i've struggled with wanting to make this blog post since blaseball's closure and end was announced, to be honest. i knew it was a necessary longform piece of content to make, a love letter to a very odd game that saved my life in a time of complete collapse and uncertainty - and i say that with no hyperbole -, but... where do i start? where do i end?
but i do want to write an eulogy, a love letter, to this game. i would not be the person i am today without it. so here i am going to try.
i knew of blaseball tangentally in 2020, during the snackrifice - an event in which the LA infinite tacos sacrificed all of their pitchers to being Shelled by a giant peanut god. i knew many mutuals on the bird site that participated, watched their organizing with great intrigue, and their celebrations when it came to fruition. "how odd," i remember myself thinking. "what an interesting game.
my first exposure to blaseball in a substantial form was the 2020 desert bus for hope garages (the band) concert. i have been part of the loadingreadyrun community since i was sixteen; i owe LRR a lot! my fiance and i first really got to know each other over friday nights and magic: the gathering, and LRR has been a stable part of my life since the worst of times. i've followed DBFH since way back then.
here is a secret; i also love music. i love punk music, especially. the garages concert blew me away.
i remember saying to luis that day, "they really have something special here, oh my god. this is amazing. i love this. this is really something incredible, luis". i stand by it. the sounds of a bunch of people in their twenties or so producing music about depression, nihlism, fighting back against oppressive forces both visible and invisible, and embracing a fragile mortality and uncertanity resonated deeply with me.
2020 was the first year i spent away from someone who warped my life in the worst way possible. 2020 was a year where my mental health was at the worst it had been in years. every stability i had was gone, replaced with a swirling void of uncertainty and trauma laid bare. the garages said, "we are suffering, we are angry, and we're going to fight. and we're going to win."
i started following blaseball the day after that concert with luis. i caught up on lore, i listened to the rest of the garages' discography, and when the deaths of sebastian telephone came out, i cried. i remember being so invested, so moved by that musical; i remember tearing up to "brushed his hand", in a time of hesitancy and navigating a healthy relationship for the first time in my life. more than that, i caught up on the mike townsend trilogy and remember thinking very clearly: "oh, this is... me."
mike townsend - an average seattle guy (who is from bellevue, but c'mon, nobody really bills themself from bellevue.) that everyone hated (because he wasn't very good at much), who sacrificed his life (both willingly, because why value your life in the face of someone closer to you that everyone else cares for more anyways? - and unwillingly, because the hands of fate are Shadowed in voices and conflicting arguements over controlling your life, entities far removed from you that you can never influence) to resurrect his best friend. who lived in the Shadows, which were such an obvious metaphor for depression and isolation to me - imagine living with Dead players, while being alive, while otherwise ignored by the public and unable to communicate with your team? it resonated. that was my life.
a man made out to be a martyr afterwards, revisionist history, who had a complicated and messy and broken relationship with his team that wasn't the perfect picture of punk, anarchistic camradery presented to the public. but it was still his, and they were still a community, a family; this was not a perfect picture, but active work to keep oiled and running smoothly. it was a far more realistic feeling to a community and found family than anything i had seen before. a transgender man who was gay, and his expression of that was a sort of "shitty" beard and guitar playing and embracing counter-culture. his best friend, a woman* who loved women and helped him with his own transition and was like a sister to him. it all made my own life so much easier to understand, through the thin veil of watching it play back through a disappointment/credit to the team. we were the same.
the percolate album remains one of my favorite albums ever released. i listen to it regularly. if you know me, i have an obsession with coffees and cafes that is either a hyperfixation that never leaves me, or a special interest i don't have the courage to label yet; does it matter? the coffee cup was my entry into blaseball proper. i was on the data witches. i had so much fun.
i joined the seattle garages (the team, not the band) immediately. i have been a local north of seattle my whole entire life; i grew up near seattle before moving rural as a child, but i had never invested into community before blaseball. i grew up told how horrible and untrustworthy you had to be of your local community, how you could be found dead in the streets at any point in the big city, because god forbid i had any stability growing up outside of my house. that would jeopardize everything.
the seattle garages got me into my local community. i started socializing, embracing being a local, looking into my deep longstanding love of punk music and embracing the garages' anarchistic philosophy. it got me to finally throw out (metaphorically; i donated them all. ahaha.) 90% of my wardrobe and actually invest in clothes that made me happy, band tshirts and repaired things i loved, pants that i didn't want to scratch my skin off wearing. i knew i was a trans man before this, but blaseball is what got me to embrace expressing myself and figuring out what "myself" was when devoid of what everyone else forced me to be, holding up their mirror to my form and playing dress-up like a human doll. half of that turned out to be a punk guy from washington. (the other half, as i've really realized this last year, is a formalwear-going-to-the-grocery-store man with a dry sense of humor who read law cases for fun at the age of 7. they coexist nicely, to be honest, even if it sounds contradictory - and i love being contradictory.)
i met many good friends through the Expansion era. i met tautology through a sidecord that luis invited me to on a whim, and my god - that did change my life for the better. i didn't really have friends outside of my close, tight-knit little group that survived a horrific set of years from highschool. suddenly, i had a few local friends and a community that really understood it when i said "i'm dead", and "i'm a h. zoroark, i think" and "i'm a trans man" and "i'm queer" and "i'm punk, i think". hell, tautology was one of a few people that actually made me realize that yes, i am certainly both autistic and have ADHD.
i could not articulate when i fell deeply in love with tillsend (tillman henderson/mike townsend), other than it happened so suddenly and consumed so much of my life that it's strange to imagine a world without it. tillsend was the catalyst for my darling fiance to come to terms with his gender, finally; but that's his story to tell, other than i remember lovingly joking that my track record of making people realize they're guys is something i have in common with townsend as well, it seems. but maybe it was the idea of two men who were just loathed for not a lot of good reason, who were counter to the images presented by their peers and rowdy, unruly, 'irritating' falling in genuine love and knowing each other both good and messy that really captured my heart.
unrelatedly, i love narumitsu. i wonder if these correlate. (they do.)
Expansion era brought so much stability to my life. i was learning who i was in absence of everyone's expectations of what i was to be, was following weekly scores and events developing in real time, writing about a guy i saw myself in deeply. my fiance joined the garages (the band) and i don't remember ever feeling more overwhelmingly, chest-achingly excited and joyful than when his song that he wrote got played on KEXP radio. he was on during that year's DB concert. i screamed. i donated to DB for the first time that year, during that concert, because i also was finally dragging myself out of depression and self-loathing just enough to finally land a job that year. when parker macmillan (the first one) was revealed, i almost cried, because seeing his story with new megan ito felt like a less-severe mirror of things i had went through; the pain of being a weapon in everyone else's hands, of being used by someone who insisted they knew better.
the amount of wailing i did when he got to Incinerate the Coin, after being labelled publically a failed son, i could not convey to you in a texted-based medium. it all ached. when UNSTABLE and DISCIPLINE released, it hit home in a way very few albums since have.
'nobody deserves to be called a curse; but if you're gonna insist, i'm happy to make things worse'
seeing yourself reflected so clearly, in such plaintext of a song, it... i wish i could explain how it made me feel. seen? heard? like i was allowed to exist, finally? the entire UNSTABLE album felt like someone wrote a biopic of my life so far. i was experimenting with changing my name for the first time since i picked one from a series that i can no longer look at without feeling nauseous. i was learning to be loud, furious, steadfast, and unapologetic. i was watching the League work together to burn an entity who didn't care for us past the blood they could wring from our bodies to the ground.
i remember joining maincord during season 24, because i had hoarded so many snacks and coins and the Navigation had just been unveiled. the garages channel argued, and cried, and frantically worked together to steer our tour bus to the Hall - because where else would we go, but the very place it had all started? we had been Deceased since day one. so had i, really. arriving to the Hall the day before we were unravelled from existance felt like you couldn't write a more perfect ending if you wanted to.
as you can tell, i'm recounting the Expansion era a bit out of order, because i just... have so much to reflect on. mike townsend changed my life. the garages (band and team) changed my life. this was the time i watched jon bois' documentary of the history of the seattle mariners, and got into real-life baseball! and what an impact that had on me; i had something to follow in real life now, as familiar to me as lines of text on a black screen, something to talk about with random people at work as i stumbled through a first few months of retail customer service with severe speech impairment and anxiety and learning to live as a being that tangibly interacted with the world, rather than a fox locked in a guilded cage left to die.
short circuits is when i first heard the death knoll, i think.
truthfully, it was less about the experimental mechanics; i just couldn't care for an entire new league of players that only lived for a week, with no music to tell their tale, no reason to get invested. i checked out for all three, but i cheered the first and only garages championship with the rest of them. knowing what i do about the mariners, i find it funny yet fitting we only got a win in an alternate universe that doesn't really matter. it's pretty on-brand for seattle.
so the hiatus started, for me, during the first short circuit. but i followed the garages (band) music releases religiously, and in 2022, not only did i get deeply into kingdom hearts, i also got engaged. (well, formally.) i also got really into stranger things, because -- well. as luis put it, "they put you in the show wholesale". (i have a hellfire club shirt now, and i must admit, if i didn't have so much gender dysphoria about my hair, i would totally rock the same metalhead hairstyle as eddie. damn.)
blaseball... stayed a presense in my life, but its absence ached like a dull wound. my fiance sang a cover of sun 2 for blaseballidays 2022, and it made me bawl like nothing else. the slightly shaky showing of the DB garages concert for 2022 showed cracks in the veil -- it was a lovely concert. but it showed. the rumblings of problems in other projects in the community made me uneasy. the length of hiatus was the first bell that tolled. the changes to lore in maincord was yet another crack that showed in the foundation, cracks that had been lovingly painted over by everyone in a genuine attempt to fix it.
the reveal of the Coronation era was exciting, but... it felt off, and of course it would seem TGB knew this as well. but i tried to get excited, even though the site changes were so drastic, it killed any focus i had for the game - bets in advance meant it ceased to exist for my ADHD, unfortunately. and i accessed it a lot at work, through my phone, which was virtually unusable during Coronation, so that was gone. i remember thinking during gamma season 1, "they can't keep blaseball going forever, huh?"
tragically, i guess i was more right than i thought. the final death knell was when the second hiatus was announced. it was... the writing on the wall, for me.
and after that, i think... i knew there would be no continuation of the era. i've had a few months before the confirmation to mourn it, but it still hit harder than i expected to be finally told so in plain text.
blaseball brought stability to my life when i had lost everything, because it turned out that everything i had as a foundation was rotted to the core, built on maggots and misery and manipulation. it gave me a pillar to lean on and start over again, exploring who i was, my gender and expression, learn to communicate healthier and replaced - for a while, at least - m:tg for me and luis to excitedly play together, since m:tg would go on an insane release schedule that scrambled both of us too much to keep up with. he's found so much creative outlet in blaseball that i would still put together a funeral of victorian aristocracy levels for it, because i love seeing his raw passion and joy for the megan itos and music-making and animatics that it unearthed. we have a thriving original character universe based in the ashes of blaseball, exploring a college-level league; that will continue despite the splort ending.
blaseball gave me a passion for real baseball - and also, wrestling, somehow - that would lead to the insane 2022 mariners season. 'casting' the 18-inning playoff game with tautology and a few other folks in said server from earlier is one of the happiest memories i have of having a real community. strangely, blaseball lead me to fediverse, to making this very site and embracing being an artist - even as unconventional as my mediums often are - and to embracing cohost and mastodon. i got to go to 2022 pride with luis - and just made our second year of local pride last weekend - and i would credit the community blaseball offered me as helping me get to a state mentally where community was important enough to me to actually leave my house and attend.
i'm now even more confidant in my identity than i was last year; i'm learning so much, embracing so many things about me. i've changed my name to something i hope remains joyful for years to come, realized my true passion in law of all things, and also finally got to embrace a special interest i've had since i was 16 without having to hide it and ignore it for my own safety due to others' control in my life. i've got a stable job, mens' formalwear, i just recently got my passport against all odds, and i'm probably moving to canada in a few years. i'd still credit at least half of this to its' origins in the seattle garages, punk music, and my friends. i have a passion for creating music i intend to pursue when my life is safer, and more stable.
a game that hits hard for me still once said, "at the end of everything, hold onto anything". i feel that to be true at the end of blaseball, and i do consider the end of the Expansion era to be the perfect end to the game. it's the end of everything; i am holding onto the wonderful community that blaseball founded, in all its' messiness and imperfections and gleeful jubilance and collaborative story-telling.
we are many teams, but one league. we are now in #PartyTime. we are Released. this Era has come to an end, and a new one is only just beginning.
thank you for participating in the cultural event of Blaseball with me. it's been truly such a great honor.
