#ardentumbra

[eternalgirlscout]

renowned goats aficionado and good opinion enthusiast sarah eternalgirlscout i come seeking your wisdom. what are some boppy or danceable tmg tunes

I'M SO GLAD YOU ASKED. your mileage may vary on danceability, but i do think all of these are certified bops. there are many more goats songs that could be classified as such, but i tried to make this quick + short so i limited this list to ones i had something to say about off the top of my head.

spotify link, if you're so inclined

Dance Music

this one was my first thought and it's not exactly a happy song to start with, but the upbeat tempo in contrast to the subject matter is intentional and one of my favorite things about the song

Southwood Plantation Road

allow me to share one of my favorite tmg banters from 2003:

"This, my friends, is a dance number. Somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty audiences so far this year have declined my kind offer that they get they freak on to this song. But you may freak away. I won’t tell nobody. [Audience member: Southwood Plantation Road!] That’s the fucking song, my friend!"

Alpha Rats Nest

another anti-love song in the vein of "No Children." a lot of songs off of Tallahassee could be categorized as bops, but this is the other one i think of when i think of tunes that make me want to get up and move

Corsican Mastiff Stride

when the album Getting Into Knives came out and i heard this song for the first time, i literally dropped what i was holding when the drums started

Parisian Enclave

the sheer rhythm of this one is irresistible. it really gives the sense of collective, swift movement, like the rats this song is about

Pigs That Ran Straightaway Into The Water, Triumph Of

another song about movement, about freedom

Choked Out

when I was in undergrad, there was more than one incident of me headbanging so hard to this song while driving that i didn't realize i was going like 15 over the speed limit

Foreign Object

an old friend and i used to joke about getting tax benefits married if we were both single in our mid-30s, and a vital part of the scenario we imagined was that this song would be our first dance at our wedding

January 31, 438

a song about dancing! like "Dance Music," the subject matter is enhanced by the irony of being paired with this tune

Wage Wars Get Rich Die Handsome

another song i should not be allowed to listen to while driving

First Blood

like a lot of high-tempo mountain goats songs, the boppiness and danceability is at odds with the topic in order to make a point. it's a fast-paced, entertaining jam tearing down the mythology of the action movie, an often fast-paced genre that puts entertainment above the implications of its philosophy. and you can shake your ASS to this song

This Year

what else is there to say about this song? the first time i saw the mountain goats live, in a tiny theater on a college campus in northern wisconsin, almost the entire crowd stood up from their seats and danced in the aisles. i spun under my now-husband's arm and i swear i got a smile from john darnielle. there WILL be feasting, and dancing. this year, next year, every year

any other Goats Enjoyers are welcome to add to this post! i admit this skews fairly recent. let's get some crunch on it

[corduroyserpent]

oh the working boys bit is Very silly. it is Much longer than i thought it was going to be, but then it does also keep pulling out new things that i was not expecting to keep me entertained as well

it'll get stuck in your head too 😆

[toytulini]

i need a favor. could you tell alex happy birthday for me also

on it boss

[benevolenterrancy]

okay I'm in love with some of the suggestions on how Wei Wuxian should fill the hole in Wen Ning's chest... obviously I had to test a few of them out. fortunately Wen Ning is nothing if not a good sport

The tags/replies come from:

@average-hua-cheng-fan, @deep-side-of-the-pool, @lifegoalsofafish, @wen-ning (does that make the fishbowl the canonical answer then...🤔), @ardentumbra

and the picture without all the text cluttering it

[elgringo300]

I tried to put a nuance option but that @ardentumbra

stole them all…

[zeemczed]

@aeondusk - She's some kinda queer, but she hasn't pinned it down yet. Girls = yes though.

@ardentumbra - Yes and maybe, respectively. Vio isn't super mean, she's just mildly grumpy. If you cheese her off she'll be snarky and passive aggressive in ways that say "why yes I did watch a lot of British comedy during my formative years".

ASK ME QUESTIONS ABOUT MY SCRUFFY ELF.

I will answer.

Her name is Vio.

[leonstamatis]

fic title prompt:

to infinity, and bed bath & beyond

oh my god what an incredible title shdjfnfnf

this feels silly to me in a way that makes me want to ascribe it to the bad kids from fantasy high. i think this is fig taking gilear to buy real furniture and supplies for living on his own pre-season one, maybe their first time alone together since he moved out, and it’s awkward and uncomfortable but they’re both trying so hard. that’s what it feels like to me.

[corduroyserpent]

GENERAL MCNAMARA????????? (i do sincerely like that character a lot, also WOW what a throwback)

I YELLED ASDFGHJK the cameos and throwbacks are a lot of fun

[corduroyserpent]

alright well i am 12 minutes into the guy who didnt like musicals and with some chagrin i am forced to admit right off the bat that the cute barista /is/ very cute. also time will tell, but SO FAR it seems like the gag here is that paul isnt even notably curmudgeonly or anything, he literally is Just Some Guy that happens not to like musicals

paul is so Just Some Guy and it's remarkably endearing to me AND YES THE BARISTA IS CUTE AS HELL

[corduroyserpent]

general mcnamara jumpscare AGAIN????

HE'S EVERYWHERE

[corduroyserpent]

WHOA okay i am maybe like 3 minutes into black friday and i gotta say IMMEDIATELY i am much more impressed with just the production quality of the music specifically. much more polished, more full-sounding, the cast sounds maybe a little more familiar with the vocal lines, Very nice

right!! i felt the same. and no spoilers but i was also far more impressed with the storytelling in this one (as well as the musical that follows it)

they just get better and better imho

[corduroyserpent]

alright black friday is over. man. that was fun. i had fun with the guy who didnt like musicals, but black friday was like ACTUALLY fun. i will get to nerdy prudes must die soon. anyway thank you for listening to my thoughts as i go <3 watching a thing is more fun with a friend i think

yessss Black Friday is SOOO much fun! i had a blast watching it so i love to know that you did too 😆 excited to hear what you think of NPMD

[corduroyserpent]

KIDS DONT WANT THAT PIECE OF SHIT!! THEYRE ALL INTO FORTNITE DUDE!!!!!!!

FAVE FAVE FAVE

[corduroyserpent]

oh we got actual horrors in this one huh

we do indeed!

[leonstamatis]

hello leon stamatis (my favorite stamatis)! i do not know anything about the state of blaseball right now, i think it was a randomly generated baseball-like a while back? my understanding was that most of the content was fan generated to begin with, being what it was and all that. is it too late to get into it? if not, i would love to hear some starter recs

what a coincidence, he is also my favorite stamatis! and blaseball is one of my favorite things. this, however, is a complicated question, so i'm gonna go ahead and apologize for what will surely be a much longer answer than you anticipated by asking this. sorry!

we're gonna start from the beginning. what is blaseball?

well, you're right. it's a randomly-generated baseball simulator. that's the general idea of it. there were 20-24 teams (sometimes more, depending on what else was happening), and they played games against each other. while it initially started as a basic baseball game -- with some absurd names and very simple mechanics -- it later evolved to include more complex mechanics, including player death, modifications to the stadiums, and other statuses that could impact and change gameplay at random (or under specific and nonsensical conditions).

blaseball started in late 2020 and had a sort of on/off cycle. during an on cycle, there would be games every hour on the hour for 99 hours over a week. then there would be a post-season to determine a champion, and the season would end. these on cycles were often divided into eras, and had larger plots and storylines forming connective tissue through the elections and special events.

during an off cycle, also known as a siesta, the devs would take some time to patch bugs, develop new features, and plan for the future. some of these siestas were a week or two; some were several months or over a year.

the unfortunate news here is that blaseball just recently... ended. the games won't be happening anymore, the site isn't active, and there's no new content coming down the pipe. the devs said it wasn't sustainable to keep doing it -- a thing that makes a lot of sense, because one thing blaseball certainly could be was overwhelming and time-consuming. and that's coming from me, as a fan who didn't have to actually do any of the coding or community maintenance.

however. onto the second part of your question. can you still get into blaseball even now that it's over?

[takes a deep breath.] YES. please do, in fact!

it's fair to say most of the content was fan-generated, i think, depending on what you define as "content." the games and the website were fairly minimalist; they gave us major events, but the characters were just names and a few lines of stats, so it's not like you're missing out on key character moments or quotes or anything with blaseball being done. all the identifying characteristics, the personality and appearance and emotional response? that's fans, baby!

this is one of the things that's cool about blaseball. i've heard it said that writing for the fandom is more in line with original fiction because so much of it is created by and dependent on the individual, as opposed to a centralized canon. which means a lot of the time, there's more effort in a fic to introduce you to someone -- something fanfic doesn't typically do! and because so much was happening in blaseball all the time, people do make an effort to explain events and canon occurrences either in author notes or in the story itself.

(unless, that is, it's a major event everyone was largely aware of. these were few and far between, but they were such a big deal that they make up a lot of the fic content. if you have questions about any of those events, i would recommend the blaseball wiki, where election results, modifications to specific players, and other significant canon events are recorded. there's lore there, too, but i can pretty much guarantee that whatever lore is there won't match up directly with any of the fic you read; blb authors tend to take the wiki and widely-accepted fanon lore more as a suggestion than as a rule.)

the long and the short of it is, you can absolutely still get involved. there are just under 3,000 fics, last time i checked, so it's not big enough that you'll be drowning. my honest recommendation is to pick a team based on who you vibe with -- the blaseball wiki has team overview pages, too -- and then see who is writing for that team. there are collections for a lot of them, and they'll focus on a specific set of characters most of the time depending on who had the most significance on the roster.

(my actual recommendation is to start with the earlier fics. the discipline era -- the first eleven seasons -- was a very tightly told story without a lot of bells and whistles. players had a normal season in season one, and then in season two everyone started dying, and then in season seven the fans messed with the mechanics and did a necromancy and the necromanced player started murdering people until we all banded together to defeat the god that was giving them the ability to do that. that's pretty easy to follow, especially compared to later eras when the entire point was adding as many new mechanics as possible or testing out new features. it got confusing, even for people keeping a close eye on all of it.)

if you find something that confuses you, that's okay! it might take some effort/research to understand these storylines, but the wiki is pretty good at explaining mechanics and events. just look up whatever is getting you and it should make some more sense. or you can use Before, an archival tool that lets you watch old games and fandom events in real time. (and if it still doesn't make sense... well. that's blaseball, baby! you kind of get used to rolling with nonsense, honestly.)

okay. that's all very long-winded, because of course it is. sorry, again. but... recommendations!

i think, often, that blaseball fic would be aided by the inclusion of a sort of "Weeb Ass Shit" scale. some of it is going to be very embedded in the nonsense of blaseball and hard to get through, especially if you're new to the team, specific player, or even blaseball in general.

hen fourteenfifteen and i had some friends who had never engaged with blaseball read a few fics of ours a couple months back as an experiment, and it shocked me to learn that the concept of an incineration -- a player being set on fire and killed by a "rogue" umpire, one of the earliest and most basic mechanics in the game -- was unfamiliar and a stopping point for the readers, because they'd never heard about that happening. and certainly not in such a nonchalant way. these kinds of terms are everywhere in blaseball fic, but if you can find the ones that focus more on a character than a game or a modification, then you've got a starting point and you can build out from there.

that being said, there's always going to be blaseball, so there are definitely still going to be moments where you end up scratching your head. it is simply impossible not to. if you're cool with that, here's a brief collection of some blaseball fics i would say have a lower blaseball-ass shit rating:

when winter turns to spring by waveridden, a love story between two co-captains from around season seven to season eight. (also, it's one of my favorite ships and it's my team. go flowers.) honestly, hayden does an excellent job of explaining everything in very simple and understandable ways. so if you want to just poke around on their page, you'll have an excellent time. there's a whole run of things from mid-2021 that is literally just character studies written for other people, and they're all great.

the things we take off for each other by bloodsweatspit is less about blaseball itself and more about one of the teams, the canada moist talkers. it looks at a handful of the key dynamics and is, in my opinion, one of the best fics for providing insight into a team and the people on it -- especially in so few words.

speaking of the moist talkers. it's hard to recommend just one of cyndakip's fics, but they all tend to exist in a similar timeline and universe and there's a lot of continuity that makes it easy to follow once you've gotten started. if you're looking for some very well-done, very lengthy character work, cynda does great things.

there's this fun trend that hit during the first lengthy break in blaseball colloquially known as the 12x100, or twelve scenes of 100 words. the idea is to give a series of short scenes that highlight a character or storyline without committing to a whole lengthy thing. i'd recommend checking out the 12x100 tag and clicking through a few to see what characters you like. (more specifically, babytriumphant's chicago, in brief series is a bunch of them specifically focused on the chicago firefighters team, and they're all lovely!)

another flowers fic. i'm not sorry. oxicleanmoron's it's my own damn fault is more recent, and set in the late expansion era. but it's not about blaseball. it's about a road trip. so you're in good hands if you want some fun character dynamics and minimal blaseball.

lift your head (and look out the window) by baliset is a nice little window into the baltimore crabs. marn also is one who does a really good job of explaining things from the beginning, so there are a few fics of hers i would recommend. but start with this one, and then maybe check out your sinking ship (is big enough for two) if you want to meet some more of her beloved little guys.

another sort of love story without the focus on game mechanics: you're at the party (you're not invited) by impernia. this one i include in part because i think it leans into some of the stranger aspects of blaseball lore without getting into the game itself; a lot of characters are strange or unusual in some way, and this fic conveys that beautifully.

take the bullet by waltztangocache is a great example of something you'll find a lot in this fandom, which is... character death stories! if there's one thing blaseball gave us a lot of fodder for, it's people dying and people grieving. if that's your thing, wonderful! you've found your people! hen does a great job showing the ripple effects that i would say are common in fanon lore -- esp on the firefighters -- regarding incinerations. i love this fic. it pains me.

i have written a lot of blaseball fic in my time, but i tend to think i fall pretty high on the blaseball-ass shit scale. there are others like me. however, if you do not mind me shilling for just a moment, i would recommend to you inside your blinding light. it's not about blaseball, as much. it's about a carpenter and a tree, and they fall in love. welcome to blaseball lore! it's fun here.

i... hope you were not overwhelmed by all of this. thank you for asking about this, and for being willing to dig deeper into this fandom and what it has to offer! i'm barely scratching the surface here, but all of the authors i've listed have plenty of fics worth reading, and there are tons of authors i love who i didn't have a specific pull from for this list but who i would nevertheless recommend once you're a little more familiar with how this fandom writes.

blaseball is over, but the fic's still around. and it's pretty fucking good fic, i'd say. <3