#if you follow me for mcyt hiiiiiiiiiiiii look at blaseball aka the life series if it wasnt real

[astronomodome]

what is blaseball

Ok so first of all thank you for sending in this ask because it gives me an opportunity to infodump about something that's really important to me... Blaseball! There's no way I can fully explain the game or what it meant to people but I can absolutely try!

Now, you may ask (and you did), what is Blaseball? Blaseball (with an L) was an absurdist eldritch horror online baseball simulator hosted at blaseball.com. Each week, 24 teams with names like the Canada Moist Talkers or the Atlantis Georgias consisting of simulated players with names like Brisket Friendo or Jessica Telephone would play game after game for the enjoyment of fans, who mainly gathered on discord to watch and cheer on their team together. Fan interaction consisted of betting on games and using the currency (peanuts) gathered to vote in elections at the end of each week, which determined new rules and game mechanics to add into the simulation.

Eventually, several godlike entities (including a giant peanut, a capitalist coin, and a friendly squid known as the Hall Monitor) would make themselves known and add commentary in between games, try to get the fans to pick a certain option, threaten the audience for picking the 'wrong' option, and so on. Meanwhile, fans would regularly screw with the system as much as they could, finding weird ways to bend the game to their advantage and creating ridiculous scenarios.

One of the most iconic events from the early seasons of Blaseball involved working around the mechanic of Incineration, in which players could randomly get Incinerated by rogue umpires during games and sent to the Hall of Flame, where they were 'killed' and unable to play. The fans were able to manipulate a Blessing (a type of vote during an Election) that would send the #14 most liked player in the Hall of Fame (distinct from the Hall of Flame, fans could give peanuts to players to rank them higher) to the team that won the Blessing. Fans carefully maneuvered Jaylen Hotdogfingers, the first player to be Incinerated, into the #14 spot. When the Election was over, Jaylen was pulled out of the Hall of Flame and back into the game... with the tragic consequence that they now had a 'debt' modifier on them that would make players who played against them more likely to be Incinerated themselves. I don't know, Balseball is weird. But it's this weirdness that made it so much fun.

The fan space of Blaseball was hugely creative, mostly because the site itself was very minimalist and there wasn't much information canonically available about the players. Thus, fans were able to pretty much build their favorite characters to be whatever they want, and they did so. Every team in Blaseball is its own subcommunity with traditions and extensive fanon of its own, and that is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in a fandom space, honestly. I highly highly recommend checking out the fan-run wiki for just a glimpse at the absolutely massive amount of fan lore that the community came up with. It's this that truly made Blaseball the cultural phenomenon that it was and I'm proud to say that it inspired my art and my creative process in huge ways.

Now, you might be wondering why I've been referring to Blaseball in the past tense. Well... despite regular dev updates since the ending of the second 'Era' (story arc, basically) and a faltering attempt at starting a third, on June 2, 2023, the dev team suddenly announced that it would be shutting Blaseball down permanently, citing financial issues. This came as a shock to fans, who had been keeping the fandom alive on discord and elsewhere for months with no sign of anything too bad from the dev side of things. We were given a few hours' notice to say goodbye before the discord was archived. It was a really difficult time for a lot of us to see the foundation of a whole community just kind of vanish into the wind, but many folks carried on in their own side discords and on tumblr and twitter where regular fan spaces are. I was pretty far from fan spaces by that time, but the news still affected me a lot. I think it's super important that I keep its spirit alive in the best way I know how: by talking about it and being annoying on tumblr.com. I hope I can keep its spirit alive in everything I create. :)

A few more things that anyone interested in Blaseball and its legacy should definitely check out:

@waveridden's google doc A Brief History of Blaseball, which explains the details of Blaseball much better than I ever could in an easy-to-understand way.

The official Blaseball Recap, in which a put-upon Anchor gives a chaotic summary of the events of Blaseball and gets progressively less sane in the process. Genuinely a fun watch even if you don't care about the rest of Blaseball.

The Garages, an incredible band (idk their genre they just do what they want and thats based) composed of Blaseball fans who sing songs about it. Genuinely really really good. You don't need to know about Blaseball to listen to them but it does make things make more sense. I have an art project that's almost done that is in reference to their music so look out for that also. :P

#i will never ever stop thinking & talking about blaseball. riv everyone but especially my bbg Kelvin Drumsolo and the rest of the Mechs #if you follow me for mcyt hiiiiiiiiiiiii look at blaseball aka the life series if it wasnt real #blaseball #astro speaks #astro asks #astro's garages brainrot #<-sure that can go here too