The lights go up: bedroom, hallway, stove, monitor, flood. The home team faces their rivals, glowering and grinning in equal turn. The sun is nowhere to be found. This is the seventh solar eclipse this week.
Before there was the Cultural Event of Blaseball, there was a long, deep void. Blank spaces gaped between our tweets. We gasped collectively for content: something, anything, to distract our thoughts from the malfeasance tormenting our plague-ridden society, even if only for a moment.
And then, one Monday, Blaseball came screaming from the ether to fill our hollow timelines and shrunken hearts. Jessica Telephone, star player of the Houston Steaks Philly Pies Hades Tigers, popped fully formed from a payphone* and hit a home run directly into the souls and psyches of every bored millennial, stats fiend, and natural gambler in one very specific corner of the internet. And, collectively, we sighed.
And then we got on Discord and yelled, like, a lot.
Blaseball is an enigma. It is a cultural phenomenon; it is a mindset; it is the 7 p.m. quarantine scream meets Twitch Plays Pokemon; it is, quite literally, four web pages, a very low-stakes introduction to sports betting, and a simulation of occult democracy. It’s whatever this means:
blaseball is 17776 for gays whose r/nosleep is SCP. it’s basically the sexymax2019 of folks who listened to the fake baseball names bit from friends at the table the same way horse_ebooks is dril for people whose Magnus Archives is ARGonauts. it’s not very hard to understand tbh
— Takuma Okada (@takuma_okada_) August 1, 2020
But Blaseball is also a community of increasingly invested and delighted fans, a growing wiki of semi-canon lore, and a dev team working extremely hard to nurture an emergent phenomenon with care and respect. The Commissioner is Doing A Great Job, but so is The Game Band, and we are thankful for their service.
Now, instead of staring at four thousand tweets in a row about government-sanctioned police violence and the looming threat of nation-wide evictions, we can still stare at those tweets, but punctuated with splorts-related game jam announcements and startlingly beautiful white papers. We mourn our departed, ponder over player stats, and try not to commit too much peanut blasphemy. We listen to a rogue radio host commentate the final game of Season 3, and we pray that the rogue umpires just… sit this one out, guys, please.
Yesterday, the Extended Siesta ended. Players have stumbled, bleary-eyed, onto the field, and have now been playing for over 20 days straight. The Blaseball Gods are granting unfortunate fans handfuls of coins with which to feed the electoral apparatus. The Game Band has returned, staffed up and better rested. The website will, perhaps, not break quite so much. The Commissioner is Doing A Great Job.
So join us. Join a team (let’s go mills baby love da mills). Be part of the phenomenon; become one with the cultural event of Blaseball. There has never been a better time.
We do not know how this season will end. We do know, however, that We Are All Love Blaseball.
* Technically, Jessica popped out of that payphone years ago. But what is a year, really.
Zora Gilbert cares a whole lot about words, kids, and comics. Find them at @zhgilbert on twitter, and find the comics they edit at datesanthology.com.
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