I’ve done a handful of updates the past few months and I realized I should probably document them somewhere, as people interested in this site aren’t going to periodically comb through the whole thing to see what’s new. So without further ado, here’s what’s new.
Text to ASCII Art Generator
For TAAG, I had a user request the ability to copy TheDraw output as bash commands so that the text could be used in bash scripts. I thought that was a great idea and added it to the app.
I also made some UX adjustments for mobile, as previously the app wasn’t very usable on mobile.
Arial ASCII Art Gallery
The Arial ASCII Art Gallery now has 1,500 different pieces. The sheer quantity of what’s in there is starting to rival some of the normal ASCII art archives out there, and I would say the quality of what’s in the Arial ASCII Art Gallery is pretty high. The biggest problem now is discover-ability.
However, I’m not completely done populating the gallery, I’ve been holding off on talking about this until I’m done, but essentially I used Claude to help me create a script to analyze 1000’s of old AOL progs to extract out what might be ASCII art. Most of what was extracted was random characters, but there’s a lot of cool art that got pulled out too.
So I’ve been going through files and if the extracted data is in fact a piece of ASCII art, I add it to the gallery and note the artist’s name. The process has been slower than I expected, but I don’t think a lot of this stuff has seen the light of day in decades.
Anyway, I still need to finish going through the output, then I want to redesign the app, and then I want to improve discover-ability. Once I’m done all of that I’ll do a full write-up here. In the meantime you can check out the app to see the current progress. I periodically update it, and you can tell when this happens because the count at the top will update.
Snake
I’ve updated my Snake game to use TuiCss for its dialog boxes. TuiCss is a UI library for creating MS-DOS-like interfaces. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but at the same time I’ve been really hesitant, since the game has had the same look and feel for 18 years. However, this game is mostly here to remind me of my high school days when I would goof off. It’s just a fun little nostalgia trip, so I figured the update made sense. Earlier this year I also updated it to work on mobile.
Image Glitcher
I’ve made some quality of life updates to Image Glitcher. You can now load any type of file into the hex editor, and a number of other small updates have been made. I want to re-visit this app later to support other file types, but I’ll circle back to that later.
Monster Eyes / Main Page
Back in 2022 I made a silly Halloween themed react library, full of Halloween decorations for websites. One of the components was a set of eyes that watched the cursor as it moved around the screen. I thought it would be fun to dust those off and place them around the main site. I’ve set it up so that if you’re in dark mode, as you scroll down the page all of these eyes will open and start watching you.
It amuses me, though I have no idea what actual visitors think.
For the Arial ASCII Art Gallery redesign, an artist filter paired with the source prog name could help with both discovery and provenance. If the same piece turns up in several progs, showing those sources under one entry could preserve that history without making visitors browse duplicates. Does your extraction output retain the original filename alongside each candidate?
Several progs (Fate Zero, Cruel Intentions) used external files and I preserved the name in those cases, but in a lot of cases the art was in the exe itself and I just have a text dump which I went through. The name shown in the title bar is the file name, but sometimes that’s a name I made after grabbing stuff out of the text dump (I’ve been debating hiding that name but have left it for now). Right now I only track the original prog I got the art from, but creating something that would identify every prog that featured the art probably wouldn’t be too hard, that’s actually kind of a cool idea. I’ll want to think on this for a bit but being able to click a prog and see it’s art would be kind of neat.