Also available via Telnet at towel.blinkenlights.nl.

FYI, if you connect via IPv6 then you can watch in colour :)

Pity ^S/^Q don't work for pause/play. ^C/^Z also don't seem to work for quitting. I wonder what's preventing these keybindings from working. Very cool regardless.

The fact that Telnet is actually a protocol, and a weird one (mostly because it's ancient and actually predates UNIX). I believe the reason is that those keypresses are not interpreted by your terminal but instead sent over to the other side to be interpreted there. Obviously, they don't do anything there.

With "nc towel.blinkenlights.nl 23", on the other hand, they would work.

Ah, reminds me of messing with my friends by piping the output to a write message on their terminals. Super annoying because it just scrolls through the terminal frame by frame.

At one point this animation was the oldest surviving file on bittorrent. I remember a Hacker News item pointing that out a few years ago.

Edit. Nope I remember wrong. It was an ASCII rendition of The Matrix that was the oldest on bittorrent.

https://torrentfreak.com/oldest-torrent-is-still-being-share...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18102578

This is way older than 2015. I remember passing around a .bat file with it embedded in High School. 2009 era. At that point it was already old.

Older still...I remember there was a telnet server circa 2002 that you could log into and watch it all.

In the 90s.

There should be a lucas 'digitally enhanced' version, with hi res svg overlays floating around.

I remember seeing it at:

    telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

This was getting passed around at work. I remember my co-worker saying.

"Looks trustworthy, what could go wrong?". I laughed, and then was amazed at the result.

Other good examples of this style: http://artscene.textfiles.com/vt100/ and http://www.textfiles.com/art/

To play the former, you’ll want to limit the rate that your terminal displays the text. I use `pv`, or “Pipe Viewer”, as such:

    clear && curl -s http://artscene.textfiles.com/vt100/bambi.vt | pv -q -L 2600

In Firefox (v82) the text-field does not seem to render in a strictly non-proportional font. Thus everything is garbled. Unfortunately w3m text-mode browser isn't capable to display the page...

[EDIT] The following steps fix playback in Firefox for me:

- I press F12 to open the web-developer tools,

- select the "Console" Tab

- at the prompt at the bottom (marked by ">>") enter:

  document.querySelector("pre#screen").setAttribute("style", "font-family:Monospace;")

- press Return. Renders correctly now.

For me (Firefox 82 on Ubuntu) everything works fine out of the box. #screen has "font-family: Courier New,Fixed;" set.

I'm running Firefox, installed from upstream, running on Devuan Beowulf. With the default "Courier New,Fixed" font family set it's just not working.

If I'm not mistaken, Courier New is one of Microsoft fonts; if you're on Linux there is an installer available for various distros; on apt-based systems it's:

  sudo apt install ttf-mscorefonts-installer

You can watch any film in ASCII with VLC and a video file[0]:

  vlc videofile.mp4 -V aa

[0] https://wiki.videolan.org/Video_Output/

I hope it is clear that this is not what the original link is about. VLC can output ascii art like what aalib and libcaca can produce (namely try to simulate images using terminal output), while the submission is an animated scene by scene recreation of A New Hope using ascii art.

I couldn't find the original file. It was possible to play the movie with Notepad, by letting your finger press the "Page Down" or "Down" key.

> Asciimation may take some time to load...

It's been sitting there like that for 10 minutes or so. How long does this thing take?

As long as it takes you to activate JavaScript, I believe.

So, NaN time then...

needs a 1995 tag ... or however old it is

Apparently 1999, but it was a Java applet at the time.

The java applet was just a telnet client in Java, IIRC. The original was a telnet server.

> The original was a telnet server.

The telnet server says:

> Original Work : Simon Jansen ( http://www.asciimation.co.nz/ )

> Telnetification : Sten Spans ( [email protected] )

> Terminal Tricks : Mike Edwards ([email protected])

IIRC, that java was self-contained. I think the applet zip file contained the textfile, which I used to make my own local viewer. FWIW, the text file has changed over time (which I guess is fair, it's not like Lucas hasn't changed his versions over time)

Super cool, his/her other projects are pretty rad too