#just like blaseball!

[tallymarkbrothers]

[Hi I'm not dead! I don't have any big reason for dropping off the face of the earth I just haven't had a ton of art motivation recently. With christmas coming up I mmmight not get back to posting before the new year but we'll see, I don't wanna give myself a set deadline so I'll leave it as hopefully new answers soonish!]

[wooshofficial]

I’ve been ruminating on this last garages album for a bit, and wondering why I haven’t been sad.

For anyone unaware: The Garages released the last album of the “we are the garages” series, titled We’ve Been The Garages, as our last album before the release of Expansion and the simmering shutdown of the band as we knew it.

I had a huge hand in this album. I wrote two songs for it—one old, one new—and helped on two others. I helped with tracklisting. I put a lot of emotion + energy + work into this, and now that it’s out, I’m left with this feeling of pride and joy.

But from reactions here on tumblr and by friends, it’s clear that feeling just pride is a singularity. A lot of people are grieving the terminal loss of the band and at large, the shocking, sudden loss of Blaseball, the game that started it all. People are left with a hole where it used to be, and it is making them rightfully very sad. I’ve gone through these same experiences with them, so I should be sad, right? Hell, I’m a part of the band that’s ending- I should be distraught. I should be grieving, it feels like.

But I’m not. I can’t find it within myself to be sad about this release, nor can I be sad about the loss of Blaseball, nor that I have to do other things now. This is because of two reasons, one of which is more important than the other:

I’ve always been terrible at handling grief in a healthy or normal way (unimportant)

I have a very different mindset about this particular ending.

For me, this album isn’t a death. This is a graduation.

I’ve known for a long time that Blaseball was finite. It was born of an era that existed only because it had to, and once that era was over, so was the game. TGB put it best when they shut it down- it was unsustainable now that the pandemic had been societally declared over. Blaseball was built in the absence of a thing that was now back, and no one could dedicate their full time to it anymore now that they weren’t locked in their houses indefinitely. When I heard the news, I had a flash of anger on how it ended, but it was quickly replaced by a resolute feeling of knowing this was going to happen eventually. It was always going to end, and it’s a shame that it did so in this way, but it had to. I wasn’t sad about it.

And with the death of Blaseball came the death of the thing that had been the Garages’ muse for so long. How long could a thing last without life support, especially when we, the people behind the band, were subject to the same situation of being needed somewhere else? The Garages’ end was going to follow Blaseball’s eventually, even if it took nearly two years to do so. I knew this and understood this deeply.

I also knew that the end of the band wasn’t going to suddenly kill the bonds I had made with my bandmates, people I have the honor to call friends, best friends and colleagues. None of us were suddenly going to drop dead (knock on wood, you bitches better survive), we were just going to stand there after the lights went out and say “now what?”. There was always going to be an end, but there was also always going to be an after.

A graduation is not a funeral. You can grieve the fact that it’s over, but really, you are meant to reflect on the wonderful (or horrible) things that have occurred in the time since you’ve started. Take all the good and the bad and the deeply complex and turn it into fuel for the new you’re about to step into. Understand just how far you’ve gotten since that initial point, and maybe see how far you can go.

I graduated high school in June 2022, about 10 months into my being a part of the band. They were among the first people I told I was going to college and that I had just thrown my cap. It rained that day, and the venue was outdoors, and I had food poisoning, but when I threw that cap, I wasn’t upset at any of that. I wasn’t upset that high school was over (for a plethora of reasons), nor was I sad that I was going into a new part of my life. I was actually thinking about my graduation cap itself, and how hard I had worked on it the night before, painstakingly painting it and making sure it was perfect. I was so happy that I had done the damn thing, and it had gotten a moment to glimmer in the air, even if a little smeared due to the rain. I walked out of there that day so proud of myself for making it through and making that cap.

And almost ironically, the words I had painted were “I’ll figure it out eventually”. I didn’t know entirely what I was going to do after high school besides go to college, or what I wanted to get a job in, I just knew that there was going to be something there. I knew that I would keep going. All I had to say was “now what?”, because this was an end, yes, but there was always going to be an after.

I don’t know what the band will become after we release the last of our stored works. We have some ideas. We don’t know what our legacy will look like in a year, or five, or ten, or fifty. We don’t know what’s coming for us, but we’ll figure it out eventually. There’s always an after, and we will make it ours.

And I’m not sad about that.

[rabbit-rays]

'what role did megan ito play in blaseball' the traitorrrrrrrrr

[echoequinox]

You know what pisses me off most about Blaseball

They didn't even have to up the ante that much, if they gave us just the same bog standard blaseball play for like, 4 months at a time, and Big Votes happened after that, we'd have eaten it up and it wouldn't even have been that difficult on them. We were not in it for the Crazy Shenanigans we just like. Wanted to bet on some games and see who got incinerated. Fuckin, sim16 and shit were wildly popular because we didn't give a shit about Peanuts and Gods and all of that shit. It was fun, yeah, and the lore stuff was neat, but like.

We just wanted to watch some blaseball.

[tchotchkeshelves]

i always think im over it and then boom, inexplicable wave of missing blaseball

[colrana]

think about it: like apples to oranges,

like trees and rocks,

think about it

022 / 365

[lycanthian]

they should invent a blaseball that is

[natbplease]

taking this as a challenge. speculation/possible spoilers below

1. bones to ohio (anyone else)

2. what have we done

3. empty stadiums

4. [no clue]

5. two week world

closest i could find for 4 was “black hole rising”, which is one letter too long? “we’ll suck forever” is two letters. idk anymore

it could also be curse of crows if you spelled it like “curse offf crows” <- girl who really likes that song

[courfeyracs-swordcane]

[pointing towards you emoji] favorite blaseball team. go

(if you want to practice drawing in another style, then draw yourself as a transformer OR as a human character)

WE ARE FROM CHICAGO

[doctorwhoisadhd]

i think blaseball ruined my perception of what a pun is if its sports related someone just sent a photo of some softball (?) players to a groupchat im in like WHY ARE THEY IN A CAGE and i immediately said "got caught stealing" because i mean its right there and the feedback is that this was an A+ joke (high praise from them). like. what? that was nothing?

[shutthedord]

So, I saw some of you talking about how Blaseball is now impossible to get into because the game/experience/cultural event is gone.

May I introduce: the Spies Debriefings

(specifically, the Spies Debriefings starting from February 2021, when I started running things)

(or you can check out the Greatest Hits if you don't want to backread a whole entire blog)

The Debriefings are/were a daily liveblog of Blaseball. Under the pen name Agent O, I was their head writer and editor starting at Season 12/February 2021. Originally starting in season 6 it was a simple daily recap - but from the end of the Grand Siesta onwards I helped document not just the game events, but also the way the fandom was responding to it. I have been told this is basically a Let's Play: Blaseball, and I even mostly agree.

It doesn't replace the live experience, obviously. It is written from the perspective of one team. And in hindsight, there were some significant inaccuracies. But it was written as a way to make sure that people could follow the game without having to be glued to Discord 24/7, and in so doing, it also became a record of the fandom experience in a way nothing else will ever be.

[lenasai]

a lil confession from a guy who used to like blaseball. going to preface with i absolutely loved it, the culture, the community, the characters and setting and all. i made art, wrote fics, bought the albums. but as someone who wasnt usamerican, who lived on the opposite side of the world in fact, i always felt a little left behind. joining late contributed to the feeling of lockout, timezone mismatch meant that i slept through events like voting, and the finale.

and… the communal character building. sometimes i felt like i had to force myself to use a usa-centric lens to see what everyone else saw. the deicide jokes were funny, but not when my actual rl faith started being teased and challenged as well.

i think i'll still always keep a shard of blaseball near and dear to my heart. the good parts of it really were amazing. but sometimes when i see people say they miss it, i think, i wish i could miss it as fiercely as you guys do too.

hey, i wanna say thank you for sharing this with me. i think it's an important perspective to put out there. i debated on whether i wanted to maintag it since i don't have a way to reach out and ask if it's okay to do so, but i really think other people should see it. (you can always send me another message if you want me to delete it and i will do so asap)

blaseball, as a game and as a community, was wonderful and overall a net positive, but it was by no means perfect. it had its flaws like any other community, in this case driven by the fact that its active fanbase was largely white and centered in the united states. there were a lot of people who felt ostracized by a community that was supposed to be welcoming to everyone - and whether it was people not knowing how to keep a bit contained to the circumstances of its universe or shutting down discussions about problems in character writing, there were people who got hurt. we cannot and should not pretend that never happened.

and of course, as you mentioned, the game was designed in a way that mostly centered the united states. i think there were attempts to fix this during coronation with planned events at different times, but we never got to see that play out. hell, you could even see it in which locations got to be represented by teams. i'm not personally sure how i feel about the fact that a lot of the teams that were represented outside of the us were prehistory teams. it feels like they took a step in trying, but those are all teams that wouldn't ever see active play, so it rang a little hollow to me.

at least from my perspective, it seemed like there were dialogues happening about this and that there was progress being made to fix those issues, but then the game ended and we didn't get to see anything come out of it. i really don't want to see that all be for nothing. i hope that everyone who learned something from this community will take those lessons and apply them to how they interact with other communities.

thank you again. i am truly sorry we didn't get to have the same experience.

[blazeball]

just like sitting here half angry and half devastated as it once again sinks in that i'll never be able to go back to when blaseball was happening and fun and beautiful

[cowboyskeletons]

baseball amiright

[ozzyfromthecafeteria]

i need to shove parker macmillan into a blender and turn it on the highest speed. augh

[lovelandfrogman]

blasetober day 25: parker+megan

ok too tired 4 new stuff today. here’s some icons i made for my art fight page :]