while i'm at it, point 8 also seems pretty random. who is to decide if background has a purpose if not artists themselves? in the end, transparency is just technical aspect - any piece will inevitably have a background - even if that background is provided by the colour of website - there's no such thing as transparency on our screen.
while i do agree with gawrone's argument regarding automation, shouldn't be the rules worded differently then? because following surely sounds restrictive and against non-manual pixel placement:
"Automated effects such as gradients, glows, blurs, semi-transparent layers, etc, are not allowed unless these effects could reasonably have been achieved by hand..."
and the quantic dust seems to go exactly against that rule.
i'm not saying it's necessarily bad thing, i'm all for automation. however i do feel that piece is more low-res art than pixel art, even though i like it. but my opinion on that is not important.
all in all i'm glad there's ongoing debate as it is quite impossible to come up with simple yet universal definition of pixel art (or any art). so let me bring my two cents:
for the sake of fairness i believe the rules should be revisited and altered, so in the future they won't seem arbitrarily applied.
quite recently there was pretty heated debate about using of gradient. which is clearly prohibited by the rules. that piece got accepted.
and now this piece, which is also (apparently) against the rules - i have a hardtime to believe someone is so insane to make by hand those semitransparent layers over animated background. also the author admitted automated indexing, it seems like the quantization was applied to the video of the woman, which -imo- is what rules describe as "automated effect".
and even if all of that was made by hand, the question is: does it matter? because i would argue that the process doesn't matter, the result does. that makes the answer to the question "what is pixel art" even harder, but let's keep it simple for now: if this piece is accepted and the use of gradient was recently accepted as well, then point 5 in the rules has to be changed if not removed completely.
Surely this piece would have been rejected without much discussion 6 years ago. That being said, the artist informed us about the processes of how he 'deliberately' pixelled all of the art. And although some of which aren't the conventional ones (manual pixel placement) we normally use, we concluded the end result (background and character included) is not out of artist's conscious decisions and thefore voted to approve the piece.
We could avoid discussion simply by rejecting it but it would be the poor choice considering the artist is trying to demonstrate new ways to make pixel art.
Would that mean we would approve some of the old pieces that were rejected in the past? Some yes, some no. We would also reject some of the (very famous) pieces if they were submit today.
We change, we transform, I can tell you that this piece caused a lot of internal discussion before a decision was made. It's not the first piece with these kinds of effects to be approved, but I can't guarantee what our opinion will be on a future piece.
What does manual pixel placement mean?
How much of a piece should be manually placed to be approved in the gallery?
How should the PJ mods or community check if a piece adheres to these rules?
1) Arworks are never rejected becasue of "lack of manually handled pixel placement". Please read the rules carefully. You won't find a rule that all pixels have to be placed "manually", and that is good, becasue then even simple fill tool would have to be forbidden. So your wish will be granted 100% - pieces will never (and never even were), rejected becasue of reason you suggest.
2) This piece you link was a matter of a very long debate, and barely got in becasue of how the end result looks. Artist provided descriptions and links to references used for hand pixelling and actually, even if some of us were intuitively against it, we would have to change/add new rules, to be able to legitimately reject the piece.
3) You will surely see many rejected submissions in the future, due to obvious breaking of the existing rules, or (in case of controversy) artist admitting to it when asked, or someone else finding an actual proof.
https://pixeljoint.com/pixelart/140547.htm
Ok, I never want to see another rejected submission due to lack of manually handled pixel placement.
The pixels shall never be forgot.
Crap I completely forgot about jal's sense of humor. The silver star can stay. I'll put the chainsaw down. 
@Ed, don't worry about it. Sometimes you just need to let these things out.
@googlyay my boi missed u
@theo ive been gucci just been living a busy as hell life lmao
Welcome back Peyton, I certainly remember your stylish works!
Yes, most of us are still around, how are you doing yourself?
aww snap a bunch of yall are still kickin
howdy long time no see doubt anyone remembers me
Congrats on calling your piece done, @DioShiba! It was great to see you push yourself further and further with it 
41 hours and 30 minutes.
41 hours and 30 minutes and I managed to go nuts on something that I wasn't intending to go too crazy on until I realized just how much I can take advantage of every color possible after The B.o.B's feedback on discord.
And then everyone gave feedback and the piece ended up evolving in ways I didn't expect it.
woah
I got a lot I could muse on with this whole project I just finished.
That's very strange, can you share a screenshot? (either here or in PM). On my end there is definitely new art in NEWEST ART every single day!
I wonder what happened? Because apart from the weekly challenge work, NEWEST ART has not been updated for three days.
i commend you for being open about your depression, ed. it's more helpful than you think. it normalizes something very normal. many folks appreciate your extension! don't push yourself, and i'm happy you're feeling better 
Thank you for FixelJoint. It is fantastic. As a person who was strugling with depression for over 10 years, I wish you strenght in your fight. It is worth fighting, and I could talk and talk about it but I'm not sure if you wish anyone to continue the topic, and if chatterbox is a good place for that. If you ever would like to talk please feel free to PM me.
I mean, I can inspect the source of any extension, so in that sense it is open source, right? :p
Thanks for popping in :). And yes, there are always messages about FixelJoint because surprisingly there are still people who don't know about it, so we make sure to mention it from time to time 
.
Hey, folks! Long time no see... again 
I'm not sure if people are constantly complaining commenting about FixelJoint here or it's just luck that I see it every time I come here, but it's nice to see it still (kinda?) works! So no PJ v4 yet, I see, hehe.
(To those who mentioned FixelJoint and don't know me, I'm the guy who made it. Hi )
But seriously, thanks for the nice words (and bug reports!) everyone, it makes me very happy to see people are still enjoying it despite all its flaws.
I want to be very honest and say I have no idea if I'll ever come back to maintaining the extension. I really want to, just as I want to do lots of other things with my life, but I've been very depressed for years and basically unable to do much but exist. These last few days I've been feeling a little better (as it seems to happen twice a year?) and that was at least enough for me to come back here and talk to you guys a little bit. I really love this site and I love seeing familiar faces here. I'd even have liked to become real-life friends with some of you if I wasn't so bad at making friends. But the truth is I've been visiting the site less and less often, just as I've been isolating more and more from the world.
I suppose that's not the kind of thing I should be just randomly telling everyone here, so sorry for that.
(Hapiel: Actually it's still not open source 
There's no nefarious reason, no tracking or anything; the reason is quite silly, I'll admit: I always thought the code was really really bad and no one should see it un-uglified and unminified until I made it decent enough. I always try to change my own mind but get overwhelmed with ideas for improvements halfway and just give up again. It's true you can still modify it yourself, though.)
Well, I guess I could at least add a notice to the extension.
Anyways... I'm not sure what I wanted to say here. I see my message is all-around pretty confusing, but I'll post it anyway. I guess I'm just glad to see so many of you are still active and that I could at least post a message here again. Who knows for how long I can keep this momentum going.
Stay safe y'all :)
Silver star is the rarest of the stars by far. Bronze is for (non-social) contributions, gold is usually saved for adding something to the site such as a new interview or tutorial, silver is for extraordinary stuff or long term achievements.
PS: I gave the silver star to Jal. He told me not to hand it out without a very good reason.
lol, whoops, I didn't even check my own awards to see. I thought it was a bit weird that only Jal, Dawnbringer, and Hapiel would have one.
A quick glance through the member list shows it is not *that* rare, you have one!
Though I am a bit miffed I don't have a single star of any color...
Wait, is that true? Only three people have it? That *is* rare
In fact, it was Jal who always said that and gave it as sparingly as possible, which is why only DB and me have a silver star besides Jal...
The Silver Star is the highest honor! :) Didn't you know that?
Oy!
https://pixeljoint.com/p/3240.htm
Whoever gave jal the "All Time Mod" award better upgrade it to a gold star or I'm gonna get pissy! 
It's been static and stable for years, but it's open source so if you wish for it to grow you can always modify it yourself!
Actually yeah now that I've been messing around with Fixeljoint for the past couple of hours this makes the website feel a lot more smoother than without it!
Definitely want to see this add-on grow over time.
I see, now that I actually downloaded it I see what you mean far as the chat goes. I'm gonna have to mess around with this addon a bit more.
Thanks and 
nameste
It makes the PJ interface a bit prettier, prezooms art, gives you a lot of emojis made by PJers 
, adds a link to the PJ inspector on every image page, horizontal piece slider and background color changer, and more tiny fixes. Oh and all of these upgrades you can turn on or off individually so you can customise your experience however you like it!
What exactly does Fixeljoint do? tis interested.
Definitely having more fun browsing PJ with the Fixeljoint extention. This extention needs more attention.
i get neither logged out nor 500 error, however from time to time website is noticeably slower to load than other webpages and sometimes loading takes really long.
Happens to me all the time and I never go to the forums. Also, I still can't set my rank as level 7 Cthulhu without a 500 error. It's ok, I will survive. A broken man.
Only when checking the forums. And that's been a known bug since like... 2010?
It happens to me on the forum quite regularly. That started a month or two ago. I don't think it's happend to me at all on the main site though.
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