More than two years ago, I made /etc/issue more interesting, showing some jokes and quotes. Just a few moments ago, I was trying to see if anyone has drawn an ASCII art for RSS feed icon. As you can already guess, I stumbled on a website called ASCII Art Farts:


    _    ____   ____ ___ ___      _         _     _____          _
   / \  / ___| / ___|_ _|_ _|    / \   _ __| |_  |  ___|_ _ _ __| |_ ___
  / _ \ \___ \| |    | | | |    / _ \ | '__| __| | |_ / _` | '__| __/ __|
 / ___ \ ___) | |___ | | | |   / ___ \| |  | |_  |  _| (_| | |  | |_\__ \
/_/   \_\____/ \____|___|___| /_/   \_\_|   \__| |_|  \__,_|_|   \__|___/

Didn’t find the logo yet, but this website is interesting. Although, it doesn’t provide any conventional API access, but it has today’s ASCII art strip in plain ASCII format, I just couldn’t let the opportunity of adding it into my generator, gen-issue.sh, which updates the /etc/issue. It is just too good to pass on.


diff --git a/rootfs/bin/gen-issue.sh b/rootfs/bin/gen-issue.sh
index 061ccff..437391f 100755
--- a/rootfs/bin/gen-issue.sh
+++ b/rootfs/bin/gen-issue.sh
@@ -34,10 +34,12 @@
 #   <http://iheartquotes.com/>
 # * QDB
 #   <http://www.qdb.us/>
+# * ASCII Art Farts
+#   <http://www.asciiartfarts.com/>

 gen_text()
 {
-  case "$((RANDOM % 3))" in
+  case "$((RANDOM % 4))" in
     0) # That's What She Said
       xmllint --xpath '//item[1]/description/text()' <(wget -q -O - http://www.twssstories.com/rss.xml) |
       sed 's/&lt;\/\?p&gt;//g;q' |
@@ -54,6 +56,9 @@ gen_text()
       sed '1,3d;$d;s/&amp;/\&/g;s/&lt;/</g;s/&gt;/>/g;s/&nbsp;/ /g;s/&quot;/"/g;s/<br \/>//g' |
       fold -s
       ;;
+    3) # ASCII Art Farts
+      wget -q -O - http://www.asciiartfarts.com/today.txt
+      ;;
   esac
 }

The first strip created on “Fri, 1999 Jun 25 (14.7 years ago),” by now, it has 5,372 strips. But, it seems stopped since March 9, this year. Not sure why, but I hope it would continue. Or I’d keep seeing this Cosmos Robot at 25% odds.

As it claims, “HERE’S SOMETHING TO KEEP YOU BUSY,” at least for a good five seconds before you’ve been logged in, every single day.