These animations created by developer Glen Chiacchieri might be the cutest example of ASCII art we've ever seen. Each piece is composed of multiple frames that are actually uniques URLs — click on one and your browser loads the pages in quick succession, turning your address bar into a flip book-style animation.

There's an option to make your own and even a tiny side-scrolling shooter that lets you control a spaceship as you tear across the interstellar reaches to battle it out with warlike aliens. (If you have an overactive imagination that is — otherwise it's mostly just squiggles and dots.)

this will spam your Internet history and possibly break your browser

Be warned though, Chiacchier's animations work best in Firefox and Chrome and even then, they're liable to break your browser after a while. (We had no full crashes during our experiments, but make sure you've saved any important emails you're working on before you click the links.) Oh, and watching any of these will definitely make a mess of your browser history — open them up in private browsing or incognito mode if you want to avoid this sort of thing:

It's just not the same when you go behind the scenes, is it?