polkadotpatterson

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Shoreline Paradoxes

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okay this is the last one i got an idea for at the moment so idk when ill make the next one of these . april is such a cutie patootie but shes so ass at the game sometimes 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️

gotta ponder for a bit for these other guys

[polkadotpatterson]

fashionable baseball

[polkadotpatterson]

british fantasy name: wicklebort smee

american fantasy name: aethiraimia “mia” windfeeler

chinese fantasy name: zhang youming (minimum two pages of in-text etymology about why they’re called this)

[polkadotpatterson]

*clears throat* Hey my friends, I attended a bee wedding this past weekend. I bet you would like to know how was it.

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*clears throat* Hey my friends, I attended a bee wedding this past weekend. I bet you would like to know how was it.

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This might be the worst ai generated hand I've ever seen. Like, that's TWICE the normal amount of fingers. Is Dot out here being Fingers Georg and messing up the stats of How Many Fingers Do Human Have or what

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submitted by @orbleglorb

[polkadotpatterson]

5 and 11!

doing them in reverse order for s&g s

11: a fic you think is a hidden gem/deserves more reads.

oh, all of them. but i will put in marn my friend marn's big news, come soon. a landry fic who would have guessed, ... and i'm going to class this as a fic that deserves more reads because compared to waveridden's published fic of the same time period, this one is seriously lacking in hits. but waveridden's golden is a good read. also it's another tigers fic... sort of. full of devastating lines about dead tigers, anyway

5: a gen fic.

so many blaseball fics are gen, so i will do one that also isn't about characters that i personally ship together, even if the fic itself is gen (so there go all my borrowed time favorites lol).

hey here's two more tigers fics. the long way down by marquis (i just reread it and i am Losing It) and ad astra by peaksykids. i'm gonna drag y'all folks to discipline tigers if it's the last thing i do

by the by, it occurred to me that i could be writing descriptions of these fics. but no. you can all just take my word for it i think

[polkadotpatterson]

fic rec ask game

Inspired by the bug me for fic recs ask game. Send an ask with a number and get a fic rec!

Recommend a fic that lives in your brain rent free.

Recommend a fic that is not posted on AO3.

Recommend fic that is less than 5,000 words.

Recommend a fic that is over 50,000 words.

Recommend a gen fic (no pairings).

Recommend a fic that does something cool with format or structure (epistolary, social media, 5 things, non-linear, etc.)

Recommend a fic that uses a trope you love.

Recommend a fic with an interesting premise/concept.

Recommend a fic from a book fandom.

Recommend a fic that is more than 10 years old.

Recommend a fic you think is a hidden gem/deserves more reads.

Recommend a fic that formed or changed your opinion on something (characterization, backstory, relationship, etc.)

Recommend a fic you've re-read multiple times.

Recommend your favorite fic.

Recommend any fic of your choice.

[polkadotpatterson]

1, 3, and/or 6. do as many or as few as you want!

1: a fic that lives in your brain rent free.

so many so many forever. y'all are gonna get sick of me recommending the same fics over and over again. but if you're on my blog you HAVE to read cloudybeams' electric wonder of the world, which may be my all-time favorite blaseball fic-- it's basically required reading on my blog.

also marn my friend marn's knows what he's gotta do, which informs a lot of my hall vibes. marn is my favorite writer for mike and derrick interps honestly.

i know i've recommended both of these before but they are probably my top two, so everyone needs to read them <3

bonus: two unfinished works i desperately need to be finished. to all the burning things by babytriumphant, and no escape by marquis

3: a fic that is less than 5,000 words.

many many blaseball fics are under 5k. uhh let's go with solitary deep sea fish by marn (really great) and an elip dean tumblr fic by my friend salthien. as a bonus, have another marn fic (do you sense a pattern here) that is also a tumblr elip fic

6: a fic that does something cool with format or structure.

i know there's a lot of 12x100s in the world, and i could of course link you a bunch of those, but i would be remiss if i didn't go for a twine, since blaseball has a number of them. we'll go with the classic, elliotfromseattle's let's tear up this rotten world together, and then two staradavid firefighters twines, run from me or rip me open and what might have been lost (don't bother me)

[polkadotpatterson]

god i love writing blaseball

[polkadotpatterson]

4 years of dick and balls. happy dick and balls day

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yupppp another bowl of black orbs for breakfast

[polkadotpatterson]

daily affirmations:

i am a credit to the team

i am like a laser beam fired at the sun

i need a theme that goes like "nana nana na na"

my redemption arc is coming up

[polkadotpatterson]

okay. it's been a hot minute since i've done any writing, we have to all agree to let that go. mmolb below the cut

Night has comfortably fallen in Kansas City by the time the Stormchasers get home from Dallas. Offloading from the truck is a somber affair—there is a sense of sundown separate completely from the darkened sky. For a bright minute, it had seemed like the Stormchasers could stand up to the juggernaut of the Instruments—but in extra innings, they fell before Dallas’s relentless machine, and now…

The team disperses almost reluctantly. Diego stops by every person individually to urge them home, and it’s only after he’s done that that the parking lot begins to empty. One by one, the Stormchasers wander off to their cars or bicycles or just down the street, beginning the process of shedding their mantel as baseball players and settling back into life in the offseason.

Before Diego can get to her, Gabriella slips away and into the stadium.

At night, once the fans have left and the stadium seating is all empty, the Thunderdome echoes with the sound of distant storms. It's there even when the roof is closed and the vast screens suspended over the outfield are turned off, there almost noiseless—something between ambient sound and the haunting feeling of silence where there should be a roar.

A little extra batting practice never hurt anyone. Gabriella drags a pitching machine onto the mound and sets up at the plate.

A couple of hours later finds Gabriella sitting against the fence, the pitching machine turned off but not put away yet. The night is long: She may find time for more batting practice. Besides, now that off-season has come for the Stormchasers, the still night in the Thunderdome isn’t capped by sunrise. There is no team practice come morning, no schedule to pen in her reign.

Noise in the dugout startles her. Gabriella sits up from where she had been listening to the storms of the Thunderdome’s ambient almost-noise.

“Who’s there,” she says, not quite asking, tone just a little too harsh. Although there are many more likely scenarios, Gabriella’s mind immediately jumps to all the ways she could be murdered in the stadium, and all the extra-natural, universal ire she’s earned.

But Mollie Lai’s bespectacled and entirely non-threatening face pops up from behind the dugout wall, and Gabriella relaxes back into her slump.

“It’s just me,” she says. Something about her voice and her demeanor has always reminded Gabriella of a small woodland critter, timid and likely to become prey to some sort of large, vicious owl. She’s not sure what the owl represents. Maybe Dallas. The metaphor has kind of gotten away from her.

She shakes her head to clear it as Mollie climbs the dugout steps and walks sort of half-purposefully towards her. “Can I sit here, or do you want to be alone? ‘Cause if you wanna be alone, it’s fine, I can go somewhere else. I just—You know, I just didn’t want to be by myself tonight, and the stadium is creepy when it’s empty. Did you notice that? It’s so creepy—b-but it’s not like the stadium—I mean, the station—it’s not like the station is less creepy—”

“You can sit here.” Gabriella cuts her off with a gesture. She could hear the sullen, flat tone of her own voice, but if it bothers Mollie, she gives no sign, just grins in obvious relief and plops down.

“Okay. I just didn’t want to bother you.”

“It’s fine.”

The silence hangs between them for a long minute. Gabriella fishes a handful of cards out of her pocket and starts shuffling through them.

“Um, so anyway,” Mollie says. Just in time. The almost-noise of the Thunderdome had started to get too loud, invade too close into Gabriella’s space. Mollie probably gets it. “Um, I thought you played really well. During the playoffs.”

“Lot of good it did,” Gabriella mutters, selecting a card painted almost entirely blue but for a small scudding of clouds in the bottom right corner. Clear skies, gray to the east: the storm has passed.

“But you still played really well,” Mollie insists. Gabriella scoffs.

This particular card was earned when she was barely out of high school—she had traded in a card of storm clouds, and a family emergency had followed. Then, like now, it hadn’t been her that failed.

“You didn’t come here to tell me that,” she says, and Mollie squirms.

“No, um. Well, I just—I…”

They sit in silence again. Gabriella flips over her card, twice, three times in her hand, then puts it back in among the deck and keeps shuffling. From time to time, she has considered playing a card on another person, just to see what it would do. She selects another card: lightning striking an umbrella, sky almost black with twisting, angry clouds.

“What happens now?” Mollie’s voice is small, underwhelming in the vast space of the Thunderdome. Sitting on the ground, the far wall of the outfield seems even farther. The outfield has been Gabriella’s safe space these past months—she knows every clod of turf in center field, has trod them all in game and at night when she wanders the field, mostly alone, sometimes with the Chaser for company. Now, the distance is cold and bleak, ground and air stretching out before her almost infinite.

She sighs and shuffles the lightning card back into her hand. All this for naught. It is impossible to predict the whims of the force behind the cards based on the weather conditions they depict. Try as she might, Gabriella really wishes no ill upon her teammates.

“I don’t know,” she says. Mollie hugs her knees to her chest and looks no less prey-like than she did, but Gabbie draws one knee up and mirrors her position with the hand not holding her cards. At least at that, Mollie smiles. “I think we probably wait for another season.”

“What if there is no other season? What if this is it?”

Relegation. They’ve been talking about it in the Lesser Leagues. It’s mostly off Gabriella’s radar (so to speak). She concerns herself with her immediate vicinity: yesterday, today, and tomorrow, for the most part. But after tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, someone from their team could be sent to oblivion when the Lesser League champion is called up. She doesn’t think it’d be her, but…

“It?” she asks instead of confronting that possibility.

“I don’t know what to do,” Mollie admits, “if not play.”

Spiraling skies, cold and green, mammatus clouds and supercells weighted and bulging with hail and rain: Control by someone else, the nonexistence of anything beyond the edges of the storm. Gabriella looks at the card face up at the top of her deck.

“Me either.”

[polkadotpatterson]

mmolb + stadiums

If there was a stadium for every Lesser League team, the world would soon run out of room, and stadiums, and the money to construct them-- so there is a compromise. The Greater League teams get stadiums, vast monoliths springing like trees from cities' fetid concrete soils.

The Lesser League teams get offshoots-- fields along far-flung freeways-- yet all a tunnel away from their parent stem.

Kansas City's monolith is the Thunderdome, each of the doors in the bunker below solid wood and painted dark blue with a silver tornado emblem carefully drawn by some enterprising predecessor. They stretch on endlessly. Gabriella has never seen anyone go through them, except for when Lawrence walked out and Mika walked in. She's never seen one of the Lesser League fields in real life, either.