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What's it about?
It's a procedural graphics generator showing some text/ascii art and transforming it on the fly. The source says it is a showcase made by a swiss company.
It's by the very excellent artist Andreas Gysin (sort of a portfolio site), he works with ASCII and procedural art. Have a look at the site without the URL parameter on it: https://ertdfgcvb.xyz/
Be careful this site makes your computer fans scream and your devices run hot.

I have no clue what this or why its needed is other than it (creatively?) drains my battery.

Ah, wait until you discover what video games do!
There is an expectation with video games.

Users shouldn't expect a webpage or microsoft word to turn their computer into a helicopter.

A lot of complaining for a website you will have visited 5 seconds in your entire existence.

Your computer is fine.

Wait, can you turn your PC into an helicopter with a simple web page? Technology is amazing these days.
It's a minor step since you already can download a car.

Which you should not do of course :)

Yes, but it requires support to WebHelices which is on the experimentation phases. There is a shim using WebWings 5.0 but it only works on Chrome Canary, because foxes have legs instead.
A user with that expectation would make sure to turn off javascript. Which probably should have been the default in web browsers, but that particular ship sailed long ago.
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Better close the browser tab before your computer lifts off!
Try closing the tab. Fixes it. Nothing to worry about, your battery is fine.
makes my PC go from 40W to 50W.

not that bad. Facebook is way worse.

Removing the "mode=screensaver" parameter from the URL:

>ertdfgcvb

>Studio for design and code based in Lugano, Switzerland.

>Specialized in procedural graphic design for screen and print; research and development, prototyping and implementation of interactive installations for exhibitions, stages and events.

And here is a link with some of their art: https://foundation.app/@ertdfgcvb

There are also some links in their homepage too. The I liked the most was: https://play.ertdfgcvb.xyz

Cool ASCI art-based design. Hmm... perhaps I'll take some ideas from it for my own website :D
They apparently sell NFTs by the "crypto art" link, I wonder if that's what their business model actually is...
NFT art is great for doing the laundry

Cool stuff regardless!

Agree that stuff is cool. The playground is especially neat. It looks like ASCII shader kind of thing.
At first I was like "what is this gonna be, a Chinese company that sells unbranded electronics on Amazon?" But no, it's the Swiss.
I was expecting it to be about some weird arm instruction.

They like mnemonics like this.

Brings me back to all the time (and paper) I wasted in the 1970s writing programs to do abstract ASCII art on line printers. Watching those patterns made me feel like a child again!
This has demo scene written all over it, in the best possible way.
Too cool. Suddenly, I want to play nethack.
The jackal bites. You die.
The lichen turns into an Arch Lich. You're covered in frost.
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If you see a bunch of random ascii characters jumping around on the screen, try adjusting your Browser zoom to zoom out a bit. On my 4k screen with Windows providing 300% UI Scaling, I had to zoom Chrome out to 33% to see the wavy ascii text art.
This domain name looks like someone pressed their ubikey to pick the name.
I thought it looked like an x86 instruction mnemonic.
That's what I thought at first.
successive keys on adjacent rows of your qwERTy keyboard
Welcome, to Ertdfgcvb. This is Ertdfgcvb. The unattainable is UNKNOWN at Ertdfgcvb!

/me wonders if anyone still knows this reference

You can do anything at Ertdfgcvb!
WELCOME TO Welcome to Ertdfgcvb!!!
Lush and deep. It's got scifi power.
This reminds me a little of the 404 page I made back in university (except it actually looks nice!)

http://yawn.io/404

Fun fact: it doesn't have a hard coded bitmap it renders in your system font onto a canvas and reads the pixels out and then converts to text.

It's great to see simple non-productized playfulness on the internet again.

All the fun experiments on https://play.ertdfgcvb.xyz/ remind me of Yugo Nakamura's now-defunct site http://yugop.com/ from back in the early 2000s.

You can catch a little glimpse of his style with the bottom menu on https://web.archive.org/web/20040804050646/http://www.yugop...., but unfortunately the main body of the site (which was the best bit) doesn't work anymore because it was built with Flash.

Some of his current work with https://tha.jp/ still has a great organic fun feel to it.

It saddens me that a browser consumes one and a half CPU cores to render a measly ~300x60 characters at 30 fps. Manipulating even just text in the DOM has so much overhead... That's on Linux with the latest stable Chrome on hardware less than 2 years old.

Nonetheless, cool animation.