THIS is the kind of thing I was expecting when I clicked on the parent link, ASCII art, instead of computer converted images. While there is nothing wrong with rasterising an image to ASCII, there is something I really love about the hand drawn stuff. Especially the early ones where the 'canvas' size was so limited, it forced such creativity.
Found the site when looking for ascii art to add to a server motd and wondered if anyone had any information about it? All I can find when searching is references to people using it in projects, but no background or community.
Has a pretty amazing number of categories / artworks, and some of them are genuinely beautiful. It feels very old internet but the domain was registered in 2018, although could have been migrated?
Almost happy for it to stay a mystery but on the off chance the maintainer(s) see this thank you for adding a bit of brightness to the world :)
There's certainly some automated conversiom happening at some point in the process, either it's scraping resources that include automated renders, or else it's doing them itself.
Lots of unreadable or very suboptimally rendered text within images that you just wouldn't do like that even if you were copying from an existing image.
Makes me wonder if the upvote/downvote mechanism is feeding into some machine learning.
However, some images do convert pretty well, and if the up/down voting mechanism reflects in what gets listed on what order, then it could become a cool little resource.
Kinda ruins the old-internet charm of the text art though.
Back in 2000s when telnet BBS' are huge, you can fit in a lot of things in a 80x24 screen. Sadly they are slowly dying out.
I'm not sure how many of them are left in the English world, but at least in the Chinese world ptt.cc is still alive.
Here's an example of experience with ASCIIArt/ANSIArt[0], when using telnet based forums:
There's also a ANSIArt version of star war, https://www.asciimation.co.nz/ , it used to be a telnet site, but nowadays no one even have the binary to telnet from.
Nice, but since each pixel consists of a solid-filled greyscale rectangle (or emojis, I guess?) and doesn't take advantage of the shapes of characters, the resolution seems limited compared to the ASCII art of yore (or even the output of aalib).
It also doesn't have any Dickbutt images and this is a crime against Dickbutt.
