It’s 2022. The world was on it way towards recovering from an “extinction event”, and on the verge of literally WW3 being started. During yet another dreadful year like this, Reddit has decided to bring back r/place, the internet’s shared canvas. This time bigger than ever, breaking the internet once again. During the 4 days r/place ran, it attracted the attention of media and individuals from all over the world. It will probably end up becoming 2022’s most influential online event.

I myself only participated, during the last 24 hours, helping out r/mushokutensei or r/sixfacedworld, which is a community around the popular light-novel series Mushoku Tensei. The community efforts only started a bit earlier than that, so I didn’t miss anything important. And we were struggling to keep anything on the canvas anyways. Being a relatively small community compared to other light-novel/anime/manga fandoms, Although we had 17k people in the discord server, only around 100 users joined the #rplace-discussion channel, and about 20 are active participants. To say the least, we’re shorthanded.

@IsSkyfalls 04/04/2022
> there’s just no way that we can make anything bigger than 15x15
> it’s takes waaaay to long
(imagine not looking at what you’ve typed)

That being said, the force we had were the most dedicated people I’d ever seen in any fan base. Multiple members with 5+ alts, just sits there waiting for the “your next tile is available” sound effect, and placing the pixels purely by hand, without even using an overlay. It’s indeed honest work, but as you would imagine, this is not productive enough, and for hours we’ve made literally no progress. People still created some really detailed pixel art, which is nice, but introduced problems later.

The first task is to capture a plot, which we already failed by starting so late. The second canvas expansion had already happened, and it was already filled to the brim. So we tried two strategies. One is to make alliances with other communities and get permission to build on their plots. Another is to try and take over someone else’s plot by force. The first one is a success, so we now have some pieces of art built on other people’s plot. They are also nice enough to provide additional cover from griefers, and that’s really important for us newcomers. But we still wanted a slice of land, just for ourselves. Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Then fighting is the only way. The canvas is already at its maximum size, 2000 by 2000 pixels. That’s 256 million pixels in total! Even a 100x100px plot is only 0.25% of that. The opponent we’ve chosen was r/marvel_place/. It’s strange seeing them only having about 150 members, considering it’s the fandom around marvel studios. Yes, the one who makes superhero movies. Maybe there are simply less movie enthusiasts around nowadays. We began our planned attack, and we did practically no damage. It turns out that defense is significantly easier than offense, when you already have a plot built. After a while we’re all burnt out, and had to look for other communities to pick on.

Isn’t it funny, what we were doing was just picking the week and surrendering to the strong? But with no other options available, that’s what everyone ended up doing.

After numerous efforts, we finally found a plot that’s not heavily guarded. Even better, there are no signs of resistance at all. So we started building. It was at this time @50rrq got a Pastebin link for a bot, supposedly from r/eightysix. And all it need was a configuration file, and credentials of Reddit accounts to start going. And @9rny6u was kind enough to run it on his computer. Now that all we need was alt accounts, so everyone started bombarding him with throwaway accounts. Thanks so much for the two kind fella who created over 80 accounts each! The story would end here if the code we got was not crashing every couple of minutes. So he spent some time fixing it, and it now works, albeit being very slow. So slow that it couldn’t keep up with random griefers now and then. Still, he managed to paint the first version of the artwork on the canvas under 3 hours. Roxy, 49x22px, First Edition

Then someone discovered that the plot above was also ready for taking. Everyone figured that it’s doable, so we started the expansion. @9rny6u managed to communicate with others, create the newly extended artwork, and also keep looking over the bot at the same time. I could see that it’s really exhausting for him to multitask like this. So I offered my help, since running two instances will speed up this greatly. And that’s what I ended up doing. After exchanging some dms, notifying everyone to drop the alts, it should end there. That is, if the damn code can work unattended for even ten minutes straight. At the time I didn’t have a proper python development environment set up, and all debugging was done by excessive print statements, and staring into the abyss of the spaghetti code. It worked, though, and we successfully built the second revision.

The background was still unfinished, so we did some improvements with that. Some people were also really unhappy with the color of the hat, which is understandable, so we changed that as well. Synchronized the changes, and the bot is up and running again. It’s around 11PM for me, and figuring that we’ve still got time, I decided to implement some more fixes. I downloaded pycharm, ran the code with breakpoints enabled, and worked on fixing bugs and optimizations for 1 hour. This improved the stability substantially, and it actually worked for 1 hour on its own until getting stuck again. This time merely wasting chances doing nothing, overwriting the pixel that was already set. After another hour of sweaty debugging, I somehow fixed the issue with some random changes here and there.

@IsSkyfalls_ 04/05/2022
> this for some reason always returns the same values
> [image] im, sx, sy = random.choice(images)
> man I don’t understand python

Guess I really don’t understand python at all, especially the non-standard libraries.

During the 3-hour crunch, I rewrote about 25% of the original code, and it’s now late night. I haven’t ever pushed myself this hard in a couple of years, and at the end of this, I was totally exhausted. I truly wanted to just go to bed, but we still got multiple people wanting to expand more and add more changes. That’s simply not possible if I were to call it a night, and I don’t want to let down people. Expansion was an immediate no. As for the additions and changes, we were hesitant. On one hand, the community really deserve it for how much work they had put into this. Without them, we will have nothing. On the other hand, both of us wished things to stay as is, so we can take a break. And we were also worried that r/place will end before we’re finished with the additions. In the end, @9rny6u compiled a real final version and at 3:03AM, and we’re done. I left the bot running overnight.

Lying in bed, I can hear my heart pounding hard. Guess how many strands of hair I ended up losing after that night.

The next day I woke up at 7. I knew that I needed more sleep, but my circadian rhythm said no. So the first thing I did was to check my pc. No surprise, the bot has stopped running. I refreshed my browser and saw almost half of the canvas covered in pure white. This text message flashed through my mind:

@51u0 04/05/2022
> inb4 somebody with a gigantic bot net claims the ENTIRE canvas

@IsSkyfalls_ 04/05/2022 (reply)
> that would be really impressive though
> if someone actually achieves that, then I’m not even mad

Well, I’m definitely not mad here. We had over-achieved our initial goals, and the thing important here is leaving a mark on this canvas of internet history. All our efforts have been rewarded. I powered off my computer and went back to sleep.

And I woke up exactly 1 hour later. Checked my phone, saw the canvas is even more white. Chatted a bit in discord, and off to bed again. The next time I woke up, r/place would officially finish, and the art it created will, like its predecessor, forever be a part of internet history.

Place has ended. by u/ggAlex(official)
> Thank you to everyone who participated.
> Maybe the real art was the friends we made along the way.

Afterwords

I wanted to this to focus on the main topics, which are Mushoku Tensei and r/place. More of my thoughts will be shared on another post, if I end up writing that.

All Our Works on The Canvas, Current Server Banner Main Character Rudus, 1536x1536px

Did anyone remember the main character of MT is this guy? Awesome art nonetheless.