haliphax

A long-standing and thoroughly-enjoyed hobby of mine is creating and consuming ASCII artwork (though not the kind of watered-down crap you would see in, say, an e-mail signature or a chain letter). I recently went on a wild tear after stumbling across a faithful recreation of the Amiga's Topaz 500 and the IBM's VGA cp437 fonts, and built a single-page application (or SPA, if you want to be a dick about it) that takes advantage of web-ified versions of these fonts—with some help from the @font-face CSS directive—to display that artwork in its intended form without resorting to a text-to-image conversion process.

Confused yet? Check out my ASCII gallery. If you want to run your own, or just see how it works, I've also put the ascii.js source on GitHub.