Textart.sh | Hacker News Reader

Textart.sh

textart.sh

250 pointsbicebird23 comments

These must be computer-generated - the third image under 'goose' has a Shutterstock watermark (oops): https://textart.sh/topic/goose

Here's a more curated and human-made ASCII version:

https://ascii.co.uk/art

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.

https://ascii.co.uk/art/earth

that was amazing, thank you

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 :)

Some of the entries I ran across made me feel like it was automated. They weren't really art, they were photos with words in them etc.

I think it's scraping images somewhere and processing them automatically.

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.

The entries seem to go on forever, although with some repetition. No way the images could be handmade.

And some of the entries even have "shutterstock" watermark on top, like in the https://textart.sh/topic/gasoline category.

Every one I tried returned a disclaimer something like, "While technically this is not [whatever] ASCII art because it uses Unicode characters ..."

This suggests some folks are expecting ASCII art.

Perhaps this website should be "unicodeart.sh" instead "textart.sh"

Doesn't seem to use the full unicode set either.

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-ohV6KZsQo

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.

http://www.asciiartfarts.com/keyword.html

This is just amazing - wondering how you made it happen

We need an LLM model for this.

this site really needs to prune its image-to-text generated crap.

These are all machines generated from normal photos without any regard if the output looks good. You can even see shutterstock watermarks in some.

Take a look at a site like https://aahub.org/ if you want to see some examples of proper text art.

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.

No goatse, either :(

I just imagined the goatse guy aging 20 years. How would he hold his crap? Would he ever live that long? Questions for the 40 year olds.

9th image on topic peen is currently dickbutt

What is the license on any of these?

I was expecting AI but was positively surprised

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