I've been messing with the framebuffer. It's actually really freaking simple!! For some reason I thought it would be difficult.
The framebuffer, for the uninformed, is a simple, low-level graphical interface on Linux. Other operating systems have similar systems, I believe, usually with different names and different specifics. I'll definitely be digging into what the BSDs and MacOS have later probably, but this writ will only focus on Linux Land.
You can see a basic bit of code for interacting with the framebuffer here: hello-fb.c displays a mandelbrot set and prints some framebuffer-related information.
The program does very little, and what it does is straightforward.
It pretty much just opens the file /dev/fb0, maps
it to memory, and writes some data in that memory. The framebuffer
is literally just a buffer of the bytes describing the colors
shown on the screen.