#AND VOTE FOR JAYLEN HOTDOGFINGERS !!!!

[spiritunwilling]

Hello my beloved mutuals and followers. On the basis of all the love you feel for me in your hearts please vote in this poll that is linked here:

[morethan0birds]

If you haven't voted yet for Jaylen in the Blorbo poll, do so here: https://www.tumblr.com/heathcliffyourascal/749670678423339008?source=share

If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry about it!

[blorbo-gerrymandering]

Final Round!

WAIT! before you proceed further you must engage with the gimmick for the final round. Which is...

A personality quiz! It will scientifically determine whom you should vote for!

To avoid people with trigerfinger voting before reading the above the poll will be below the cut.

[heathcliffyourascal]

Hello Players! Welcome to my gimmicky-est gimmick blog I've made! (also my least successful one)

You did well to find this, here is your reward!

[corvodumpy]

explain blaseball to me like I don’t know what baseball is

In the most simple explanation possible (simple does not mean short), it was a baseball simulator where the fans could bet on the teams with fake currency. The teams were all original teams and the players were randomly generated from their names, stats, position, down to their preference in coffee and pregame rituals. Fans would pick a favorite team and use the money they gained to buy raffle tickets, which were submitted into an online election system.

The election page contain simple things like "improve one of your players batting stats", "trade a player with the season winning team", or massive rule changing things like "The Top 4 Teams of the Regular Season must run an extra base next season" or "Every Season, a random team from each Subleague will become the 5th Playoff team. A best of 3 Wild Card series will happen on Fridays."

Fans would often work together to pool their raffle votes on what they wanted. The winners were pulled at random but the more votes you submitted the better your chances. The game took harsh turns into cosmic horror very quickly. The first season allowed fans to vote to "open a forbiden book" which resulted in the book cursing the game as a whole, causing solar eclipse weather which caused the umpires to occasionally turn into mindless killers who would randomly incinerate players mid-game. These deaths were permanent and the player was immediately replaced with no fanfare.

Fans often got very attached to their teams players, drawing art of what they look like or writing up stories about them, so their deaths often really meant something to a lot of people. Fans would often find ways to manipulate the simulation to do weird things, or try to push their team in interesting directions to reach some goal. The game devs often noticed what the fans were doing and would play into their games to cause many funny "monkeys paw" results.

One of the most famous involved a player named Jaylen Hotdogfingers. She was killed when the forbidden book was opened because she was the best pitcher in the league and it wanted to punish us. There was an option in an election one season to "steal the 14th most popular player onto your team" and fans quickly noticed you were still allowed to claim dead players were your favorite. Jaylen was listed as playing for the "Null" team because she was obviously dead, but it still counted as a real team. Fans succeeded in trading with this "null" team and jaylen was brought back to life. Fans refer to this as Necromancy.

When she started playing, she returned to pitching, but she started causing "Hit-By-Pitch"s, which was not a standard part of the simulation at this point. Players hit were marked as "Unstable". Eventually, an unstable player was incinerated, and that instability spread to another player activly in that game, and text read out "[PLAYER] was incinerated, A Debt was Collected."

So jaylen was spreading some "mark for death" on players on purpose to repay whatever God controlled this game for bringing her back from the dead. This lead to a domino effect of death until this debt was repaid that many fans call "Ruby Tuesday."

Overall the game had a few main plots, one involving us challenging/killing one of the gods of this game, the other fighting against the "boss" turning the game into a profit hungry hellscape. The fanart was insanely good, the unique stories every fan had about their team and players were always fun, and a lot of good was done for many different charities. Many fans would get together and make music, resulting in a band and record lable.

All fan communication was done through an official discord or team specific sidecords, so live games had live fans watching in real time. It really was a "you had to be there" thing, a real cultural event. Fans have done everything they can to preserve it. Nothing will ever match the energy of the live discovery of events in a live chat, but the messages are all still in there, and there's a website to replay the old games exactly as they were. And the blaseball wiki is a blast to scroll through even if you never watched it because all the player and team pages are filled with the stories fans made up.

Anyways Goobie Ballson did nothing wrong

*coughs up blood and dies*

[anonymous-blorbo-bracket]

Hey, it’s @blorbo-gerrymandering (and by extension @who-do-i-know-this-man)‘s mirror self. While this may appear to be a normal Jaylen Hotdogfingers appreciation blog, it is in fact a blorbo popularity contest. You’re free to organize and whatever else. Actually PLEASE do propaganda and tag me in it I’d love to see what you all come up with given this blog’s gimmick.

HOWEVER! Speaking of that!

You’re not going to know who you’re voting for (unless you’re observant)! I will be providing brief descriptions, and will refresh the descriptions to be longer (or include more/different details, we'll see. Depends on how much time I have during this tbh) each round, so as the contestants narrow down, you get a clearer and clearer idea of who you’re voting for! After the tournament ends, I will provide a de-anonymized version of the bracket, so you can all see how things shook out. Maybe you’ll find someone interesting you never knew about! The only potential for bias in this tournament is “since I had to choose the characters to avoid you all knowing them off the bat, there might be more blorbos from my current interest(s), for obvious reasons.”

Guesswork is welcomed, and will be reblogged to @anonymous-blorbo-detective without comment. That being said, please don’t try to "spoil" people on your theories in propaganda. A decent amount of the gimmick is that you're not 100% sure who you're voting for, and besides, you could always be wrong! Then where would you be?

Current bracket is here.

Tagging my mirror self @blorbo-gerrymandering / @who-do-i-know-this-man, as well as @infinite-tournament, for visibility! If you feel like reblogging this just on a whim and you're not tagged you can do that too.

[miketownsends]

Have been wondering for a bit, since it flew completely off my radar for all of the time it was happening. What was/is Blaseball? Like I know from wikipedia that it was a baseball horror game (?) but it really gives no impression of like. What was it like, what was so special abt it?

blaseball was, at its core, a cosmic horror baseball simulator, with some kind of TTRPG-adjacent aspects. it’s… hard to describe. in so many ways it was something you needed to be there for. but i can try!

there were 24 (originally 20) teams, based in both real (Seattle, Tokyo, Boston, etc) and fake (Atlantis, Hellmouth, Hades) locations. seasons lasted a week. games played out every hour on the hour starting at 7:00am PST on Monday and running until 99 games had completed. games were played out under various weathers, such as Solar Eclipse and Feedback, that could impact the players or the game at random. the postseason played out on Friday evening and Saturday. election results occurred on Sunday.

elections were the big interactive portions of blaseball. throughout the week fans could bet in-game money on the outcomes of games. you could then use that money to buy votes. the votes were used to either vote on Decrees, which were rule/game changes (decided by popular vote) or to try to improve your team through Blessings or Wills (decided via raffle). these could do anything from buffing a player to stealing a player from another team to giving your entire team a specific blood type to killing off your least-idolized player and replacing them with a new one to… any other number of things. this forced a kind of collaborative community effort because teams would prioritize certain things and try to steer their fans toward putting their votes toward those things to increase the odds of their team getting picked in the raffle.

the community was the big thing about blaseball and it’s why it’s kind of hard to explain what it was really like now that it’s over. every blaseball player was just a name and a randomly generated collection of stats. the community gave every one of these players personalities and stories and lives. the teams had their own lore and “personalities” as well, kinda. different teams prioritized different things and had their own team culture. some teams were really stat-focused, some were really insular, some were more heavily into lore and narrative.

i think i will tell you the story of The Resurrection of Jaylen Hotdogfingers. i’ll try to keep it brief. (it will not be brief, i’m so sorry)

in season one, the Seattle Garages are not a very good team. their lone bright spot is their ace, 4-star pitcher Jaylen Hotdogfingers, who is the best pitcher in the league. (she is also mayor of Seattle.)

at the end of season one, the fans vote for the Decree to open the Forbidden Book. why? obviously, because it is Forbidden. (this is the first but not last time blaseball fans ran headfirst toward consequences just because they could.) this has several very immediate consequences, one of which was the incineration of Jaylen Hotdogfingers. this is the first ever incineration. it is permadeath. moving forward, any games played under the solar eclipse weather carry the risk of a player being randomly incinerated and replaced with a new, randomly generated player. the Garages lose a lot of players to incineration in the early seasons, which combined with Jaylen’s targeting give rise to a significant “fuck the gods” sentiment amongst the fans.

as per Garages lore, Jaylen’s final words before she was incinerated were “we’ve just gotta make it to the playoffs.”

seasons pass. the Garages are still bad but getting better, slowly. they win a couple pitching blessings, which helps a little. one of the other Garages pitchers is a guy named Mike Townsend. he’s… pretty bad. definitely no Jaylen. Mike gets unfairly scapegoated for the team’s struggles, to the point where there is a real actual real-life song called “Mike Townsend (Is A Disappointment)” written about him by Garages fans. (this starts The Garages the band, which now has like 20+ albums and hundreds of songs. they are on Spotify.)

going into season 6, a new site feature is introduced. fans can choose to idolize a player and then they can earn passive income whenever that player strikes someone out or hits a home run or whatever. cool! partway through the season, a player for the Boston Flowers, Caligula Lotus, is incinerated. Caligula is a popular player, and quite a few fans had her idolized. one of those fans noticed that, rather than having the option to now idolize a new player, they are still idolizing Caligula even after her death, which means they can still see her player page. prior to this, players who were incinerated were just… gone. no way to access them anymore.

the player goes to report the bug. they are informed that this is not a bug.

about 15 minutes later, someone from another team, the Canada Moist Talkers, comes into the Garages channel of the blaseball Discord. they drop a link to Jaylen’s player page with just the message “we know how to get her back.”

one of the Blessings that season was a Blessing called Lottery Pick. this would allow the winning team to steal the 14th most idolized player in the league. (the top 20 players are visible on an idol leaderboard.)

Jaylen’s page had a button that allowed her to be idolized.

all hell breaks loose in the Garages channels (and throughout the rest of the Discord as word gets out). the thought is this: with some coordination, Jaylen can be moved into the 14th spot on the leaderboard. this will, theoretically, allow the team who wins the Lottery Pick to steal Jaylen from… wherever she is. (her team is listed simply as “Null Team.”)

the Garages close their channels to visitors briefly to discuss amongst themselves whether or not they want to attempt this (the Garages mantra is “the Garage is always open,” so closing the channels is a huge deal). it’s a HUGE, fairly contentious, discussion. there’s, obviously, a million things that can go wrong. a different team could win the Lottery Pick. Jaylen could get bumped out of #14 last minute. no one knows if it’s even possible to steal a dead player (and if it is, there will DEFINITELY be consequences). other teams are interested in potentially resurrecting former players, too, but the overarching league-wide sentiment is “first in, first out” - if the Garages decide they want to try and get Jaylen back, they get first crack at it, so the Garages HAVE to come to a decision.

no matter what, SOMEONE is going to push the button. Jaylen has, by this point, already made her way onto the leaderboard. the Garages fans decide “well, someone’s committing necromancy; might as well be us.” they inform the league they’re going for it and everyone starts strategizing to hold Jaylen at #14. some fans of other teams switch teams temporarily to the Garages just to put votes into the Lottery Pick blessing in order to increase the Garages’ chances of winning.

meanwhile, the Garages (the blaseball team)? actually having a pretty good season for once! they manage to make it into the playoffs for the first time (“we’ve just gotta make it to the playoffs”). they sweep the Philly Pies (two-time champions) and the Hades Tigers (two-time champions) to make it to the Internet Series (where they are then swept by the Baltimore Crabs, but that’s okay).

fan sentiment on Mike Townsend has also shifted by this point. he’s still not very good but he’s become beloved. fans mostly find his terrible pitching kind of endearing. there is a new song about him called “Mike Townsend (Is A Credit to the Team).” the song contains the line “your redemption arc is coming up.”

the morning of the elections comes. Jaylen is still firmly at #14 on the leaderboard. all anyone can do is wait for the results.

the Garages win the Lottery Pick, with 58% of the vote.

Jaylen returns to the Garages. as was the case with other similar Blessings which stole a player from elsewhere in the League, Jaylen replaces the worst player on the team for her position (pitcher).

the Garages’ worst pitcher is Mike Townsend.

usually, in a situation where a player is stolen from an active team, it would just be a player swap. however, Null Team is not an active team and Mike cannot be sent there, so instead, Mike is sent to the Shadows. at this point, the Shadows are a mostly-unknown and inaccessible site feature. he’s not DEAD, but he’s no longer on the Garages’ active roster. within an hour there is a song called “Mike Townsend (Knows What He’s Gotta Do)” about Mike getting Jaylen back for the team.

his redemption arc.

Jaylen’s return gives her a status called “Debted” that simply says “this player must fulfill a Debt.” no one knows what it means. probably it will be bad (it is). in the moment, it doesn’t matter. Jaylen is safe. she’s home. it’s a victory against the gods, against the Peanut. (the Peanut is a whole other story.)

this is not even close to the end of Jaylen’s story, or Mike’s, but this is more than long enough. and this is just one story - a big one, since it had a wider impact on the narrative, but every team had hundreds of stories like this. about big things, about small things. they took a random number generator and spun it into an infinite amount of stories. they made narratives out of spreadsheets.

it really, truly sucks that it’s gone.

[doctorwhoisadhd]

hi blaseball fans. vote now on ur phones

[astronomodome]

what is blaseball

Ok so first of all thank you for sending in this ask because it gives me an opportunity to infodump about something that's really important to me... Blaseball! There's no way I can fully explain the game or what it meant to people but I can absolutely try!

Now, you may ask (and you did), what is Blaseball? Blaseball (with an L) was an absurdist eldritch horror online baseball simulator hosted at blaseball.com. Each week, 24 teams with names like the Canada Moist Talkers or the Atlantis Georgias consisting of simulated players with names like Brisket Friendo or Jessica Telephone would play game after game for the enjoyment of fans, who mainly gathered on discord to watch and cheer on their team together. Fan interaction consisted of betting on games and using the currency (peanuts) gathered to vote in elections at the end of each week, which determined new rules and game mechanics to add into the simulation.

Eventually, several godlike entities (including a giant peanut, a capitalist coin, and a friendly squid known as the Hall Monitor) would make themselves known and add commentary in between games, try to get the fans to pick a certain option, threaten the audience for picking the 'wrong' option, and so on. Meanwhile, fans would regularly screw with the system as much as they could, finding weird ways to bend the game to their advantage and creating ridiculous scenarios.

One of the most iconic events from the early seasons of Blaseball involved working around the mechanic of Incineration, in which players could randomly get Incinerated by rogue umpires during games and sent to the Hall of Flame, where they were 'killed' and unable to play. The fans were able to manipulate a Blessing (a type of vote during an Election) that would send the #14 most liked player in the Hall of Fame (distinct from the Hall of Flame, fans could give peanuts to players to rank them higher) to the team that won the Blessing. Fans carefully maneuvered Jaylen Hotdogfingers, the first player to be Incinerated, into the #14 spot. When the Election was over, Jaylen was pulled out of the Hall of Flame and back into the game... with the tragic consequence that they now had a 'debt' modifier on them that would make players who played against them more likely to be Incinerated themselves. I don't know, Balseball is weird. But it's this weirdness that made it so much fun.

The fan space of Blaseball was hugely creative, mostly because the site itself was very minimalist and there wasn't much information canonically available about the players. Thus, fans were able to pretty much build their favorite characters to be whatever they want, and they did so. Every team in Blaseball is its own subcommunity with traditions and extensive fanon of its own, and that is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in a fandom space, honestly. I highly highly recommend checking out the fan-run wiki for just a glimpse at the absolutely massive amount of fan lore that the community came up with. It's this that truly made Blaseball the cultural phenomenon that it was and I'm proud to say that it inspired my art and my creative process in huge ways.

Now, you might be wondering why I've been referring to Blaseball in the past tense. Well... despite regular dev updates since the ending of the second 'Era' (story arc, basically) and a faltering attempt at starting a third, on June 2, 2023, the dev team suddenly announced that it would be shutting Blaseball down permanently, citing financial issues. This came as a shock to fans, who had been keeping the fandom alive on discord and elsewhere for months with no sign of anything too bad from the dev side of things. We were given a few hours' notice to say goodbye before the discord was archived. It was a really difficult time for a lot of us to see the foundation of a whole community just kind of vanish into the wind, but many folks carried on in their own side discords and on tumblr and twitter where regular fan spaces are. I was pretty far from fan spaces by that time, but the news still affected me a lot. I think it's super important that I keep its spirit alive in the best way I know how: by talking about it and being annoying on tumblr.com. I hope I can keep its spirit alive in everything I create. :)

A few more things that anyone interested in Blaseball and its legacy should definitely check out:

@waveridden's google doc A Brief History of Blaseball, which explains the details of Blaseball much better than I ever could in an easy-to-understand way.

The official Blaseball Recap, in which a put-upon Anchor gives a chaotic summary of the events of Blaseball and gets progressively less sane in the process. Genuinely a fun watch even if you don't care about the rest of Blaseball.

The Garages, an incredible band (idk their genre they just do what they want and thats based) composed of Blaseball fans who sing songs about it. Genuinely really really good. You don't need to know about Blaseball to listen to them but it does make things make more sense. I have an art project that's almost done that is in reference to their music so look out for that also. :P

[warm-mojito]

hi, just stumbled upon your account in the jet lag tag (thanks for the drinking game)! i've never heard of blaseball before, and unfortunately it seems i'm late to the party, but i'd love to learn what it was about! i love weird cool internet things

Hoo boy, I'm glad you enjoyed the Drinking Game! I sure can try my best to explain what Blaseball was. But quick warning, it's a lot.

Okay, so at its core, Blaseball was a Baseball Simulator, where you could bet fake money on simulated games, where players could die mid game. Hence the name Blaseball, which is a mixture of Blood, and Baseball.

Blaseball games took 30 minutes to an hour to play out, and would start new games at the top of the hour. Seasons would last a week, with generally the schedule being 2 weeks of games, followed by an average of 2 weeks of "Siesta", a time where no games were going, and almost nothing happened, that gave the developers time to crush bugs, and implement new features.

At the end of each season there was an election, where fans (us), could use the money we made betting, to buy votes, to vote in the election. Every season there was the big thing to vote on, The Decrees, which had wide sweeping implications on how Blaseball would continue to be played; as well as smaller things to vote on that impacted team performance, such as legendary items, or custom modifications that protected players from some fates.

To be clear, in Season 1 there was no death, and nothing weird going on, everything just seemed like your standard baseball game, very reminisciant of the 1968 book, "The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J Henry Waugh, Prop." By Robert Coover. That said, there was one very peculiar thing, and that was the decrees.

In season 1, the decrees were listed as:

Redistribute Wealth: The top five players from the Internet Series champion will be distributed to five other random teams in the league.

Relegation: The last place team in the league will be eliminated from the league, and replaced with a new team.

The Forbidden Book: It is Forbidden.

Obviously, The Forbidden Book was the one that was voted on, and that's when they really put the Blood, in Blaseball, as immediately after opening the book, the umpires went Rogue, and the best player, Jaylen Hotdogfingers (Please note this was July 2020, well before EEAAO), was incinerated, by one. In addition a Hellmouth would swallow the Moab dessert, and the team that was formerly known as the Moab Sunbeams, would henceforth be known as the Hellmouth Sunbeams.

The final change was that Blaseball received a Subtitle, and this subtitle was "The Discipline Era". There are a few eras of Blaseball, there is the Discipline Era, The Coffee Cup, The Expansion Era, Short Circuits, and The Coronation Era. Each one functions as essentially the next chapter of the story.

This said, it is regrettable that I have gotten this far into my summary of Blaseball without talking about the community that formed around it. It was passionate. It was bright. It was essentric. To this day there are few players, that had any playtime, that do not have at least one piece of fan art for them. There is a music collective that started up, that is called The Garages that made songs about the game, that are incredible (If you like Ska Punk I highly recommend their album The Skarages), which got their name from the in game team, The Seattle Garages. All of this for a list of names on a webpage. There was not official art of anyone in Blaseball. No physical descriptions. No personality included. The fans breathed life into the characters adding some, and the developers (The Game Band, who also created a game called Where Cards Fall that you actually can go play on Steam and Switch still) embraced it, and basically said all of it was canon and none of it was canon.

Did the fans have their fair share of drama? Of course, any time you group 10k+ people together, of course not all of them are going to get along. I mostly avoided this by spending most of my time on Twitter for Blaseball, instead of in discords, and using the Block Button liberally.

I could go point by point down the story of Blaseball, but I imagine that if you're still reading at this point, that you'll probably want to go do that yourself, and you can! Blaseball originally had a Fandom wiki, however they realized that the company Fandom sucked, so the fans in the Society for Internet Blaseball Research (SIBR for short), created a new wiki which can be found at Blaseball.wiki, from there you can learn about everything that happened, it's very well organized.

Last Friday, June 2nd, The Game Band announced after a 4 month hiatus that Blaseball would not be coming back, and that we would not be seeing an end to The Coronation Era. The reasons of which are complicated, and many. One of the developers tweeted out in the hours leading up to the announcement "(quote from man who died by a thousand cuts): what are you gonna do, stab me one thousand times", which is likely the situation, as sometimes it isn't 1 big cut that does it, but 1000 little ones.

I hope this helps you understand what Blaseball was, I am open to answering further questions in DMs.

[blaseballshipbracket]

BLASEBALL SHIP BRACKET ROUND 2

64 ships enter, one ship leaves! who will reign supreme? how will your faves fare? it's a tlournament for the ages!

this is the second round of the bracket. round 1 ran 03/30-04/06 - check out the results here. thank you to everyone who has voted so far! this round will run for a week starting sunday, 04/09. propaganda still encouraged, tag me if you'd like me to reblog something!

ROUND 2 MATCHUPS:

Leon Duncan/Andrew Trebek VS Finn James/Kennedy Loser

Flattery McKinley/Niq Nyong'o VS Tillman Henderson/Declan Suzanne

Baldwin Breadwinner/Alyssa Harrell VS Dominic Marijuana/Andrew Solis

Pedro Davids/Valentine Games VS Baby Triumphant/Castillo Turner

Yosh Carpenter/Sebastian Woodman VS Mcdowell Mason/Sexton Wheerer

Eugenia Garbage/Ziwa Mueller VS Caleb Alvarado/Isaac Johnson

Brock Forbes/Adalberto Tosser VS Lenny Marijuana/Chorby Short

Margarito Nava/Nic Winkler VS Inez Owens/Bees Taswell

Tyreek Olive/Landry Violence VS Val Hitherto/Nerd Pacheco

Luis Acevedo/Tot Clark VS The San Francisco Lovers

Famous Owens/Mclaughlin Scorpler VS Nerd Pacheco/Lars Taylor

Nagomi Mcdaniel/York Silk's Mom VS Jacob Haynes/Alaynabella Hollywood/Moses Mason

Jaylen Hotdogfingers/Jessica Telephone VS Sandford Garner/Don Mitchell

Rivers Rosa/Lou Roseheart VS Declan Suzanne/Edric Tosser/Baby Triumphant

Cornelius Games/Richardson Games VS Shannon Chamberlain/Kennedy Loser

Caligula Lotus/Beck Whitney VS Summers Preston/Stephanie Winters

[blorbo-gerrymandering]

Round 2

Baseball has sponsorships, right? If not maybe Blaseball does.

Propaganda Under The Cut

Jaylen Hotdogfingers:

The greatest came-back-wrong character ever. She's the mayor of Seattle. She's was the best pitcher in the league. She was murdered by an umpire in an act of divine retribution for the fanbase's transgression. The fanbase exploited game mechanics to bring her back to life. Immediately she murdered 12 people. She died again and got revived a second time as part of a team of undead players that killed god. She's a really awful batter. She has, like, 16 songs written about her and they're all really good. I thought about her every single day for a period of six consecutive months. I love her.

I'll be real. I'm an outsider to the Blaseball fandom. I don't understand it. I think they've crowdfunded characters from fictionalized fucked-up Baseball stats and a dream. I love seeing what the fuck they're doing in their eldritch sandbox just so much.

Simon Laurent:

I love him so much! Yay! Yippie! he got what he deserved tho

have i submitted him yet? if yes here he is again. what did you do to my French man, now he has anxiety, and maybe 50 other things. i can fix him, but it would require a lot of time travel and a complete lack of trains. as i can't do that, he instead gets his very own tumblr poll submission. one vote for train man is one dollar towards the invention of the simon-specific time machine. (your other guys cant come unless they have the same name sorry) its for a good cause

imagine: youre in the trolley situation. well an oh-so-kind tumblr user decided to give everyone who submits this character a get-out-of-a-train-free ticket! use that ticket, and you're no longer responsible for the death of someone (or you are no longer fated to die)!

[miketownsends]

i found blaseball in season 3.

the very end of season 3, and i remember i only found it because one of the NITW creators tweeted something along the lines of “ok i’ll bite what’s blaseball” and i went “what IS blaseball?” and i Googled it and suddenly there i was

i picked the Garages because i always have been and always will be a Seattlite at heart - i remember briefly deliberating over the Tacos (who were just the LA Tacos at the time!) and a couple other teams, but the Seattle pull was too strong

i remember that i joined either very late on Saturday or very early on Sunday - it was post the s3 finals because i remember seeing the Tigers as the s3 champions, but it was pre-election because i remember casting my lone vote for Eat the Rich

but this was RIGHT before the first siesta, and i had no idea what the timeline of a season looked like, and i went “well i guess i’ll check back in later” and then basically completely forgot about it for the next couple weeks and might’ve forgotten forever if i hadn’t seen another tweet from someone when it came back.

i remember watching my very first game on the bus to work. i think i must’ve missed the first day of games, i think it must’ve been a Tuesday, because i caught the bus at like 7am and i remember seasons not starting until 8am on Mondays. i watched the Garages play the Crabs (Garages lost). i remember falling in love with Avila Guzman and Allison Abbott and Malik Destiny (pre-catboyification!) based on nothing but vibes because i didn’t know anything about blaseball lore, i didn’t even know blaseball HAD lore. i think i found the Discord later that day, and i remember the Avila-Farrell feedback happening right around the time i joined the Discord.

i got my best friend into it at the same time and it turned into a hyperfixation for both of us. i remember sitting in their living room watching the finals for s4 while our partners sat by slightly befuddled by this thing that had suddenly taken over our lives.

i moved a couple hours away for grad school at the beginning of Sept 2020 and it was possibly the most miserable time of my life. i was lucky enough to be with family at least, but i was away from my now-husband and because of COVID everything was online and i am NOT a person who does well with online courses - when i had applied in fall of 2019 i had obviously assumed everything would be in-person. i had multiple meltdowns the first few months and blaseball was often the only bright spot.

the Jaylen necromancy, oh man. i remember when i first started looking up our lore and went “i missed out on a player named Jaylen Hotdogfingers????” she loomed so large over the Garages those first few seasons. her death kind of set the tone for us, especially as we kept losing players - every team wanted to fight the gods, but it felt so viscerally PERSONAL. and then one day i opened the website and saw her on the idol board with the little flaming skull next to her name.

i cannot even begin to describe the chaos i walked into when i opened the Discord and went to the Garages channel. it was just something you had to be there for. i was IMMEDIATELY team necromancy, because what was blaseball all about if not slamming big red buttons? and i figured if we didn’t, someone else would, so it might as well be us. a lot of folks felt the same. some didn’t. my mom called me at one point and asked me why i was talking about necromancy on Twitter. the Garages, obviously, decided to go for it. we had to try.

and at the same time, the Garages, somehow, were finally becoming a decent team. we made the playoffs for the first time in season 6. Jaylen’s final words, as per lore, were “we’ve just gotta make it to the playoffs.” we swept the Pies and Tigers - both former 2 time champions - to get to the finals. Mike Townsend, he who lived always in Jaylen’s shadow, threw out the first pitch of the first game of the finals. the Crabs swept us but we didn’t care. we had made it to the playoffs. we could do ANYTHING. we could bring our star pitcher back. and we did.

god, i’m just telling stories now, but to be fair blaseball is nothing BUT stories. i remember i spent a lot of that weekend in bed sleeping and crying because i was so depressed, but i pulled myself out of it enough to watch the election results roll in. to see Jaylen come home. to see Mike truly relegated to Jaylen’s shadow.

on Ruby Tuesday i was busy trying to unpack my room with my mom’s help. i took a break to check in on blaseball. games weren’t running even though they should’ve been. i scrolled through the game feed until i hit the Tigers-Moist Talkers game and realized just what we’d done, what Jaylen’s debt truly meant.

i didn’t always remember to watch the playoffs if the Garages weren’t in them, but i was watching when the Shoe Thieves reverse-swept the Crabs and were launched into a boss battle. Jaylen pitching against the puppets of a God. (the results of the Snackrifice.)

i cried when Jaylen went back to the Hall, even though i was sure her story wasn’t done. (and it wasn’t.)

the s11 finals between the Beams and Garages was one of the most emotionally draining things i’ve ever been through. we KNEW the Beams had us beat but the Sun 2/Black Hole shenanigans kept us holding on. i cried when we finally lost. and then the Keepers opened up the eternal concert in the Discord, and for hours there were hundreds of us packed in there, listening to Garages songs that sounded like you were hearing them played at a dive bar down the street because the quality was so bad and “singing” along, and eventually Get Normal came up, and everyone had been waiting for it, and. i don’t know. god, i cried so much. something about that moment of connection. something about the closest to a concert i’d experienced in a year. something about knowing it was the literal end of an era.

i don’t even know where to start with expansion. yeah it was an exhausting mess. my hyperfixation fucking LOVED it. i may have to do an expansion era retrospective/ramble separately because this is already too damn long, and expansion was SO much. for now i’ll just say that i will carry the way the Garages handled the final season of expansion with me for the rest of my life. it was so… poignant. watching us cling to our philosophy of “the Garage is always open” even though we KNEW we were inviting our own potential destruction through the door. choosing containment because we refused to save ourselves at the expense of the league but we could at least make sure the damage started and ended with us. making a beeline for the Hall because at the end of it we just wanted to go see our friends one more time.

i’ve mentioned this before, but when we melted the Coin i was at a minor league baseball game. it was the first game i had been to in probably four or five years and it was the first time i can remember actively CARING about baseball as an adult. i work for that minor league team now and i absolutely would not be doing that if not for blaseball.

god. i’m so, so sad. i will miss blaseball for the rest of my life. what a weird little piece of the internet i was blessed to partake in.

[catilinas]

Yken what I finally caved. I have to ask. What is a blaseball. How does one engage with a blaseball. Everything I see of it confuses and intrigues me

honestly at this point i am unsure myself it was a strange time in my life but it’s like. a cosmic horror random number generated baseball simulator bloodsplort with a heavy element of audience participation? as in the presence of spectators (you) is part of what keeps the players endlessly playing ball but also spectator interactions via. mostly weekly elections where you vote how to alter the rules of the game. are what can save the players from uh. peanut god iirc. you engage with it by making an account? logging on idk and joining a team and then placing bets on games. but it might work differently for whatever it’s coming back as i’m not the most up to date atm! there’s also a discord where you can like. scream. during games. and copious amounts of Lore about the randomly generated players and their randomly generated and yet deeply compelling narratives (who is doing it like jaylen hotdogfingers etc). also one of the teams (the seattle garages) have a bandcamp and a lot of the albums To Me are like. the equivalent of the iliad as an oral history of whatever the trojan war might have been. to the events of early blaseball seasons. highly recommend ‘the garages fight the gods’ ‘an incomplete and contradictory history of jaylen hotdogfingers: her trials and tribulations’ and of course ‘the mike townsend quintology’. oh also the uh blaseball ceo prime minister commissioner has a twitter but also got launched into space and??? i cannot remember wtf was going on there

[lenasai]

[KICKS THE DOOR DOWN] hi. >:)

i'm gonna put this under a cut because it's gonna be long as fuck (and probably incoherent because i'm eepy)

okay so picture this, it's season 14. early expansion era, starting to get just a little fucky, but not "holy shit this is too much" (that's season 19)

anyway: me, garages fan, looking at the stadium renovation options like "yeah no way are we gonna pick this weird mystery option"

because you see, all we really knew about that renovation was that it had something to do with feedback weather, which the garages had a love/hate relationship with. it would make sense under most circumstances for the musician team to like the sound-based weather, but it also burned us pretty bad in the past (most notably our beloved mayor and major plot character jaylen hotdogfingers, but also avila guzman, who has multiple songs written about her.)

okay anyway, latesiesta arrived. checked the results and....holy shit the garages voted for the mystery renovation

little did we know building the psychoacoustics renovation came with a ✨FREE LITTLE GUY!✨ wow! this ended up helping our secret "expand band" plan >:)

anyway there were twelve other free little guys distributed to the league, and ours was the tenth, so we named xem "max" (a shortening of "mason x") and immediately got attached (oops!)

and we went "how lovely! we got a free little guy with a strange new modification attached! i sure hope xe doesn't face any immediate existential threats! :)"

and then on day 73, we found out that strange new modification let xem copy the modifications of random opponents in feedback weather (and teammates in reverb, but that's not super relevant)

and we went "how fun! look, xe has someone else's mods! i sure hope this doesn't have any negative effects! :)"

sure, we wondered what might happen if two of the little guys played each other in feedback weather, but we didn't think too much of it until it happened on day 77. things went mostly normal until partway through the game, when--

holy shit they 💥Fucking Exploded💥

and everyone in chat was like "holy shit! they Fucking Exploded!" (except they couldn't say that exactly in maincord because no cursing - also i don't think "exploded" was colloquial for static players until after we found out megan ito went to superhell)

and the garages were like "oh no :("

and everyone else who got a free little guy that was still standing at this point was like "oh no :("

anyway to make a long story short, only two of the masons survived...but good news, max was one of them! :)

the other survivor was the tacos pitcher, whomst they named ivy because they were the fourth one and unlike parker, they used actual roman numerals instead of tally marks. i got very attached to them as well by association with max

so that's how they got into that predicament: being the last two survivors who could explode each other with just one bad schedule. and that's when i started really paying attention to the Forbidden Knowledge™ at the beginning of each season.

of course max did the funniest thing possible at the end of season 14 and just fucking teleported xemself to the elsewhere wlaffle house by yoinking the elsewhere mod from schneider bendie (and at that point we were like "yeah i guess that's a thing that can happen. not gonna question it!")

the following is purely personal lore because i have a lot of interconnected headcanons about elsewhere and the people who pass through the wlaffle house

so because max didn't get swept elsewhere, xe's completely immune from the effects of scattering, which is great if you want to go walking around in the woods. you don't have to worry about losing track of where--or perhaps even who--you are.

this fact is extremely useful to one neerie mccloud, who was shadowed while elsewhere and therefore unable to return at this point. by this point, neerie has her own ways of coping with the effects of being out there, but to get really deep into the woods, she needs someone who can handle being in the woods longer.

max becomes neerie's assistant for long-term forest expeditions, mostly in mapping out safe paths for players who get swept and finding players who are lost in the woods. xe takes on the role of the seeker and treats it very seriously, perhaps to the detriment of xer own well-being at times. see, max has a very keen survival instinct, but xe also leans toward self-sacrifice sometimes. thankfully xe's never had to put xemself between another player and something lurking in the woods...

(oh also xe gets a cool cape here 😌)

some folks say max doesn't want to play blaseball because xe ends up elsewhere so much during the expansion era, but you look at what happened to xem right before that first time and you can probably understand why xe would not want to be playing (and xe eventually ended up getting swept elsewhere more than not getting swept by the end of expansion. i guess the elsewhere just really likes xem)

as for ivy, they were on a team with a short rotation and had to play every three days. this just so happened to line up with four games in which their siblings exploded. no pressure! :)

here's a fun fact: they almost lost their day 99 game when quitter and vi exploded because shortly after it happened, they let in four runs and the worms got very close to the tacos' score before the offense came in to back ivy up.

their claim to fame in my eyes happened in season 20, when they were in the same league as max. see, ivy got traded to the georgias via wimdy (1% vote) in the season 17 elections (inconvenient for them but not too bad) and then to the steaks in the season 19 elections (VERY BAD!)

somehow, they managed to never meet the garages in feedback that season, but when the sim asked them to push the plot button, they said "okay" and yoinked the hard-boiled modifier from uncle plasma and did Cool Detective Shit™

one season later, we found out all the detective messages in the feed gave everyone a red herring to use in the library, and i was so proud when someone made a list of all the detective feed messages and it was all uncles plasma and liquid friends....and one from ivy mason :)

i'm so proud of them. that's my favorite herring

the steaks did us a huge solid and moved ivy to the shadows as soon as possible because, you know...they were both still in danger of Fucking Exploding - and it was a good thing they did because the garages and steaks did play each other in feedback once, but nothing bad happened because ivy was safe in the shadows

and somehow they managed to not only survive blaseball itself, but they also did a bit of god killing >:)

okay so the reason they got pulled onto their teams was because the coin, who had previously tried to fucking drown them in immateria, set up the psychoacoustics renovation as a trap just to make sure none of them would survive. they both ended up on rogue teams who "died" so they could get cool fire powers from binky and incinerate the coin.

(oh, and here's another fun fact about ivy: at this point, they were holding a squiddish ring and the mods of the last player to get incinerated in the expansion era, peanut holloway.)

anyway i'm still putting thoughts together re: the black hole and its relation to elsewhere (see: "blaseball is elsewhere" after the end of season 24) and what it means for the players who didn't fall during fall ball and the coronation era. i do think the players who were up there come out of the black hole eventually, which would include max

as for ivy, they spent the short circuits period in the vault, where they had plenty of access to the library and other sources of information they could use to figure out what the fuck was happening with the microphone. of course, as we found out, at the end of each circuit, the mic ate a bunch of players and they Fucking Exploded. ivy did not take this very well at all, but instead of avoiding it completely, they threw themself into their research to try and get some answers.

unfortunately, we didn't get any further macrophone plot, but i think ivy deserved to tear it apart with their bare hands :)

i think after blaseball ends, they eventually figure things out with help from some friends and all the formerly exploded guys get un-exploded. also max gets reunited with ivy whenever xe finally gets out of the black hole. the kids deserve a happy ending.

okay that's all for now, if you read all that you get a cookie 🍪

okay while people are reading my blase posts i am so far behind on player lore. somebody tell the story of their favorite player so i can cheer or cry a lot or reblog it 10,000 times and hype them up to all my friends

[betweenlands]

p-please help idk what blaseball is and im too afraid to ask-

rubs my hands together. alright! so, blaseball is -- i like to refer to it as "what you get if you cross a zany fantasy sports simulator with existential horror and a deep-rooted hatred of late-stage capitalism." there's sort of two layers to blaseball -- what it is mechanically and what it is as a story.

buckle up, folks. we're rolling up our sleeves and getting into the fandom with the wildest elections ever, and i do mean ever.

mechanically, Blaseball is a fantasy sports website loosely based around the sport baseball -- though Blaseball is a splort and not a sport. the game is simple: you make an account on the website, choose a favorite team and a favorite player, and bet on games with fake money in order to earn more fake money. these games all have some wacky stuff in addition to regular baseball things, usually determined by weather effects -- for example, during Flooding weather players on-base can be swept Elsewhere and be unable to play until they return, during Coffee weather players can get status effects that make them more or less good at certain plays, and during Solar Eclipse weather players can get [checks notes] incinerated by beings called Rogue Umpires and just, like, straight-up die (they're then immediately replaced by a randomly-generated new player, and play continues).

at the end of the season, you can use the money you've earned to buy votes, which you can then spend in the Elections. here, teams vote on one or more Decrees that they want to have pass into League rules, as well as competing among each other to try and earn Blessings to help them out in the future. Blessings include stuff like adding players to your team somehow, giving players stat boosts and items, or giving your team/players on your team some sort of Modifier to help them better weather whatever gets thrown at them.

Decrees, on the other hand, are both mechanical and heavy plot. Decrees influence things like future weather types to be added, what kind of league-wide rules will be put in place to be played under, and even just straight-up what kind of things will be added to the game next.

as a story, Blaseball is about fucking around and finding out, often with severe consequences. each team has their own cast of players, all of whom have fun names and stats and, more likely than not, some amount of fanon behind who they are as a person. each team on its own has a group of fans who talk about it on Discord and form a cohesive team culture, often also collaborating to create interpretations of the players in Blaseball.

when plot happens in Blaseball, it is very hard to miss. it's things like opening a Forbidden Book and causing the Moab Desert to turn into a Hellmouth, or a site crash causing the entirety of the Los Angeles Tacos to be renamed Wyatt Mason, or a giant peanut reprimanding everyone for not setting its brethren as their favorite players. it gets weird, and it gets intense.

the Blaseball fandom is pretty evenly split between people who like the game for its mechanics and people who like the game for its lore, though i'd wager there's probably a few more lore fans than mechanics fans these days. some teams tend more heavily towards lore (for example -- the LA Infinite Tacos, Tokyo Lift, and Seattle Garages); other teams lean more heavily into mechanics and Being Good At Game (for example -- the Philly Pies, Kansas City Breath Mints, and Hades Tigers); still others just really want to fuck around and find out (this is almost always the Baltimore Crabs).

for a good overview of most of the plot, the Blaseball Roundup is a pretty decent place to start, since it's maintained by the official Blaseball gamerunners and is therefore canon in some form to Blaseball itself. for more specific information on the earlier seasons, here's a video on the first eight seasons of Blaseball, encompassing most of the Discipline Era (note, this was when Jaylen Hotdogfingers was most relevant). for an overview of what happened during the two most recent seasons -- seasons 23 and 24 -- i've managed to find a very brief overview here and here (links in watch order). Blaseball Blexplained actually appears to be a very good overview channel in general.

hope this helped! :D