#rplace

r/place is a reddit event with a large canvas where each user can place one pixel every 5 minutes. The point is that communities come together and create artwork collaboratively.

When the event ends, instead of erasing the canvas all at once, users are allowed to place only white pixels so they gradually erase their own creations.

This year, the users decided to use these final minutes to write "Fuck Spez" in giant print across the entire canvas, using only the white pixels.

—

Foolish: Buenos Dias~!

Rubius: Hello!

Foolish: Hello, hello!

Rubius: How are you, my friend?

Foolish: Oh, I'm doing good! I'm doing good! :D

-

Foolish: What's um, what's that that you're building?

Rubius: Ehhh, it's -

Foolish: Is it like your little bear guy? Your little Minecraft character?

Rubius: Yeah.

Foolish: [Noticing Titi] Oh! That's a fun little guy. What- what's that? Is that like a caterpillar? Is that a cat? What- what's like that-

Rubius: What - it's not a cat, it's Titi!

Foolish: Titi?

Rubius: Yeah! It's the main character of- from Karmaland. He- he- he died. :(

-

Rubius: Titi, come back! Over here!

Rubius: Don't do it, Titi.

-

Foolish: [Laughs]

Rubius: No- don't laugh! It's not funny.

Foolish: No- estoy triste [I'm sad].

-

Rubius: Ok, now you have to help me because you insulted the- you insulted Titi.

Foolish: Is T- is Ti- so Titi' i's a cat?

Rubius: IT'S NOT A CAT! It's a...

Foolish: No! Right, fck! No, that's right! It's not a cat!

Rubius: It's an... alien tree. An alien tree. [To his chat] He keeps calling him a cat! It came from inside a friend called Staxx. He was pregnant, and this came out of him.

Foolish: Ohh. Wow!

Rubius: Yes.

Foolish: That's- that must've been intense.

Rubius: Yeah, a little bit. [Laughs]

Foolish: And- and that was your... like, became like your kid kinda? Or like a- you were like an uncle for it?

Rubius: Yeah, I'm his... father because I was the only one taking care of him.

Foolish: Ohhh, but then you did a bad job and he died?

Rubius: No, I- I- no. He died because he saved us.

Foolish: OHHH wow!

Rubius: From a massive attack, yes.

Foolish: That's very- that's very noble of Titi.

After Reddit's API fiasco of this year and the subsequent controversial event that was r/place 2023, I decided to save as much documentation about the 2022 event as I could. Luckily, I remember how there are already a series of posts by @riacte who documented the progress of the Hermitcraft mural throughout the whole event, from beginning to end. Her blogposts form the bulk of this book (like, 95%!) and I cannot thank her enough for preserving the happenings of the block men mural.

With that said, I quickly realized that someone who's not a Hermitcraft fan - or me if I'm older - might not get the gist of who's who on the mural. The solution? Make several pages dedicated to just listing who's who on the murals! Because of the sheer number of heads, the mural was divided into several pieces for easier labeling. As a bonus, I also threw in another mural nearby which was connected enough to the Hermitcraft community.

For consistency's sake and preserving focus, I decided to not label the peeps from Dream SMP or the MCC secondary mural. Wrangling Microsoft Word to create an infographic was hard enough, let alone 3! If I inadvertently left out a few bits of extra context from this decision, mea culpa.

When it came to typesetting the entire text block, I decided to make some consistent rules. Titles denoting each day or stage of the mural are on their own pages. New sections are titled using the Bahnschrift font and colored blue, while the first paragraph has their beginning lines look Minecraft-coded and topped with a drop cap (aka. those super-large alphabets).

The names of Hermitcraft and Minecraft players in general are bolded when they first appear in the text. Afterwards, they are bolded if they are contextually important to what's being said.

Extra context would be placed in the footnotes section at the bottom of the page. This is also where I dump some background information that would be invaluable for any readers who aren't Minecraft fans, which is why the SpaceX page looked like... uh, that.

My image policy is to go with the flow; I used as many images from riacte's posts as possible, but I also added-in some of my own if more context is needed. Placing them to look smooth with the text was harder - some are small enough to not cause any problems, others are large enough to fill entire pages without any problems, but a few like the Dream SMP mural (hey there! I managed to put you in!) are too wonky to fit perfectly without leaving no empty spaces.

So in that mural's case, I placed them to the side and let the contextual text flow around it. This principle was also used for the Dota2 / Love Live images and in a few other places throughout the book. The biggest case of this are the few images that are just too wide.

Like this one.

Making double-page spreads is not the easiest thing to do in Microsoft Word, and there are a few r/place images that are too wide to fit perfectly in a single page. Confining them to one page would also mean losing all their details, so making them a double-page spread was necessary.

Didn't make it easy though, especially when there are paragraphs of text and other images that needed to be shuffled around. Mess up the double-page images, and they won't meet in the middle. Mess up the text and other pics? There goes the layout and overall flow!

In the end, making this book took a lot longer than I expected, but I am still grateful to have made this as I have now read through many posts from Tumblr, Reddit, and even Youtube - people expressing joy that they have collectively made something together. I can only hope I have made some justice to them by compiling their work and (even if a small sliver) preserving their testaments.

May this r/place be remembered.