#best part of blaseball

[callibones]

rat mason

[blaseballshottest]

[ID: The minis of Eugenia Garbage and Jaylen Hotdogfingers. End ID.] (Minis by HetreaSky.)

[tiktaaliker]

WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT. scratch deleuze former star worm batter current spy batter now has 2 batting stars and. 3.5 pitching stars. this is so funny to me

[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)!

[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*

[doctorwhoisadhd]

and in the water here / you'll always be my dear / how could i be angry when the water's so clear? / and if you're all alone / build a ship and sail back home / whatever the weather or wherever you roam

i wrote this song immediately after the season 23 election, in which parker macmillan roamed to the fridays. we pretty much knew at the time that we were going to die. i've been following blaseball ever since the very first siesta, and its been such a huge part of my life. im going to miss it a lot. im still getting stuff ready on posting the full version of this, but this is one of the best songs ive ever written, and i didnt want to let this day go by without posting at least some version of parker macmillan. thank you blaseball fans. its been an honor

[ditto-the-alien]

in less than 60 days, It will have been a year since blaseball was suddenly canceled.

TRUST ME, THE OTHER TAGS WILL MAKE SENSE IN A LITTLE WHILE.

Blaseball, in its 2.867 Years of existence, was many things. but the easiest way to describe it is "Good". It had a very incredible fanbase that still kind of mourns the game to this day. the devs had a panel at GDC in 2022. It was nominated for a Nebula Award for Best Game Writing in 2021 and also the "Best Video Game" at The Hugo Awards in 2021. It won the Nuovo Award at the independent games festival in 2021. people could observe the games happening, gamble fake money, and also affect how the story and the characters would develop at certain points. It was a great game, that sadly was canceled because the cost that was needed to run the game was too high for the team at the game band to support, at least according to wikipedia. It being dead is also a major part in proving that there is no justice in the universe because of it not being here, yet SILENT HILL ASCENSION SOMEHOW HASN'T KICKED THE BUCKET YET.

Now for all Silent Hill fans who have blocked that game out of their memory, and for everyone who has no idea what Silent Hill Ascension IS, here is a refresher:

"Released" on October 31st, 2023 (which was already a bad day for me, but I am NOT getting into that), Silent Hill Ascension is an interactive thing (listen its not a tv show, and it isnt a video game. the developers say that its "the best of both", but lets be honest its more of the WORST of both) that is canon to the silent hill franchise.

people can observe the games happening, gamble fake money, and also affect how the story and the characters would develop at certain points. Yes, I know this sounds EXACTLY the same as what I described blaseball as, but thats because I purposefully oversimplified both games a bit. Silent Hill Ascencion has bland writing (so bland people even thought it was AI), all the mechanical depth of a bad mobile game, and all the horrible microtransactions (loot boxes, a season pass, and something else I will get into later) as well. Blaseball, as previously mentioned, was nominated for several story writing awards, had enough mechanical depth that some fans created a SCIENTIFIC COLLECTIVE TO ANALYZE IT, and at the time it died, NEVER had any micro transactions or a fee to enter.

Remember how both games use fake money? In Blaseball, those who were in the 1% of money havers had all their coins distributed to the other players. In Silent Hill Ascension, you can literally just buy so many "Influence Points" that you can manipulate the entire fucking story, and you can hoard them for as long as you fucking want. Also, Something else I want to mention: Literally nobody talks about Silent Hill Ascension because its so bad. hell, and those that do talk about it DON'T have anything good to say. very few people play it, and there are a shit ton of bots that the devs added so it feels like more people are actually watching. Silent Hill Ascension has reached lower lows than blaseball ever did, and is less than half a year old. So why the hell is it still alive, when a game that did its entire stick better is fucking dead. THE ONLY REASON I CAN THINK OF FOR IT BEING ALIVE IS BECAUSE ITS SUPPORTED BY FUCKING KONAMI.

There is no justice in the world.

[dying-signals]

i’m very tired and i’m recalling old blaseball information remember Don Mitchell’s comment from Lootcrates when he got captured that was kinda fucked up. Like most if not all of the vault legends captures were particularly funny & brutal but the exclusive tension of being a Lovers fan during that time (especially with the voting effort put in at the time between the Fridays & us) what a fucking way to go.

Retelling this entirely from memory but key aspects of the situation with Don was he was our best old guard player (while there’s definitely observable team improvements leading on following Don’s feedback which was a incredibly irony in the context of the way we handled losing all of our OG players) however eventually the realization that Don was & will continue to be a money making machine until he’s vaulted led to a concentrated effort to keep a skilled player in the game instead of losing him to the virtual museum exhibit in the sky which led to things such as alt-ing him (didn’t matter, his stars were too high to make any difference in his like, overall performance & skill/ability for the most part) & swapping place with long time pitcher & notable Lovers’ & freak feedback alum Yosh Carpenter in what i feel was a small significant moment in the overall storytelling scape for these two particular teams in this context.

I also remember reacting strongly to his performance in the semi-cent but that’s a blur for me. Man what a player. Miss you king.

[wayslidecool]

best blaseball sim event was ghost redaction. yes i am very much biased because my favorite player was involved but ALSO. such a specific set of occurrences had to happen to make that possible. you had to have a pitcher with debt against a haunted batter, for the batter to be inhabited when the pitcher threw a beanball, for the stadium they're playing in to have a secret base, for the ghost to make it to second and enter the secret base. it's like. the stars had to align for this exact interaction to happen and they DID.

and the best part? the game band didn't even know it happened until it was brought up in an episode of inside a blaseball. it rules

[elifinchsart]

Wanted to give a bit more coherent life update. For the last three and a half weeks (and possibly longer) I have been dealing with excess fluid in my cranium, causing extremely frequent migraines, nausea, occasional loss of sensation in limbs (thankfully my non dominant arm LOL) and my eyeballs are swollen in a weird shape that hurts + gives me temporary vision loss. The neurologist I've been seeing has decided to hold off on treatment until we have a cause for it (or rule out causes for it). I have an upcoming lumbar puncture this week as well as further MRIs so I'm hoping we have answers soon. This is they best option to figure out what's wrong with me medically but unfortunately means in the meantime I have to deal with the above symptoms (+ my previous disabilities) with very little relief besides OTC meds and self medicating with weed. With my symptoms I was no longer able to work my part time job and had to quit early before the season ended which was devastating as I really, really liked the job I had. Luckily, my parents are supporting me financially right now in addition to the government assistance programs I am on (again, already had health issues that only allowed me to work part time and have been having a rough summer). I do not need any donations or financial assistance at this time (though any nice words you have are appreciated!) I hope to open commissions back up some day so I can contribute to my own finances again (+ they're fun!) but for now they will have to remain indefinitely closed until I receive treatment and recover. If you have an outstanding commission I will be completing that for you! Thank you so much for your patience, it is very appreciated. I pride myself on quick turnaround time for my comms so it's been very frustrating to not be able to keep that up. I'm extremely thrilled the Blaseball Fatshion Zine was completed and so proud of and grateful to everyone who submitted work. Next up on my list is completing outstanding commissions and art trades. I have some personal projects I want to complete as well as some other plans with friends in the future but for now expect my art output to be a little slower than normal. That said no force in the world can stop me from drawing Tillman o7

[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.

[polkadotpatterson]

It’s not an exaggeration to say that blaseball has dramatically changed my life. I’m immensely grateful that one day I just happened to stumble across a silly little tumblr post about a silly little sports simulation, and I don’t know where I would be right now if I hadn’t.

Through blaseball, I learned to find confidence in myself as a writer again, and more importantly, find confidence in myself as a person. It’s helped me untangle my own identity, guided me through the worst year of my life and into the best one (so far!), and given me some of my best friends and even an incredible partner who I want to spend the rest of my life with. Blaseball has brought me so much wonder and love, and I will forever be grateful for it.

I’m also not going anywhere! I have so many wips and I fully intend to finish them. Or most of them. Or some of them. You know how it is with wips. And I have more ideas on top of that, and there’s The Salt, and the zine jam… admittedly I’ve been in a bit of a writing slump lately, but I haven’t lost my motivation for writing blaseball in particular, and I truly do think I’ll still be going for years to come.

I love my community of writers and creatives, and I love my cnnmunity of moisties, and as long as people still want these communities to exist, I will be there. My DMs are always open, and I love to chat blaseball and everything else! 

It has truly been an honour and a delight being part of this cultural event with you all. We are all love blaseball, and may it live on in our hearts forever. Many teams, one league, and one shared experience we will never forget.

[tiktaaliker]

man it's fucking wild to me that it's now almost impossible to Get Into blaseball if you're new to it because it's just. Not possible to experience it in the same way anymore

Like sure you can go back and watch the roundups or even watch replays on before sibr but at least for me the biggest part was just. Experiencing it alongside others and figuring out what the fuck was even happening. It was desperately trying to organize a bunch of strangers to come up with a voting strategy only to see it fail in new and exciting ways. It was frantically making shitty propaganda and on my phone while on vacation and eventually making custom reaction gifs for my favorite players. It was making dumb inside jokes with people and planning online events and cheering for players who were names on a screen but they were real because we DECIDED they were real. It was getting genuinely emotional when something cool happened or when a player I liked got incinerated as I watched. It was voting to make this better and voting to make things worse. And sure a lot of it is still there but a lot of it is just. Gone.

but that also brings me to how whenever i see people suggesting how to get into blaseball it's all about watching the roundups checking out reblase or before or even listening to the garages which is all well and good. but I think that's only a small part of what blaseball was, at least to me

So I think the best way for someone who wants to get into blaseball now that it's over is to just. Talk to people who were there. Just find someone who was into blaseball and ask about their favorite player or a game they remember fondly. And the coolest thing about that is I can GARUNTEE that every person you talk to is going to have something different to say because there's just. SO MUCH

[blorbo-gerrymandering]

Round 1

Note: before voting for the first option please leave a detailed explanation of what Blaseball even is in the notes, cause I have no idea. Also votes for the first option count for Jaylen Hotdogfingers

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.

Bruce Wayne (Batman):

he's babygirl your honour! single father of 6 (ish), world's least likable manwhore, he's obsessive and mean and cares a lot and is an asshole

he’s a whore. he’s batman. he’s terrified of bats. he’ll fuck villains he’ll fuck heroes he’ll fuck any consenting adult. he’s a dad. he’s traumatised. he beats the shit out of people. he can do anything with enough prep time. he creeps people out on purpose. he lives and dies by the bit. he is everything to me. truly the character of all time

[fogwitchoftheevermore]

i'm going on a VERY fun rabbit hole with this life series/hermitcraft/empires blaseball au thing, so have the next installment, the hermit blaseball au! this one is a lot easier to understand if you don't know anything about blaseball, because this is Much more "i've just put them into the plot of blaseball, they're just hanging out in there". my empires blaseball au can be found here, and the third life blaseball au will be linked here one i finish writing that up.

also, a few of my choices for teams i am not... particularly confident about (namely xisuma, bdubs, hypno, and tango) so if you have a better suggestion for them please pitch it.

Grian: Batter for the LA Unlimited Tacos

Scar: Batter for the Miami Dale

Mumbo: Batter for the New York Millennials, Siphon

Cleo: Pitcher for the Kansas City Breath Mints

Ren: Batter and team captain for the San Fransisco Lovers, Charm

Bdubs: Batter for the Hawai’i Fridays

Impulse: Batter for the Hellmouth Sunbeams

Pearl: Pitcher for the Houston Spies, Precognition

Gem: Pitcher for the Kansas City Breath Mints

Xisuma: Pitcher for the Philly Pies

Evil X: Pitcher for the Hades Tigers

Wels: Batter for the San Fransisco Lovers

Hels: Batter for the Baltimore Crabs

Hypno: Batter for the Mexico City Wild Wings

XB: Batter for the Atlantis Georgias

Beef: Pitcher for the Dallas Steaks

Keralis: Batter for the Core Mechanics

Joe: Pitcher for the Kansas City Breath Mints, later batter for the Seattle Garages

TFC: Coach of the Ohio Worms

Doc: Pitcher for the Core Mechanics

Jevin: Batter for the Charleston Shoe Thieves, Flinch, later rerolled into Reverberating

False: Pitcher for the Tokyo Lift

Stress: Batter for the Tokyo Lift

Iskall: Batter for the Breckenridge Jazz Hands

Tango: Pitcher for the Chicago Firefighters, Fire Eater

Cub: Batter for the Charleston Shoe Thieves, got Flinch from fighting god and got it rerolled into Debt

Etho: Pitcher for the Canada Moist Talkers

Zedaph: Pitcher for the Yellowstone Magic

Wormman: Pitcher for the Ohio Worms

This AU is, even more so than the Empires part of this AU, just me shoving the Hermits into the Blaseball universe and letting it happen.

The only people who are even sort of replacing an actual Blaseball player are Cleo, Joe, and Gem.

Cleo is our Jaylen. She pitches for the Kansas City Breath Mints, and is the best pitcher in the league, and when the Forbidden Book opens, she dies. Her intended replacement is False Symmetry II, aka Empires!False, but when the Forbidden Book is opened in the Empires, Hermitcraft, and Life Series universes all at once, everything gets a little muddled, and everyone comes out of it a little muddled. The biggest change is that Cleo is instead replaced by Gemini Tay, the newly generated player from the Empires world who was meant to replace Xornoth. 

When she is resurrected at the end of season 6, Joe goes into the Shadows in exchange. Within a few seasons, he is able to leave the Shadows and bats for the Breath Mints for about a season, afterwards he is transferred to the Seattle Garages, where he stays. I am not putting him back in the Shadows because it makes me kind of sad.

Cub and Jevin are both players for the Thieves, so they get cursed as a result of the boss fight against the Shelled One. We will resolve that later. Hels, despite being on the Crabs, does not get cursed, because he doesn’t join the Crabs until after they return from ascension.

Other than that, the Hermits are just sort of Existing in the world of Blaseball. Evil X and Hels are both created in similar ways to Evil Twin and Bontgomery Mullock, which is to say, Blessings break and accidentally clone a guy, so we just slightly edit one of their names and keep going. Don’t worry about it. 

At one point during Expansion, while the Reroll Will is still in effect, fans of the Thieves attempt to reroll the Flinch modifier that Cub got as a side effect of fighting god and losing that one time. It gets rerolled into Debt, in a similar vein to what happened to Silvaire Roadhouse, but because he’s on the Thieves, he actually gets to kill people. Good for him. Jevin’s Flinch modifier also gets rerolled, but he gets Reverberating. Good for him, but in a different direction.

[thehallstara]

things i made in 2022

i asked my friends if i should do a roundup of things i made this year and they said yes so!!! without further ado!! (this is gonna be a mix of fan and personal stuff please join me for the ride)

GAMES on nights we dream of stars - my first bitsy!! a semi-autobiographical game about the sky on the nature of ghosts - another bitsy, this one about metaphorical ghosts and the nature of being haunted the end is near - yet another bitsy!! probably my favourite one– a soliloquy at the end of the world agami village - a visual novel made with weiwei xu as part of hand eye society’s SUFest, aka the coolest thing i’ve ever done probably. if you like fish and/or time loops check this one out.

ZINES square roots - a collab zine i did with @tigerquoii as part of @blaseballzinejam!! celestial cartography - my first solo zine, also part of the zine jam. every other zine i was a part of for the blaseball zine jam lmao - what it says on the tin untitled perzine about chronic illness and turning 25 - ditto

SELECTED (OTHER) FANWORKS cards fall where they may - css heavy twine anthology of blaseball stories, if nothing else the formatting still holds up lmao what might have been lost (don’t bother me) - twine about baby “ruthless” triumphant for the wonderful dasy~ and one day i’ll watch them burn with me - aka the bright zimmerman (and haruta byrd) saga. still technically unfinished but may still be some of the best+most fulfilling writing i’ve done all year. the burn with me b-sides - series of 12x100s that expand on the characters of the burn with me series. short and snappy. may also be viewed in zine form fall ball calls - another series of 12x100s that follows the fall ball and it’s drops

and there we go!! 2022 was a weirdly busy year and i can only hope for 2023 to be as fruitful in new and exciting ways 🥰