This looks aesthetically pleasing but this is not ASCII Art it seems, where’s ascii? All those differently sized dots are not ascii chars, are they? Perhaps this is unicode-art?
But it strikes me as an affectation of technical austerity, i.e. you’re borrowing the credibility of a constrained medium without embracing its constraints.
Again, it's very pretty but... it's a bit like reconfiguring your Tesla to look more like a Citroën 2CV.
Ayyy that's a much more articulate way to put what I was also thinking.
"Being constructed of text characters" is a very loose definition of ASCII art. Not to say it's not visually interesting, but just that it's on the far ends of the histogram of what people think of when they hear "ASCII art".
Personally, I think the fact this is relying on colour for contrast makes this feel more like a shader that quantizes the input into little dots, than ASCII Art. It's a vague border between that and an ASCII shader, and then ASCII art, but there's definitely some measureable distance between those peaks.
I was mesmerized by the animation in https://omp.sh/ yesterday but this takes it to the next level. What makes something like this be prevalent now if ASCII has been around for so long? is it just the trend?
Thats awesome. I did something similar (much smaller scale) for Claude Code/Pi to show how much it's working https://github.com/robdmac/flow
But this ASCII Art reminds me of my original desire to have something for each server I SSH into to help me keep a mental map of where I am. I'm not SSH'ing into servers anymore but if I was, I'd totally be trying to remake these scenes on the terminal!
I see nothing being animated because my system is set to prefer reduced motion. That's a cool accommodation, but I wish at least the demo page made that more obvious.
Neat. Some of my earliest online contributions were to local dial-up BBSs. I spent entire days making animated ascii sequences in the theme of the board.
But it strikes me as an affectation of technical austerity, i.e. you’re borrowing the credibility of a constrained medium without embracing its constraints.
Again, it's very pretty but... it's a bit like reconfiguring your Tesla to look more like a Citroën 2CV.
"Being constructed of text characters" is a very loose definition of ASCII art. Not to say it's not visually interesting, but just that it's on the far ends of the histogram of what people think of when they hear "ASCII art".
Personally, I think the fact this is relying on colour for contrast makes this feel more like a shader that quantizes the input into little dots, than ASCII Art. It's a vague border between that and an ASCII shader, and then ASCII art, but there's definitely some measureable distance between those peaks.
But this ASCII Art reminds me of my original desire to have something for each server I SSH into to help me keep a mental map of where I am. I'm not SSH'ing into servers anymore but if I was, I'd totally be trying to remake these scenes on the terminal!
Also, the art scenes section is not ASCII.
The rest is also very maximalist and ornamental. I like them as animations but wouldn’t like them as part of UI or TUI.