An infinite canvas that people can draw ascii art on together. I wrote an announcement post and a follow up post about it. I also showed it off on Hacker News and then had to spend an hour removing all of the vandalism left behind (but at least people liked it).
Backstory
Back when I was active on the Game Maker Community forums, someone had the idea that we should hop onto www.yourworldoftext.com and draw some ascii art together. We had fun for a day or so but after that other people showed up and started vandalizing everything.
Years later I thought it would be fun to try drawing some ascii art again but I wanted to use something more sophisticated than yourworldoftext.com (which at least at the time, had no moderation tools and was missing basic features like undo/redo).
Naturally the thing to do then was write my own multiplayer ascii drawing webapp! And fortunately I was using Lamdera at this point so I had a convenient way to implement both the frontend and backend purely (heh) in Elm.
Ascii art (lots of it)
There is a lot of quality ascii art that has accumulated over the years. The rest of this article is going to showcase some of the cool stuff other people and me have drawn/made.
Real quick though, some of you might be thinking, Lots of quality ascii art? Easy! Copy-paste it from elsewhere!
And yes, some ascii art is copied from elsewhere. I ask people to prefer drawing original stuff but I don't enforce it.
I'd say 80% of it is original art however! How do I know that? Ascii-collab lets you color code changes people have made. Using this tool we can tell that this is probably copied due to the unnaturally placed space characters.
And this, on the other hand, is an original drawing.(?)
Anyway, lets see some ascii art!
Posters
You saw the ascii poster already at the start of this article. Here's the raw image for it.
And here is the color coded version. The green text represents changes I've made.(?)
There's no sign-up so once someone's session cookie expires (which happens after a few weeks) they get a new color. So there are fewer unique contributors than there are colors.
There's lots of little details in this poster (can you find Waldo?) but it's only a fraction of everything drawn so lets continue!
Coffee mugs
I ordered two coffee mugs (one for me, one for my sister) with an ascii art design printed on them!
And here's the raw image in case you too want an ascii coffee mug.
T-shirts
I ordered three t-shirts with an ascii art design printed on them! One was for me with black text on a white background. One was for my sister with a purple background. And the last one was for my girlfriend with orange as the background (her favorite color). Unfortunately women's clothes sizes are really unpredictable and their t-shirts ended up being too small.
Miscellaneous things
Here are some things people have made. The titles for them are made up by me.
There's lots more to see, but you'll have to explore ascii-collab if you want to see the rest. You're welcome to contribute as well, but make sure to read the rules first. Also I highly recommend using a mouse and keyboard, the site does not work well with touch screens.
