Friday, March 27, 2009

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.

kelly kelly-Playmate_1960_08-portfolio-PM-A1-07-lrg

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:

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.

 YouTube_CommunityGuidelinesViolation_ASCIINudesVideo_20090326_ScrShot-Notification

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

Friday, March 20, 2009

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

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

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.

nude1315_1964-03_Nancy_Scott joan calgirl    nude1315_miss1964-03_Nancy_Scott

original ASCIIside by side

org ASCIIside-by-side

org ASCIIside-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".

nude365-7005 kathy   nude365-miss may1970

original ASCIIside by side

original ASCIIside by side

 

Miss January 1970, Jill Taylor

nude362-7001 nude362-miss beloil miss january1970 nude363-jill taylor-miss january1970

original ASCIIside by side

original ASCIIside by side

Miss February 1969, Lorrie Menconi

nude399-6902 nude399-miss-february1969   nude1319-miss-february1969

original ASCIIside by side

original ASCIIside 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 :).

6410-Playmate_1964_10-RoseMarie_Hillcrest 6410-ingrid   6410-anna

original ASCIIside by side

original ASCIIside 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
6601-nude1316-6601
6601-nude1316-another_playmate
original ASCIIside by side
Miss December 1966, Susan Bernard
6612-nude360-66126612-nude360-miss_nov1967
original ASCIIside by side
Miss November 1968, Paige Young
6811-nude304-6811
6811-nude304-paige
original ASCIIside by side
Miss December 1968, Cynthia Myers
6812-morgana-6812 6812-morgana
original ASCIIside by side
Miss October 1969, Jean Bell
6910-nude1320-6910 6910-nude1320-ms_black_is_beautyful_playmate_oct1969
original ASCIIside by side
Miss November 1969, Claudia Jennings
6911-nude361-6911 6911-nude361-muss_november_1969
original ASCIIside by side
Miss October 1970, Mary & Madeleine Collinson
7010-nude1321-7010 7010-nude1321-_the_7010-misses_october_1970
original ASCIIside by side
Miss October 1971, Claire Rambeau
7110-roxanne-7110 7110-roxanne
original ASCIIside by side
Miss March 1972, Ellen Michaels
7203-cloe-7203 7203-cloe
original ASCIIside by side
Miss January 1973, Miki Garcia
7301-nude306-7301 7301-Nude306-MissJanuary1973
original ASCIIside by side
Miss December 1973, Christine Maddox
7312-nude366-7312 7312-nude366-christine-miss_december1973
original ASCIIside by side
Miss April 1978, Pamela Jean Bryant
7804-nude388-7804 7804-nude388-pamela_bryant_miss_april_1978
original ASCIIside by side
Miss July 1978, Karen Morton
7807-nude303-7807 7807-Nude303-missjuly1978
original ASCIIside by side
Miss January 1980, Gig Gangel
8001-nude384_198001_Gig_Gangel_CF 8001-nude384-Gig_Gangel_Ms_January1980
original ASCIIside by side
Miss July 1980, Teri Peterson
8007-nude1313-8007 8007-nude1313-teri_peterson-ms_july1980
original ASCIIside by side
Miss August 1982, Cathy St. George
8208-nude394-8208 8208-nude394-miss_august1982
original ASCIIside by side
Miss July 1983, Ruth Guerri
8307-nude368--8307 8307-nude368-miss_july1983
original ASCIIside by side
Miss March 1984, Dona Speir
8403-nude372-8403 8403-nude372-dona-created_april1984
original ASCIIside by side
Miss April 1984, Lesa Ann Pedriana
8404-nude373-8404 8404-nude373-april-created_april1984
original ASCIIside by side
Miss June 1984, Tricia Lange
8406-nude374-8406 8406-nude374-miss_june1984
original ASCIIside by side
Miss March 1971, Cynthia Hall
Playmate_1971_03_Cynthia_Hall_CF MissMarch1971_WA6PIR
original ASCIIside by side
Miss August 1960 - Elaine Paul
 
6008-Org kelly
original ASCIIside by side
Miss October 1960 - Kathy Douglas
nude1317-ms october1967-Kathy Douglas-Miss Oct1960-28879_196010_122_136lo nude1317-ms october1967
original ASCIIside by side
Morganna Roberts - The Kissing Bandit
nude330-morganna the kissing bandit-3a82 - Morganna Roberts nude330-morgana the kissing bandit
original ASCIIside by side
Miss July 1972 Carol O'Neal
7207-Playmate_1972_07-Carol_O''Neal 7207-susan
original ASCIIside by side
Miss "Ape Girl" - Victoria Principal - 09/1973
nude342-ms victoria principal-ape girl-playboy sep1973-large-41869_210_123_248lo nude342-ms victoria principal-ape girl-playboy sep1973
original ASCIIside by side
Miss December 1976 - Karen Hafter
nude353-miss karen hafter-dec1978playmate-32540_jc-PB-197612-033_KarenHafter_123_237lo nude353-miss karen hafter-dec1978playmate
original ASCIIside by side
Miss January 1974 - Nancy Cameron
nude357-heads or tails-miss jan1974-50918_197401b_Nancy_Cameron_CF_AltSize_122_48lo nude357-heads or tails-miss jan1974
original ASCIIside by side
Miss June 1983 - Marianne Gravatte
nude1312-marianne gravatte-playmate of the year1983-88472_1983-06_Marianne_Gravatte_7145_123_557lo nude1312-marianne gravatte-playmate of the year1983
original ASCIIside by side
Alberto Vargas Girl "Topless Batgirl"
batgirl-org batgirl-ascii1
original ASCIIside by side
Playboy 12/1972 Cover Image
nude323-org nude323-ascii1
original ASCIIside by side
Alberto Vargas Girl from March 1968
nude324-org
nude324-ascii1
original ASCIIside by side
Miss September 1966 - Dianne Chandler
Nude328-org
nude328-ascii1
original ASCIIside by side
Alberto Vargas Girl from July 1972
nude329-org nude329-ascii1
original ASCIIside by side
Alberto Vargas Girl from April 1973
nude333-org nude333-ascii1
original ASCIIside by side
Alberto Vargas Girl from April 1972
nude336-org
nude336-ascii1
original ASCIIside by side
Alberto Vargas Girl from March 1968
nude375-org nude375-ascii1
original ASCIIside by side
Miss July 1983 - Ruth Guerri
nude389-org nude389-ascii1
original ASCIIside by side
Alberto Vargas Girl from February 1972
nude395-org nude395-ascii1
original ASCIIside 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