#has anyone read 17776

[eggvlyn]

I DIDNT MISS IT THIS YEAR YAY FOR TERRIBLE COMICS

[syn4k]

i feel really fucking sorry for every historian that is going to have to research this century in this future. Hey I know this is a bunch of words on tumblr.com on an internet designed to degrade down over the years which is terrifying but like if anyone from the year 2110 or some shit like that manages to see this, please know that it sucked for all of us learning about this stuff too

if this post can be salvaged from the wreck of theseus' ship that this site will eventually become and survives until then, hello humans in the future. everything is very scary right now. i think everything's always been scary but its different when you're staring down entropy itself

here are a few things that i want people from the future to know:

in between all the crazy shit going on in the 21st century weve been eating dinner and petting animals and scheduling times to hang out with friends just like weve always been just like we always will be. for every huge groundbreaking event you learn about theres gonna be several million people at any time going "damn" and immediately putting their phones down and going to do regular shit cos life goes on man

we're still telling stories! just like always! and singing stupid little songs just like always and most of it will be never recorded and lost to time forever but please dont be sad even if you dont know the origin of a story or song just know that in creation you are connected to the past always :)

i hope the internets still up we got a lotta good shit on here

i love you. we love you

has tumblrs search function been fixed yet?

what version is minecraft on

seriously dont get sad about whats been lost. its ok. it was here once and it was beautiful

i love you

i love you

i love you

if you really are reading this in 2110 then i am almost certainly dead by now

(unless the events of 17776 by jon bois occurred in which case yippee! immortality! we still got 2 years til april 7th 2026. holding out till then o7)

i love you

[wander-wren]

i’ve been trying to look for critique of 17776 but it’s actually quite hard to find. not because i dislike it (i don’t think you could look at my blog and come away thinking i dislike Football Satellite Story) but because i just like to see critiques of things i like sometimes. opens up the old brain.

plus there are certainly things that i could critique in the story, i just haven’t quite figured out how to articulate them. most of them feel like quite low-hanging fruit, anyway—the whole narrative is predicated on time essentially pausing in the 2020s, plus apparently all bad things have been eradicated (war, hunger, money, i don’t know if it’s explicitly stated but i assume bigotry etc). american government still exists as it does today, at least in name—there is a president and governors. quite a lot to unpack there.

i read 17776 as a utopian story. it’s not a perfect world, but as jon bois says several times, the imperfections are necessary, deliberate, chosen. therefore….don’t they make it perfect? up for debate. it’s certainly the only utopia i’ve encountered that i respect, for the simple fact that it never turns out to be a lie or boring.

that said, there is SO much of the world of 17776 that we don’t see. we don’t see disabled folks, and we especially don’t explore what that looks like with the nanos. we don’t see people from the places that were underwater, that juice tells us survived and “continue their cultural practices elsewhere.” we don’t see anyone wrestle with the premise, that is—no more children. no making new families. no change. a flooded world. an infinite sun. the unfairness of everyone who didn’t make it to the end of the world. and of course you can say, to the last bit, that it’s been 15,000 years, people have already done all of that wrestling. you’re telling me it doesn’t still hit them?

that’s not even touching on the fact that we don’t see the rest of the world. we don’t know what happened to it, what the politics are, what land has even survived. jon bois is very insistent on glossing over all of the difficult questions.

and i’ve written before about how i admire that, for the guts alone if nothing else. why don’t people die? who knows! what about this bad thing? it’s gone. what about this problem with the world? it’s fine.

so 17776 is flawed, mostly in that it is deeply american and apparently uninterested in engaging with the less comfortable parts of its premise. for the first, i want to know what else anyone expected from a story titled “17776: What Football Will Look Like In The Future.” for the second, i maintain that changing that would require that jon bois had simply written a different story.

17776 is ultimately a positive narrative to me. i almost said hopeful, but it’s not that. there’s no hope after the end of the world, there’s no need for hope. it’s just content, despite the occasional dips. this is the part i struggle to articulate, because i so clearly understand where jon bois needed to go, and it is obvious that he was steamrolling over any pesky bits that would detract or distract or slow him down in getting there (again: guts). i respect it.

would telling those grittier narratives, turning this utopia into a dystopia, be worthwhile? certainly, to some. would it wreck the existing themes/message? very probably. would that make a better story? do the themes deserve to be wrecked because the way they were presented is flawed?

up to you.

[express-rehiring-project]

->

welcome to my multimedia mouthwashing / 17776 au!

i started writing this very soon after finishing (and falling in love with) 17776, and swore to myself that i WOULD make something of it. writing fic in a way that isn't just narrative chapter storytelling has been something ive wanted to do for the better half of a year now, but i haven't had the motivation or way to do it. 17776 added fuel to that fire and inspired me to finally, FINALLY, write something.

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i can't say for sure when new chapters will be updated, and i absolutely cannot promise anything consistent long term. i have a full time job and cannot write every day, but i will do my best to update this as often as i possibly can.

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***DISCLAIMER: real people, companies, and events will be featured in this story, but not every event will be real. what does this mean? stories like the one featured above, are entirely untrue, and are not trying to pass as true. this a dystopian, futuristic, fiction story, i am not attempting to slander or spread rumors about anyone/anything, they are simply ways to convey the story i want to tell.***

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content warnings: mentions/descriptions of rape/sexual assault, emotional abuse, murder, suicide, and artistic depictions of gore.

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this will not feature any romantic pairings, as i don't think that will add anything narratively, and i don't really ship any characters anyway...... if you read any dialogue/interactions as something romantic, that's fantastic! you can think, do, and make anything you'd like with my work.

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id like to give a special thanks to:

soph, @sarcasticscribbles, for illustrating visual aspects of this story. i absolutely could NOT do this without you, thank you for being part of it. (will also be tagged in chapters where her art is featured).

dannie, @lys5ophobia, for beta reading!! i would scream cry and shit myself if i posted typo

tristan, @good--merits-accumulated, for beta reading, as well as being my biggest supporter in anything creative i do. i wouldn't have the confidence to do this if he didn't push me to do it.

monty, @sirwormbell-the4st, for being my bestest friend and always cheering me on no matter what i do (except if its stupid)

freddie, @marlboro-freds, for showing me 17776, still being around, putting me first for over a year, literally everything.

ralphie, @anhonest-puck, for always being around during the biggest change in my life in the past while. you're so beyond lovely and im so lucky to have you.

i love you all so so much, and i will until i die and have my consciousness forcefully shoved into a spacecraft <3

- @desire-mona

[desognthinking]

in light of just leave a comment fest's bookmark day, i've dug up, mostly for my own notekeeping purposes, a bunch of the deepest cuts i've got in my ao3 warrior nun bookmarks. they're variously short, sweet, totally unique, and so on, but they're all very specifically underrated pieces that i've commented on recently (ish). i've probably missed out a ton 😓 (and my marked-to-reads are overflowing) but anyway here goes:

Please Respond by @daisychainsandbowties - 17776 au

mama (carry on, carry on) by @jtl07 - 5+1, the ocs and mothers

romance is not dead (if you keep it just yours) by @emilyjunk - post season 2, ava comes back :')

Entropy, or the Heat Death of Sister Beatrice by @leet911 - switzerland and the laws of thermodynamics

across the boulevard, she hears a hallelujah by @potsticker1234 - spidey ava and her best friend/roomie beatrice

Canceling the Apocalypse by @knightsofrayx - pacrim au

like dust for stars by @wingedsilva - intelligence agents au

an old friend of the devil by alex_writes_things - john wick hitmen/assassins au

the wolf, the wolf, the wolf that stalks the forest by @foulbearobservation - fairytale au

when the caged bird sings (will you set me free?) by CardinalisSilva - the holiday au

Dear Fellow Traveler by @the-darkness-does-not-bargain - haibane renmei au

The Pendulum by Which We Sway by gleecastost - sequel to time travel magic au

when my day has come at last by @imnotevencatholic - mermaids, sailors and mermaid hunters

they say it gets better (but what if i don't?) by @halobearers - beatrice character study

lots of the authors here have many more fantastic pieces! i'm not sure if anyone's seeing this but if you do please consider trying out their other works too 🫶

[nonbinaryriverclan]

has anyone else started occasionally starting their sentences with periods after reading 17776?

[winterpinetrees]

Has anyone read 17776 and also The Silmarillion? Do we think that’s how Valinor will eventually end up? I can imagine all of the elves who spent their younger years fighting and dying in Beleriand making up new ways to spend their time on after several ages of peace.

That makes Earendil the narrating space probe, doesn’t it?

[daenystheedreamer]

I love 17776 is this your first time reading??

yes my first read!!! its wonderful i love it, im maybe half way through? im obsessed its so wonderful. i think the idea that america has no culture is a bizarrely reactionary take that some leftists have taken as fact, just patently ridiculous. this series does an amazing job showcasing and examining it. highly recommend if anyone hasnt read it yet!

[once-vel]

i know absolutely nothing about blaseball but you have no idea how desperately i want to know everything about blaseball

[ID: An ask from @/celestinecerasus, reading: "all i know about blaseball is it's like evil 17776 (not about football) (not about satellites) (evil things happen)". /End ID]

(context, for anyone confused)

hehe... excellent... the short answer is it was an absurdist horror baseball simulator which ran near constantly during the onseason. i cannot summon a coherent explanation of it for the life of me so i'll put some assorted fun facts under the cut. i also tried to explain what my last post involving my ocs meant down at the bottom !

if you want an actual decent explanation of what it actually was, i recommend this post here. it is not mine! but it is good

umpires can go rogue and incinerate players, but only during solar eclipses

names are completely randomly generated based on a pool of names. so while there were characters with very normal names there were also characters named like... jaylen hotdogfingers. boyfriend monreal. freemium seraph. you get the point

there were an assortment of fun weather games could be played in, such as birds, peanuts, solar eclipse, feedback, salmon, sun 2, and three separate coffee weathers. this is not all of them i just cannot be bothered to pull up a list

said weathers had unique effects. my personal favorite is salmon weather which made everyone time travel

none of the players had a shred of canon lore so a lot of the fun was coming together as a community to make shit up for them. a whole lot of this has been recorded on the wiki if that interests you!

there WAS a story going on, separated into two eras, discipline and expansion. i cant tell you much about discipline because i wasnt there but expansion featured a god named The Boss buying the league and destroying it in pursuit of making it marketable. it ended with everyone killing her. as she was represented by a png of a coin, when we killed her, all of the ingame currency was completely removed from the website. after that the league was slowly destroyed by a black hole (games continued during this)

one time los angeles got split into infinite separate versions of los angeles. i am not sure how it worked because this concerned a team that was not mine. they called these the infinite los angeli

during. i think it was that same event? every player on the los angeles team got renamed to wyatt mason. there was a whole thing trying to get everyones names changed back. several players names were never fully corrected. this was named the wyatt masoning

then there was the time multiple teams across the leaves got their own little clones of wyatt mason. there wereee 14 i think? this was named the second wyatt masoning. i personally like the seventh mason a lot

there was one time a team got reduced to one(1) active batter and the game continued like normal. that one active batter was just. in several places at once. ze hit a triple at one point. all by hirself

necromancy was a thing. oh necromancy was very much so a thing. the first time we necromancied someone she came back with a debt to fill and killed many people

then you had the time someone necromancied themself with zero consequences. they got incinerated but they had a modification (attribute) that gave them a chance to change teams at the end of every season and fucking apparently dying didn't turn this off? so they just walked out of the hall of flame (the afterlife) and onto a random team. they proceeded to die again that season (i believe), and then they walked out of hall again

there was lore about the Before Times. in these Before Times, a guy was given a modification called firewalker that was essentially Super Debt. he left a team? whole team became unstable. he got many players killed. there's a song about this!

speaking of music! a lot of fans came together to write blaseball themed music. if music about this game interests you, check out the garages (the band)! they have a LOT of music. some songs i recommend are bones to ohio, fight gods, ur too slow, free space, mike townsend (knows what he's gotta do), and dead ringer. i also like your favorite one to break a lot. zakri song.

ok thats enough fun facts for now this is a c.ob blog not a blaseball blog. BUT i will now explain what my post from earlier means!!

kelzil is an alternate. getting alt'd in the actual sim essentially just means your stats get rerolled, but a very common interpretation of getting alt'd is outright getting swapped out for an alternate universe version of yourself. this is the interpretation i like! getting alt'd early specifically means they've had time to get used to it, so they're mostly just hanging out.

zakri's deal is like... i already explained the incineration thing in the post so i don't think i need to say more on that. flickering means he's more succeptible to the effect of feedback weather, which is two players on opposing teams getting swapped mid-game. this usually results in getting moved around from team to team a lot. he then gets shadowed, which pretty much just means he's taken out of active play. i don't have a solid interpretation of what the shadows Are so i don't have much to say on that.

THEN he gets elsewhere'd, which entails getting swept [vague gestures] elsewhere by flooding. this also takes you out of active play but this time it's for a random amount of time - a player might be gone for a day, a player might be gone for multiple seasons. zakri is gone for multiple seasons. i personally think of elsewhere as very foggy and very wet and very lonely, especially when you're there for a while. zakri will not be having a very good time !

now, for unnamed kiv. so the rising stars are a team that were introduced at the end of expansion. long story short, there was a big special game between two teams made specifically for the game - the good team (the rising stars) and the evil team (the vault legends). the vault legends were, specifically, the boss' team. we didn't really get to pick who got put on what team, players were drafted through a specific process. if you got too popular you got put on the legends and if you were popular but not too popular you got put on the stars, iirc. so because i imagine unnamed kiv to be a generally good player, they get forced onto the stars. after this is when the sun exploded and the league was destroyed by a black hole btw. so like. unnamed kiv is having a great time i'm sure

[atalana]

(for anyone who doesn't get the reference, it's about jon bois' multimedia webcomic 17776: what football will look like in the future, and specifically it's sequel 20020: the future of college football. definitely worth reading but the important thing to note here is that it's set 15000 years in the future after an event in our time where every human being became immortal)

but to this actual post, the lightbulb is possibly my favourite thing across both comics

bc like, so much of 17776's emotional core is layered quite far under the surface? having 9 come into consciousness at the start gives the audience a viewpoint into what humanity would have felt like in those first few decades, but for the most part everyone in this story has adjusted to what is essentially paradise millenia ago. one of the very first things we're told is that humanity solved every problem.

and unlike most media with similar themes, it doesn't go back on that! there's a lot of stories about how you created paradise but because it never ends it becomes hell, and exploring that what people think they want isn't what they need and all that. not the case here! humanity is, as humanity always has been, just kinda fine. we live, we play, as we have always done

and so the emotion for the audience is the moments that reflect what our life is like now. and they can be really small, a few words lost amid the absurdity of the rest of the story, but once you can see the full context they hit hard. the end of 20020 with the prison break guy, that's giving us all we need to know why people in the future play the games they do. it's a moment of we are the same, no matter what. then and now and in the future, and what we do matters, even if it has no end goal whatsoever

the lightbulb is fun because it goes the other way round. we celebrate this lightbulb in our time because it's been on without breaking or burning out since 1901. even now, that's a really long time, and that living connection between history and now matters to us. but we also live in a world where stuff breaks, and stuff ends. we know this lightbulb will have an end to its life, and we're prepared for that to be just around the corner

so what happens if the bulb is still on in 20020? that's a lifetime that goes beyond myth, permanency on a level that is incomprehensible to us - only comprehensible to people who've lived those 18000 years alongside it. and it gets destroyed on a whim as part of a game.

it's possibly the only moment across both comics where 10 and juice are more devastated about something than 9? 9 as the audience surrogate doesn't have the context for it, but everyone else in that world is suddenly having an emotion that hasn't been felt in 18000 years - loss. the only thing from our society they're missing. and it's a lightbulb, who cares, but 17776's other thesis statement is that humans breathe life into everything they create, so that lightbulb was a living thing. one of the few living things that can still change

and it feels like looking through that temporal window again but from the other side. they're seeing us, remembering what our world was like, and finding a connection of their own there. closing the loop.

and i think that's pretty fuckin neat

most insane way to introduce people to an extremely cool random thing that exists in the world is to put it in your story in the context of how utterly fucking devastating it would be for the thing in question to be broken irreparably

[georgierre]

i keep thinking of like. f1 in an 17776-esque universe

[stevieharringtonwifeguy]

do you think the like. actual scientists and engineers and ppl who worked on juice have ever seen a juice post and been like. what. why is the probe ive spent the last 8 years of my life working on wearing a hoodie and eating lunchables.

[ruffboijuliaburnsides]

Hey so anyone talkin about how 17776 has a sequel? I had not heard of it and stumbled across it by accident when I was going about re-reading 17776. It’s called 20020 and there’s another part coming out this year apparently. (this is conjecture - it was meant to come out last year but appears to have been delayed? Or noplace remembered to update and say “oh yeah it came out”)

Also:

Never change, Juice.

[carnotaurussastrei]

https://www.sbnation.com/secret-base/21410129/20020/

Here’s the sequel story too!!

[noneedtofearorhope]

Just saw your reblog about that football article post. Idk if anyone’s explained yet but it’s actually a sci-fi webcomic. If you keep scrolling it turns into a story set in the year 17776, I highly recommend it if that sounds like your kind of thing.

Idk if webcomic is quite the right word for it, maybe multimedia story? Idk it’s been a few years since I’ve read it

i had looked it up and found the wiki article about it, so i knew it was experimental and all and not just a typical sports article, had looked at the source code and found the link to chapter 1, i just, couldn't find anyone mentioning it consuming so much resources, or the text blowing up specifically. i wasn't joking when i said i could hear my pc start to struggle.

for whatever reason tho now when i follow the link it just has a list of chapters. it does sound like a cool concept, but i got enough tabs waiting to be read as it is 😅. i do appreciate someone actually piping in tho, people were reblogging me and i think they thought i was in on the joke or s/t.

[dankar-camoran]

what are some movies/tv shows/assorted media you find yourself constantly gravitating towards?

Time for a little unpacking of my interests!

Movies and shows are always Star Wars. Even when it's shitty garbage. Lately I've been a bit burnt out what with how much content has been and does continue to be released for it and the flaws become harder to ignore, but that just means I go back to the older stuff I've got nostalgia vision for. Really any time there's a Star Wars that does a Found Family well enough it hits me right in the part of me that would self-insert when I was younger.

Music-wise, my spouse has been a big fan of The Mountain Goats for years, and a couple years ago, I listened to a bunch of their albums so I could share it with them, and got pretty impressed with the fact that they've been doing music ever since. I learned most of his albums aren't really my jam, but the ones I like, I really really like. And, while I could very well be wrong, John Darnielle seems like he's not at the Unrelatable level of celebrity, and is just a pretty cool seeming guy.

The thing I am most obsessed with for the past three years or so is the Immortal Hulk run of comics written by Al Ewing. I was always a Hulk fan, but not really enough to get into the comics in a big way, but Immortal Hulk made me realize exactly what about the Hulk appealed to me and perfected it. It's also very easy to read without having to know a billion years worth of comics in order to put it into context, if anyone is interested. I highly recommend it without reservations.

Les Miserables is the musical that got me into musical theatre. I don't have much to say about it, because people who are into theatre probably already know more than I do, and if you're not into that, I'm not gonna be the one to convince you, but it's been a dream of mine to be a part of a production in any way (but preferably as Javert, or Grantiere, or the Bishop).

and 17776 and its sequel 20020 are fucking amazing, I adore them and recommend them so much it's fantastic and uplifting and so much fun.