Truly a credit to the team
November 11, 2020 11:22 AM   Subscribe

How Eldritch Sports Sim “Blaseball” Inspired A 20-Person Rock Band (Bandcamp) As of press time, two of the best-selling Seattle rock albums on Bandcamp are by The Garages, a global 20-member (and counting) collective of musicians and writers who, over the past 14 weeks, have released 13 EPs of various concepts, lineups, and styles—all united around the thread of Blaseball. posted by CrystalDave (20 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
I was just logging in to post this! The Garages albums have been on heavy rotation for me in this century of 2020.
posted by curious nu at 11:40 AM on November 11, 2020 [1 favorite]


Don't forget the Temperate Sea Monkeys, also from Blaseball, but a one-person operation as far as I can tell: https://temperateseamonkeys.bandcamp.com/album/temperate-sea-monkeys-ep
posted by PennD at 11:57 AM on November 11, 2020 [1 favorite]


I just created a blaseball account but it seems it's on hiatus?
Is it defunct?
posted by Baby_Balrog at 12:37 PM on November 11, 2020 [2 favorites]


It's on hiatus, yeah. After running full-tilt for a while the devs needed to take a month to clean things up, lay groundwork for the future, etc. We're midway through the hiatus right now, though the return date hasn't been announced yet.
posted by CrystalDave at 12:38 PM on November 11, 2020 [3 favorites]


*should clarify, "we" being "us fans", I have no affiliation with The Game Band
posted by CrystalDave at 12:52 PM on November 11, 2020


The Mike Townsend trilogy is in heavy rotation on my phone right now. These guys are great and part of what I love about Blaseball.
posted by gc at 1:05 PM on November 11, 2020


Enormous, bonkers, online hypernarratives sure do have a way of building music scenes.

Opening the site feels you're walking into the story the way you walk into a wall. I don't have the slightest clue what's happening beyond the sense that I'm about three levels of reference away from getting it. Even the Fanfare page reads like HP Lovecraft playing Madlibs with a copy of the Baseball America annual.

But even if I'm bouncing off of it, I love that stuff like this exists and has so many fans. "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro," and given *gestures broadly at 2020* I totally get the attraction of a bonkers hypernarrative.
posted by ZaphodB at 1:15 PM on November 11, 2020 [6 favorites]


I also wanted to shout out these truly great Garages parody covers by M Lee Lunsford.
posted by gc at 1:21 PM on November 11, 2020 [1 favorite]


ZaphodB, that’s totally understandable. Once you get past “It’s like baseball, where fans can bet fake money on games and vote on things like whether money should be redistributed at the end of each season, or if the losing team should be relegated to a lower league, or to open the Forbidden Book,” it’s all kind of nonsense from there.

A lot of the action happens in the Discord. The game itself is, well, it’s boring like baseball. But it’s a lot more fun when someone named, say Richmond Harrison is really a nine foot tall axolotl whose best friend is a tiger-man who can understand his warbles and gurgles because his patron god speaks that way. Or when the server breaks and suddenly everyone is named Wyatt Mason on the Unlimited Tacos. Or when the fans figure out a way to commit necromancy and raise a player from the dead. All of that comes from the fans.

I told a friend who is also bouncing off of Blaseball, “this is what it must have been like when you were in to Homestuck and I just didn’t get it.” There’s a lot happening outside of the game that’s not just stats and text plays on a screen. The Garages are one of the bigger manifestations of that.
posted by gc at 1:37 PM on November 11, 2020 [1 favorite]


Baby_Balrog, despite the hiatus, there was a major trial of the blaseball commissioner last weekend. I missed it in the general insanity, so I will be playing blaseball by reading some trial transcripts and a summary. Trust me that it makes as little sense to me as it does to you despite my having done some necromancy before. That's blaseball.
posted by joeyh at 2:05 PM on November 11, 2020


Opening the site feels you're walking into the story the way you walk into a wall. I don't have the slightest clue what's happening beyond the sense that I'm about three levels of reference away from getting it. Even the Fanfare page reads like HP Lovecraft playing Madlibs with a copy of the Baseball America annual.

I've tried to talk about Mike Townsend (Knows What He's Gotta Do) to some non-blaseball people recently and it's hard because the amount of context that goes with it is kind of intense.

Blaseball started out as, ostensibly, a baseball simulator. Early on, it started to get pretty interesting -- rogue umpires began incinerating players, random peanuts could either boost a player's stats or cut all of them in half, etc. The only way for players to actively interact with the game is via decrees and blessings, which are bid on/voted on at the end of the season (each season is 1 realtime week), with virtual coins that you win by betting on the game (there's no way to spend real money on anything in the game, this is 100% fake monies).

The first player to be incinerated was Jaylen Hotdogfingers, a pitcher for the Seattle Garages. They were not the last! (In memorium: so, so many)

Fast forward a few weeks. A new system is introduced: the idol system. Now you can select a favorite player, and if they do well, you can get some passive coin income. Up to this point you either got coins by betting, or if your favorite team won a game. With the idols, you could get quite a bit more without betting, especially if you were paying attention throughout the day to switch who you were idolizing to maximize your income.

One of the blessings in that season: steal the 14th most-idolized player, from the idol board of the top 20.

Someone realized that, if you knew the URL for a player's data, you could pull that up and idolize that player without needing to find them in the existing teams' rosters.

And that incinerated players still existed in the database.

There was this amazingly fast evolution across the fandom from "hahah we can idolize a dead player!" to "oh my gods what if we stole a dead player, what if we raised the dead."

Jaylen became the top candidate, having been the first player out. This also played into the general mythos -- while a lot of the teams have a general "fuck the gods" attitude, this was, like, a THING for the Garages.

It's important to emphasize that the players have almost no identifying characteristics. They have a name pulled from a couple of name pools, they have a whole bunch of secret goofy obscured stats and then some generalized baseball stats like Defense, Baserunning, and so on, and some characteristics like a pre-game ritual and a blood type (A, AA, AAA, Coffee, Oh No, Water, etc). And that's it. No pronouns, no appearance descriptions, no histories. From pretty much nothing the fandom - mostly on the Discord, but a lot of it on Twitter as well - has spun wild stories of love and loss, incredible art (illustrations, games, fiction and prose, music, cosplay), all incredibly LGBTQ-positive and inclusive, each team developing its own aesthetic.

Mike Townsend was, yes, a disappointment -- a 1-star pitcher who could never come through when the team needed. There was eventually some pushback amongst the team about, hey, that's kind of shitty, let's be more inclusive. Sure, he was still a disappointment, but he's also a credit to the team. Amongst all the teams, I think the Garages were the only one without an explicit team captain on the Discord -- very explicitly this anarchic co-op team.

The weekend of the great necromancy was INTENSE. This huge, coordinated effort to ensure that Jaylen got to #14 and stayed there. And it worked! The election time came around (Sundays at noon PST) and Jaylen was in the #14 spot and not only were they in the #14 spot, but the Garages won the blessing -- which isn't guaranteed, the blessings are essentially a raffle.

So Jaylen was back! But.. the blessing with a steal, a swap, so if Jaylen came back to the team, that meant someone else had to go.

Mike Townsend.

I don't know if we'll ever know if that was pure chance or - more likely - the dev team leaning into the poetry. It doesn't really matter either way, only that it happened.

The most incredible part is this is ONE blaseball story. (and it's not even the end! everything that happened after Jaylen came back is also SO MUCH).

There are dozens of these stories, maybe hundreds at this point. Some of them are longer or shorter, some more or less poignant, but the heart that has poured into this frantic, frenetic, frenzied baseball thing - games every hour, on the hour, M-F, playoffs on Saturday, huge world-shaking rules changes on Sundays - is STUNNING. It both mirrors 2020 and maybe could only really happen in this year. The fandom supports each other as much as it supports blaseball; it's a shared framework, a reference point, and maybe those connections last into 2021 and maybe they don't, but right now it is absolutely beautiful, and I love it, and I love us.
posted by curious nu at 2:44 PM on November 11, 2020 [12 favorites]


(also thank you cortex for talking to me about blaseball so much)
posted by curious nu at 2:44 PM on November 11, 2020


This Blaseball: the first eight seasons video is a really fun explainer. No idea how accurate it is, but it's a fun watch and gives a sense of how the collaborative storytelling thing is working.
posted by john hadron collider at 3:59 PM on November 11, 2020 [1 favorite]


Blaseball is what you would get if Homestuck were written by Jon Bois.
posted by NMcCoy at 4:26 PM on November 11, 2020 [5 favorites]


this is almost certainly an estrogen imbalance but Mike Townsend (Knows What He's Gotta Do) made me cry & then I had to explain to my normie non-blaseball boyfriend why I was crying

(at least I've forced him to learn enough about the splort that he's decided he's a Jaylen Hotdogfingers fan or it would have been a much longer conversation)
posted by taquito sunrise at 5:23 PM on November 11, 2020 [1 favorite]


gc, the Homestuck analogy hits home. My 16 year old son went through a bout of Homestuck recently, and would talk incessantly about it. He shakes his head and walks away when I start talking about Blaseball.
posted by mollweide at 5:38 PM on November 11, 2020 [1 favorite]


curious nu, The Game Band is definitely watching what the fans are doing. This was most evident during the Shelled One battle when the Shelled One said "RING RING" when Jessica Telephone came up to bat under their thrall, or when York Silk came up to bat, and it called him "MY DORK." Both of which are related to what fans will chant in the Discords when those players came up in the lineup. You only get that from the devs watching the fans.

(The chills I got from when the Shelled One said "MY DORK" during that battle. It was so sinister, but also brought me so much joy because of how everything was coming together.)
posted by gc at 7:37 PM on November 11, 2020 [1 favorite]


Oh, for sure! I think that's part of why the pods' battle was so good (and ties back into all the character stories people have made together). I didn't remember any cutscenes(??? what else do we call them???) specifically mentioning Townsend when Jaylen came back, so that particular swap looks opaque. It's too perfect for it to be chance, but.. maybe!
posted by curious nu at 7:47 PM on November 11, 2020




My favorite recent development has been how we collectively decided that Jessica Telephone has peanut-shell patterning on one side of her face from the experience with the shelled one. It's pretty pretty consistent in the recent fanart I see, and I like it.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 8:25 PM on November 13, 2020 [1 favorite]


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