Wplace
Wplace is a collaborative pixel art website first unleashed upon an unsuspecting Internet on 21 July 2025 by Murilo Matsubara. It differs from other collaborative pixel art stunts that have previously graced the Internet such as Pixelplace and r/place by allowing users to commit large-scale, real-world vandalism to God's green, gracious Mother Earth – one pixel at a time. Every click placed on the site is instantly transmitted to a global network of industrial-grade paintball satellites, which proceed to colour in the corresponding square kilometre of the planet's surface, regardless of whom or what happens to be standing there, so whether your name is Kim Jong-un or you happen to be an unsuspecting Nigerian prince, you better watch out.
Since its inception, Wplace has proved itself a convenient planetary graffiti service for hardcore devotees of such exotic substances as Brasilium, Undertaluren and Deltarunavir, who use the platform to immortalise their kaleidoscopic drug-induced visions directly onto deserts, forests, oceans, the White House, Jane Austen's place of residence and other places inhabited by folk blissfully oblivious that they are now part of a 400x400 pixel rendition of Spamton G. Spamton.
Origins[edit | edit source]
The origins of Wplace can be traced back to a drunken quarrel between two English cartographers aboard a ship steered by colonists in pursuit of planting more Union Jacks across every inch of the coast of the Falkland Islands in 1825. Hugo "Hugh" Gerald Rection, one of the two cartographers, instantaneously devolved into what he termed an "objection to reality" upon heeding a misaligned compass rose on a map of Wales, a consequence of the pedantry that stemmed from what the industrial psychological complex of this day and age would classify as a textbook case of Redditus autismus.
The dispute escalated until he overturned a bottle of cyan ink onto the map and, upon realising his grave mistake, began bellowing the spontaneously-coined interjection "pecksels!" on repeat whilst breakdancing naked. Hugo "Hugh" Jass, the boatswain of the crew, was confused by the cartographer's frantic cries and recorded them in his logbook as 'pixels'. Whether Rection's gyrations had any genuine cartographic consequence is unclear, but the term 'pixels', as erroneously recorded by Jass, would echo through history during the development of digital imaging and computer graphics when resident otherwise nobody at NASA Frederic C. Billingsley indirectly accommodated a space for 'pixel' in the dictionary to describe picture elements in the wealthy deal of satellite imagery he captured of piquant extra-terrestrial nudes.
The modern incarnation of Wplace was officially launched in 2025 by a coalition of bored, unemployed programmers all diagnosed with the aforementioned Redditus autismus, alongside a handful of freelance arsonists and one comatose satellite engineer who, following a minor ketamine overdose, was under the impression she was signing up for a paintball tournament – all with an inspiration by Rection's faux pas in common.
Functioning process[edit | edit source]
At its core, Wplace is a deceptively simple collaborative pixel art platform. In practice, however, it operates as a weaponised marriage of Reddit and orbital artillery. Every pixel placed on the digital canvas is immediately relayed to a fleet of Soviet paintball satellites commissioned during the Cold War and recommissioned after one tipsy NASA intern inadvertently sold them for free on eBay in 2003. These orbiting harbingers of chromatic anarchy then fire pigment-filled canisters at the corresponding square kilometre of Earth's surface, so somewhere right now the city of New Delhi could be engulfed almost entirely in the colour brown.
A user begins with a limited pool of a pitiful 30-odd pixels to place, and regain one spent pixel every half a minute so as to prevent any one individual from monopolising the cosmic paintbrush. Unless, of course, said sad sole soul decide to register using a multitude of emails and passwords in order to monopolise the cosmic paintbrush in the name of adding the finishing touch to their anime waifu or the occasional swastika. At that point, the servers will have already collapsed into a molten heap of silicon with said emails and passwords seeping from the cracks like radioactive goo, wafting the intoxicating aroma of unauthorised access straight into the lungs of other 'artists'.
Servers[edit | edit source]
Without exaggeration, the Wplace servers are allergic to traffic. Developers have claimed this is due to the 'inherently democratic' nature of open-source hosting. As a result, Wplace routinely goes down for days at a time. By the time the servers stagger back to life, vast swathes of the website's userbase have withered away to death, victims of their physical ineptitude to endure more an hour without having finalised a large-scale rendition of the transgender flag to be engraved directly onto J. K. Rowling's residence in Scotland.
