Force of Will (2014-12-03)

tx 9a74d0ee2e9a925d9afadc413e087fa2effda031935bf19a0d4d48df76e4ce3f (2014-12-03)

ASCII art of a Force of Will, a famous and powerful Magic: The Gathering card first printed in 1996.

This is Ciro Santilli's personal favorite ASCII art he has found in the blockchain so far. Also Ciro could not find any other previous source of this, so there is some chance it is original. One can dream.

The choice of card is probably linked to the function of the card in the game of Magic: The Gathering. This card essentially prevents the opponent from casting a spell they are about to cast. The presumed intended meaning of this art is further accentuated by the old card type term "interrupt" (late renamed to "instant"), which suggests that "this ASCII art is an interruption to the normal monetary transactions of the blockchain".

One of also reminded of the prayer wars interruption attempts. We could not however identify anything specific that this ASCII art might have tried to interrupt besides the normal flow of monetary transactions.

If one goes full art critic mode, it is also tempting to draw a parallel between the card's "You may pay 1 life" alternative casting cost (as opposed to 5 mana, 3 and two blue, which is a very large cost for most games) as being a reference to the money spent by the uploader of the art to upload it.

TODO understand exactly how it was encoded and why it is so weird. The UUUU has a slightly weird encoding which we fixed by hand here TODO understand.

 -------------------------------------
|  Force of Will               3 U U  |
|  ---------------------------------  |
| |                  ////////////   | |
| |                ////() ()\////\  | |
| |               ///_\ (--) \///\  | |
| |        )      ////  \_____///\\ | |
| |       ) \      /   /   /    /   | |
| |    ) /   \     |   |  /   _/    | |
| |   ) \  (  (   /   / /   / \     | |
| |  / ) ( )  / (    )/(    )  \    | |
| |  \(_)/(_)/  /UUUU \  \\\/   |   | |
| .---------------------------------. |
| Interrupt                           |
| ,---------------------------------, |
| | You may pay 1 life and remove a | |
| | blue card in your hand from the | |
| | game instead of paying Force of | |
| | Will's casting cost.  Effects   | |
| | that prevent or redirect damage | |
| | cannot be used to counter this  | |
| | loss of life.                   | |
| | Counter target spell.           | |
| `---------------------------------` |
|                                     l
| Illus.  Terese Nelsen               |
 -------------------------------------

Figure 16. Force of Will Magic: The Gathering card (Alliances) Source. A high resolution scan of the original card depicted in the ASCII art for comparison.

The following two ASCII transactions:

tx 0f05c47a8caafadecc10d70ba3bf010eaf6bb416b5e1ad7b01cf3445f5fb7a1c
I am. Therefore, I have come to be.

-- Hyena


tx e6d48f6912929a58a2ee30c13768058777d8547215c27109b5cb0724e7abaaba
Erich,
Bro, this looks excellent!!
-Duriel

suggest this ASCII art might have been uploaded by Figure 44. "Erich Erstu", AKA Hyena, creator of cryptograffiti.info, a service which would have allowed uploading ASCII content to the blockchain.

The only other mention of "Duriel" in the blockchain is tx 140562ceb42fc8943fa52ccc0ddbb11ca2d88dae9b5240d7a4b46864538c515a which has some freedom of speech comments and gives the email:

Duriel@paystamper.com = 1HcuhfTAiQCt6KdMG2rZLXsTcKYj9nLDhS

paystamper.com was some other blockchain service from circa 2015:

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 Incoming links

BitcoinStrings.com