ASCIIwith.us
Before images on the Internet, there was ASCII Art! ASCII was an early standardized character encoding, and ASCII Art meant using the characters of the different letters to create pictures from the text!
ASCIIwith.us is a fun way to create ASCII Art in a public place where other people can see it and add to it! It also creates an endless world of ASCII Art because any character can be converted into a link - a door to another screen - by just hitting ENTER. The possibilities are truly endless!
The website also refreshes LIVE! (although not very fast) so you can see someone else typing if they are on the same screen as you! You can invite your friends to the same screen, and draw a picture together, or play a game like tic-tac-toe or boxes together!
Philosophy
The corporate Internet creates the illusion that everyone must depend on their centralized infrastructure to function. But that's only because we store such vast quantities of data, pictures, music, and video, these are the main things taking up so much storage on their servers. That, and the vast processing power it takes to run their A.I. algorithms that are working full-time to figure out how to keep us addicted to their platforms. These things are all wasteful and counter-productive overhead costs. This ASCIIwith.us website was made as an example of how we can still have the vast expanse of an endless digital frontier that operates on smaller websites outside the grasp of corporate social media giants, if only we can find simpler formats that require less processing and less storage! Such as this simple text-based format that allows anyone to contribute to a vast landscape of text (and images made of text) without needing very high CPU power. Using this format, we can create an endless world, unlimited, complete with hidden gems, and together create worlds within worlds together!
Getting Started
To get started just go to the website and follow the instructions on the screen. If you're on a mobile browser, you can click to show the on-screen keyboard to have an easier time controlling the game. It's a pretty nice on-screen keyboard. The most important keys that most mobile phone keyboards don't have are the arrow keys.
Please don't just go around defacing art - there's no stored data other than what you see, so once you delete someone's art it's just gone forever (unless they took a screenshot!) That's why there's endless options to go create more screens and create more scenes without messing up everyone else's art.
That said, sometimes it's fun to create interactive scenes and if you're just making small edits to make it look like time has passed and things have just changed a little bit, then that type of thing is more than welcome! I encourage screenshots for this reason, just in case someone does just totally mess up your ASCII art. Better safe than sorry.
And see the little "-" and "+" in the top-right of the screen? That let's you increase or decrease the size of the entire website to help you get it the right size for your device. I've tried to put everything I could to make the website accessible by mobile as well as desktop!
Please Enjoy
If you appreciate ASCIIwith.us, you can donate any amount using paypal, but only if you really want to!