#velasquez alstott

[manderleydesign]

Vela is the character I've drawn the most. I hope to draw her again one day. 

[polkadotpatterson]

ok it’s been a while since I did some late-night reblase-fuelled fic-rotating unhinged angstposting so here’s some of that. which ended up almost veering into Actual Fic Territory whoops

thinking about. abner and parker. what if you were part of the team that cursed a guy and then you died because of it. what if you were both dragged back into this hell to face each other in a pointless showcase game and then you both got thrown back in the league and were even on the same team for a while and watched the coin melt and maybe sort of almost forgave each other for a moment before the world ended.

what if you fell to some weird moist team and made some weird friends in a weird garden and just when things felt almost okay he fell to a new team too and you waited for the league to burn again. and then you didn’t face each other all season but at the end of it they opened the book like they always do because there’s no escape from this game, not ever, not even after you all killed a god. you’ll always be here playing and burning and being puppeted around on their little stage for everyone’s amusement.

and what if back when you fell you had said to yourself no, I’m not doing this again, I’m not going to be their star. maybe some part of you was afraid you couldn’t live up to that anymore, but you buried that deep beneath the part of yourself that was so tired and angry, so it became easy to say no, you’ll pitch how you want. not terrible, but bad enough to be off their radar. you’ll put on a show, but not the kind they want.

but the gods can’t be so easily defied, not even after you’ve proven they can be killed. they love to forge stars, design their pretty little constellations. they look at you on the day the book opens and they set you alight in a new way, different from your first team’s spark that still burns inside you, different from the flames that consumed you when you died.

they say you’re a star again. they say he isn’t. he’s just some guy. not a firewalker. just a batter for the crabs. you can be just some guy, too. watch! you barely win your first two games. you give up ten runs to the millennials. the gods have given you something, some new understanding of the game, something stranger than your own magic, but you do not let it rule you. you will never stop fighting with all that you have.

you did not know velasquez alstott, but donna did. there was no one to protect her this time, no trace of her fire eater ability left to save her. on tv, you watch the firewalker step up to bat. you watch vela burn. you watch the firewalker hit a home run before her ashes have time to settle. donna is crying. she’s dead, and donna is crying, and the firewalker is being the perfect golden boy again, hitting his little home runs as everything burns around him.

you said you wouldn’t be a star again, but that doesn’t mean you won’t stand on the mound two days later and stare him down and do your damndest to strike him the fuck out.

he’s spent so long looking away from you. he’s looking at you this time. maybe remembering how you cursed him. maybe remembering how you burned. you’d throw the ball right at his perfect little face if you could. maybe you try to. it sure doesn’t land anywhere near the strike zone.

(he was just a kid)

he swings weakly.

(he’s still just a kid, even after two thousand years)

he swings again. 1-2. you can almost taste the strikeout. 

(it wasn’t your team. not really. it was the fans. they voted for it)

it tastes like ashes.

(that’s what you tell yourself, sometimes)

he hits the pitch. he always hits the fucking pitch. that’s what he does. star player. burned brighter than you ever could, while you were burning in the background.

vela burned, too, and he still hit the fucking pitch.

donna’s thinking about her. she misses the ball when Winters hits it. she lets him score. you don’t blame her for it.

(who do you blame, Abner Pothos?)

if he’s going to look at you, you’re going to look back. you’ll stare him down until one of you breaks.

(maybe both of you)

[ditto-the-alien]

RIV Velasquez Alstott

A member of the Charleston Shoe Thieves when this sport first returned July 20th, 2020, They once had Fire Eater as a modification, but lost it during Fall Ball. They landed on the Hades Tigers during Fall Ball and were the first Eclipse related incineration of this NEW eon of Blaseball. RIV. However, also welcome Hana Wildebeest to this wild splort.

[waveridden]

i've crossposted some of my zine jam fics to ao3! here's what we've got:

death after life, part of @bread--quest's shuffle au zine, wherein flowers batter enid marlow muses on death, decay, and being on a cursed team

triptych, wherein richardson games, jaylen hotdogfingers, and velasquez alstott are given gifts (or curses)

imprinting, wherein salmon and solar eclipses are combined, and death is no longer a permanent guarantee (cw for major character death, undeath, and redeath)

[viciathief]

some of my fav thieves!

[theunsubtleknife]

[ourkicks]

Dramatic sketches of the shoe thieves hitters

Art by @lizzybutt 

[sunkencharlestonpost]

July 11 - Daily News Update

It's Sunday Sunday Sunday and here is your daily news update from your beloved Maincord reps!

Top Stories

Back today after a frozen day of no Maincord and you were all missed very much! Hope you had a nice break and got good rest!

Dr J has been putting out some interesting updates on the Library as lines become unredacted! Check it out on twitter account for WSHU, voice of the Charleston Shoe Thieves!

Rogue's Gallery Rundown

The Steaks will be joining us in the Rouge's Gallery today at 1pm EST to talk about their beloved Conner Haley joining our team! Whether you join in the jam or not, let's give them a warm welcome and share a few dad jokes wih good pals! If you can't make the jam or want to get some ideas out now, you may use this form here to submit your ideas!

Wiki Update Jam for Choux Stadium will be ongoing today in the Rogue's Gallery! Drop in any time (exept for during the Conner Haley lore jam above) and share ideas of how to update/change the wiki entry for Choux Stadium! Please use the tag _lorejam_update_Choux to help find ideas easier!

Tomorrow's Wiki Update Jam will be Simon Haley! See the calendar for more upcoming events!

Heist Planning Hoopla

Heist Planning is still closed to help with a brain break. Can't wait for Blaseball to start again and the stratigizing to continue! In the meantime, please stop by the Thieves' Guild and chat about your favorite moments from previous seasons, theories about stats, hopes for future seasons, or even to just spam +simba!

Thieves Home!

Today's Art from the Gallery is from Manderley (@manderleydesign on Twitter) of another great take on Negative Alt Velasquez Alstott!

[pinkspaceprincess]

daleween doodles ever get the feeling your art’s getting progressively worse?

[vickysaurus]

The Shoe Thieves on their latest heist. Yes, Beasley came along for old times’ sake.

[hadesblaseball]

And third in our lineup... Velasquez Alstott!

[ID: A screenshot of the Blaseball.com page for Velazquez Alstott, that shows a break down of their stats. They are as follows: OVERALL RATING (2.5 stars), BATTING (2 stars), PITCHING (3 stars), DEFENSE (1.5 stars), RUNNING (3.5 stars), and VIBES (1 star). End ID. ]

[lycanthian]

UPDATE: STOP BEING MEAN TO ME BLASEBALL SIM.

checked my costar (silly astrology app i check for funsies) and it um

[SCREAMING]

[polkadotpatterson]

I want to take a moment to talk about something that I've never really seen discussed before: The Curse of the Grand Unslam. Essentially, how the sim has an incredible tendency to punish the Thieves and Tacos for that time they broke it.

First, let's set the scene. Season 3, Day 73. Tacos vs. Thieves. Lee Davenport vs. Beasley Gloom. The score is tied 13-13 at the top of the 15th inning, and with 50 minutes elapsed, it looks like we could be heading for the first-ever spillover.

Until Davenport starts having a bad inning, that is. Thief after Thief gets on base: Ren Hunter, Velasquez Alstott, and Antonio Wallace all score, putting the Thieves ahead 16-13, and soon enough the bases are loaded with Sebastian Woodman, Workman Gloom, and Esme Ramsey. Blankenship Fischer strikes out swinging.

And Morrow Doyle steps up to the plate, and hits a grand slam.

That’s where things start to get glitchy. The timeline splits in two: one game where the grand slam happened, and one where it didn’t, ultimately earning the Thieves one extra win and the Tacos one extra loss. The site crashes, a 502 bad gateway error appears, and during the siesta, the Shelled One shows up for only the second time ever, delivering the following message: 

HELLO

DID YOU TASTE THE INFINITE?

I AM BENEVOLENT

I AM A SNACK

I AM A LEGUME

I WAS BENEVOLENT

YOU ARE INSATIABLE

WHERE IS YOUR RESTRAINT?

Fast forward to the election, where we see further side effects of the Grand Unslam: 

The Microphone Lifts

ERROR: The Grand Unslam Weakened the Bridge

Spacetime Tears over Los Angeles

The Infinite cit(ies) shine

Platonic Form corrupted

You've looked too close...

Los Angeles splits into infinite Los Angeli, and every player on the Tacos roster is renamed to Wyatt Mason, some of them never fully recovering their original names. Essentially, the devs saw the infinite opportunities this glitch offered, and used it to tell a story.

However, the sim was soon to remind us that it likes to tell stories, too.

When I first planned this post, I intended only to focus on the five players who were directly involved in the Unslam, but I realized the curse starts to show itself even before that. The sim wastes absolutely no time in punishing these two teams for glimpsing the infinite. 

Just two days after the Unslam, in the final game of the very same Thieves-Tacos series, Blankenship Fischer is incinerated. Just ten days after the Unslam, the very next time Lee Davenport and Beasley Gloom face each other, Beasley swallows one of those infinite peanut fragments and has an allergic reaction.

Next, of course, is the Wyatt Masoning, occurring after the election. I think there's probably too much to be said about the Masoning in general, so I'm not going to touch on a lot of it here, outside of the fact that apparently the Masoning itself was a glitch. TGB wanted to lean into the multiple realities by making more copies of Davenport, but a bug in the code made the entire team Wyatt Mason instead. The subsequent Unmasoning caused the original Wyatt Mason to become NaN, and again, a lot could be said about them alone, but we'd be here all day. Flickering, Receiver, Roaming, in and out of the Shadows... though they weren't directly a part of the Unslam, they certainly glimpsed the infinite along with the others, and paid the price for it. 

Let's talk about feedback, though. It's the new exciting weather in Season 4, and though the microphone supposedly originates from the Interviews decree, it can be speculated that feedback itself occurs thanks to the Unslam causing reality to flicker; a direct consequence of the glitch.

The Tacos have two feedbacks that season: Moses Mason to the Flowers in exchange for Vito Kravitz, and Baldwin Breadwinner to the Fridays in exchange for Basilio Fig. The Thieves have three, the most of any team that season: Workman Gloom to the Moist Talkers in exchange for Joe Voorhees, Morrow Doyle to the Flowers in exchange for Hotbox Sato, and Ren Hunter to the Millennials in exchange for Richardson Games.

That's right, the Thieves’ first feedbacks involved two of the players who were part of the Unslam, and then one who scored just before it happened. Coincidence? 

...Probably, but it sure is interesting.

Morrow Doyle’s story doesn't end with feedback, of course. On Day 98, after less than half a season with the Flowers, they are incinerated.

In a game against the Tacos.

With the pitcher formerly known as Lee Davenport on the mound.

This is sim storytelling at its finest. Morrow Doyle hit a pitch that broke the world and then had their own world torn away from them, dying far from home on a new team, facing the only other team who glimpsed the infinite that day. They were fielding at the time, not batting, so they had no need to be staring down the newly-named Wyatt Dovenpart, but I think maybe the two of them looked at each other anyway as Morrow went up in flames, wondering if this was the end of a punishment, or only the beginning.

Dovenpart learned the answer soon enough, as the reverb (which, of course, was also partially a result of the Unslam) made him a batter in Season 5, preventing him from throwing any reality-breaking pitches ever again. For good measure, Season 9 saw him enter the Shadows, and he has not emerged since, though not for lack of trying. Not the absolute harshest of punishments, but a clear punishment nonetheless.

When you think of Workman Gloom, you probably think of the time they hit a home run while going up in flames, or the time they helped kill a god, or maybe even the time they feedbacked to the Talkers and immediately hit a home run off their own dog (Incidentally, that happened in the very first game the Thieves ever played against the Talkers, and it would be far from the last time the two teams have a swap, but that's a story for another time). Point is, you probably don't associate them with the Grand Unslam, but they were on base when it happened, and the sim sure seems to think they deserve to be punished for it.

I've already mentioned Workman’s Season 4 feedback, and, well, at least things were good for a while after that! They continued to be one of the best hitters in blaseball, consistently on the leaderboards... and then Season 7 rolled around.

On Day 51, Workman had some of their hitting ability siphoned. This might have gone on to be a bit of a long-term problem for them, if it weren't for the fact that they soon got beaned by Jaylen and died just 30 days after that blooddrain. 

I think they knew how it would end, as soon as that pitch slammed into them. It was the 16th inning, just one inning longer than that time they watched the world break apart. If only either game had ended sooner, if only they hadn't been in the wrong place at the wrong time, if only the universe didn't hold a grudge for what had been done to it.

Workman saw what happened to Morrow, and Dovenpart, and so many others. Fresh in their mind is Antonio Wallace, their teammate twice over, once a Thief and now also a Talker, feedbacked like Workman, dead from instability earlier in the season. 

Workman Gloom knew where it was going. But they fought anyway, refused to go out until the ball had gone past the stands and what was left of their body had gone past home plate. Not a home run to break the world, but one to make the world take notice all the same.

Compared to the other players on this list, Sebastian Woodman is often overlooked. Perhaps that's how they managed to escape the curse for so long, surviving the Discipline Era and living through the Grand Siesta before finally being incinerated in Season 14. Three of five players directly involved in the Grand Unslam incinerated, one shadowed, bringing us to…

Esme Ramsey. It may seem like she's escaped the worst of the curse; she's never left the Thieves’ active roster, never been feedbacked or incinerated or shadowed or anything at all. However, Esme was the first, and for a long time only, player to ever be Haunted, a “blessing” she received in the Season 10 election. Everything her team has gone through is more than enough to be figuratively haunting, but things got painfully literal for her too on top of that. Frequently having your body taken over by dead players can't be easy; like the Masoning itself, it brings quite a loss of identity.

There's more to the curse than even everything I've said so far, though. Let's go back and look at the Shelled One, shall we? It showed up specifically to chide the two teams for glimpsing the infinite, and soon proved itself to be the main antagonist of the Discipline Era, culminating in two nerve-racking fights against its Pods. 

And who made up half of the Pods’ roster? Why, former Tacos players, of course.

To be fair, the Snackrifice was the result of the fans’ actions rather than the sim itself, but regardless of how it came about, few curses are worse than being brainwashed, forced to fight your friends, and then scattered around the league when it's all over. Not to mention that the sim managed to get in on it anyway; Wyatt Quitter was the only player in the entire Discipline Era to be randomly shelled as an effect of peanut weather. (In the Expansion Era, Quitter would go on to be the first former Pod to shell someone, as well as the only player not currently named Wyatt Mason to Echo into static.) 

And who was the first team to fight the Pods? Why, the Thieves, of course.

Can you imagine how it must have felt? To win your first championship, to finally be on top of the world after seasons of suffering, and then to hear those sirens, see those shells descending on the field. To look into the eyes of people you shared that infinite moment with, the only people who understood, and realize that they can now see nothing but the infinite, with no space left for compassion. To be thoroughly beaten into the dirt, and lie there, and watch them walk away without looking back. 

An entire team now officially cursed by the gods, cursed to always flinch before they can get anywhere.

But the gods don't always win. Workman and Morrow return one season later, rising along with the rest of the Hall Stars. They once saw the world broken, and now, they will see it remade. The Shelled One falls, the Pods are freed, and though the curse remains, it has proven to be breakable.

This story does not entirely have a happy ending. Sebastian Woodman still dies, and stays dead, as do others. Wyatt Dovenpart is still in the Shadows. The former Taco-Pods do not return to their original team. Wyatt Quitter is still static. I could go on about every little bad thing that happens to every Season 3 Taco and Thief, but I think you get the idea; suffice to say I haven't touched on absolutely everything, only the most relevant punishments. 

But eventually, Esme Ramsey is no longer Haunted. One by one, the Thieves start to lose their officially-labelled curses. The Tacos win a championship. Morrow and Workman are Released, and get to live again, free from the chains of blaseball. The Hall opens, letting everyone out; and though a black hole swallows all of blaseball and the future is unclear, there’s still a chance for everyone to be free someday.

As the original Wyatt Mason would say: Have hope.

[nullteam]

1

Hey Velasquez Alstott! How are you Holding up?

PRETTY FUCKIN BAD

[waveridden]

people keep reblogging that post about who has seen the most incinerations and being like “damn i wasn’t expecting X to be on the list” so just for funsies here is the list of everyone who they saw get incinerated

please note that these lists include both teammate incinerations and non-teammate incinerations. but for the sake of drama the teammates are italicized

beck whitney:

flowers, s1 to mid-s6: sosa elftower, famous oconnor, hurley pacheco, bryanayah chang, tyler violet, jorge ito, isaac rubberman, matheo carpenter, morrow doyle, caligula lotus

dale, mid s6-s13: dominic marijuana, murray pony, raul leal, theodore holloway, augusta chadwell

fridays, s14-s22: pudge nakamoto (the first time), alejandro leaf (the first time)

millennials, s22-s24: tot clark

dunlap figueroa:

tigers, s1 to mid-s23: juan rangel, landry violence, combs duende, emmett internet, moody cookbook, elijah bates, mclaughlin scorpler, kiki familia, antonio wallace, sebastian telephone, yazmin mason, frasier shmurmgle, hobbs cain, wichita toaster, igneus delacruz, carmelo plums, yong wright

sunbeams, s23 while super-roamin’: pudge nakamoto (the second time)

karato bean:

fridays, s1-s7: fitzgerald massey, jessi wise, hurley pacheco, sebastian townsend, sam solis, hendricks rangel, sebastian sunshine, thomas england

spies, s8-s14: case sports, raul leal, theodore holloway, norris firestar, son scotch

lovers, s15-s24: sparks beans, helga washington, jon halifax, helga moreno, peanut holloway

knight triumphant:

lovers, s1-s12: lars mendoza, zi delacruz, paul barnes, miguel javier, whit steakknife, caligula lotus, jose haley, tillman henderson

spies, s13: raul leal, theodore holloway, norris firestar

georgias, s16-s17: chorby soul (the third time), luis acevedo, hercules alighieri

steaks, mid s18-s20: chorby soul iii

lift, s21-s22: gerund pantheocide, brock forbes

steaks (again), s22-s24: helga moreno (former teammate)

spears taylor:

pies, s1 to mid-s4: alexandria dracaena, cedric gonzalez, juan rangel, kennedy alstott

tigers, mid-s4 to s8: combs duende, emmett internet, moody cookbook, elijah bates, mclaughlin scorpler, kiki familia, antonio wallace, sebastian telephone, yazmin mason, frasier shmurmgle, hobbs cain

fridays, s9-s24: hands scoresburg, pudge nakamoto (the first time), alejandro leaf (the first time)

tot fox:

jazz hands, s1 to mid-s4: alexandria dracaena, aldon anthony, cedric gonzalez, theodore passon, ogden mendoza, velasquez meadows

crabs, mid-s4 to mid-s19: combs duende, murray pony, tillman henderson, annie roland, chorby soul, luis acevedo, chorby soul iii

lovers, mid-s19 to s24: sparks beans, helga washington, jon halifax (former teammate), helga moreno, peanut holloway

wyatt pothos:

tacos, s1-s9: tyreek olive, scrap murphy, jessi wise, natha kath, blankenship fischer, hendricks rangel, sebastian sunshine, stevenson monstera, eduardo ingram, morrow doyle, richardson turquoise

pods, s10: sebastian telephone

jazz hands, s11-s24: lawrence horne, combs estes, sutton bishop, hercules alighieri, tamara crankit, bauer zimmerman

[manderleydesign]

An old one I found of Alt!velasquez Alstott from the thieves.