If you're not familiar, WPlace is a collaborative pixel art canvas of sorts, utilising OpenStreetMap and MapLibre for a rather joyful 2025 internet experience. Alternatively, it's the hottest place to shitpost right now.
The servers work approx. 4% of the time, which is charming for now. This will tire out a lot of the freshly enthusiastic crowd that have joined recently, but I'm sure scaling up the servers would be stupidly expensive for such a silly little (affectionate) site.
It is reminiscent of many more delightful websites that no longer exist. Existing not for profit, just for fun. Seeing your home city lit up with flags, artwork, and love is quite touching.
I've been painting, cleaning, and maintaining pride flags in my home city, helping a friend paint her cool custom Pokemon trainer sprite, creating a big sign that tells everyone where my cats live, and planting a little surprise for my online friend in her hometown (Hi Brigid <3).
Though it does expose the fact that art and creativity have never been my strong suit. For every living second in school, my mind would lock up when given any open-plan "write/draw whatever you like" task, then I'd inevitably get shouted at for it. This builds up into me clutching to certainty and security a little bit too much. An open canvas is still scary in a sense.
As much as I like painting big trans-coloured love hearts where my friends might find them, something a bit more individual might be neat. I briefly toyed with sprite creators and assist tools before hitting another creative wall that I've never figured out how to break through. This also ties into creativitiy issues when it comes to this site, and my life and hobbies in general.
Much like relearning Irish, some kind of fundamental restart is needed.
