Animated ASCII Art for Web Pages (ascii.rest)

"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 that just happen to be 1 of 3 characters, 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.

How does one learn to write like this? Damn.

Examples of changes I'd like to see:

    1. I want a decay on the flame, so on every state change, the flame slowly works its way back down to a base rate, say at 2 minutes. That would imply that a strong fire is a recently changed state, while a decayed flame is a stale state that hasn't changed in a while.
    2. Automatic choosing of a different animation on every open. I run half a dozen to a dozen agents on a single terminal window (full screened on a 27" monitor) and I already built a way to distinguish sessions from other other with my pre-plugin psuedoterminal crabigator and I'd like to do the same for these animations. Basically a way to distinguish sessions from other other.
    3. More so than just changing animations, I'd like to have a random palette chosen per-animation, so there's multiple flames, but there's the purple-esque flames, the blue-esque flames, the red ones, the orange ones, the yellow ones, and so on.
    4. I'd like a way to integrate the plugin into crabigator so its takes a single section instead of being full width.

BTW, I used to have different ASCII art images on each of my servers. Here's a sampling:

https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/blob/main/ansible/rol... https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/blob/main/ansible/rol... https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/blob/main/ansible/rol...

Text art itself is s prevalent because it borrows the appearance of careful crafting while it's generated by a program. Also, CLIs and text are more popular than GUIs these days, with many people.

Chat interfaces are almost like CLI! Markdown is getting more popular than binary Office text files!

Vibe coding with AI now commodifies the remaining manual steps: obtaining nice raster images, and feeding them into a text-art generator.

Or creating a script that renders them as dots on a canvas (what's done here).