Some pictures are worth a thousand words. This one's worth about 1500 codepoints.

I made this very simply by drawing a little black-and-white 160x75 image in GraFX2, then running it through Stewart Russell's img2blocks.py, which you can find here: <https://gist.github.com/scruss/b064a667cebecf31e4896f92659505e1>. From there, I added the gradient to the UTF-8 Micron source in Emacs. It's kind-of a nice, Atari 8-bit effect, isn't it?

I have some ideas of my own about an image converter like img2blocks, but one that also makes use of the diagonal blocks from the Symbols for Legacy Computing Unicode block. ...Who knows if I'll ever get around to making that, though.

At the time I'm writing this, I haven't implemented tag search yet [update, 2026/06/31 - it works now], but I'm going to tag this anyway: [#dinosaurs] [#textgraphics]