I love ASCII art, I know it’s also ANSI art, basically text art plus ANSI escape codes for color, cursor movement, blinking, bold text, background colors, etc. But I call it simply ASCII, as at the end of the day, they are all created using colored text characters.
Textual Images and some ASCII tricks
In the early 90’s I was constantly online, just not on the Internet, on the BBS’s or Bulletin board system. You used your modem to dial directly to another computer just like making a telephone call but between computers. The called-up computer ran a BBS program where people could leave messages and files for others. Once you disconnected others could c…
One day, while browsing the TikToks, the almighty algorithm served me this video, and I thought, " That is so cool, I also have access to modern AI coding tools, let’s give it a whirl”.
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At its most direct, the app can turn uploaded media into ASCII art. A photograph becomes a field of glyphs. A video becomes a moving grid of characters. Shadows, midtones, and highlights are mapped into different marks, and the app gives the user control over the whole translation process.
The grid resolution can be changed so it looks blocky or increased to resemble the original image or video more closely. The background color can be changed. Brightness can be inverted. The output can zoom, pan, rotate, scale, and shift over time.
The core of the app is the seven-state system. Instead of treating an image as a continuous blur of brightness, the ASCII Dither Filter divides it into seven tonal levels, from deep shadow to highlight. Each level can have its own color and its own uploaded SVG. The app can read colors from the uploaded image or video and apply them directly to the ASCII. It can also extract a seven-color palette from the source media, giving the shadow-to-highlight ladder a palette that belongs to the image itself. If the user wants a more synthetic look, colors can be randomized, cycled, or animated between keyframes.
![brave_41Ifwx58jK.gif [optimize output image]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!fLi2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5ba57daf-3b26-4fad-a358-20d1707ec5b1_640x731.gif "brave_41Ifwx58jK.gif [optimize output image]")
Animation is where the tool becomes more than a still-image processor. Every major property can be keyframed: glyph sets, colors, zoom, zoom position, rotation, scale, inversion, source-color behavior, and other filter settings. The timeline sits below the main canvas so it can be edited with more horizontal space. Keyframe markers show where changes happen, and a dedicated keyframe list appears when an animation exists.
This makes it possible to build gradual transformations. An image can begin as a tight monochrome ASCII grid, then expand into colored SVG shapes. A video can start with small upright glyphs, then rotate and scale into a more abstract pattern. A palette can jump from source colors into random tones and then interpolate into another saved state.
Video handling follows the same logic. When a video is loaded, the animation timeline adapts to the length of the clip. Scrubbing the timeline also scrubs the video frame, so the filter settings and the source footage stay connected.
Animation can be saved and exported as a WebM video.
If you would like to experiment with video, you can get free videos at Pexels, but any image would do.
This was a fun project, and the code can be found, as always, on Barn Lab’s GitHub page.
Well maybe it's a little late for me to try to figure out technology? I thought you might help me anyway?
If I could get my phone to work!.
I think you're going to get quite interested in understanding the physical structure of atoms and why chemistry does what it does and the true activities of electrons. I've thought of a simple experiment that shows a problem with the kinetic energy Theory and our opinions about electrons somehow being both particles and waves.
I think the easiest way to create a knowledge Renaissance and shock the world is to show them that there's something wrong with the kinetic energy Theory. People just love the idea that you heat up water and it picks up kinetic energy and evaporates but that simply cannot possibly be true because water is the stickiest thing we know and making it hotter does not eliminate its stickiness. So we have also a problem with beliefs about electrons and both of them can be quickly addressed in a very simple experiment.
I was hoping you would somehow post that or talk about it a little bit and convince people to explore. We need a few talented people to do a very simple experiment and everything will work out and we will have a happy future. You are part of the collective and you have the talent to generate public interest, I need that help! Here's what I'm trying to get to go viral:
I love pragmatists and people willing to explore. And I agree that people going out like Einstein and trying to explain gravity is completely wrong. What you need to do is explain light and how it creates its frequency which is the key to finally understanding the balance of forces so you can understand how volume is established. I won't go through a detailed argument here but you can find it on my website or try Google searching: medium Light Orbits and especially read my co-authors brilliant article called validations.
Calling all practical-minded people: As someone deeply interested in material properties, I find the precise mechanics of evaporation of condensation to be a fascinating puzzle. Standard kinetic models treat these phase changes as well enough explained, but if you look at them more closely, the legacy textbook explanations introduce quite a few complications that challenge credulity and violate Occam's razor.
To look at this empirically, I've put together a practical $20 backyard dare on my Substack page Decoding science using everyday materials. I am seeking pragmatic minds who focus on physical data to review the setup, test the anomaly, and see what the observation actually shows I would love your thoughts on it.
https://whitethomasalan.substack.com/p/the-20-backyard-dare-that-quantum?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=88ul7d
Hopefully this is a short enough formated message that you can just send this around and encourage people to do this simple experiment and help launch an exciting new sge of science.
Well maybe it's a little late for me to try to figure out technology? I thought you might help me anyway?
If I could get my phone to work!.
I think you're going to get quite interested in understanding the physical structure of atoms and why chemistry does what it does and the true activities of electrons. I've thought of a simple experiment that shows a problem with the kinetic energy Theory and our opinions about electrons somehow being both particles and waves.
I think the easiest way to create a knowledge Renaissance and shock the world is to show them that there's something wrong with the kinetic energy Theory. People just love the idea that you heat up water and it picks up kinetic energy and evaporates but that simply cannot possibly be true because water is the stickiest thing we know and making it hotter does not eliminate its stickiness. So we have also a problem with beliefs about electrons and both of them can be quickly addressed in a very simple experiment.
I was hoping you would somehow post that or talk about it a little bit and convince people to explore. We need a few talented people to do a very simple experiment and everything will work out and we will have a happy future. You are part of the collective and you have the talent to generate public interest, I need that help! Here's what I'm trying to get to go viral:
I love pragmatists and people willing to explore. And I agree that people going out like Einstein and trying to explain gravity is completely wrong. What you need to do is explain light and how it creates its frequency which is the key to finally understanding the balance of forces so you can understand how volume is established. I won't go through a detailed argument here but you can find it on my website or try Google searching: medium Light Orbits and especially read my co-authors brilliant article called validations.
Calling all practical-minded people: As someone deeply interested in material properties, I find the precise mechanics of evaporation of condensation to be a fascinating puzzle. Standard kinetic models treat these phase changes as well enough explained, but if you look at them more closely, the legacy textbook explanations introduce quite a few complications that challenge credulity and violate Occam's razor.
To look at this empirically, I've put together a practical $20 backyard dare on my Substack page Decoding science using everyday materials. I am seeking pragmatic minds who focus on physical data to review the setup, test the anomaly, and see what the observation actually shows I would love your thoughts on it.
https://whitethomasalan.substack.com/p/the-20-backyard-dare-that-quantum?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=88ul7d
Hopefully this is a short enough formated message that you can just send this around and encourage people to do this simple experiment and help launch an exciting new sge of science.