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There are lots in there with proper ASCII check out https://ascii.rest/julia-set/ for example

Your point is valid, I just want to add that deriving ASCII versions of them should be trivial as ASCII already has dots of different pitch, etc.

Agree, though that’s the current trend of UI design. As you expressed eloquently, the purpose is exactly that: to try to project some values previously attributed by these visuals (eg slow craft, effort) to today’s products.

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 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.

> affectation of technical austerity,

How does one learn to write like this? Damn.

Flow is gorgeous and fits this ascii art theme beautifully. I've installed it and have lots of changes I'd like to make. Are you open to PRs or should I maintain my own fork without expectation of upstreaming anything?

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...

Should be now fixed!

> plays it while it is on screen, and holds the first frame for anyone who prefers reduced motion.

Click on one to go to a page and see only that animation. The framerate is super low on my phone on the front page.

Thanks, Let me know if you face any issues!

this is not ASCII, it looks like Unicode, but it's not even that, it's scripting and canvas rendering.

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).

It's definitely a trend. But it's also arguably not ASCII art. But maybe I'm just moving the goal posts.

Yes, I will take a look at this Thanks for the recommendation :D

are you using firefox mobile?

Thank you!