#goodnight sweet blaseball. it was a good run

[bluntforcefem]

the thing is, right. that i wrote 75 fics for blaseball. more, if you count tumblr prompts - more if you count wiki pages. over the course of late 2020 to the very beginning of 2023, i wrote more for blaseball than i have for anything else, except maybe my friends' oc rp. maybe i'll never write that much for fandom again. my writing developed so much over that period of time - blaseball gave me a lot of inspiration and a lot of practice!! i met incredible writers through it who inspire me so much To This Day. i met incredible people with incredible ideas. i still lurk around in the crabitat, because the community there is lovely and i love looking for secondhand recommendations in the media channels. i could list a lot of regulars i've just... seen around, for about 2, 3 years. blaseball offered me both the opportunity to grow as a writer and the opportunity to find communities that, even if some of them fell apart, taught me a lot of things anyways. i'm still in contact with a lot of people i met through blaseball, and that's fucking lovely!!

i can't say i'm sad it's over. i guess i'm a little sad. but blaseball's been dying for a while, now, and it's the kinda thing you sorta see on the horizon. i'm one of the people who distanced themself from it before it came, and i'm a little grateful to my past self for that - i've got so much going on that i don't have quite enough room for a "i just moved across the country and also tot clark died in my funny game so i'm going to lose it for 5 hours" kind of night. i still have everything that matters. the experience, the community, the funny little guys. but blaseball did a lot for me, so i wanted to say goodbye. here's goodbye.

there is a radio.

sometimes it's in the crabitat. sometimes it's in other stadiums, darkened locker rooms slowly collecting dust; maybe there's the occasional visitor, casting light across worn benches, footsteps leaving imprints on the tile. but there's less and less visitors.

most of the time, it's at home.

you can tune it, if you're careful. it likes to play what it wants, though, and so not-players-mostly-people just let it go, when they find it - whatever jaunty commentator/clawmentator voice it wants to remind them of, games stretching from the very first season to the very last, it gets to do that. it keeps playing, however distorted by static it gets.

time goes on.

there are less people to visit, as time goes on. some people grow old and die. some people don't die, but they do move on, and the radio knows it'd be an unwelcome reminder. but there's always a handful to visit, to comfort, to celebrate with. immortals at a graveyard that used to be a field with strings of pearls in their pockets. the handful of players that kept playing, in the after, maybe other splorts or other games - but they kept playing, and they had fun, eventually. parties of people that used to be on different teams and now just share jerseys like old sweaters, trading stories of how their hometowns have changed since it ended.

sometimes the radio sticks around with someone for a while. sometimes it changes hands every day, every hour, switching its tune to match. sometimes nobody sees it for a very long time, and sometimes people forget it exists entirely. but it always comes back for a visit. a little memory, a little burst of joy-in-static. hello- hello- blaseball fans!

there is a radio. it's lasted for a long time, and it'll last for a while longer, even in the absence of blaseball itself. it lasted through ascension, after all. it lasted through siesta after siesta after siesta.

there is a radio, and there is a world moving on from blaseball.

there is a radio, and there is the lilt of old words, phrases quickly becoming antiquated, kept alive through pick-ups and muscle memory.

there is a radio, and there are people who used to be players.

there is a radio, and there are people who used to be fans, who still are fans, who still will be fans.

there is a radio, and it still loves.

there is a radio, and it still is loved.

(that's all for today's game, folks!)

there is a radio.