Boxes made out of asterisks, dashes, and slashes appeal to me about as much as cutlery made out of recycled tin cans and coat hangers; it's the worst of both worlds, too ugly to qualify as real graphics and too distracting to be useful as text. Weirdly, the look worse than 'graphics' on the Commodore PET or TRS-80 (whose 'graphic' characters were helpfully printed on the keys and accessible through combination button presses).
Wow, I can't believe I went this long without realizing there were these characters specifically intended to be used in text based interfaces. It's funny, these are almost like the opposite of emojis, text trying to be graphics, rather than graphics trying to be text.
Boxes made out of asterisks, dashes, and slashes appeal to me about as much as cutlery made out of recycled tin cans and coat hangers; it's the worst of both worlds, too ugly to qualify as real graphics and too distracting to be useful as text. Weirdly, the look worse than 'graphics' on the Commodore PET or TRS-80 (whose 'graphic' characters were helpfully printed on the keys and accessible through combination button presses).