ASCII – side by side
Miss August 1960 - Elaine Paul   original ASCII – side by side	Miss October 1960 - Kathy Douglas original ASCII – side by side	Morganna Roberts - The Kissing Bandit original ASCII – side by side
Miss July 1972 Carol O'Neal original ASCII – side by side	Miss "Ape Girl" - Victoria Principal - 09/1973 original ASCII – side by side	Miss December 1976 - Karen Hafter original ASCII – side by side
Miss January 1974 - Nancy Cameron original ASCII – side by side	Miss June 1983 - Marianne Gravatte original ASCII – side by side	Alberto Vargas Girl "Topless Batgirl" original ASCII – side by side
Playboy 12/1972 Cover Image original ASCII – side by side	Alberto Vargas Girl from March 1968 original ASCII – side by side	Miss September 1966 - Dianne Chandler original ASCII – side by side
Alberto Vargas Girl from July 1972 original ASCII – side by side	Alberto Vargas Girl from April 1973 original ASCII – side by side	Alberto Vargas Girl from April 1972 original ASCII – side by side
Alberto Vargas Girl from March 1968 original ASCII – side by side	Miss July 1983 - Ruth Guerri original ASCII – side by side	Alberto Vargas Girl from February 1972 original ASCII – side by side

That's it and all that I got so far. I try to find more matches, but it's not that easy. The names and notes of the ASCII images is not always very detailed and some times even wrong. In some cases is the original also not the Playboy centerfold, but something else.

YOUR HELP IS NEEDED! There are still plenty of ASCII art pieces in my gallery that need to be matched to their reference photograph (Playboy Magazine Centerfolds, Pictorials and other Photo Sources). I wrote another blog post about this project, where I also provide some more information and several downloads that help with finding the original photos for the remaining ASCII art images. See details here. Hey, looking at beautiful nude girls is not a bad job at all :)

I hope that you liked my discoveries. Let me know in the comments below.

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Roy/SAC Homepage