#blaseball: the card game

[leonstamatis]

Art & Attribution Issues In Blaseball: The Card Game. An FAQ covering common misconceptions and concerns.

I am not a visual artist and am not personally being impacted by the card game. But I’ve seen a lot of the same questions (and arguments against criticisms) pop up, and I’ve decided to compile some of the information into one place for the purpose of easily sharing it.

Specific questions regarding artists’ experiences probably shouldn’t go to me! I’m just following along.. A text-only version is available below the cut further down.

Sources:

Goblin’s post comparing Blaseball: TCG player designs with fanmade designs

TGB Reddit AMA (includes Tillman’s original designer, Marn @/charaznablescanontoyota, confirming she was never contacted.)

Mentions of whitewashing concerns from @/hadestigers

DMs with Wayfinder regarding credit for a stolen design and accreditation (via Goblin)

Also, adding here that Gob has posted a couple asks with specific desires and concerns as an artist affected by this.

Additional Links:

Cancel your preorder (originally found by @/waveridden)

Wayfinder contact form (or email at info@wayfinder-games.com)

Art & Attribution Issues In Blaseball: The Card Game. An FAQ covering common misconceptions and concerns.

1. What is Blaseball: TCG?

Blaseball: The Card Game is an upcoming game from Wayfinder, which aims to recreate some of the experiences of Blaseball.com in a card game format. A pledge campaign was launched in early 2022 to fund the project. The game itself was unveiled at PAX Unplugged this month.

2. So... Why are people mad about it?

The current iteration of the card game, from what we've seen, includes recognizable fan favorite players from Blaseball. Some of that art bears significant resemblance to design elements made popular by fandom creators. People working on the game have said they made an effort to avoid this and, when a fanon design was used, asked artists for permission. But as more designs were unveiled, artists have said they continued to see popular fanon ideas without acknowledgement of where it came from.

3. How do you know the ideas came from fanon?

Blaseball doesn't have player designs. All we know about the players from the site itself is coffee preference, blood type, some stats, and the name/team. That means almost everything about the player is created from the ground up by fans. Wayfinder (and The Game Band, who operate Blaseball.com) have confirmed they specifically sought out artists who weren't in the fandom for the game in order to prevent copying. But according to a Reddit AMA with TGB, those artists were then given descriptions of gender, race, and specific features of the players. Those aspects were created by fans, and often a specific fan who cared a lot. They deserve credit for that.

4. Did anyone talk to them about it?

Yes. Extensively. Goblin has spoken at length about efforts to contact Wayfinder privately about accreditation and acknowledging fan artists. They tracked down the original artists for every design being stolen and sent it to Wayfinder, despite not being involved in the game or receiving compensation. Specific examples are available on their Tumblr, @stainedglassgoblin, where they've been speaking about this process.

5. Is it possible it was accidental?

Some of it could be due to coincidence, sure. But the number of similarities has prompted concerns. Goblin has a post with about a dozen examples of overlap between fanon and Blaseball: TCG designs. Again, TGB confirmed during their recent Reddit AMA that card game artists were given specific summaries for characters appearing in the card game. Here are a few:

Nagomi Mcdaniel is an Asian woman who has undergone carcinization and developed crab attributes.

Chorby Short is a frog who plays blaseball.

Specific designs were also used for popular players like Wyatt Quitter, Tillman Henderson, etc.

There are a few issues here:

Carcinization is not implied to change a character's appearance in game. That is a fanmade interpretation. While Nagomi is a name with Asian roots, gender is always up to interpretation with names -- so why does the summary specify? That's fanmade lore, too.

Where on Blaseball.com does it say Chorby Short is a frog? (It doesn't. That's fanmade.)

While creators have confirmed one artist was asked for permission to use their Tillman Henderson design, two other artists also had huge influences on the common design -- and at least one, who initially drew the design, says she was not asked.

6. I preordered the game and now I feel weird. What do I do?

Great news! If your order hasn't shipped yet, you can cancel it. The best way to make clear your disappointment about this issue is to revoke your financial support. Visit the GameFound page for the game to find details on cancellations and refunds.

7. How do I voice my concerns?

Wayfinder Games has a general email listed on their website at info@wayfinder-games.com. There's also a contact form there that you can fill out. I recommend telling them you won't purchase the game, and will be telling others not to purchase it, either. Money goes a long way. And so does public scrutiny! Talk openly about your concerns on social media. Tag them. Put pressure on them, publicly.

8. What are artists asking for?

Credit for their work. It's also worth noting that this is a for-profit game! Wayfinder is making money off of it, while the people who came up with these players' lore aren't being compensated at all. It's a shame that the people who have made art out of genuine love for the game now have to see someone else get paid for it.

9. If people didn't recognize the player designs, they wouldn't buy the game. This is stupid.

I’ve seen this sentiment a few times, and I'm a little tired of it. I understand the need to bring people in and sell the game, but there were plenty of ways to go about it that didn't involve art theft. Here's just a couple:

Make new characters. Seriously. The fans love to make up new players, and this would not have been the business failure you think it would be. It's better than having artists call you out for plagiarism, anyway.

Don't provide character details to the artists you specifically hired because they were unfamiliar with fanon. I really don't understand why they did that. I can't figure it out.

Work with fandom artists from the beginning in order to give them credit for their designs from the start, avoiding this whole debacle. Checking for permission is the bare minimum; providing compensation is even better. This could have been a collaborative thing, instead of leaving fanartists out despite their obvious sway in fandom spaces.

Make a game without character art. This is the boring answer, I guess, but... Blaseball.com doesn't have any pictures of the players! It still has plenty of fans! If the card game were just the same player cards we already know, I'm sure it would have been fine.

10. Is there anything else?

Yeah. I don't have specific examples of this handy, having not seen all the art, but some artists have expressed concerns about the whitewashing of certain players in the current designs. While the designs may riff on art concepts from fandom artists, there are cases where artists say the skintone is lighter or facial features and other details have been scrubbed of their racial/ethnic ties. I didn't want to leave that out. Some cards have been redesigned since they were unveiled. But artists say they had to reach out to Wayfinder with concerns to make that happen, and it resulted in the artists they did hire having to do more work to completely redo cards -- instead of only doing the work once. That's unfair to everyone, and also unnecessary.

11. Stay informed and updated

We've yet to get an official statement from Wayfinder (on Twitter, at least) on this issue since it was brought up. The "blaseball: tcg" tag on Tumblr is full of posts with additional context and information, and Goblin (and other artists!) have made a number of statements regarding their experiences.

Also? Support your fandom artists. Give them a follow.

--

Thanks to Gob and to lofi for reviewing this. Again, if anyone has concerns, additions, or corrections, send them my way.

[whales-are-gay]

blaseball tcg not beating the art theft allegations

[ID1: A tweet from Wayfinder Games, showing the box art for Blaseball: The Card Game. On the cover is art of Jessica Telephone, who's batting with a giant telephone, and Nagomi McDaniel, a woman with a long ponytail who's holding up a massive crab-like claw and grinning.

ID2: A thread from gob! (twitter user glassgoblin):

Still waiting on any kind of formal recognition or royalties given to the fans who designed the players featured in @/blaseballtcg instead of consistently ignoring the fact that @/WayfinderG did not ask for permission to use several of these designs, like at all.

I found out several of my ideas and designs were being used in Wild Cards through press releases, not DMs. I was also quick to recognize that my friends' designs had been used without prior contact. None of us have been credited or paid in this *for-profit* game.

I have stayed quiet about this for a while, hoping that someone at Wayfinder would release a public statement on the lack of design credit. There has been none. This is extremely unprofessional and I have no intentions to buy a game that stole intellectual content from fans.

ID3: A google search for "glassgoblin nagomi mcdaniel" with several images of Goblin's design. Nagomi is a short, muscular half-Japanese person. The lower half of their face is exposed skull with curved tusks. Their left arm has a tebori sleeve, and their right arm is a kona crab claw. Their hair is a dark and long side-shave, partially pulled into a ponytail that reaches their lower back. The crab claw and ponytail are similar to the art in the card game, which was created after Goblin's art. /end ID]

[sprucelogsarepeak]

It’s been said before but the whole card game situation was probably doomed from the start. You’re either gonna get people mad if the designs are uncreditedly similar to fanon or people mad if the designs don’t resemble fanon at all

[crowcaws]

Just finding out now about the blaseball art thing and idk if I need to do anything actively because I only contributed to at maximum like two semi famous designs and idk if they're even famous enough to be included but also very frustrating situation as a whole like... The lack of recognition and stuff is kinda why I had to step away from Blaseball art. Blaseball as a community tends to act very entitled to artists' time and work with little appreciation like they forget we're doing this for free out of love for our imaginary blorbos. So while I'm disappointed I feel I'm not surprised. Anyway if any Dale players past or present made an appearance please let me know if I need to make any Phone Calls ig

[hesitationss]

they (collective they) shpuld burn the fucking blaseball tcg booth at PAX. like if you’re designing a whole dumbass fuck card game, why would you not hire any of the illustrators you’re stealing from ? they should also publicly shame the artists who were actively looking at fan art to make card designs lol

[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*

[thehallstara]

hi hello it's both itch creator day AND my birthday so this is a perfect excuse for me to do a master post of my games and zines!!!

Collabs:

Agami Village: Created with Weiwei Xu as part of last year's HES SUPERFestival, supported by Hand Eye Society and Canadian Council for the Arts. It's a short visual novel about fishing and time loops!

ghost story: A short prototype of a first person murder mystery where you're a ghost trying to solve your own murder. Done as a final project for Code Coven's Intro to Game Making course back in the winter.

(neither of these are purchasable but if you try them and like them you can always send a kofi!!)

Bitsy:

on nights we dream of stars: a semi-autobiographical story about stars. mostly just me figuring out how bitsy works.

on the nature of ghosts: small vignette about ghosts made for the february 2022 bitsy jam.

the end is near: a soliloquy about the end of the world, done for both the july 2022 bitsy jam and crabjam 2022. inspired by s24 for of blaseball but wholly independent to it.

lungs to burn: a short poem game about wildfires, grief, and queer connection done for the may 2023 bitsy jam. featured in indiepocalypse #43

no postage required: a somewhat-sequel to the end is near; or a letter to a lost love. done for the 2023 trans game dev server jam.

Twines:

cards fall where they may: anthology of interactive blaseball stories told through a tarot reading. some of the most impressive css i've done to this day, and i honestly think it's worth checking out just for that.

ablaze with the people you've been: another interactive story, this one a story about edric tosser told in four acts. still worth checking out even if you know jack shit about blaseball imo and still one of my favourite things i've ever made.

run from me or rip me open: the thing that started it all, the first game i ever made. yet another blaseball story; it's a little rough around the edges but it's got heart.

Zines:

Kriah: A personal zine about my experiences with antisemitism over the years. a heavy read but one i would implore gentiles to take a look at regardless.

square roots: made with @tigerquoii for the 2022 blaseball zine jam. a series of conversations.

and that's it!!! all of them (besides the collabs) are pay what you can, forever and always. if you've ever enjoyed something i've made, consider supporting me and my projects! and if you can't, rating and comments are always equally appreciated mwah

[fogwitchoftheevermore]

sometimes that's just the way that it goes

or, joel smallishbeans joins the tokyo lift (an mcyt blaseball au fic)

the thing about joel is- well, there's a lot of things about joel, but the most relevant thing, is that he never really got in to blaseball.

he'd gone to few of grian and jimmy's games in college, been brought to an equal number of pearl's minor league games, and mostly paid attention in conversation about it after his entire friend group became obsessed with the splort seemingly overnight.

but then he'd moved out to tokyo after college, where the blaseball scene had yet to expand to a proper minor league; let alone a major league. he got a non-splorts related job. he had non-splorts related hobbies. and he was suddenly in a timezone 17 hours ahead from all his friends who cared about these things.

so maybe he managed to forget basically all the knowledge he had about the game. sue him.

by the time the ILB expanded to tokyo with the lift, joel was certainly more knowledgeable on the splort than he'd ever been. he had basically the entire league's schedule in his calendar at all times, he voted in the elections, he kept a close eye on weather forecasts across the globe. a small side effect of most of your friends playing a splort that started killing people 10 years ago.

but here's the thing- despite joel's expansive knowledge of what's happening the ILB on any given day, despite his stockpile of votes, despite his constant presence as someone's plus one at any given ILB event or party-

despite all of that...

joel doesn't really know how to play.

which is a problem, when, on a whim that he now knows was definitely some divine intervention at play, he decides to actually go to one of his friend's games on a day they happen to be playing in tokyo. and it becomes more of a problem when an umpire goes rogue, and in the blink of an eye, joel finds himself vaulting a railing and picking up a bat that, until two minutes ago, belonged to a toyko lift player.

and now belongs to a new tokyo lift player.

him.

shit.

and that is how joel finds himself here, on a stool in stress and false's bathroom, staring at his actively-being-dyed hair in the mirror and considering.

he didn't know stress and false very well before joining the lift. he'd met them, of course, at the aforementioned parties and events he'd been brought to, but they weren't close by any means. but seeing as they were the only members of his new team he'd been properly introduced to prior to becoming their coworker, he found himself following them around like a lost puppy from day one. they seemed mostly endeared by this, so far, which joel was taking as an embarrassing but necessary fact of his new career.

the "sitting in their bathroom getting his hair dyed" part of his current situation had come about a few days prior, when the wild card teams were announced and the lift had officially made their first ever post season. joel's remark that they should do something for the occasion had spiraled into stress lending him her bathroom and hair dye to dye the streak in his hair pink in celebration.

by the time they actually got around to it, the lift had been knocked out of the post season by the wild wings in a two game sweep, but joel hadn't backed out, so here they were.

stress was mixing the pink dye while joel got the green bleached out of his hair, humming along to a song joel wasn't really listening to. the bathroom isn't large enough to fit false as well, with joel on a stool, so she's hovering outside doing... something. joel's kinda lost track of her exact movements due to his aforementioned considering.

joel hasn't actually played a lot with the lift, yet. he'd joined the team in the last 20 days or so of the season, so they've gotten a good 20 games worth of a look at his... let's say, skill, and they've all presumably figured out that he's not very good. no one's said anything, but that doesn't mean they haven't been thinking it. but it's also possible they haven't been thinking it, and if joel brings it up right now, then they'll all realize that he's terrible. but also, joel knows he needs to fix this problem, because he's seen what happens to bad players.

so he's sucking it up.

"stress, can i admit something to you?" joel says, as confident and nonchalant as he can manage. it's not very nonchalant.

"hm?" stress says, looking up from where she's fidgeting about. "sure, i don't see why not."

joel takes a deep breath before he continues. "now, i don't know if any of you have noticed this yet, but... i don't really know how to play blaseball."

this is when false chooses to poke her head in from whatever she'd been doing to comment. "sorry, repeat yourself?"

"well, despite the fact that all of my friends have played this game for years, i haven't been paying much attention to how it actually works. so i don't think i actually know how to play, which wasn't a problem for me until about three weeks ago. and now it's a very big problem."

"oh," false says, looking him up and down. joel tries not to feel scrutinized. "i wouldn't have guessed that from your stats, but yeah, in hindsight, that makes sense."

"you looked at my stats?" joel sputters.

"yeah is that not-" false looks at stress, desperation clear on her face. "do people not usually do that?"

"i mean, i don't, but i don't know what all you other geezers are up to."

joel has yet to move on from the stats thing. "i haven't even looked at my stats. what- are they good? actually, no i don't want to know. or, if they're bad, i don't want to know. if they're good you can tell me."

false laughs. "you're fine, overall. not a good pitcher, but that's not your problem. everything else is pretty average, but your batting is your best stat, and it's pretty up there. not really indicative of someone who doesn't know how to play."

"oh!" joel thinks about this. he doesn't think he's been a particularly special batter thus far, but he's not objecting to whoever's quantifying his skill saying he's good. not at all. "ok, well, i kinda know how to play. i think. i know enough that i've been able to be passable, but i want to be good next season."

"are you asking us to coach you?" stress says as she starts the tap to wash the bleach out of joel's hair.

"uh, if you want to, yeah. you're both good, i think."

false, who is now leaning in the doorway instead of poking her head in, laughs again. "yeah, i'd say we're alright." from her tone, joel suspects they're actually very good, and he once again has no idea what he's talking about.

"but we'd love to!" stress says, lightly pushing joel to put his head into the sink. her next words are slightly drowned out by the running water. "obviously the lift practice in the off season already, but we could spend a bit of time doing one on one stuff with you. show you the ropes, you know?"

joel, still in the sink, answers with a thumbs up. as he sits back up and takes the towel stress offers him, he sees false leave the doorway and go back to whatever she was doing, decision seemingly reached.

joel dries off his hair and stress moves in with the pink dye and a dye brush, humming along to another song he doesn't know. he definitely doesn't need her help dying his hair- he's been doing it on his own for years now. but she'd offered the dye she already had so he didn't have to buy a new color, and apparently that offer came along with her doing most of the work as well.

and for once in his life, joel is going to take the help without a fuss.

[stainedglassgob]

Since people are curious about the design copying in Blaseball: Wild Cards (which is a for-profit card game) I thought I might as well put together a graphic of some of the most obvious examples. For clarity, Blaseball: Wild Cards art is on the left, design origin/inspiration is on the right. Some things of note:

None of the designers featured in this post have been publicly credited or given payment/royalties even though the game has been funded since May 25th, 2022.

Some designers were contacted by Wayfinder after the card was drawn for permission to use their design.

Designers were contacted only after I sent Wayfinder an email about their inappropriate conduct with lack of crediting and asking for permission. Read more about their response here.

In at least one situation with Tillman Henderson, Wayfinder only contacted one designer and not the two others involved in his visuals. The artist they contacted is only responsible for a singular aspect of the Tillman design (autopsy scars along chest.)

There are dozens of cards that have yet to be released to the public.

Wayfinder expects fans to tell them when they’ve stolen designs instead of doing the due diligence themselves. See Reddit AMA for more information.

Instead of paying or crediting designers, Wayfinder has repeatedly made their artists redraw cards.

[tillman]

I met one of the ppl who worked on baseball at a furry convention at 12 am during a game of cards against humanity, after the most embarrassing word flub of my life

really fucking funny lmao. i was working on becoming a moderator for the main blaseball discord when The Event happened. TGB was chill and im glad a lot of people who did stuff for it managed to find some stable footing.

[leonstamatis]

like not to be that guy but if you do want to let the people producing blaseball: the card game know that you would like to see credit given where it is due, to the artists who created these designs and made blaseball what it is today, wayfinder has both a contact form and a general email listed as info@wayfinder-games.com. they also have a twitter and a facebook listed on the card game’s website.

i know this is something that has been brought up before in the blb fandom in some capacity or another since the card game was announced, but given nothing has been done on the production end to fix the issue, it seems like we have to keep bringing it up again and again. so. here are some places to do that.

[whales-are-gay]

just cancelled my blaseball: wild cards pledge!!

[waveridden]

also fyi i've seen a couple people say things like "i preordered the blaseball card game and now i feel weird about it because of the art credit thing" and like, just so you know, you can cancel your order as long as it hasn't shipped yet. which, according to their most recent updates, your copy probably has not. so get in touch, tell them you're canceling because of the art credits, and put your literal money where your mouth is

[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.

[fourteenfifteen]

Fic authors self rec! When you get this, reply with your favorite five fics that you've written, then pass on to at least five other writers. Let's spread the self-love 💞

tagged by @thehallstara and @leonstamatis thanks friends : )

five favorite is so tough. so tough! but i’m not going to overthink it here’s a gut check answer

direct membrane interface (fatt: palisade)

YAYYYY BLOOD i love writing gross bloody stuff and had a lot of fun w this fic. i have some agonies over being mostly a short fiction writer and also i know gross shit isn’t everyone’s cup of tea so the positive response to this and my other little cori fics has been really nice and appreciated lol they are so me on my bullshit

business is business (original work)

favorite is a bit of a strong word but i was thinking abt this one and think it was extremely slept on. i love writing original fiction and had a great time w this which is a monsterfucking story i did for an exchange. and it was fun ok. major win for self-indulgence and gross shit

avoiding it (the hunger games)

a gale/madge fic about them both having feelings for katniss. both a labor of love and an idea that i had and went SURELY someone has written that already (and then was so surprised when i couldn’t find it). this is the most kudosed fic on my ao3 and obv that is 99% just bc of the fandom but i can’t be mad abt it, i love how it turned out

you will not go to heaven, you’ll go to kansas city (blaseball)

ach i love this one. truly took over my life for a week and a half (as shown by it having been written in that amt of time i’m not very fast or verbose lol). i published other blb fics after this but in my heart it’s my goodbye to blaseball - the weird scary messiness of it, the strange shape of characters’ stories, and all the strange things it inspired me to write. i feel like i need to send the band old ‘97s a christmas card as thanks for the inspiration

black hole oral history project (blaseball)

not just a me fave but a fan fave too lol. the things worth saying abt this fic are that i agonized over it for literally two and a half weeks and that it came out exactly how i wanted it to.

sure that works as a list. ty for the tags stara and tb! i will be tagging uhhh @rozecrest @swallowtailed @littleladymab and anyone else who wants to ik everyone says that and that it feels embarrassing to capitalize on but fr do it and use me as your excuse

[internet-league-blaseball]

i still really wish the blaseball card game had just like ... made their own players . because like the cards are designed after pre-existing characters yeah?? but most of these characters are going to be plot important ones that people who like smaller characters won't get to experience the joy of playing their favorite player and teams without characters with the same level of importance won't have many players in the game either

and honestly i think it'd be more interesting if they just made their own characters with similar naming schemes PLUS you don't have to worry about art theft because there's no damn designs to steal from