Hello, blaseball fans and fans of fans! It’s been a bit of a quiet week over here, with my attention split between blaseball and the emergent systems of the just-released Crusader Kings 3. (I’m not sure if the stream where I dropped by to talk about that game is up yet, but when it is I’ll link it.) Also, I dropped by The Short Game podcast where we chatted about the bleautiful game and I explained what I think blaseball and Legos have in common.
But I want to hear about how your team did this season! Reverb feels like it struck everyone at different times, leading to a sense of distributed, slightly chaotic narrative. What were your favorite moments this season, narratively speaking?
Though the tacos failed in our goal to net precisely 72 losses, we did succeed in reaching #partytime faster than any other team in history (no team parties harder than the Tacos; we are Experts, admired for our free drinks, feared for our spice). Our embrace of failure is gleeful. It has given us the will to dig deeper yet deeper still. We WILL set a new record for partytime. We WILL idolize NaN. We WILL preheat our ovens and set our deos necandi phasers to "yummy." And everyone will feast.
To be Taco is to do a sick kickflip and give the middle finger to the gods. Fuck your decrees! You're not even our real dads!
So I've never really "gotten" sports. My partner is a huge sports fan (she even has a great podcast about sports and marginalized identity in Canada!). Listening to her has gotten me the closest to understanding the idea of sports narrative, but I've still only really understood _conceptually_. It's always baffled me how people could root for "teams", which are shifting ship of Theseuses of players and management. But in the middle of this season of blaseball this season, something finally clicked. When I first created my blaseball account, I picked the Wild Wings as my team at random. After suffering loss after loss and watching them vacillate between bottom of their division or second from the bottom, I decided to play the odds until I got up enough coins to pay for the Fairweather Flute and pick a DIFFERENT team as my favourite. I wanted to see what it was like to have my team win. But in the middle of this season, damn it all, I found myself genuinely rooting for the Wild Wings to climb up in their division of the league and turn things around. When they made it to third in their division and were consistently turning out pretty good passive income for me, I suddenly got how people could spend decades rooting for the Toronto Maple Leafs through loss after loss, or for the Cubs to finally win after almost a century. When I got up 2000 coins, I decided to use them on Blessings for the Wild Wings instead of switching teams. To me, blaseball feels like a kind of great sports journalism, an acceleration of the joys and pains of sports that makes clearer the narratives that may not be as obvious when played out over years and years in real life. And when it comes to the Wild Wings - I'm in it for the long haul now.
Though the tacos failed in our goal to net precisely 72 losses, we did succeed in reaching #partytime faster than any other team in history (no team parties harder than the Tacos; we are Experts, admired for our free drinks, feared for our spice). Our embrace of failure is gleeful. It has given us the will to dig deeper yet deeper still. We WILL set a new record for partytime. We WILL idolize NaN. We WILL preheat our ovens and set our deos necandi phasers to "yummy." And everyone will feast.
To be Taco is to do a sick kickflip and give the middle finger to the gods. Fuck your decrees! You're not even our real dads!
So I've never really "gotten" sports. My partner is a huge sports fan (she even has a great podcast about sports and marginalized identity in Canada!). Listening to her has gotten me the closest to understanding the idea of sports narrative, but I've still only really understood _conceptually_. It's always baffled me how people could root for "teams", which are shifting ship of Theseuses of players and management. But in the middle of this season of blaseball this season, something finally clicked. When I first created my blaseball account, I picked the Wild Wings as my team at random. After suffering loss after loss and watching them vacillate between bottom of their division or second from the bottom, I decided to play the odds until I got up enough coins to pay for the Fairweather Flute and pick a DIFFERENT team as my favourite. I wanted to see what it was like to have my team win. But in the middle of this season, damn it all, I found myself genuinely rooting for the Wild Wings to climb up in their division of the league and turn things around. When they made it to third in their division and were consistently turning out pretty good passive income for me, I suddenly got how people could spend decades rooting for the Toronto Maple Leafs through loss after loss, or for the Cubs to finally win after almost a century. When I got up 2000 coins, I decided to use them on Blessings for the Wild Wings instead of switching teams. To me, blaseball feels like a kind of great sports journalism, an acceleration of the joys and pains of sports that makes clearer the narratives that may not be as obvious when played out over years and years in real life. And when it comes to the Wild Wings - I'm in it for the long haul now.