You seem to be such a great pixel artist that you totally cannot recognize jpeg artifacts! LOL, that is a compliment, actually. But lets see how clever you are:
1. Jpeg artifacts - none. Double-check before flaming someone. 
2. Stray pixels - true. This is a "messy" piece. Do I have to obey your clean style? Maybe I want to make it messy and dirty, or clean. If you've read (which you haven't) some history of art, you'd know that each style has its effects. Forcing one or the other is stupid and completely unprogressive.
3. High colour count - bravo! You got me! Tell me, what is the upper limit for number of colours a "proper" pixel artist can use? Give me the link, I want to read the rules! This piece has 256 colours, it's a GIF. So?! Cm'on, tell me the exact upper limit, if you're so smart. If there are no strict rules, then keep it to yourself (aka stfu).
4. Skill incostistency - eh? I really don't get it. Skill incosistency inside this piece or all of my pieces? With a few years of pause in between, I'd like to see your skill too. If inside this particular pixelart, then you know so little.

Your arguments are weak. If you want to tell me my pixelart is crap, you don't like the style, it's to blurry, not well defined or whatever -- than say it loud, it's your subjective opinion. If there are rules about number of colours, please give me the link, I want to obey the website's rules, I really do. But don't tell me there are too many colours as if there was some rule, while in fact you have some personal problem with more than 10 colours.
All you think of art in pixels is number of colors and clean lines. Call it art, but in that case I can write the software in 10 min which would rate the quality of pixelart.

And please stop flaming me because of my style and some invisible rules. I agree this is a messy piece and deserves a re-touch, but don't hang me for that.

p.s. respect to the guy who added Portal to fav! thanks man!

This is not pixel art. Jpeg artifacts, stray pixels, high colour count, skill inconsistency.  Making cocky comments like you've just done makes this even less believable:

"You know what, I'll make a black-and-white piece just for you ;) one-by-one pixel, of course. That should be art enough. Or even better, black and transparent, you can't be a better artist than that!"

A proper pixel artist would never make comments like that.

filters? like, lens flare? color reduction, yes. Not that I meant it as cheating: contest had no rules about number of colors, so I wanted to create a high-res (smooth) art. Go and flame me for that, why not?! You know what, I'll make a black-and-white piece just for you ;) one-by-one pixel, of course. That should be art enough. Or even better, black and transparent, you can't be a better artist than that!
Anyway, I did not start defending myself "before accusations were made" -- I edited image description after some comments, just to clarify things to newcommers like you. But if someone's gotta flame, someone's gotta flame

Yea, I know it's the only way of having some order inside of pixelart community, to treat 'real' pixelart where you place pixel-by-pixel. And it's really where 'real' pixelartists differentiate from other reduce-high-res-and-compress artists.
The piece of mine unfortunately got unfinished-it's smooth and stray pixels should've been cleaned-up but basically, it was made for 320x200px, so there's no talk about me cheating lol :)
Anyway, I promise I will fix this one and upload as new. Also expect some new stuff.
No hard feelings :)

Cya on pixelween, right?

There is obvious auto colour reduction there. When the software does your colour picking and dithering for you then it is not pixel art.

In my (not insignificant) experience of Pixelation they are much harder on NPA and questionable stuff than Pixel Joint.

Your point that its silly is an acceptable point of view. The reason PixelJoint sticks to the 'one pixel at a time' theory is because we are trying to see how much can be achieved with such a limitation. Because it keeps PixelJoint from becoming a free-for-all art depository like other sites are.
Because your other added pixels are 100% pixel goodness. Please don't take offense that this one won't be allowed in. Comparing your piece to any other is unfair. If you find any pixel breaks the 'one pixel at a time rule' then please report it. The PJstaff is not perfect and occasionally things get in that shouldn't. This was especially true several years ago and is never the case now.
Welcome to PJ and lovin' that crazy fish :)

I don't really think there is pixel-art way of shading. Except if you think of pixelart as placing every pixel with one-pixel brush. Could be. I also like pixeling like that. Though, limiting pixelart only to one-by-one pixel drawing would be silly.
Anyway, I've seen some other pieces around here (better than mine) which also shade soft and compress to get smooth dithering effect.
I'd rather say it's messy pixelart, which it is. There are no clean pixels/shape. Shame on me, I admit. Take a look at some other, cleaner pieces.

p.s. jalonso: I think it was Pixelation! back then they didn't have zoom option. And noone complained about stray pixels, everyone was positive! :) lol

Thanks for commenting! :)

It's definitely not pixel art. You can tell by the way that light is shaded, among others.

Seems to suffer from some icky jpeg compression artifacts as well. Definitely not pixel art.

No. It was not at PixelJoint for sure ; )

254 colors, stray pixels. not pixel art.