#I can’t ever forget Blaseball

[cryinginblaseball]

Goodbye Blaseball

I don’t think I’m being dramatic when I say Blaseball changed my life. I had been a bad place in July 2020. I wasn’t writing anymore, something I had been trying to make a career out of. Then I joined this silly game — there were players like Oliver Notarobot and Eugenia Garbage — and I knew I was in the right place.

What I got out of Blaseball was the best community I’ve ever been a part of. I have said this a hundred times before, but I’m constantly in awe of the community and what they can do — there’s been so much writing and art and music and software projects and all of it is amazing. The community pushed me to try to do better. My art got better and I started writing again — as of this time, I have 24 pieces on AO3, including a collaborative AU with my blesties, Cynda and Kit. I learned how to write faster, my writing matured, and I learned that perfect is the enemy of good.

I made friends, who’ve been an absolute joy and absolute gifts, and I feel lucky to have found them. My team, the Canada Moist Talkers, have been the best team, and I have so many memories hanging out in chat:

celebrating every Garbage Day when Eugenia got a hit

when we somehow managed to get PolkaDot Patterson

who because one of the core members of the team

losing Richmond and then Hobbs in the same season

resurrecting Jaylen and experiencing the Consequences

Ruby Tuesday

PolkaMunnion

Day X

and into Expansion:

Foul ball: 0-2.

I remember getting to work and finding out York Silk was gone

watching us win the Season 14 championships on my grandmother’s couch winning For York, the chat going supersonic

Dot getting alted and the emergence coming together of the Talkers and the Mechs to fix it

Manifest Pressure

You Hate It Here

and hey talkers.

I will never forget Valhalifax and Jasper Coven, my Blaseball son.

I cannot describe these events without sounding unhinged. These events are burned into my brain.

Someone’s brought this up already, but The Garage’s “Everyone That’s Left” has been hitting differently today, specifically:

I want you to feel joyous I want you to feel okay I want you to wake up tomorrow and fight another day

I want you to look back and see how far that we’ve all came I want you to remember them And carry on their name

(God, remember hearing “Everyone That’s Left” at the end of Discipline, after “Godspeed (Revised)”, when the Hallstars are all released and gone, and the melody of “Eyes in the Dark” started playing, and it sounded so triumphant and spirited and new?)

This isn’t the end. Blaseball will live as long as we keep it alive. There will still be stories to tell, there’s still art to make.

Oh, as far as I’m concerned, all of the players — the redacted players, the staticed players, the ones returned to the Hall, the buried players and the players on a quest, the players on current rosters, the season 24 teams, the prehistory players, and everyone left in the Blackhole (Blackhole) are all Released. Everyone gets to go home. Everyone gets to rest.

Goodbye, Blaseball. Thank you for being a turning point in my life. Thank you for making me better. Thank you for the community and the friends. The commissioner did a great job. I am all love you.

And finally, Be Gross, Be Kind.

[charaznablescanontoyota]

first line meme

rules: list the first lines of the last ten (10) stories you published. look to see any patterns you notice yourself, and see if anyone else notices any. then tag some friends.

these are aaaaaaall gonna be blaseball lmao. i got tagged by @waveridden!

the most peculiar day of your life (sc3 crabs) // excerpt from the handbook, twentieth edition, published june xx16:

baby, there’s a shark in the water (sc3 crabs) // when tommy john walks out of goodman high for the last time, there are three things he knows for certain.

feel the weight of what we owe (sc2 crabs) // ATHENA: Is the tape going?

lucky people (shaqedric, expansion era au) // excerpt from art of the side hustle: blaseball players exploring new careers during the grand siesta by justin breadcrime, via splorts illustrated

running just to keep your back in view (carson/quill, sc2) // Olive is the one who reads out the election results, ultimately.

miss my family, merry xmas (ella & eliot, sc2) // Broadcast #1 of The El & Ella Holiday Special, Sponsored by Maryland Public Television!

when the heat dies down (carson/quill, sc2) // The first nine times Carson Yates meets Quill Harrow, they’re trying to kill him.

forgetting you but not the time (sc1 crabs) // alarm: DON’T FORGET EMILY FRIENDO -10:00 am

no one lives forever (em friendo, sc1) // “hey,” em says, speeding down the beltway on the way back from bwi, “what’s the trench like?”

can’t promise tomorrow (but i promise tonight) (space ghosts, post-expansion era) // you are cordially invited, the invitation slid under the door proclaims, to the nonagon’s first ever spaceship prom, presided over by the inimitable dj logi horseman.

posts that make extremely apparently how much i’ve fallen in love with script format/found document fics and out of love with capitalizing letters in the past four months lmao. also how much i tend to establish person place and time period in the first line of a fic which is not necessarily the worst thing in the world!

uhhhhh i am gonna taggggg @sanscena @impernaway @peeshykeen @crabmoney3 @haunthouse and anybody else who wants in!

[chorbyshort]

Eleutheromania

A wip for blaseball’s wip amnesty! I started this a while back and I do plan to finish it, maybe not in the near future, however. It’ll be heavily edited if I ever post it, and most likely twice as long. Happy funny frog Friday Saturday! 

It’s the thirtieth day of the season, 3:17 pm. No one on the Magic could say they have a close relationship with the Crabs, but York Silk is already crossing over the field to leave the stadium. 

In the time it takes for her eyes to scan across the field and for Washer to settle by her side she can see at least one Crab staring down on her with pity. She’s well aware the stare doesn’t stop even when she’s turned her back. It’s been a well recognized emotion ever since the first day she’s gotten to bat. She’s not sure if the other Crabs care enough to pity her. Recently she has a track record for making pitchers hate her and none of them know her well enough to care if she’s the next one to disappear. She can’t debate if it’s better or worse than whoever is full of too much sympathy that’s still carefully watching her. It’s not something she can think about when the people who really care about her are asking questions. Are you okay? Her instant response is that she’s fine. It’s easy to tell where the ball hit because her hand is glued on the spot. Chorby says It doesn’t hurt too bad. Never mind the way it flares up for the most of it and it feels sore. Or how it spreads down into her hand in different waves for a feeling she won’t forget. Eiz tells her that she’ll get an ice pack. That, in the mean time, Chorby should go lie down in a cabin for a while and rest up until it’s time to play again. They don’t want her to hurt her arm anymore than she already has. Her fate starts anew when Tiana offers to walk with her to the cabin. When there’s nothing she can do but say yes, they go. Neither of them say anything when there’s nothing that can be said. What fills the silence is the crack of sticks and tumbles of rocks. The steps that Tiana take aren’t the ones that disturb nature, it would be the life inside each of Chorby’s hops throughout the forest. Moves that are chalked up to what Eiz meant, of unnecessary movement that’ll hurt her in the end. Chorby finds it too vital to her soul to stop. Tiana doesn’t mention it, even after they settle themselves into the cabin. In the grand scheme of everything it doesn’t matter, not when both of them are aware of what the next step is. Someone has to say something. She has never hesitated to take a leap before. Her left hand tingles along with any starter in her head, it’s a rhythm. It reminds her of the way she strums her guitar during campfires. She doesn’t want to miss the next one. There is no choice. “I’m scared,” is what she starts with. The future is too blurry and her hand is too numb for her to remember what she ends with.

[mudkept]

Ok so like I was hesitant about writing in-depth Arturo meta because if you're not familiar, his shtick is that he's got an SCP style memory-fuck effect that means he's impossible to document, etc. In Teddy Duende's words, "There are many things we don't know about this world, and one of them is Arturo Huerta." I say this bc I personally find it fucking hilarious and fitting that there is so very little fan talk about him which is partly on purpose but also because he's very easy to forget despite being on the Garages since S1.

THAT BEING SAID, I miss the OG (cerca s3-4, before the big theseus' ship situation w the feedback) Garages and sometimes I get emo about people that don't exist so here's some thoughts about him anyways. It's going to be so so fucking long sorry I hate making posts 💕 /j

CW for blaseball-typical angst and discussion of death

Okay so obviously, Arturo Huerta as a character concept is genuinely very very funny and VERY blaseball. But y'know what else is very blaseball?? Getting sad and stupidly analytical about funny absurdist humor (I say this with so much fucking love like yeah me too </3). Like, being a killjoy and thinking about what it would really mean for no one to know anything about you the moment you leave their sight, that shit's horrifically sad, but it could also be More.

Here's some thoughts, all of them from my funny little brain aka pure headcanon

1. Arturo Huerta, and this weird relationship he has with death in blaseball. Getting into like sub-meta and I do not want to make this even longer than it already is but essentially the only way most people really really "die/unbecome" is through being forgotten. Arturo Huerta was never afraid of incineration, because in blaseball? If you're forgotten, you've already got one foot in the grave.

2. Arturo Huerta, and this weird relationship he has with his team. Of course he loves them, and they do love him (in return, per se? It's hard to parse that). But his team loves him as much as they reasonably can, given that to them, Arturo Huerta is just a name that's been on the roster for a while. On his part, it's hard to build a really strong attachment with anyone that's, y'know, going to forget everything they know about you the moment you leave their sight.

3. Arturo Huerta, and this weird relationship he has with guilt. It fucking sucks that he's never going to fully understand how other people perceive him, or don't. Would they remember conversations with him if they tried? Would they remember more than his name if he himself tried harder to...what, BE more of himself? Exist so hard that it would be impossible to undefine him? For all Arturo knows, they could be under the impression he's just not a people person. So there's always that little doubt that if he reached out more, played better, practiced harder, someone would grasp him. How can he be so much of himself that he's unforgettable? So real they can love him without it being granted? To earn something like affection entirely his?

4. Arturo Huerta and the weird relationship he has with Derrick Krueger and Jaylen Hotdogfingers specifically. Might let the Jaylen part be it's own post lol. There's something about them that can't help but feel personal. Derrick— unremarkable. He wasn't remembered, simply because he wasn't a very good player, and not much outside of that. That's, as horrible as it sounds, a wasted opportunity, right? It's worth something to just have a chance to be seen on the field, and be someone NOTABLE even if it isn't for your skills (citation: mike townsend). Maybe Arturo feels almost jealous; maybe he could accept being forgotten for something as simple as being an unremarkable player.

And then, Jaylen... Twice-dead, and quite literally dragged out of the Trench by her popularity, she was never meant to be forgotten. The moment she became a casualty of the game, the entire goddamn garage was named after her. But she played the fame perfectly, even when she was hated she was never insignificant, even when she was powerless she was never inconsequential. But, he admits, Arturo doesn't want to be famous. Not really. Jaylen's story, Mike's story, hangs over his head as a reminder that you'll lose yourself in fame as well. He would like to be mediocre. Maybe even above average, just part of the team, pretty damn good at pitching.

5. Arturo Huerta, and You.

So, remember his Weird Relationship to the team? It's weird because it's almost one-sided. One-sided in a very familiar way, if you've ever been yknow, emotionally invested in a fictional character. Canonically speaking, blaseball players have to be SOMEWHAT aware of the fans that vote and idolize and fill their stands, aka, us, but it's definitely not a mutual level of Knowing. That's the situation between the rest of the league and Arturo Huerta. He knows his teammates' answers to conversations they don't remember having, and their habits and messy breakups and their senses of humor. They knew his, at one point, before forgetting.

Arturo Huerta is in a unique position as a Blaseball Character, because he's so stuck in the in-betweens. One foot in the grave, so to speak. Halfway between spectator and player. Halfway between no one and someone.

Ok! So essentially I went crazy over Arturo Huerta because while characters are not people, he is a person character (?) and I'm giving him a desire to be known. Again, it's fun not doing unnecessary deep dives into player shticks but also my favorite cognitohazard deserves some love.

[everygame]

Blaseball (Web) 

Developed/Published by: The Game Band Released: 20/07/2020 Completed: n/a Completion: Maxed everything in the shop. Trophies / Achievements: n/a

Alright, if you’re here there are two options:

You already love Blaseball and just like reading about it.

You have no idea why people are obsessed with Blaseball.

Now, in the grand tradition of my article on Cinco Paus, because it turns out this tumblr shouldn’t just be about me finishing games and then complaining about how they failed me, I present:

Blaseball or: How You Learn To Stop Hating The Fact The Canadian Team Is Called The “Moist Talkers” And Love A Game That’s Usually Sold As A Communal Storytelling Experience (As Wank As That Sounds)

There’s a challenge here. Blaseball, once you’re in, makes you want to immediately gush about the cool things that are happening in the game, to tell the story of it, but unless you’re definitely tuned in to it, I think it can be somewhat alienating. Like here’s what I want to say, right?

That after the Raptors went out of the NBA playoffs I stopped caring (this is not entirely true; I stopped after the Nuggets put the Clippers out because spite/the lols) and was kind of looking for something else to obsess over in a not-too-active fashion. You see, what kind of got me into sports, as much as learning to enjoy the actual games, is the… theorycrafting? I might be using the term wrong. But it’s looking at the schedules and thinking, “ok, if they beat them, then they’re here, but if they get beat, then they might struggle there” or “trading X player for Y would be the best move… will we do it? Can we do it?”

It’s part of the reason why this year’s NBA bubble was such a success--they created a play-in situation for a group of teams on the edge of the playoffs, and then even though I don’t really care about any of the teams involved, there was so much drama, and so many ways for things to go, that you could spend ages just thinking about how X thing had to happen for Y thing to occur and then get excited if it happened or have to recalculate.

So: Blaseball. It is, ostensibly, a game in which you gamble on baseball blaseball games. I mean for the most part, I will be clear with you, that is it. It’s a game where you make bets and use your winnings to increase your ability to make bigger bets. It’s not even a particularly effortful example of this. There’s no clicker mechanics outside of one involving peanuts that turned out not to do anything, and all games are pretty clearly given odds so you can mostly fire and forget.

However. The thing you have to do with blaseball is actually the thing I have to do with a sport: pick a team and care. It’s not a baseball blaseball betting sim. It’s a sport fan experience. I say experience, not sim, because you will not be pretending to be a fan. You will be a fan, and if it’s for a made up team, who cares? 

I think for a lot of people (the kind of nerds who play this kind of game) that’s a novel experience and I think that for people like me (who like sports) there’s an immediate sense that people are being ironic. You know; “blaseball” doesn’t feel that far from saying “sportsball” and I can’t guarantee that a lot of folk aren’t enjoying it… wrong. But then I also feel like people enjoy actual sports wrong so fuck it (I’d just warn you that if you go hard and join the discord--which is kind of necessary--you might find some people… annoying).

So you might think I’ve just described a few things at cross purposes there: I said you’ve got to be a fan for this to work, but then I also said that the NBA bubble succeeded because it made me care about teams I didn’t care about because of theorycrafting. Well, not exactly: what I’m saying is that in this game you’re going to need one (the ability to be a fan) to make the other pop.

I’m lucky here, because I’m Canadian (among other things) immediately and violently defending the one Canadian team in the thing is instant. I don’t need to put any effort in. I’ve never been the kind of guy who could just pick any team because I like the look of them, maybe you are or maybe you’re actually going to have to live in Charleston to want to support the Shoe Thieves, but let me say: if you are not American, the only correct decision is to support the Moist Talkers despite their terrible name (that I have come to terms with.)

Anyway, now I’ve given you the background, let me explain what happened last season to my team.

During a game, an legendary undead pitcher swapped places with our worst pitcher before, in another game, swapping places with a dog who used to be owned by one of our previous players. Then our fans started a campaign to make sure our best pitcher, who was trapped inside a peanut, would be idolised enough that they’d meet the “Monitor” a huge squid god, which most people assumed would kill them. At the end of the season, the squid cracked open our pitcher’s peanut shell, chose not to eat them and as a result saved them from the end of the post-season, where a vengeful peanut god turned all the players trapped in peanut shells (or, uh, who had Peanut in their name) into an evil team who then played the season champions in a RPG battle-style blaseball game (with hit points and everything) and cursed them. Then, at the end of the season blessings were handed out and thanks to having our best pitcher and receiving and absurd four blessings (including one which increased the size of one of our batters and one that gave a player a fishing net) we were suddenly one of the best teams in the league… with the danger that we might actually win the next season and be forced to fight the peanut god.

Now, as I said above, there’s a fair chance that seemed like absolute drivel to you. And even if it is exciting, I think the most important thing to do is to scroll back up and look at the screenshots and remember that the game doesn’t really have any graphics. Blaseball games occur in a tiny window with a diamond graphic, and so it’s a bit like watching just the corner of the screen in a baseball game. It is not particularly entertaining to watch games (although you can learn how to be captivated by it anyway). The game also, despite not being anything, can take up a massive amount of mental real-estate because you’re going to be checking in on it every hour of almost every day even though all you’re doing each time is clicking ten things and checking scores. It’s probably much too much, and it gets worse when you start to engage with the discord, because as a fan you really have to co-ordinate how to vote for blessings to make sure your team is always improving and you’re raising money for a good reason.

Alright, by this point it’s almost sounding like I’m trying to talk you out of getting into it, and I *do* recommend you don’t sicken yourself of it too quickly by checking it all the time. But most importantly I sort of glossed over what the genius aspect of Blaseball is: that being a fan has a weird, roundabout effect on how well your team does, and that reflects the fact that being a sports fan is not passive. When you watch a game you’re somehow putting everything into it even though you can’t affect anything. It’s why you spend all that time theorycrafting. Here, you, as a group, pool the votes you’ve spent all week raising money for and try and make your team what you want it to be. You don’t get to change what’s going on in a game like it’s Twitch Plays Baseball, or something. That wouldn’t be a fan. In Blaseball, instead, what you do is you try and make your dreams real via collective wishing. It’s only the slightest step up from just being a fan of a real team, and it gets to the heart of the communal experience of being a fan.

If I was the NBA, the NFL or very specifically the MLB I would 100% be looking at Blaseball and how to learn from it. I think there’s a crass version of it--imagine fans of teams in the NBA bubble could have voted to like… make sure their team got the nicest hotel rooms, or nicer meals or something--but giving fans a way to boost their team (outside of the brute force of their psychic power in a home game) by, I don’t know, checking into an app or otherwise engaging is a truly interesting (and honestly kind of disturbing, for people who hate the implications for tracking) concept.

Anyway. Try Blaseball! Pick a team, bet based on the odds, invest in snake oil, idol the best pitcher every game you check, but don’t check too much (and invest in the pitcher pendants, once you’re maxed buy votes and join the discord to find out what your team is voting for/get involved in the conversation. That’s it. But it’s pretty cool.

Will I ever play it again? I mean, it still feels a bit rich to say I’m playing this but I’m invested at least until the Moist Talkers win a season. Which could be this season. I’m really interested to see how much The Game Band expand this, too--I can think of a lot of ways that fans/players can be ever more empowered, but I’m interested in how carefully they could destroy the balance, and so many ways this could simply be more entertaining to look at and engage with (I mean the fact that you have to go to external sites for things like future schedules is kind of wack imho.)

Final Thought: There’s a ton of other stuff people like about this game--making up stories about the players, who they are, drawing them--and the nice thing is I don’t give a flying fuck about any of that and I don’t really have to. You can completely ignore the wiki’s fanfiction if you like and just deal with the reality of the game and how you personally react to it. Or you can really get into it and care about it way more than what’s actually happening on the field. I don’t care, I’m not your dad.

Even if I did just spend a long time shouting at you about sports.

[waveridden]

You were talking about the Snackrifice which made me want to go read the Snackrifice fic again, so how about a director’s commentary on something from that?

would you believe me if i told you that it actually started with the shell-epath pun

anyways some actual fun facts. originally it was all going to be wyatt’s point of view but i got very worried about it becoming repetitive, especially the making-connections scenes inside the shells. i don’t normally bounce between multiple viewpoints (maybe this is just me being weird?? i very rarely if ever alternate) but i think it works really nicely here because pothos francisca and jessica all sort of thrive differently in the different phases of shelled-ness

i actually almost didn’t finish this fic because i started it... probably at the very beginning of season 9? which means that pods happened and i was like oh jesus christ i can’t write this because they’re villains now i don’t know how to handle that. honestly i have spent a lot of time thinking about if, in this specific interpretation of events, they were brainwashed or pods was voluntary. i do not have an answer so don’t ask for one but i do have many many thoughts on whether or not pods was voluntary

also lastly the comment i got on this fic that i think the most about was one that said like. “you write york like he’s a little kid.” to which i say: dude, eight years old is SO young. i know that we have a lot of fun here making lore, but york silk is a third-grader. york silk has not learned long division. york silk probably learned cursive like three months ago. york silk is a CHILD. i write a lot about teens in blaseball but y’all know that i hate movies where bad things happen to kids, and while i think aging him up eventually was the right decision i am very adamantly “no kids in blaseball” and barring that i am very adamantly not going to let anyone forget that he’s a fuckin’ kid

[tchotchkeshelves]

"things you said at 1 am" kiss my bat ppppplease?

1) things you said at 1 am

The glow of late night television bathes Kichiro’s otherwise dark living room in a soft warm light. From where she lays on the sofa, head resting in Allison’s lap, she couldn’t even tell you what show was playing anyways. 

They should both be asleep by now, but neither of them are used to having so much time together free of fear and distance. She’s too afraid to waste it and although it goes unspoken, she knows Allison feels the same. And so they stay up late every night just reveling in the fact that for once, they can be a normal couple. No incinerations, no feedback, no gods, just getting to sit in each others company and tune out the TV with chatter.

“Kichiro?” Allison asks softly, absentmindedly playing with a strand of her hair. 

“Yeah babe?” 

“What do you think we’d be doing if blaseball didn’t exist?”

She grins. “We’re getting hypothetical tonight?”

“Kichiro, you forget I’m a poet. Hypothetical is what I do.”

“A poet now? I thought you were too punk for that.”

Allison playfully smacks her arm, “Hey! Poetry is punk as fuck. Besides, what do you think I did for the garages?”

“Play the xylophone?” 

“Yes but- I swear if I didn’t love you so much I would hate you right now.”

Kichiro snorts. “You should put that in a song. Call it Kichiro 2.”

“Oh gods, please don’t remind me about that song. I’m a whole different person now I swear.”

“BS, you’re still a lovesick fool to me.”

Allison drops her hair back onto her face. “Whatever, I’m not the one on a team literally called The Lovers.”

“Hey! I never said I wasn’t a lovesick fool.”

They’re both laughing at this point. It’s the kind of mirth you only get when the rest of the world is asleep. As if you’re the only people in the whole universe.

After a pause, Allison perks up. “You still never answered my question y’know.”

Kichiro does think about it, but at this point blaseball is so much of what she knows, she can’t imagine anything else.

“I don’t really know, I would hope you were there with me though. Why? What would you be up to?”

“I think I’d still sing, I’d be every closet punk’s gay awakening,” she laughs. “No, but seriously, I think I’d have my own band. You could totally be in it too. We’d be the biggest power duo the world has ever seen.”

Kichiro grins despite herself. “You know I can’t sing.”

“Yeah but you’re hot so no one would care.” 

“Hey!” 

“What? It’s true!” She looks down, “You know one of these days when all of this is over and blaseball is done with us, we could totally start that band.”

Kichiro knows it’s just late night fantasizing, but there’s something in Allison’s voice that makes her want to believe it could be true.

“And what would the band be called?”

Allison smirks. “WLW Catnip.”

“Too on the nose.”

“Do you have a better idea?” 

Kichiro yawns. “Tell you what, we go to sleep now, and then we can decide on the name in the morning.”

Allison grins and ruffles her hair one last time. “Anything for you.”