Not all that long ago, in the olden days someone began rules for email etiquette. Someone else renamed the rules Netiquette. One of the old rules was for email signatures - the few lines of text at the end of the emails you send out. Email signatures used to include links, favourite quotes and even ASCII art.

The netiquette rule was that an email signature should be 4 or 5 lines or less. As an ASCII artist who loved having my own art in my email sig, this was tough, but do-able. I miss seeing the old fashioned email sigs. They were replaced with fancier, bandwidth sucking HTML signatures and now they seem to be replaced (in a way) with social bookmarking which comes at the end of a blog post.

Someone has set the netiquette rule for that too. It’s a limit of five, someone says. It made me feel sentimental for the old email signatures, those 5 lines or less. You can pack a lot of ASCII into five lines, a lot of creativity. Social bookmarking is just another image file. Don’t they seem kind of dull when compared to the old signatures we put so much thought into?

_,@=;:;-._y

One line dragon ASCII art. I'm using it for my sig line at NeoPets.

"Language is a virus from outer space." -- William S. Burroughs

"Say everything as simply as possible, but no simpler." -Einstein

The purpose of words is to convey ideas. When the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten.

--Chuang Tzu

Words _{so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.} Nathaniel Hawthorne

All writing is a form of prayer. -- John Keats

Very hard to post ASCII art, as plain text anywhere now. I tried and just posted an image file instead.

I really do like my ASCII art. In some ways I like it even more than my writing and that says a lot. I love writing, the act of it especially. But, the ASCII art is something more. It is partially a skill I never thought I had and yet there it is right on the page in front of me, showing me how "Yes, you silly grrl, you can do it!". So, I'm proud of my ASCII art. I have found a way to convert it to a graphic image file too. So you can see some of it live and in person. Right now it's a little dragon.

Here is more: http://www.geocities.com/theshedragon/ldbascii.htm

If that link is a dud just hang on. I was moving things over yesterday and possibly I have slipped up on the URL. That's where it will end up.