Community dictionary

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Many terms, references, and in-jokes have been made by the pxls.space community over its lifespan.

Aspects of the site

Template

A template is an image displayed on top of the canvas to make it easier for a user to create an art piece.

Information on how to create a template can be found here.

Undo

After placing a pixel, a large undo button will appear at the bottom of the screen allowing you to undo your pixel in case you misplaced it, or are devirgining. This button will disappear after around five seconds. Alternatively, the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Z will also undo a pixel whenever the undo button is visible.

Every user has three undos available a minute. When a pixel is undone, a sixty second timer begins that will restock your undos once finished. This means that you are able to undo a pixel, then (for example) do two more undos after waiting fifty seconds, and your undos will restock ten seconds after that instead of forcing you to wait a full minute every time an undo is performed.

Griefing

Griefing is the act of intentionally placing pixels over another user or faction's art on the canvas to be malicious, for fun, or for revenge.

Faction

See Faction.

Background

A background is often used an infill between art pieces, but may sometimes have its own area on a canvas. The most common type of background is a lattice.

Lattice

A lattice is a type of background characterized by repeating patterns.

Ego

An ego is a number built on the canvas by a user displaying the amount of all-time pixels they have placed. These can vary in size, but tend to be small due to an ego being a solo project.

Pixel farm

A pixel farm is a small area built near the end of a canvas as a place for users to place pixels once all the art projects on the canvas are completed.

-snip- mode

-snip- mode is a canvas mode that effects user's usernames, changing them all temporarily to '-snip-' instead of their usual username. This effectively makes each user anonymous. -snip- mode does not affect the color, faction or tag of the user's username. -snip- mode has only been used on a few gimmick canvases, those being canvases 13b, 21a, 34a, 43a, 60a, 78a, and accidentally on 67a due to lookups being broken.

The reason -snip- mode was created was to hide users' IP's since they would've been shown instead of usernames due to the pxls.space server being migrated to a different computer. Since then it has been just been used as an interesting gimmick on some gimmick canvases.

Cooldown event

The Pxls developers may sometimes temporarily lower the cooldown between getting pixels as a fun small event, or to make up for lost time if the site went down unexpectedly.

Canvas reset

A canvas reset is a mechanic of pxls.space in which the current canvas changes to a new one. These usually take place at 5:00 PM UTC (or 4:00 PM UTC from spring to autumn for daylight saving time), and last around an hour. A canvas resets once the canvas is deemed “full” by the Pxls staff (usually around a month). Resets get announced around 3 days in advance in the Pxls Discord server and in the notifications tab on the site.

Terminology

"Fiddle" related terms

"Fiddle abuse" is used to refer to "fiddled" projects that have excessive/bad dithering, anti-aliasing, and/or bad palette conversion. The term originates from the now-deprecated pxlsFiddle, which was originally used as a tool for such conversions.

The term "defiddling" is the act of manually cleaning up an art piece using a photo editing software by removing any out of place pixels generated by whatever method was used to either downscale the image or convert it to the Pxls palette. A guide on how best to defiddle art can be found here.

"Virgin" related terms

"Virgin" pixels are pixels that no user has placed on. "Virgin abuse" is when an art piece or lattice shares many colors with the initial canvas, meaning only a fraction of the art/lattice has to be built. Some users dislike when others use virgin abuse to construct art/lattice since they see it as being a bit lazy and not putting in the full effort to construct their project.

"Devirgining" is the act of placing pixels over virgin pixels to devirgin them. Devirgining is sometimes done by users to make their project feel more complete.

Users have the ability to view the "virginmap" by pressing the X key which shows which pixels are still virgin pixels. Virgin pixels appear light green, while non-virgin pixels appear black.

There is a setting Pxls developers can enable that causes pixels placed on non-virgin pixels to make the pixel refresh cooldown longer (1.6x by default). This setting has not been enabled since Canvas 18.

<1ker

A term used, often condescendingly, to refer to users who have placed less than 1,000 all-time pixels.

Community creations

Clueless

See Clueless.

Happy New Year

This phrase is typically said in Pxls chat by a few users at the start of every hour. It started as a joke by Pxls user fisk during New Year's at the end of 2023 with them continuing to say "Happy new year" long after the new year had started. Some other Pxls users noticed and joined in wishing a happy new year, with others noticing them and joining as well leading to the phrase being as widely used as it is today.

The reasoning for Happy New Years typically being said at the start of every hour was caused by the Pxls staff telling fisk they are only allowed to say Happy New Year 3 times per hour.

The phrase eventually grew so popular, an entire faction was made that builds new year themed art on the canvas.

:welldone:

See Steven the Cat.

:ThisCanMeanAnything:

ThisCanMeanAnything, otherwise known as a "Bag," is a small sprite brought to Pxls by Bezimienny and shadow_z_az. It comes from the game "Knights of Pen And Paper 2" and is intended to be a guinea pig. However, this fact isn't immediately obvious, so users on Pxls began theorizing what it could be (including but not limited to: a kangaroo, a rat, a bag, a fetus, a potato.) People also used the bag emotes to express various different emotions. Quickly, people started adding stuff on to "bags" or creating a new bag entirely. The naming convention for bags is "thiscanmeananythingbut-x."

Over the course of time two separate bag factions have been created: Bag Faction created by Bezimienny and shadow_z_az, and Bag Nation created by Mr. Sneke and House-5.

Canvas 43a depicts a large bag as the placeable area of the canvas.

A list of all the variants that have been made of the bag can be found in the #bags channel in the Bag Nation Discord server.

The original bag sprite

Carl

Carl is a green bird designed by the user TattleKat on January 29th 2020.

Annie

Annie is a character/inside joke created by Pxls staff. She was mentioned in the canvas announcements for C34, C34a, and C36.

The story goes that canvas 34 (a teddy bear) was given to the community by Annie to be colored. Canvas 34 was stopped midway through for the gimmick canvas 34a, which had the design of a few viruses. The "lore" reason for the surprise gimmick canvas was that Annie was taking a COVID-19 test and the teddy bear was quarantined. Annie was mentioned one last time in the announcement for the ending of canvas 36 (a slice of cheese) stating "yall took Annie's cheese smh, what is she going to take to the picnic on the beach now."

This was one of the only times "lore" was added to the canvases, the other time being on canvas 67a.