Day 45 - r/place shuts down after 72 hours, WHY was it created?, Emma is an ENIGMA

03 Apr 2017 100daysofwriting · books · writing

If you didn’t know about r/place, I will give you a lowdown on it. It first started as an empty canvas apparently. When I went to it, there was a lot of pixel art there already. Anyone can place a pixel anywhere, with one catch: you can only place a pixel once every 10 (later 5) minutes. This is how the canvas looked at the very end, about a couple hours ago when r/place crashed and the whole project was ended. Initially, I thought this was a social experiment to prove that there are more constructive art-makers on reddit than there are trolls who only want to destroy everything good and honest. Was it, though? I couldn’t find the first post on that subreddit, which I am somehow convinced would have consisted of some rational of building this thing. I will keep trying to find out why this thing stayed alive for 72 hours and then just stopped.

It would be safe to say that people did indeed come together and made something great starting from an empty canvas spewed with NSFW messages to the final form of the canvas which had a lot of flags, the GNU/Linux penguin, Counter Strike logo, Tesla logo and SO much other art that wasn’t created by one person. This was a fun thing that was around for three days and I got to experience it in real time! And not in retrospect. There have been so many 2-3 day trends that I have missed out on simply because I was tuned out and doing something else and was late to the game.

Inched a little bit further in Emma, finally she starts to “get” Elton! Harriet is soooo being taken for a ride! But there is this particularly fascinating and disturbing paragraph. Emma is daydreaming about Frank Churchill, who is a mysterious character who’s never been seen by anyone in Hartfield, and herself being seen as a couple in everyone’s eyes and RIGHT AFTER that, Weston (Miss Taylor’s husband) calls her up and tells her that he thinks Frank and Harriet would make a perfect match and she doesn’t bat an eyelid before answering! Not even in her inner monologue! HOW?! This is disturbing because this is weird behaviour, if you are daydreaming about someone and their parents want you to arrange a match for them with a friend of yours, what would your reaction be? (This is totally only going to happen in a late 18th century book where you call your father Sir and all the conversation is painfully formal and to the point and asking after other people obediently because that’s what you do.)

Emma Woodhouse is an ENIGMA. Frank Churchill is also an ENIGMA.

POST #45 is OVER