#blaseball: the card game

[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.

[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.

[stainedglassgob]

i will miss blaseball, it inspired me endlessly to design and create and collaborate however, i will not miss nor forget when wayfinder games ripped designs from fans without preamble or acknowledgement for a for-profit card game. like seriously what the fuck LMAO

[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

[apollosopera]

RIV (rest in violence) to the beautiful, nightmare-fueled world of Internet League Blaseball

this game got me through quarantine and my senior year of high school. I joined the discord server, snatched up every piece of lore i could get my grubby lil hands on, and cheered proudly for the Jazz Hands despite our lack of wins (THESE 👐 HANDS 👐 DONT 👐 CLAP 👐). whenever life felt overwhelming and scary, blaseball was a constant that, though i didn’t follow it every day, was always waiting for me when i needed it. i revisited the game for what i didn’t realize was the last time this January and created a Blaseball card for my ‘sona, Magenta’d Triumphant. hope y’all enjoy and i hope we’ll all reunite soon, whether the ILB returns or not.

[charaznablescanontoyota]

lorcan comes back from the mints' last postseason game to find briskie and rosa sitting on opposite ends of the kitchen table, both staring intently, hands held palm-down against the wood.

"did you guys order dinner, or -" ey starts, and gets shushed by two voices in unison.

"are you a blaseball player?" briskie asks no one in particular. "once for yes, twice for no."

there's a knock on the table, plain as day, though neither rosa nor briskie's hands move.

"what the fuck," lorcan says.

"there's a ghost," rosa says, and doesn't elaborate. "how was your game?"

"we sucked," lorcan says, letting eir backpack of equipment fall to the floor, striding into the kitchen to take eir own seat at the table. "don't we have ghosts? i thought they just, like, stayed in the crawlspace. or they're arturo moving shit around in the fridge at night."

"it's something new," briskie says. "or - they are. probably not dead. the ones in the trench never did this. knock twice if you're dead."

another singular knock, right on the heels of the request. whoever it is must be right here, listening.

"knock once if you're alive but invisible?" lorcan ventures, and gets one more knock in response.

"interesting," rosa muses. she takes her hands from the table, evidently satisfied that it's none of them doing the knocking, and twists her hair up into a bun.

"probably one of the fallen players," briskie says. "hank said the ones who didn't join active play are somewhere we can't see. the garages have one and apparently xe can make phone calls out." he purses his lips. "why come here, though...i don't know."

"well, clearly they're here for a reason," rosa says. her eyebrows are furrowed together, her fingers still teasing at her hair like they do when she's mulling over a problem. "could you be...arturo's husband?"

two knocks.

"enid?" lorcan tries, hopefully.

two more knocks. damn.

"what if we put down a bunch of tlopps cards," lorcan says, "and they pick one?"

ey realizes the problem as soon as the suggestion leaves eir mouth - no hands to point with, and no evidence that the invisible player can hold a pen or move an object. nobody even has to say it, though briskie half-arches an eyebrow and it's clear he's thinking it. lorcan appreciates the discretion, anyway.

"this is the worst fuckin' game of twenty questions ever," ey mutters.

"are you..." rosa trails off, considering. "a former crab?"

one knock.

"who was in active play?" she continues.

one knock.

"in the discipline era."

two knocks. rosa pauses.

"the expansion era?"

one knock. lorcan imagines expansion era crabs lineups in eir mind's eye, tries to sift through them, separate the old-timers from the late arrivals. leave out everyone who's already playing for a team right now, and...

"were you on the team in season 24?" briskie asks.

one knock.

"alston," lorcan says suddenly, sitting bolt upright. ey laughs, and slaps eir hands over eir mouth like ey's trying to hold it in. "holy shit. it's alston."

"ah," briskie says. his face is carefully neutral - alston's who he was traded for, and he doesn't talk about it, but maybe he's never gotten over that. he'll be alright, though, lorcan thinks. he can compartmentalize.

"well, that's settled. welcome to ohio, alston," rosa says, glancing around the room. there's still no telling where alston actually is. they'll find workarounds, surely. "can you eat? are you hungry? i think we were just about to order dinner."

[bread--quest]

@orbleglorb tagged me in a tag game thingy! oh boy

RULES: Reveal the titles of the documents in your WIP folder and tag as many people as there are documents. Let others ask questions about the ones that interest them and post snippets or explain the contents as you see fit!

hm. ok. this will be,,, interesting. i write on three different platforms and dont really have a wip folder and also give placeholder titles all the time so. good luck (to myself?)

fanfiction:

(there are like three different things i'm working on for the mills fic exchange but i'm not saying any of them because Secrets)

mountain/forest/sea

i don't ever want this to end / and you said that makes two of us

yaaaay besties yaaaay

a doomed universe

triptych (three-card spread)

[this one legit doesn't even have a title but uhh the vault retires and becomes a museum]

meegab :)

aeiou aeiou aeiou 🏈 (this one is remarkably not a blaseball OR a 17776 fanfiction (its wtnv))

original:

sprout (this one's currently just 5 different rewrites of the same opening)

countdown

the plurality one

oh right and now i have to tag. 12 people. hm! not doing that. uhhh. tbh i can't even remember which of my mutuals do writing. yeah i'm just gonna open this up to anyone who sees it and wants to do it sorry

[geyfrog]

fine ill bite. i would like the funny mafia context

I got a role in a shortform mafia game where I got to pick a tarot card each night to be displayed publicly as the next day's reading. Presumably, this role was supposed to be used to communicate information to the town and convey a general sense of where the game was going.

Ahead of the first day, I submitted XVI The Tower. The day went fine, actually, we used up our one skip vote. Ahead of the second day, I submitted XVI The Tower. The day went even better, and I led everyone to execute a mafia member. Ahead of the third day, I submitted XVI The Tower. I managed to narrow down that there was a mafia member in a group of four people, and the raffle voting mechanics (Blaseball game) meant we managed to hit the 1/4 chance to vote out the right one.

After all that, I did have to die - the host did the mandatory mafia elaborate death flavour, and then an explanation of what my role was... immediately followed by the day's tarot reading: XVI The Tower.

(Through an incredible series of coincidences, we managed to hit the 1/7 chance of voting out the last remaining mafia member, ending the game. Technically wasn't a townie doing it, but that's an explanation for another time.)

Basically, I kept submitting XVI The Tower and we got luckier every time. FAILED seven towers attack FIX your world FOREVER!!!!!!

[blaseballteamshowdown]

💾 Colorado Clones

ORIGIN: secret (and fk) Short Circuits team

LINKS: none available; however, players are viewable by selecting the two Clones teams on blaseballplayers.netlify

⭐️ Auric Allstars

ORIGIN: Blaseball: The Card Game

LINKS: roster poster

[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 🥰

[fogwitchoftheevermore]

hi . what is blaseball. looking it up i cant find anything except that it Ended which is extremely unhelpful . but i'm intrigued by ur au

YAYAYYYYY YOU'VE ACTIVATED MY AUTISM TRAP CARD. whisp i also have an uncompleted beastlife one that i'll offer you here once i'm done explaining.

so! blaseball was (rest in violence) a live play video game that combined aspects of roleplay, fandom, and TTRPGS with text based video games, and it ran from July 2020-June 2023 (specifically starting on july 20th, hence my reblogging of all my au posts today). blaseball was a surrealist horror game based off of america's favorite past time, baseball! in order to play blaseball, you had to make an account on the website and choose one of 24 teams to be a fan of. you then watched as the seasons played out, with one full season taking one real life week.

each season was made up of 99 games plus a postseason of indeterminate length. games were played every hour on the hour, with the regular season playing out monday-friday. the post season had it's wild card rounds on friday afternoon, and then the rest of the post season played out on saturday. sunday had no games, with the entire day being reserved for the election results, which came out at 3 PM EST every sunday.

what is the election? well, this is where the fans come in! throughout the season, you could bet on games (as well as do some other stuff that's not wildly relevant) in order to get coins. you could use these coins to buy votes, and use these votes to change the game in the election. each election had a few things you could vote on (two in the first 11 seasons of the game, and 3 in the last 13. i will only be discussing the first two of them here, as the third isn't super relevant.) the first was decrees, of which there were usually 3-6, and they were new rules that would apply to the entire league. only 1 or 2 would pass every season, based on which got the majority of the league's votes. the second was blessings, which acted as boosts for your team and/or handicaps for your opposing teams. there were usually 10+ blessings available, and they would all (usually) be rewarded to the team that put the most votes into them.

elections are where the surrealist horror comes in. in the first election of blaseball, there was one decree titled "open the forbidden book". it had no description, and fans were repeatedly warned against voting for it. as you may expect, it got 60% of the vote immediately. upon it passing, we were punished for our hubris. the moab dessert became a hellmouth, the world began to fracture, and umpires began to be able to "go rogue" during games played under solar eclipses. when umps go rogue, they straight up kill players by setting them on fire. the best player in the league (at the time) was also instantly killed as further punishment for opening the book. so yeah, that sure is where the horror came in!

there's a lot more that happened after all that, but that's the basic primer. if you want more, i'd really recommend the blaseball roundup, which was a recap show made by the company that made the game, the game band. it covers seasons 1-22, so almost the entire game, and it was made by an in universe character (the anchor), so you get a good grasp on the vibes of the whole thing as well. there are 5 episodes, all under 20 minutes, so it's not too much of a commitment and it's a lot of fun.

a quick primer on how my aus work- each au (the life series, empires, and hermitcraft) are separate universes from each other, all running simultaneously alongside one another. they pretty much just follow the plot of actual blaseball, but with a focus on these new guys instead of that aforementioned plot. some of them do fill in for actual characters, but the majority of them do not, and the ones who do fill in for those actual characters just go through said character's story beats.

now, beast life au! i'm just gonna copy paste all my google doc into this under the cut, as a special treat.

SATURDAY LEAGUE

Dingo: Batter for the Hellmouth Sunbeams. Dingo becomes much more boar when the Hellmouth opens, having been a pretty normal human prior. Had an unhelpful modifier rerolled during the Expansion Era, giving them a Debt. Thus far the only victim has been Bree, but the Debt remains.

Modifications: Debt, Life of the Party

Kiki: Pitcher for the Yellowstone Magic. Has spearheaded many a resurrection, drawing the ire of a lot of the league to the Magic, as players with Debt keep ending up on the team because of him. Sonic and Kiki both picked up the Siphon modifier at the same time, but Kiki makes much less use of it. His only successful saves as a Seeker have been for Fishie. He also picks up the Traitor modifier during Expansion for. Reasons.

Modifications: Siphon, Seeker, Traitor

Sonic: Starts as a pitcher for the Boston Flowers. Very, very good at what she does, partially due to pure skill and partially due to Siphoning a lot of other players. They rocket up the Idol Board as a result of their skill. They spend at least some amount of time Shelled as a result, though she gets pecked out pretty frequently as well. He is taken by the Shelled One to play for the PODS and falls to the Charleston Shoe Thieves after Season 10, Day X, where she has stayed since. At some point in the Expansion Era, Sonic Shelled Null, hence Space’s one sided hatred of them. 

Modifications: Siphon, Parasite, Honey Roasted

John: Batter for the Miami Dale.

Modifications: Redacted, Electric, Life of the Party

Fishie: Pitcher for the Baltimore Crabs. Fishie has a penchant for being swept Elsewhere, having had two particularly extensive stints that resulted in her returning with significant memory loss until the Scattered modification wore off. The first time lasted about a season, and the second one got close to it, but both of these stays were cut short by Kiki dragging her back. Unrelated to the above, but due to the carcinization, she has a crab arm.

Modifications: Scattered [sometimes], Life of the Party

Phia: Batter for the Houston Spies. Phia lies low most of the time, managing to avoid the ire and love alike of the fans, which is pretty much entirely to faer benefit. Phia is/was the member of the Spies that Broku is/was closest to post-alternation, as she didn’t know Oku well at all and didn’t have the cognitive dissonance after all that. Pregame ritual is making stew.

Modifications: 0 No (this is technically a Blood Type and not a Modifier, but whatever)

Null: Batter for the New York Millennials.

Modifications: Shelled (that one time), Redacted

Space: Batter for the Hawai’i Fridays.

Modifications: None

Joe: Batter for the LA Unlimited Tacos. Joe was one of the victims of the Wyatt Mason-ing, an event where the universe fragmented and the entire LA Tacos team was turned into the worst player on the team briefly. Don’t worry about it. Joe was one of the players who did not get their full name returned to them, with the last name “Flyaway” being replaced by “Mason”. After the fact, Joe had a relatively normal time as the Tacos deliberately put themselves through God’s silliest hell. Joe became a Receiver (hooked up to the Microphone, which is possessed by the previously mentioned Wyatt Mason, again, don’t worry about it) due to nebulous shenanigans mostly because I thought it’d be funny. Receivers have a lot of weirdness going on that I think suits Joe’s “guy from the real world who got put in here” vibe, just trust me.

Modifications: Receiver

Bree: Batter for the Breckenridge Jazz Hands. Oku and Bree were together before season 4, when Oku was affected by the Alternate Reality decree. Bree originally attempted to maintain a relationship with Broku, which did not work, and Bree took this very poorly. Bree made an attempt to get herself alternated as well, but players have no voting power, and Bree’s stats weren’t enough of a nightmare that it occurred to any Fans to Alternate her. At some point in the Expansion Era, Bree was killed by Dingo, and now makes frequent ghost appearances via Haunting Echidna.  

Modifications: None

Oak: Batter for the Hades Tigers.

Modifications:

Oku: Batter for the Houston Spies. Oku and Bree were together until season 4, when Oku was affected by the Alternate Reality decree and Alternated, switching places with Broku. This obviously put significant strain on the relationship, and Broku has become far more involved with/close to the Spies in the wake. Broku also potentially got Redacted? Not sure about that yet.

Modifications: Alternate, Redacted[?]

Echidna: Batter for the Hades Tigers. 

Modifications: Haunted

Gery: Batter for the Tokyo Lift.

Modifications:

Moch: Batter for the Seattle Garages.

Modifications:

Mei: Batter for the Mexico City Wild Wings.

Modifications: Redacted, Life of the Party

FRIDAY LEAGUE

Dingo: Pitcher for the Atlantis Georgias, originally a pitcher for the Dallas Steaks

Modifications: None

Kiki: Batter for the Boston Flowers

Modifications: None

Tom: Batter for the Hades Tigers

Modifications: Siphon, Supperyummy

Sonic: Pitcher for Hellmouth Sunbeams

Modifications: None

Eker: Batter for the Kansas City Breath Mints

Modifications: None

Phia: Batter for the Miami Dale

Modifications: None

Viz: Batter for the Houston Spies from their shadows, spent a season on the Canada Moist Talkers but went back

Modifications: None

Jack: Batter for the New York Millennials 

Modifications: Haunted

Echidna: Batter for the San Diego Saltines who died in Pre-History and Haunted Jack for a while

Modifications: None

[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.

[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]