#blaseball gamma

[lenasai]

honestly even if blaseball hadn't abruptly ended, one of the most dangerous things you could have done during its runtime was get attached to one of the short circuits guys

oops

[captainbuzzard]

realized i never posted this one. the gamma4 partycrabs.

in the gamma4 universe, a group of baltimore highschoolers attempted to kill the olde one. the final blow of the battle did not kill her, and for the following decades, she lay dying in the bay. she was due to die during the short circuits, and an awful and awkward high school reunion of sorts took place to witness her death and steer her subsequent rebirth.

[ID: a grid of 20 squares, with each corner square containing a drawing of a crab with an eye in its center, with a smaller crab with a party hat in the eye's iris. the remaining 16 squares each show an uncolored digitally drawn portrait of one of the gamma 4 baltimore crabs team. name, stats, and position are shown above each portrait. End ID]

[waveridden]

i've long held a fascination with blaseball gamma 1 (the test circuit that was revealed on the website after it had finished running) because there's a whole lot about it that doesn't add up. if you compare the rosters in the last available gamelogs for teams to the rosters on the websites they don't match up - and i don't just mean "oh the static charges" i mean there are new players and reverbs that have happened that aren't recorded. it is a weird, messy circuit that we didn't get to see, and i care for it quite dearly.

(personally i've long held the theory that there was a third season of this circuit that we didn't get to see that led to additional weather and another round of charges. this is beside the point but i think if they ever do another IAB y'all should help me flood the question box asking about this. i want to know.)

one thing you Can see when looking at gamma 1 teams is that several of them have four pitchers. this is, obviously, not how blaseball works; teams should have five pitchers. some of them were charged, and we know some of these from feed messages. some of them are just missing.

i found some of them tonight.

i've been working on recreating the election results from gamma 1, season 1, and through that i've found three pitchers that i'm not sure people know about. i don't have their stats info, i don't have their performance records. but i found three players who were missing. those players are:

pedro greatlakes, miami dale

jamaal hardison, baltimore crabs

manuela byron, new york millennials

there are, per my best count, three teams with pitchers that are still missing from the record (firefighters, sunbeams, lift) and because of the quality of pitcher feed events i'm not sure they'll ever be found. and maybe this is actually old news and i'm out of touch. and maybe (definitely) i'm a bit of a sap. but i wanted to publish those names. because blaseball is over and gone, and this was a dead circuit in a dead world in a dead game. but there are still new things to find.

[clawsup]

by god. their are fall guys among us

[zweihawke]

SHORT CIRCUITS

Sometimes you don’t know where the future goes. And that’s alright. We made our best effort in here, we banded together to create a bet-rigging system to harness the most votes in combo betting, though casually it was very much not as fun as passive income was.

[charaznablescanontoyota]

refute it in red, if you can: the forbidden book and the reader are one and the same! there were only 4 npcs present when blaseball was compressed into gamma!

[patchdotexe]

Colorado Clones Crash Course (...ish)

hey does anybody remember that one time on halloween when blaseball was trying to launch the first proper Short Circuit and instead the site blew up and did some weird junk to the teams

so uh. they accidentally deployed a brand-new, never-before-seen team during that: the Colorado Clones!

...and there were two of them!

there was a VERY brief period of time where they were level 2 fk and so there was a tiny bit of hushed discussion behind spoiler tags, but then the maincord rules got updated soon after (and... might've been in response to that?) so they got locked behind the insurmountable wall of level 3 "Do Not Talk About This" fk.

BUT BLASEBALL IS OVER. IT IS TIME FOR CLONES

(specifically it is time for me to talk about the version of the Clones me and my friends lorejammed because, what, do you expect me to look at a team called the colorado clones and Not immediately get attached and spin together some wild lore?)

so, hey: what if the shadows with normal names and pregame rituals were the people that made the numbered clones? what if they used to work for the ILB and were responsible for the creation of the Parkers and maybe a certain other event that didn't go as planned? what if i forgot what else was in this paragraph originally because tumblr ate it

behold my blorbo Sondra Friendo, aka Dr. F! pregame ritual "praying for death" in the "auaughghhhh i can't believe this, i hate this, i'm tired and stressed and wish i was dead so i didn't have to deal with this bs" exaggeration way. one of the leads of Facility 1F (Gamma 3), which focuses on Weird Science in contrast to Facility 3B (Gamma 2)'s focus on Weird Magic.

(incidentally, 3B's pgrs are all ominous stuff like warding off demons, locking the cellar, opening up the pit... and dancing????)

she is relentlessly bullied by her teammate Kyler Light, a clone that decided to gain free will and a personality. they might also be kissing? the clones are all weird blank slates with the origin of whoever they're clones of being completely lost, so Kyler breaks the mold with a cool name, outfit, and retreating to the shadows. (and it was designed by @.elemom!)

mostly Dr. F is grumpy and desperately wishes she was a girlboss instead of a girlfailure.

as for what the Clones might've actually been about... i mean, this is just speculation on our part, but hey, there sure was. whatever the heck this unsolved mystery is:

i'm sure the fact that there was a Level 3 FK team called the Colorado Clones has nothing to do with the multiple Davenports.

[wooshofficial]

Heyyyy blesties. I know we’re all kinda mad about the site lookin like it does. And so some people made some skins for the site that make it look cool. But they’re scattered throughout fanwork channels across the league and hard to collect. So I made a masterdoc of all the ones I could find, with links to each, and credits to who made them, and what programs are needed to make them work.

[leonstamatis]

reasons to vote for jacob/moses/layna in the @blaseballshipbracket :

(listen. I can’t make you do anything. i almost didn’t submit them at all because they won’t make it all the way and it will lowkey devastate me when they lose. i’m not even offering rewards, because i want to save those for the more contentious battles later on. but, yknow, just for kicks, let’s make a case.)

my second-ever blaseball fic was about these three. it was the first ship that i thought of all on my own, and i was very nervous about putting them all out there.

since then, i’ve written 21k across four fics detailing their relationship through pretty much all of blaseball, up til gamma.

they quite literally have everything? i’m not even joking. moses was involved in the masoning before they came to the flowers. layna was on the beams when they fell into the hellmouth. jacob is a good enough player (or was before gamma rerolls) that he would almost certainly have been vaulted or at least gotten ego a couple times if not for the flowers’ insane lineup.

(moses and layna have sucked outrageously for most of their blaseball careers. that’s not related, it’s just infinitely funny to me.)

that’s not even all.

layna was sent over to the garages during an absolutely absurd three way swap in s12. later, while she was there, she also got alternated.

moses was a receiver, was temporary alternated, had an allergic reaction, watched quitter and wyatt mason vi die (while they were echoing elsewhere, actually! it pains me), and then, instead of staticking out, moses themself died! a regular incineration, at random!

jacob was mostly fine during all of this. he doesn’t experience much. that’s what makes him special. but he’s on the magic now! he fell to their shadows. i’ve given him a wizard hat, in my head.

layna was involved in the first major swap of the expansion era, and one of the biggest ones from discipline, too. moses was the first death on the flowers since cali. (it had been a little over ten seasons.) somehow, in picking three largely unconnected names off a roster to write about, i pulled some players who would have a lot of outside significance. (i did not know this at the time; it was season seven.)

there’s even a dramatic breakup at the end. i made a playlist about it. (there are annotations, too! password’s jacoblayna.)

and like look, i’m detailing all of this because I think the gameplay comes first in storytelling. i can talk about moses as a victim of the game and layna as a victim of the game and jacob as an extremely anxious, but largely untouched, guy, watching both of his loved ones experience tragedy over and over beyond any of their control.

but yknow, I think the fic actually explains their dynamic better than i can in a (relatively) brief post giving an overview. so i’m focusing on what happened to them canonically, and in the spirit of irm, allowing your brain to fill in the gaps of what that’s like for people who love each other.

point is, this may not be the layna you know or the moses you know, or even the jacob you know! but they’re good. and if you are undecided (or have perhaps been persuaded), you should vote for ‘em. because they’re good.

[lichensbian]

i will be honest with you gang. i do not like blaseball gamma

[dynamicentropy]

TGB didn't really give a damn about diversity and inclusion until people complained either. From low contrast colors to unreadable fonts to lack of screen reader access to the fucking name pool issues, Fans having been fixing and pushing for fixes to these things since day one.

And TGB kinda just insulted that and the work put in at every opportunity. Like. Why did they always work against SIBR and act like they were competition when all they did was make the game more accessible? Why was that necessary? Why were multiple POC kicked from maincord for raising the alarm on some Really Egregious issues when their private reports were ignored for weeks or sometimes months at a time? (ESPECIALLY when the mods were notorious for just straight up ignoring these issues when racism was involved). Why was there a list of accessibility mods for gamma made by fans being passed around weeks before those issues were even verbally addressed by tgb??

It genuinely feels like they disliked blaseball's fans on every level. It's something that I completely fail to understand.

If you design a game meant to be enjoyed by a large community, don't mock them for enjoying it and trying to help you improve it is the moral here I guess.

*Added Side Note Because I'm Still Angry:

Also don't steal their designs and lore for a card game that you get money for, fucking cunts. I know artists that had designs ripped almost wholesale that are really struggling financially right now, so uh. Fuck TGB actually. Pay them. They also should've paid keepers for professional mod work and compensated SIBR for carrying most of the accessible engagement for their game on their backs, but I'd be happy if they started with paying the original artists.

hey not to start shit this long after blaseball ended. but im still pissed at how tgb treated its fans, especially the creatives.

there's the entire blaseball tcg thing. which isn't strictly tgb, a different game studio made it, but it really highlighted how tgb treated the fan creations as their own. they said "we just gave them summaries like 'nagomi mcdaniel is a japanese woman with a claw arm' so they're not copying from an artist" but like... that version of nagomi mcdaniel was MADE by the fanbase. NOT tgb. someone pitched the idea of nagomi being a japanese woman, and someone pitched the idea of crabs players carcinizing, and someone pitched the idea of nagomi having a claw arm. and all of those people were fans.

and, this is a much smaller gripe, but like, TGB has always relied on word of mouth to get people interested in blaseball. so like. those "stretch goals" at the beginning of fall ball relied on word of mouth. and they were pretty ambitious! considering how little marketing they have (from my perspective, anyway), a lot of that pressure was put on fans. so like. of course we only hit one of those goals. lmao.

and the "final goodbye" concert just really pisses me off. they couldn't even be assed to make anything as a proper farewell! they used FAN-MADE MATERIAL in their OFFICIAL goodbye party. fan-made material. they didn't consult the creators before using it. idk how all garages members felt about it, but i know some were pissed. because tgb is using something they made to give a sendoff instead of putting any fucking amount of effort into a goodbye. like, no final entity appearance? you couldn't have binky say goodbye? YOU COULDN'T HAVE PARKER TWEET GOODBYE? just rting the game band's announcement? that's lazy as fuck and a huge fuck you to the fans that made blaseball what it is, because it IS the fans that made blaseball what it is. fans made the lore. fans made the wiki. fans created plotlines like the shelled one. fans took site bugs and glitches and made them into huge events through the sheer power of storytelling and passion. fans have poured so much time into this game. developing strategies, loring players, loring TEAMS, setting up whole separate websites just to help newcomers and store info (including but not limited to the wiki and houstonspies.cyou), moderating and paying for those websites, analyzing stats, delving into fk, writing fanfiction, drawing fanart, donating money, roleplaying on twitter, REVIVING SALMON MODERATING SOFTWARE TO TRACK ILB WEATHER PATTERNS, writing research papers, writing songs, creating discord bots, AND MORE. fans have been the backbone of the blaseball community. and to not do anything to honor these people besides just using their own creation as a last-minute goodbye party? fucking pathetic.

tgb has just been so fucking terrible towards its fans. i'd go as far as to say that some creatives got taken advantage of. i love blaseball and i am forever grateful for this experience. i also wish tgb didn't fucking throw it away one afternoon. they announced blaseball was ending, shut down the server for the weekend, then re-opened it to have a pitiful goodbye party of fan-made material (that the keepers put on for us) that they used without permission. like how the fuck are we supposed to feel appreciated in any way? again, would it have fucking killed them to have parker tweet on his own? they say it was a long and hard decision but it really just feels like they decided they were done with blaseball and never wanted to touch it again, and it feels like nothing but a huge "FUCK YOU" to all of the fans that cared.

[lenasai]

ID: A screenshot from the Blaseball Wiki detailing the player changes for the Gamma 4 Seattle Garages. A note at the bottom reads "Ryan Bluff remained on the roster until the end of Day 147, despite being deceased." End ID.

god this chart is everything to me. ryan bluff getting incinerated and not actually dying for ten days. dimi wobbler getting exploded three times because the election ran three times in a row. good shit. i miss this.

[waveridden]

i haven't gotten to do a deep dive blaseball numbers question in a while. so when @leonstamatis asked a question and i realized i was curious, i got excited.

how common/likely is it for a blb player to have a completely unique name that they do not share with anyone. a first and last name, neither of which has been given to anyone else yet.

TLDR: 5.5% of all randomly-generated names are fully unique, and 7% of randomly-generated names of beta players are fully unique within the beta.

but let's break it down a little more.

so first thing's first: i needed a list of players. a quick check with sibr and i ended up using astrology to get two lists: one of all the players from the beta/gamma teams, and one of all the players on delta/coronation teams. i merged the lists and made a note of when players first appeared: beta, coronation, coffee cup, prehistory, the forbidden short circuits teams that didn't make it onto the website, you get the idea.

final list: 5,072 names. boy howdy.

next: nonrandom names! a lot of names were generated in nonrandom ways, like replicas (which are all named after the original player), coffee cup teams (where the artists/data witches/real game band were all manually named), and even things like evelton mcblase ii and bontgomery mullock, where the name is based on another randomly generated name.

list of random names: 4,876. if that's not 3.8% more manageable then i don't know what is!

from there the steps were pretty simple. separate the names into first/given names and last/surnames, see how many of each of those was unique, and then see how many names were not shared with anyone else.

so looking at all of the 4,876 players randomly generated ever at all:

752 have unique first names (15.4%)

926 have unique surnames (19%)

259 have completely unique names (5.3%)

most of the 259 unique names come from prehistory, with an overwhelming 51%, followed by 26% from beta and 13% from the coronation era.

of course, most of us are here primarily for the beta, so how does that stack up? there are 973 names generated that were on beta teams, either in active play or in the shadows. of those 973 names,

227 have unique first names (23%)

250 have unique last names (25.7%)

68 have completely unique names (7%)

for me, this all naturally leads to another question: what are the most common names? across all 4,876 players the most common first names are:

dimi (12)

sebastian (12)

chandra (10)

ruth (10)

bennett (10)

bernie (10)

dagmar (10)

dominic (10)

eliot (10)

wyatt (10, although 4 of these are due to the wyatt masoning)

and the most common surnames are:

murphy (12)

davis (11)

caster (10)

highway (10)

horne (10)

schofield (10)

based on these numbers, which names are the least unique - that is to say, who has the most other players that match either their first or last name?

juan murphy (6 other juans, 11 other murphys)

eliot schofield (8 other eliots, 9 other schofields)

sebastian owens (11 other sebastians, 6 other owenses)

dimi santana (11 other sebastians, 6 other santanas)

and the final question: what full names have been randomly generated more than once? there are 8, and all of them happened in short circuits:

bees manhattan

candy finnegan

copernicus biscuits

layla pork

levar shoemaker

sancho thrower

tall everts

worf hatchler

and notably, the pairs of candy finnegan and layla pork were within the same short circuit! every other pair was across two different circuits.

if you're interested in name uniqueness, here's my spreadsheet - i did the legwork so you don't have to! please drop me a line if you notice anything weird (sooooooo many nonrandom names have snuck into my random names tab) and if you do any other name number crunching, let me know about that too!

[kayleerowena]

a few designs for the new batch of crabs! happy short circuits launch day, claws up!

(more info about each character concept under the cut!)

i have thoughts about these characters and the crabitat is still on 24-hour lore lockdown, so! concepts!!

grapefruit walnut (pregame ritual: blessing their weapon) is a paladin of the olde one. ey have armor made out of the olde one's carapace and a floating dagger.

malachi others (pregame ritual: shouting "gametime") is a shadow person with an ornate skull mask that floats in front of where their head would be.

iliad offshore (pregame ritual: chanting) is the spirit of a shipwreck! she's made herself an unofficial recordkeeper/storyteller of the league, especially trying to collect information on who everyone is so their story lives on if they happen to be incinerated.

cara yates (pregame ritual: awaiting orders) has something to do with the olde one, but i haven't decided exactly what yet.

amos penny (pregame ritual: hyperbolic time chamber) is a time traveler with coral growing on them. she has a mullet. i think they might be in love with iliad?

[jaybot-hotdogfingers]

i have also only ever posted fics about blaseball on ao3! the ones i'm proudest of are:

patch notes, about chorby soul iv's first season of existence

deep dark, static and smoke, about jenkins ingram gradually pulling wyatt mason vi out of the static, featuring my self-indulgent how-blaseball-godhood-works thoughts

that which is predestined but is not for this reason evil, about parker reuniting with reader!megan post-s24

all the cool teens are into occult bloodsplort secrets these days, haven't you heard?, about scores baserunner before they joined the flowers

and as for recommendations for other people's fics i have Many of them. just pulling from my bookmarks:

double or nothing, or, sometimes you have to say "go fish" even when you have threes. this is a tactic known as "lying" by @burningcrab, about ajax black and nevaeh flapper of the gamma 4 garages, and the party crash. this fic fucking RULES i love it so much. i love ajax and i still wish we'd exploded him. let him face consequences for his actions

shenanigans inevitably ensuing! by @bread--quest, a chatfic about the lift showing the flowers around tokyo in season 11. it's just very sweet and funny and i love it so very much

growing pains by waveridden, about gloria bugsnax. just. gloria my beloved

cultivation by marquis, about lotus mango (robot version). what can i say i'm a sucker for fic that does formatting stuff with robot pov. also fic about robots just in general

on (re)inventing yourself by @quantumducky, about dunn keyes, figuring out who you are when your entire life has been being who other people want you to be, and jaybot hotdogfingers

do androids dream of electric tea or shadow grandparents or static siblings or awkward sports-obsessed friends with godlike powers by @burningcrab, a... is diptych the right word? about jaybot. i love jaybot a lot (you may have guessed this) and this fic specifically has jaybot being friends with reader which is a dynamic i am obsessed with, and also it has jenkins ingram and wyatt mason vi

what if we got stuck together because the world ended... and we were both overprotective sentient locations... haha jk... unless? by @quantumducky, about the vault and the garden post-s24

knock knock. who's there? not me building a robot clone of myself by @suitablysolemn, a 12x100 about jaylen building jaybot and the other flowers helping. just. love is stored in the boston flowers and in the jaybot

Wincon by Spiderface, about tiana takahashi and scores baserunner playing against each other in the finals of a tlopps tournament

let it all drop by paopuleaf, about silvaire roadhouse, brock forbes, and debt

reading that fic made me HUNGRY FOR MORE. ive read like four blaseball fics ever and i loved them so much but theres so many i dont even know where to start. if you see this and you want to plug your own fic or one you like Please Do. do not be modest i want to hear about The character

[charaznablescanontoyota]

a mage ump ruled in vaquita's favor and then one of the steaks hit a home run so make of that what you will ig. vaquita was just standing there fielding

UPDATE FROM SIBR: vaquita's attributes all went up after it happened, the site is just bad at showing the change

[ID: A reblase log of Blaseball Gamma Season 2, Day 3. The score is 0-0, and the events of the log are as follows:

"A Mage Umpire rules in Vaquita Magno's favor!"

"SMASH! Baby Sliders slaps it to the Wall..."

"Baby Sliders hits a Home Run!"]