It's kind of a throw back to the C64 days when you actualy had to buy a book to know where to poke sprites into place, so Ascii graphics and clrscr was the thing for animation! I might do some more like this. For better obfu, though, I should probably look into regexes for ways to hide the repeating string, "Just_another_Perl_hacker."
Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.