Night coast, a lighthouse made of dots

I found night coast on ascii.rest this week and I keep going back to look at it.

It’s a lighthouse on a wooded headland at night. The beam turns rhythmically, the clouds drift past the moon, and the sea carries a strip of moonlight and the reflection of the lighthouse lamp. All of it is made of dots. It’s so lo-fi, but for people of a certain age, and anyone who played DOS games, it’s like looking at childhood photos. The nostalgia just keeps washing over you.

It feels old in the best way, like something that used to run as a screensaver, or a demo someone squeezed into a few kilobytes to show off.

It reminds me so much of the After Dark Star Trek: The Next Generation screensaver.

My computer at the time had no sound card, so I was amazed to hear the interface sounds and Picard giving orders come out of the system speaker, which until then had only ever beeped at startup.

ascii.rest is a library of these pieces made by @bas3line. There are scenes, spinners, charts and logos, and each comes with a snippet for HTML, React, Astro and more. You can even play this one in your terminal:

npx ascii.rest night-coast

Now the hard part. I really want to put it in the header. A thin strip of night sky above my name, the beam sweeping across every page. I’ve already worked out how it would look, and I have to keep talking myself out of it.

So it’s not going in the header. It gets this post instead. For now.