Ask me about blaseball and teaching in semi-rural New Zealand.

So myeth and I were shooting the shit after banning a self-proclaimed 15 year old from discord and realised for a lot of Eagle Timers it’s maybe been pre-pandemic since they stopped by here.

So I’m fielding questions about two things I got up to in these intervening years which, other than some p neat life milestones, are probably the two main things:


-Blaseball
-being a high school biology teacher in semi-rural New Zealand.

So yeah. I will take all questions until 3am Central European time on Saturday. Then someone else can take over this thread and tell us what they got up to.

What's Blaseball about. Is it a game simulator?

why were you a high school biology teacher in semi-rural new zealand, and was it worth your time? what is there to do there?

What's Blaseball about. Is it a game simulator?

Blaseball was called a "cultural experience" which is one of many ok-yet-inadequate summaries of it.

Blaseball was a website made by The Game Band, partly in response to organised sports being a thing you couldn't go to during the pandemic ending up with "crowds" like this:


So they wanted to make a little sports simulator you can watch from the comfort of your own home and have watch parties and cheer for your team. Baseball works really well for this, because they could make a bunch of stats to figure out what the players do. In essence:

• the pitcher must throw the ball. We then find out if it's in the batting box or not.
  
• the batter can choose to swing or not, determining if it's a ball or a strike.
  
• if they do swing and the pitcher got it in the box, then we find out if they hit it hard enough to get a single, double, triple, or home run.
  
• We find out if the fielding team manage to catch it as a fly ball.
  
• players who are already on bases will try to run to the next base. they may even try to steal bases. (Some players, like Hahn Fox of the Hellmouth Sunbeams, had underlying stats which made them likelier to steal, and then to be bad at stealing.)
  
• defense is probably a thing. We're not sure exactly at this stage until they remade the simulator after Season 24.
  

You can actually still watch it much the same way we did when it was happening proper, using the Before site. I linked to opening day of Season 2, because everything from Season 1 except the Postseason was lost to the sands of time.

A regular season was 1 real-world week long with 99 days of play. Every day started on the hour, and ran for 24 hours a day, for 9 innings each (unless the score was tied at the bottom of the 9th, in which case they'd go on to the 10th inning and onward (the longest game in-world ran for 28 innings; the longest non-exhibition game that wasn't caused by the website slowing down was 82 minutes long)). The top teams in the league would then qualify for the Postseason, and by the end of the week we'd have a season champion.

I'd recommend going and looking at the Before site I linked because it gives you a good idea of the simulator portion of it. Before, uh, shit happened anyway.

---

So you've got this setup where when you sign up for the site, you're not playing the part of a blaseball player, you're playing the part of a Fan. You pick a favorite team (mine was the Moab Sunbeams, renamed to the Hellmouth Sunbeams after the Beta Season 1 Elections, had a short stint as the --------- -------- at the end of the Expansion Era, then finally the Moab Hellmouth Sunbeams when Blaseball returned.) In real-world sports, Fans yell at the teams from a distance and rarely-if-ever impact the flow of the game or get much of a say in how the game should be played.

Where Blaseball differed was the fact you could bet in-game Coins on matches, earn more Coins if you guessed correctly, and spend all your Coins eventually on Votes. You could spend your Votes in a couple of ways:

1. Blessings were fun little prizes you could win for your team; they were kind of like a lottery so the more tickets your team poured into one, the better (but not guaranteed) odds you'd win it. When a team won a blessing despite only having put in a couple % of the total votes, that was what we called a wimdy. Most Blessings were positive improvements to the team, like maxing out batting stats on a random batter, or stealing the best pitcher in the league to join your team, or rerolling the stats of your worst players. Some were more like flavour that would only have a mechanical impact in niche situations.
   
2. Each week (and more instrumental to the overall arc of Blaseball as a storytelling experience), there would be several Decrees. These could add new mechanics, change the rules of the sport, or more often be cryptic bullshit. We'd be told how many Decrees would pass in a given season, and then they'd pick by whichever one(s) got the most votes.

You could get your votes in before the end of Sunday, a short while after the Post-Season. Season 1, fans voted to pass the Decree which would "Open the Forbidden Book". This had a couple of immediate consequences:

• Solar Eclipse. The entirety of Season 2 was player under Solar Eclipse Weather, until we voted in fun new kinds of weather to add to the rotation. When the weather is Solar Eclipse, Umpires have a chance of going rogue and incinerating players, killing them on the spot and generating a new randomised player to take their place.
  
• One of the best pitchers in the league, Jaylen Hotdogfingers of the Seattle Garages, was incinerated before the new season event started. They were immediately replaced with a fresh player, Derrick Krueger. This also had Additional Consequences, which I can get into later.
  
• Hellmouth swallows the Moab Desert. Mechanically, this did nothing except changing the name of the Moab Sunbeams but us Beams fans went kind of wild imagining life in a town where not only did a giant pit to hell open up and take half the town with it, it fucked with collective consciousness so they believed it had always been there, and that nobody had died in the incident because everything that had been swallowed by the pit had been erased from memory. Also the Colorado River is an aberration now.
  

This marked the start of the Discipline Era, which concluded at the end of Season 10 after we assembled a crack team of ghosts (with the help of a Microphone and the giant squid who guards the Hall, an afterlife for incinerated blaseball players) to fight a bunch of players who were kidnapped by an arrogant Peanut who was also a god. I'll explain that in more detail if people are interested.

---

I think that covers the guts of what, gameplay-wise, blaseball actually was at its core. You absolutely could, and I imagine many folks did, "play" it by watching what happened on the site: placing bets, accruing Coins, chucking Votes on either what they thought might be fun/funny or - if they were invested in their team improving and winning Championships - whatever might boost their team's performance. Where Blaseball became something much more, both for me and a lot of other folks, was the community around it. I'll get into that in another post.

why were you a high school biology teacher in semi-rural new zealand, and was it worth your time? what is there to do there?

Ok so. front half of 2017, I was wrapping up my final year of living in Japan and getting ready to come home to New Zealand. I had Depression and Anxiety and also the Genders so first thing I did once I got back to NZ was have a really good nap. Then after some thinking and chatting to family friends, I figured while I was pretty lukewarm about teaching English to Japanese folks, I did actually quite like teaching. So 2018 I went to teachers' college, got a graduate diploma, and outside of the still-undiagnosed ADHD making anything relating to staying organised a Hell Time I did get through it alright (one thing I've re-learned about myself the past month and a half, attending a course to study German, is I actually really love organised learning) and had myself a job lined up for the coming year.

That first teaching job in 2019 was not in semi-rural new zealand. That happened because I got cold-called while wandering round a wildlife reserve in Wellington looking at takahe.

That's this absolute unit of a rail, in case you were wondering:


I was wandering round a wildlife reserve in Wellington because it was a long weekend and I'd been tabling at Wellington Zinefest, where I debuted Horses which is still one of my best zines I've ever made. I got cold-called because I gave my CV to a guy I'm gonna call Dan a year prior. Dan was the principal of a high school in a town of what'll probably be 10,000 people within the next decade or so. I met Dan because the teachers' college runs an open day each year where trainee teachers can meet principals from all over New Zealand, principals can line up graduates in hard-to-staff subjects like Technology, and all the Canadian exchange students on my course could piss about in queues waiting to talk to the principals of the three biggest high schools in the city we were in. I guess because they were just soooooo keeeeeeen to continue life in New Zealand but lacked the imagination to think about working anywhere except this one city they were already parked in. Lmao.

Anyway. Dan calls me because a year ago I couldn't be assed waiting in queues, and ended up talking to various principals with far fewer educational acolytes vying for their time. The principal of the Correspondence School for instance was pretty cool, it makes sense but I didn't realise of course they'd hire actual teachers for that. Dan meanwhile had the good fortune of living three hours drive and zero major bodies of water away from my hometown, so I figured I'd try him out for a vibe check as to how the school community might handle a genderqueer menace like myself.

Dan's got a biology teacher off next year on parental leave, a stack of allegedly-underwhelming CVs from applicants, and also my CV from when we had a yarn a year ago. I'm offered an interview. I accept the interview. I drive three hours and over a small mountain range, still one of my favorite drives in the whole world probably, and let Dan and the HOD know I'm not taking the job if it's a one-year fixed-term position. They have a chat, crunch some numbers or something I guess, and provisionally offer me a permanent position.

A couple weeks later I accept the position. I let my current school know that I'm wrapping up with them at the year's end, I tell my shithead flatmates who told me they were lending their room out to friends when actually they were putting it up on AirBnB that I'm moving out, and Mirdini comes and visits over the Christmas/Summer holidays. Because I get removal fees covered as a side perk of moving to a hard-to-staff school, I leave my furniture and the bulk of my effects to the truck-having guys and load up my car with one suitcase, a futon, a sleeping bag, and a metric fuckton of houseplants.

I drive the three hours over the hill with minimal potting mixhaps, get the keys to the house I'm renting, meet the neighbors, find the bathroom light was left on and the bath is full of moths, and as of a couple days prior to my arrival the power had been cut off and is going to take a couple business days for some wires-having guy to hook it back up again. Luckily my neighbors take pity on my electrically-challenged ass and let me have a shower at their place and crash in their spare room. I vaguely recall the rest of my furniture coming in before the school term proper started, so I was sleeping in a proper bed by the time I actually had to look presentable and non-sleep-deprived in front of all my new kids.

The first month and a half or so at the new job went pretty smoothly... then some shit kind of went down.

Tell me more about the world of online biology

(or whatever you did for the sick years)

Tell me more about the world of online biology

(or whatever you did for the sick years)

I had the one Level 2 Biology class, where the kids do an assessment looking at zonation and ecology, another assessment where they show they can use microscopes and create correctly-formatted microscopic drawings of properly-prepared slides, and they have exams for genetics and cell biology. I can't even properly recall what we were working on during that first pandemic lockdown; I think it was cell biology. I vaguely recall doing my damnedest to explain the phases of meiosis while drawing stringy looking pink-and-blue chromosomes with a touchpad. My most salient memories of that time are:

• The morning of the first day of lockdown. I put my sheets through the laundry, and also put my phone through the laundry. The previously-mentioned neighbor was kind enough to let me into his bubble and lend his phone, so I could call the phone company and purchase a new one to be delivered.
  
• The education system was figuring out the sudden transition to online learning on the fly, so there was a good share of teething troubles. We set up Google Meetings and posted the links on our classroom webpages, and I guess someone saw the link up for my senior biology class, jumped in and without saying anything started streaming pornhub. I kind of sort of panicked and said "ok everyone out, I will send a new link for our class" because I don't think I was actually able to kick people.
  
• I think we made the juniors (who were looking at forces and motion) film themselves doing the trick where you've got an egg resting on a toilet paper tube above a glass of water, then knock the tube out and have the egg land safely in the water. Very few of them actually did it.
  

We were in full lockdown for four weeks; during this time if you weren't an essential worker you could go to the supermarket, head out on a stroll for fresh air, and that was about it. By the end of April, you still had to stick to your bubble, but the government wanted the economy to start ticking over again so juniors were allowed to come in if their parents needed them at school. Again, that was a pretty chill time because we were still doing lessons on Google Meetings, iirc teachers also did stuff like cooking lunch together for the small handful of kids who were doing "distance learning at school".

Mid-May, we had to do social distancing but things were mostly back to normal. A week into June, we pretty much had stamped out Covid within the country and were putting incoming travellers in Lurgy Jail (hotels in all the cities with international airports) for a couple weeks until they were either Covid-free, or caught it and got better from it. So for the rest of the school year, we were more or less normal except for going through copious amounts of hand sanitizer because those little shits loved to take the big classroom-sized bottles and "do science" with it.

What's your favorite character archetypes and plot beats.

What is the word for schadenfreude but also you relate to the frustration and anxiety on a deeply personal level?

I know in the US, really rural areas have incredibly high drop out and drug/suicide rates. Was any of that a big concern over there?

What's your favorite character archetypes and plot beats.

The last good while I've really had endings on my mind. It's in the nature and circumstances of the kind of media I enjoy (collaborative, generated on-the-fly) that I've many a time been bereft of an ending. They intimidate me, I dread them, and yet, when they do arrive it's a catharsis.

Arright so. I explained what Blaseball was at its core; a sports simulator which was also like a massive tabletop roleplaying game because the DMs (The Game Band) had particular story beats they'd hit, but also respond to what we the Fans were interested in (through the Decrees system).

In rough chronological order, Blaseball had two main Eras: Discipline and Expansion.

---

The Discipline Era started with Fans voting to Open the Forbidden Book. This made the umpires go rogue and they would randomly incinerate players during games where the weather was Solar Eclipse. The next season (Season 3), Fans voted to add Peanuts to the game. As a result this guy showed up:



We got new weather, Peanuts, during which players could potentially swallow a peanut as they rained from the sky. Players had a hidden stat indicating if they were allergic to peanuts or not; if allergic swallowing a peanut would tank their stats, if non-allergic they'd get a stat boost instead. We also got a new mechanic where you could spend your Coins on Peanuts, and eat them.

Then it turns out some people hacked the site and gave themselves ridiculous amounts of Peanuts and Coins, which made the Peanut show up and yell BLASPHEMY while the devs fixed it in the background. The Shelled One showed up a few more times to explain when Fans had done things to earn "Strikes", and eventually-presumably some form of divine punishment. We eventually got our final strike because instead of eating peanuts for ourselves, we chucked 100 million peanuts into the afterlife where a big psychopomp squid was happily munching on them.

So, us fans could've followed the plot laid down for us, with the bloviating, self-important Shelled One demanding our tribute and worship etc etc, except someone discovered that the first ever player to get incinerated, Jaylen Hotdogfingers, still existed on the site and, moreover, was a valid target to be Idolized.

---

The Idol Board was a new mechanic introduced in Season 6, which let you pick a Player and every time that Player did something good (a Batter scoring hits or homeruns; a Pitcher striking out batters or getting shutouts) you'd get more coins. This obviously made the better players in the game the most popular players to be Idolized, and eventually we got a Leaderboard where the best players in the league sat comfortably at the top (with names like Jessica Telephone, Axel Trololol, PolkaDot Patterson, York Silk, and Randall Marijuana). With the new mechanic also came some Blessings which interacted with it: one team could boost their most idolized player1, one team rerolled their least-idolized player2, and one team could steal the least idolized player in the whole league and max out their stats3.

1 2 3
Conner Haley, Leach Herman, and Howell Franklin. Keep an eye out for the third guy he may show up again later

---

Where the Fans diverged from the Game Band's plan, and for which they richly rewarded us, was a fourth Blessing: One team could steal whichever player was on the 14th position of the Idol Board. As soon as someone realised a dead player could be Idolized, word got out and Fans from all over the League jumped on to Idolize the first player to be incinerated, Jaylen Hotdogfingers. It was generally agreed upon that the Seattle Garages, Jaylen's team, should be the one to win the blessing. There was a real sense of anxiety, but hope, that this way we might be able to pull fallen players back from the dead.

And then, consequences!

The plan worked. Jaylen rejoined the Garages' pitching rotation. In exchange, Mike Townsend of the Garages was "sent to the Shadows". (They even wrote a song about it! And by "they", I mean a group of fans who decided to run with the headcanon that the Seattle Garages were an anarchist community of musicians who also play blaseball, and then make actual real music we can listen to.) HOWEVER Jaylen was saddled with "Debt", a mysterious modification on their player profile which made its effects clear pretty quickly:

When Jaylen pitched, there was a chance they'd hit the batter with the ball. This rendered the struck batter Unstable, a condition which wore off after 7 games but made them vastly more likely to be incinerated if they played later in Solar Eclipse weather. To make things worse, if an Unstable player were incinerated, the Unstable status would jump to another player. We didn't find this out until day 32 in the following Season, when the Hades Tigers were playing the Canada Moist Talkers. Two Unstable players were incinerated, passing it on two other players who also got incinerated within the next day or so of games.

Unrelated to the Instability chains, one replacement for the incinerated players, Kiki Familia, played exactly 5 and a 1/3rd innings before getting incinerated. Over the remainder of the season, the Moist Talkers and Tigers lost four players to incineration.

This was about the time when everyone realised that necromancy was not, in fact, cool and fun and consequence-free.

(actually, we do get to sort of dodge consequences, because Jaylen's Debt gets "refinanced". From there when they hit people, they start Flickering, which increases the odds they'll permanently switch to the opposite team during Feedback weather. This still makes people sad because their faves keep getting yeeted to other teams, but it sure beats dying!)

---

End of Season 7 (each of these seasons is a real-life week, also, remember). The Monitor makes an appearance.

The Monitor is a big squid, harking from the Trench and/or the Hall, aka the Hall of Flame where all the incinerated Blaseballers are hanging out in what's generally imagined to be a deep, dark, bottom-of-the-sea purgatory. They're pretty chill, and showed up just now because they realised Jaylen Hotdogfingers was no longer in the Hall. They like to eat "eggs" (peanuts), and let the Fans "see their friends" (view deceased players in the Hall) in exchange for tributing Peanuts.

The tributing of peanuts pisses off the Shelled One, who 's the league's favorite players all hanging out at the top of the Idol Board. players can't bat, because they're trapped in a giant peanut shell, but apparently can catch fly balls when they're out on defense. This goes on for a couple of seasons, until one of the worst teams in the League, the LA Unlimited Tacos, decide to do some Idol Board Science of their own: What happens if an entire team's pitching rotation is Shelled?

campaign material for the Snackrifice.

As it turns out, a team without an available pitcher is provided a Pitching Machine. Pitching Machine also gets , because everyone is idolizing them because a pitcher who pitches every game will be paying out a whole lot more than a pitcher on a team where they rotate days with four other pitchers. (also at this time a shadowy cabal of team reps conspired to pull a player called Chorby Short from the shadows. Which is like, definitely in my top 3 favorite stunts I helped make happen.)

All these players (a mix of the best players in the league, and also the Tacos' former pitching rotation) meet a terrible fate at the end of Season 9, when they all got kidnapped from their original teams and added to THE SHELLED ONE'S PODS. They then proceeded to curbstomp the Season 9 champions, the Charleston Shoe Thieves. The Shelled One taunted us, and let us know if we wanted to try free the players it would be waiting for the end of Season 10 for a rematch.

---

Season 10. More Idol Board shenanigans. Jaylen (who, unrelated to Debt, had gained the modification Fliickerrriiing which was sending them on a world tour around the Leage) accidentally swapped places with a dead guy called Tillman Henderson, and ended up in the Hall. We kept pouring Peanuts into the Hall, expecting... something. The Baltimore Crabs won the Season 10 Championship, created a black hole which destroyed the Moon (don't worry about it lmao), and THE SHELLED ONE'S PODS promptly made their appearance.

What happens next, well... I'd recommend if you've read this far, you should take half an hour or so and watch it for yourself.

---

What's quite funny about the fact that I typed all this out, is that while all this was a fun puzzle for the Fans to collectively solve, it's not actually close to my favorite story in Blaseball. One of the most compelling things about Blaseball, for me, was the fact that in-game the players were nothing but a name, a statline, and some randomly generated trivia about their "pregame ritual" and how they like their coffee. There was no canonical gender or appearance for any player. Instead, a team's fans would look at their players, share their thoughts and their fanart and other works that detailed what they might be like, and we developed a consensus reality.

The Blaseball universe canonically has separate realities; players can be Alternated which is described as replacing them with a version of themselves from another reality. Same name, different stat line. One time, when a player hit a grand slam, time froze, time jumped back three innings, the the site went down for three hours and eventually showing both timelines of the game in the teams' league standings. This was later narrated as having split the skies above Los Angeles, turning it into infinite Los Angeleses all overlaid on top of each other. Thanks to the Blaseball universe being shaped like this, it's a handy explanation for why some Fans interpret Lenny Marijuana as the lesser-known Marijuana sibling who didn't read the paperwork and ended up in the Garages' shadows, while others say Lenny is the father of Randall and Dominic Marijuana who made a deal with a devil to ensure his sons' success... and why both reads are valid.

Team culture varied from team to team, both in terms of how much consensus lore a player would have and also the worldbuilding of the city the team called home. Part of why I loved the Sunbeams was how rich our fan-made player lore was. The opening of the Hellmouth was nothing more than a few lines in the actual game, but we played with that concept.

We imagined a former small-town tourism hotspot in the east of Utah with a giant memory-devouring hole swallowing half of it. We imagined what it's like to live there, where the Hellmouth actively repels you if you're an outsider, then grants you an Adaptation once you both realise Hellmouth is now your home. We imagined the original lineup of Sunbeams players were just regular folks from the small, tight-knit community. We imagined Hellmouthians would see our ace batter, Nagomi Nava, and see her as the local psychopomp and cat cafe owner first and a sports star second. We imagined that the parking lot around the stadium is permanently molten asphalt, and imagined a thriving and fucked up lacustrine ecosystem for it. We joked that they stopped doing money there, and things just cost a numerical amount. If a packet of chips cost "three", you could pay in three of anything. Cool rocks. Yachts. Names you've shortlisted for your firstborn.

It's those stories I love. With Blaseball ending, it quietly kills me that there's no real answer to what happens to Moab and its residents. Does the Hellmouth, an entity summoned by Blaseball, close? Do the once-players start to age, now that their souls are no longer contracted to a sport where play must never stop? Sure, I could write or draw something, put my interpretation out there into the world, but also what's the point? I may as well write about life on SWEEPS-11, the farthest-from-Earth exoplanet discovered so far in our universe. The world of Blaseball is closed off to us in this one.

---

In Season 18, Blaseball got a new feature called the Library. This was mostly meant to drip-feed us information on how this wasn't the first League, and the previous had been reset under apocalyptic circumstances we were liable to re-enact. In "the first day, zeroth edition", there's one particular line that made me scream with rage when I googled it:



Apophenia. Perceiving meaningful connections between unrelated things. Seeking patterns where there are none to be found. Seeing a randomly generated name, and a randomly generated statline, and imagining a person. Someone who, in the grand plot of Blaseball, barely registers, never thrust by RNG or Fan manipulation into the spotlight where the Game Band makes them a vehicle for their plotlines. Following their randomly-generated path through up to 26 seasons, and imagining some narrative thread that courses through their "life".

Which member of the Hellmouth Sunbeams would you like to hear about first?

• Lars Taylor
  
• Nagomi Nava
  
• Phineas Wormthrice
  
• Howell Franklin
  
• Sandoval Crossing
  
• Sutton Bishop
  

Sutton Bishop is definitely one of my top faves.

What is the word for schadenfreude but also you relate to the frustration and anxiety on a deeply personal level?

Empathy.

I know in the US, really rural areas have incredibly high drop out and drug/suicide rates. Was any of that a big concern over there?

I know that our pass rates for senior years were below national average, though most who were dropping out were heading into work. We had a real boon in our town, that a polytechnic offering trade courses (hairdressing, civil engineering, automotive mechanics, hospitality, a bunch of other stuff too) allowed our senior students to take part, having one day a week away from school and doing these courses - with the caveat they should be keeping up with assessments for school, and particularly passing the assessments (predominantly in English and Maths, but an assignment requiring an essay for any subject could be literacy, and assessments for designing+writing up experiments with quantitative data in Science counted for Numeracy) that would award them Literacy and Numeracy.

Senior students who did leave school early, for the most part appreciated the importance of getting Numeracy and Literacy and dipped after passing what they needed to. Whether the assessments they could complete to be awarded those would always accurately reflect their ability (or lack thereof) to be literate and numerate enough to be a contributing member of society is an excellent question. The Ministry of Education assures us it's at the top of their list.

While there almost certainly were students who were taking drugs, you could count them on one hand. Vaping became the new smoking around the time I started teaching, so that was a constant issue (again, mostly, around a small core of students who were receiving a lot of wrap-around support). To my understanding, we probably had about the same proportion of students having these issues as any other high school round the country.

An issue which had been rumbling on the horizon while I was teaching but I mostly dodged was the readiness of primary school kids coming up into high school - or the lack thereof. Word in the staffroom (and particularly among the teachers in the Technology Department - of which I was one for two years - who saw kids from most of the local primary schools once a week to use our Technology department's facilities) was more behavioural issues at primary school, including kids whose families were involved in gangs.

Poverty was another huge issue; we had a staff member whose full-time job was community outreach, keeping contact with families who were struggling. Organising school uniforms, food, groceries, whatever they might need when things like "my work schedule means I can't drop the kids at school two days of the week, and we can't afford the bus" was affecting attendance. I had one kid who was a royal pain in the ass, whose family was living out of a tent for the first six weeks of the school year.

I did not experience the suicide of a student during my five years of teaching, nor was I in a position where a student told me something I had to disclose to appropriate channels for the child's safety. For, that I am extremely grateful.

There was one death of a student during my four years living rurally. I do not wish to discuss this further.

How you got into crocheting?

That first teaching job in 2019 was not in semi-rural new zealand. That happened because I got cold-called while wandering round a wildlife reserve in Wellington looking at takahe.

zealanda is great
everyone fawns over the takahe and the kaka but the pīwakawaka, toutouwai and other smaller birds are the best
what die hunde (ferg) doin?

Sutton Bishop is definitely one of my top faves.

Great choice!

(I'm gonna be mixing in-game player history, our fan-made in-universe lore, and the vibes of the actual community in this. Hopefully it all makes sense.)

The Hellmouth Sunbeams were, through most of the Discipline Era, a less successful team who were lucky to crack a season win rate of over 50%. Despite being one of the largest teams in terms of Fanbase, the team was also not great at winning Blessings. One of the first really good blessings the Beams won was Precognition at the end of Season 4, which appreciably boosted the stats of three batters: Nagomi Nava, Emmett Internet, and Randall Marijuana.

Although the only in-game flavour for the blessing was "Visions of things to come", we thought it was pretty neat and wondered what else these three were seeing. We decided to call these three the Precog Trio, only later discovering that we had a Pattern of our Trios of players being Befouled with Fates.

Toward the end of Season 5, Emmett Internet was incinerated, replaced with Sutton Bishop. This was the first Beams incineration since Season 3 (when Rhys Trombone and Velasquez Meadows were replaced with Dudley Mueller and Alexander Horne respectively), and the majority of the community hadn't physically been around for those. We didn't actually extensively lore Rhys and Velasquez until quite some time later... and the Beams had up to this point avoided player-losing Consequences like team swaps. With all that, Emmett's incineration was the first loss of a player most Beams fans experienced live.

Sutton was... well, they weren't terrible, but generally not as good as the player we'd just boosted and lost in a rapid ump-based immolation. As was the way in those earlier days of blaseball, when a team received a new player we'd start figuring out what their deal was by simply bouncing lots of ideas around. One of the immediate touchstones was discovery of an actual real-world village in the UK called Bishop Sutton. At some point I chucked this out into the chat:

Sutton Bishop burst onto the scene almost exactly one year after the release of Untitled Goose Game, so "The entirety of Bishop Sutton is working together to pilot an avatar that's playing blaseball" mutated into... "the entity being piloted by Bishop Sutton's residents is an eldritch being who most of the time resembles a goose."

There were additional fun details, like the fact the village was doing this because some kind of curse had pulled their village out of reality and into a pocket dimension, and controlling the goose (who was contractually obligated to play blaseball) was their only way to interact with the rest of the world. The entity, being a goose, was obviously a chaotic evil asshole, but the village folk were also not averse to making the goose also commit petty crimes.

It's presumed that the rest of the Beams were unaware there were people on the other end of the goose, and just assumed its more calculated acts of malice were "typical goose(?) behaviour". The gooseform was for the most part impossible for anyone to control, though it seemed to behave at least a little around the pitcher and team dad Sandoval Crossing.

Roll on Season 6! The vibes remained a lil tense after our grief, because the League had been restructured via Decree and the five worst teams in the League (the Beams, the Boston Flowers, the Tacos, the Miami Dale, and the Houston Spies) were thrown into the "Wild Low" division. Every division had a different stat-shifting mechanic planned for it, with our worst-of-the-worst division having the division winner siphon stats from the worse teams. They did end up scrapping the mechanic, once folks pointed out you'd end up with four truly dogshit teams in the league - who'd keep being fodder for whichever team had sunk into Wild Low for that season from the rest of the league - we didn't find this out until the end of the season though. Luckily, Wild Low collectively said "fuck that", pulled their forces together, and won all of the division-wide Blessings which were on offer that season.

Wild Low actually developed such a strong sense of camaraderie from this incident that they pretty much kept winning division-wide Blessings in later seasons whenever they turned up. Sutton Bishop's , until most of the teams got pretty damn buff. Some folks even wrote a song about it!

We ended up calling ourselves "enby baby jail" once most of our teams got Good, and joked we were contained in one division for the rest of the League's safety.

So yeah. All that was fun, except we didn't find out until the end of the week that things were going to turn out ok, and in the mean time that season we lost another Precog-boosted player, Randall Marijuana, in a team-swapping Feedback event, and also lost Alexander Horne. We got Hendricks Richardson from the Jazz Hands and Sigmund Castillo from the Lovers, both of whom eventually thrived on our team and are also excellent characters I'd love to talk about. In the moment, though, this was probably about the lowest Sunbeams Fans' morale got.

Also, Randy died to incineration about forty days after leaving our team. So now Nagomi Nava is the last surviving member of the Precog Trio (I'll tell you that story though if/when y'all let me rant about Nagomi).

Sutton has an otherwise-humdrum rest of the Discipline Era, which ends with the Shelled One being defeated at the end of Season 10, then the Sunbeams going absolutely bonkers.

---

Let's step away from Sutton for a moment and just break this down because it's up there as one of the funniest things in Splorts. Here's the prelude to Season 11:

• Since Season 7, occasionally in Elections there'd be Blessings where teams could win a Blood Type. Quite a few teams managed to nab blood types that thematically fit them (cuz the rest of the League was nice and fans from other teams would avoid putting in Votes for that blessing), like the party-loving Dale getting Electric Blood (which let them "zap away" strikes and have more than 3 strikes before being out) the Lovers getting Love blood (which let them Charm opposing players and make them screw up) or the Spies getting Psychic Blood (which let them "undo" bad outcomes like getting struck out by performing a Mind Trick).
  • In the Season 8 Elections, the Beams got Basic Blood, which gave us Base Instincts. This gave us the power to occasionally, when drawing a walk, just.... keep walking. To Second Base. Sometimes even to Third Base, which let bullshit like this happen if the bases were loaded:
    
  • 
    
• In the Season 10 elections, one team could win Fourth Strike (so your team is only out on four strikes instead of three) for the next season, and also give it to the worst team in the opposite league. Thanks to the Shoe Thieves and our piss-poor performance in Season 9, Beams won that.
  
• Also in the Season 10 elections, one team could win a blessing called Walk in the Park and share that with their division. Tacos won that, so Beams could, for one glorious season to wrap up the Discipline Era:
  • Have four strikes for each batter before they were struck out
    
  • Walk on the third Ball thrown by a pitcher, instead of the fourth
    
  • Potentially walk multiple bases when drawing a walk
    

Also, because of the Sun exploding (don't worry about it) and being replaced with a Black Hole and a replacement called Sun 2, there was no dangerous weather like Solar Eclipses or Peanuts or Feedback. Both the Black Hole and Sun 2 would only react if a team scored 10 runs in a game - the Black Hole would eat them and give the opposing team an Unwin; Sun 2 would eat them and instead give the team who scored an extra win.

The Sunbeams' win-loss record for the 99-day regular season was 68 wins to 39 losses. We scored 834 runs that season; the previous record was a little less than 600. There are only three teams who ever scored over 700 runs in a season, and the Beams were one of them. No other team ever scored over 800, and the beams did it again in Season 23.

We were unstoppable through the regular season, and only one thing could stop us in the Postseason: OURSELVES.

---

First match-up of the PostSeason: we were up against the Spies. 5 games, first to 3 wins moves on.

Game 1 was Sun 2 weather; we scored 12 runs total and ended up with 2 Wins by the end of it.
Game 2 was Black Hole weather; in the 6th inning the score hit 2-10 to the Beams, the Black Hole ate the 10 runs and gave the Spies an Unwin. The Spies scored four more runs by the 9th inning, but Beams clawed back and scored 7 more, including 3 at the bottom of the 9th.

It's at this point everyone notices a problem: If, under the Black Hole, a team scores a 10th run in the final inning and the other team has runs on the board, the Black Hole eats the runs, the low-scoring team wins because they've got more runs in the final inning, but they also get an Unwin because the Black Hole triggered on them. This does, in fact, happen, because the Tacos "lose" twice to the Tigers because they keep scoring too much under Black Hole weather.

And the Beams batters will not stop.

The Tigers eventually net 3 wins and move onto the semifinal where they'll face the Beams, but only after 6 games.

---

There was a running joke that the Sunbeams establish passionate rivalries with anyone who looks at them funny (so, the rest of the League), and also that any kind of passionate camaraderie is also a rivalry. Our longest-standing anti-rivals were, of course, the Hades Tigers , with our bond unbreakable since the dawn of Blaseball. Sure, there was the Hell connection, but also before the Wild/Mild league shuffle of Season 6 we were both in the Lawful Evil division, where the Tigers were among the best in the League and the Beams were... bad. The Tigers were so dominant, in fact, they already had two season championships under their belt, and the third put them in line for Ascension.

Only one team had Ascended at this point, the Baltimore Crabs, and they disappeared from the League to places unknown after winning Season 10 and were replaced with the Tokyo Lift. While Crabs fans were assured that their team would return at some point, the vibes were definitely weird.

Tigers and Sunbeams Fans would cheer for each others' teams, calling them the "Tigerbeams" and claiming when one team won, they both did. This was especially great when the two teams played against each other, because that would be a day when everybody won. With the threat of Ascension, while we assured each other no matter what happened it would be Tigerbeams Forever, we knew what we had to do.

The Beams had to stop the Tigers' Ascension.

----

Semi-finals time. Once again, first to 3 wins moves on.

Game 1, featuring our beloved pitcher, Lone Star Lars (so called because he's got 1/5 stars for Pitching): We go into the 9th inning with the score 9-9. The Tigers score, give the Beams an Unwin, then lose.

0 wins to 0.

Game 2: The Tigers are leading 6-4 a the bottom of the 9th with the Beams up to bat. They equalise. Tigers score 2 more runs in the 10th. Beams equalise again. The score sits at 8-8 until the 14th inning, when the Tigers score another run. The Sunbeams respond in turn, with one home run followed up by another by Nagomi Nava. Sun 2 eats the runs, gives a win to the Beams, and the Tigers win Game 2 9-0.

1 win to each team.

Game 3, with the Tigers' 4.5 star pitcher, "ace in the hole" Hiroto Wilcox: Shutout to the Tigers, 7-0.

2 wins Tigers, 1 win Beams.

Game 4: We finish the 9th inning with 4 runs each. Both teams score another run in the 10th, then Beams score twice in the 11th (this featured Sigmund Castillo walking directly to 2nd base, then stealing third, then running in on the next bat.)

2 wins each, next game could finish this. The other semi-final playoff has concluded, with the Seattle Garages moving on.

Game 5: 3 runs each as the Beams step up for the bottom of the 8th. The beams score 7 runs in an inning, trigger Sun 2, and gain a win, resetting the score to 3 nil. They manage to equalise at the bottom of the 9th, but give up two more runs in the 10th, netting the Tigers another win.

3 wins each. It's extra innings, except now it's extra games.

Game 6: Lars is up on the mound again. The Sunbeams hit 11 runs in the 3rd, gain a win, and reset the score to 2-1 to the Tigers. Both teams keep racking up runs, but Lars holds his own and the final score at the end of the 9th inning is 5 to 7. Beams win!

---

IT'S TIME FOR THE SEASON 11 CHAMPIONSHIP: HELLMOUTH SUNBEAMS VS SEATTLE GARAGES

Game 1. We wrap up the 9th inning with the score 5 all. The Garages nab another run in the top of the 10th, before the Beams step up to bat, and rack up runs until the score is 6-9. Nagomi Nava steps up to bat. She scores. We gain a win. The score is 6-0. Two more batters strike out.

The win record is 1 to the Garages, 1 to the Beams.

Game 2. A nice normal one, where the Garages score 3 to the Beams' 4.

1 Win Garages, 2 wins Beams.

Game 3. Black Hole again. Our pitcher, Zack Sanders, mostly keeps the Garages at bay, allowing only 2 runs by the end of the 9th. The Sunbeams lineup, meanwhile, have scored a merry 8. Everyone is begging the Beams batters to chill the fuck out for a minute. We get a double. We draw a walk to second base. Nagomi Nava steps up to bat. She hits a double, and the two folks on base run in. Game ends 2 at-bats later, 0-2.

1 Win Garages, 2 wins Beams.

Game 4. Same shit, different pitcher. Beams trigger the black hole again in the bottom of the 9th, while the Garages have a couple runs on the board.

1 Win Garages, 2 wins Beams.

Game 5. The Hellmouth Sunbeams batting lineup is officially holding the League hostage. In the 7th inning, Sutton Bishop nabs the 9th run for the Beams. Lone Star Lars, who's pitching again, has let 5 runs through so a loop right now all-but spells a Game 6.

Game 5. Beams in the 8th. Sutton hits a double, but the batter after them strikes out.

Game 5. Beams in the 9th. 1 out, Igneus Delacruz on 1st base. Nagomi Nava steps up to bat. Iggy gets caught stealing, and Nagomi hits a ground out immediately after. The nightmare is over... unless the Garages can tie this or trigger the black hole for themselves.

Game 5. Bottom of the 9th. Theodore Duende steps up to bat. Ball. Strike. Strike. Flyout. 1 out.

Game 5. Bottom of the 9th. Paula Turnip batting for the Garages. Ball. Ball. Strike. Ball. Groundout. 2 outs, and a final out between eternity and the Championship's end.

Game 5. Bottom of the 9th. Sparks Beans steps up, and hits a single.

Game 5. Bottom of the 9th. Lars Taylor nabs two strikes on Oliver Notarobot. A ball. A final strike. The Hellmouth Sunbeams are the Season 11 champions, and Blaseball enters four-month Siesta.

---

Welcome back!

So after the Beams won we entered an era of Peace and Prosperity, with only a small interruption for something called the Coffee Cup. This was a self-contained tournament with minimal impact on the overall plot of Blaseball, but players were enrolled on teams based on their (randomly generated) coffee preference. The members of the winning team got to drink from the percolated remains of players who got abducted by a Saucer during the tournament. Sutton was a pitcher on the winning team, Inter Xpresso, giving them a permanent boost in Coffee weather.

Blaseball returned, 18 weeks after the end of the Discipline Era.

We had a new antagonist, in the form of the Coin, and a fresh cast of other godlike entities whose motives and priorities we would have to figure out. The main theme for the Expansion Era was exploring the consequences of unchecked growth, with the game piling features on top of features and giving the fans even more granular control over their team's structure and development. It was bloated and overwhelming by design, but Sutton didn't get to see much of it.

They were incinerated near the end of Season 13, replaced by Kaj Statter Jr.

---

Day 98 was already proving to be another dark day for Blaseball - the Beams were playing an away game in Breckenridge, home to the Jazz Hands, and we'd already had an incineration earlier (Jazz Hands' batter Combs Estes) in the game. We were in extra innings and just wanting out of the danger zone, only for Sutton to be incinerated one play before the game ended proper.


Kaj Statter Jr., who uses sea/shore/seas pronouns and is a mailman who's also a pirate, was tasked with delivering a letter to the Hellmouth Sunbeams from a small British village that had just recently discovered itself reconnected with reality. Kaj made a beeline in seas boat for the Hellmouth, found the team was playing an away game, sailed the boat directly from Hellmouth to Breckenridge (presumably up the Colorado River), then crashed it through the wall of the Jazz Hands' stadium. Sea stepped up to their first at-bat on Day 99... during which they partied (a thing players can do if their team's no longer in the running for Post-Season, nabbing a little stat boost), stole home, and tapped into their Base Blood and walked straight to second.

(if you want to see the story of Sutton Bishop up to this point in animatic form, click here!)

---

Being dead, Sutton Bishop didn't see play for the following 9 seasons, until Season 23 when we were warned of an upcoming Exhibition Match.

The aforementioned Coin had been using the Idol Board to find the most popular, most profitable players in the game (the MVPs), and each week that a player spent near the top of the Idol Board they would gain another layer of Ego. When a player hit Ego+++++, they were deemed Legendary and removed from the game, Preserved in a mysterious location known as the Vault.

The exhibition match was to be a 50-inning match between the Vault Legends, the best and brightest in the League Preserved at their peak, and the Rising Stars - any player who had gained at least one layer of Ego. Of course, we weren't the only team thinking it'd be fun to get one of our players into the exhibition match... though we were the only one who had a dead goose and an extremely catchy name for our campaign to make other people vote Sutton for MVP at Season 23's end.

The Blaseball Discord had a community billboard where you could post whatever to try to convince the rest of the Fans to go along with your silly plans. Much of it is incomprehensible.

The plan actually worked - despite being Deceased, Sutton joined the Rising Stars, played ball, and then... got Heisted by the Vault Legends. The Legends had the Tunnel system installed in their stadium, but where regular teams could only steal Runs or items off of the opposing team, the Legends were able to steal players. Sutton, along with seven other players, were Heisted and added to the Vault Legends team.

After the exhibition match was cancelled due to another sun exploding, that should've been the end of Sutton Bishop's story.

In a final twist of fate, the Boston Flowers won a Blessing that season that would trade one of their players for a random member of the Vault Legends.

Sutton was picked. Sutton escaped the Vault, escaped the Hall without the Debt which other targets of necromancy had been subject to, and was free to terrorize Boston with zero consequences.

Moral of the story: Necromancy is bad, unless you're the Sunbeams, in which case go hog wild I guess.

How you got into crocheting?

Been doing it for years, really. My earliest stuff from 2010 (my first year of university) is still on the internet if you know where to look. I got into it the same way I did most craft forms; my mum did it so all the hooks and yarn must've been available in the house during high school, and I kept at it once I headed off to university.

Mum's crochet format of choice has always been granny squares; my stuff is historically in the amigurumi style (98% single crochet, worked in rounds to make tubes and orbs of various permutations) but I've definitely built up a preference toward patterns with more sophisticated sculpting methods.

Once I moved to Japan in 2013, I fell out of crochet for a while. My main media were carving rubber stamps, needle-felting, and a little bit of sewing. Looking back on photos on my phone, after that was some cross stitch and embroidery, but still not actual crochet.

It would seem that I got back on my hook-based bullshit in 2021 or so, so I'm pretty sure it came with a couple of friends having babies (which is actually also why I learned to knit recently!)

----

In New Zealand, when you're new to the teaching profession, for the first couple years you'll be "provisionally registered". This means you're required to have scheduled time in the school term with a mentor, and taking part in a structured professional development program until you've built up your body of evidence that says you're good to be fully registered. If you haul ass, you can get this done in a single year; most folks take two.

I had a few reasons why I took four years to get it done instead:

1. Undiagnosed ADHD. I was under the impression that I was supposed to assemble, print, and arrange a systematic and organised corpus of lesson plans, personal reflections following any professional development I participated in, proof of sourcing and acting on student voice, and a bunch of other tedious horseshit. This was overwhelming and I really couldn't be assed.
   
2. My first year of teaching (2019), I will conservatively say that my mentor was not a very good mentor-er, and I honestly felt like that while I'd learnt some tricks of the science-teaching trade I'd made negligible progress in things like classroom management or being on top of my shit. I figured I'd start fresh next year with building up this mystical ring binder at a school I'd actually be guaranteed to spend multiple years at.
   • Also, that year in Christchurch there was an incident that made international news, and due to proximity of one of the mosques to our school it became a triage point and community hub for families affected. Suffice to say it was not a normal year.
     
3. My second year of teaching (2020), well, I just made it clear while I was certainly developing as a professional, it was definitely a wash of a year in terms of normality and I'd get on with reaching full certification next year.
   
4. 2021 was probably my first somewhat normal year of teaching, and my mentor was this amazing champ I'll call "Stan". Stan was an English teacher, and was married to the school's Dance teacher who I'll call "Ellis". Stan was patient, level-headed, warm and stuck to wearing one hat in the school (that of being in charge of the mentoring program for beginner teachers like myself). Stan and Ellis left my school at the end of 2021. The teacher who took Stan's role, Hannah, was a good mentor but also had like. Three hats on so she often felt too busy for me to arrange the one-on-one time I had found that Stan could make for me. Still, she supported my anxious ass well and got me through to full registration by the end of 2022.
   

I got to know Ellis better when I decided to actually take her up on the usual pleasantry-based invitation of "oh you should come over so we can do crafts together!" and then I decided I wanted to make a baby blanket as she was expecting twins. I think Ellis liked that I was the type of low-maintenance house guest who'd come around and then need nothing but some tea, a comfy place to sit, and periodic conversation while we both worked on our respective projects.

The girls were born in June, and I finished the blanket some time round November:


You can also see one of my earliest whales there. I only had this one for a good while, until I found some nice denim-patterned wool in a vintage clothing store in Milwaukee in the middle of 2022. Between then and leaving for Austria, I made enough of them to tack them all onto a jump suit and call it a Met Gayla outfit. I'll see if I can find a picture.

I was a semi-regular visitor at Stan and Ellis' place through the back half of the year, so I got to see the girls go from funny little blobs to tiny little humans with personalities and such who were almost crawling. Ellis was really struggling with raising twins in an isolated area though, away from her parents and in-laws, so they made the decision to move back home to Motueka at the end of 2021. I kind of contemplated buying their house; it had a beautiful garden with a neat building, that I think used to be the house for the local guy whose job it is to do signals on the railway or something (when rail was the main way to go up and down that stretch of coast).

So I made more whales, and snails, a parrot for a school production, a millipede as long as I was tall, and two of these frogs (because I made one on the plane going to the States in 2022 and left it at my friend's house in Illinois).

There's one thing here I forgot to mention, but is incredibly important to me personally because I'm a big sap:

When the exhibition match was happening, Sutton was not the only player on the Rising Stars who was kidnapped. What was neat was that, every time a player got added to the Vault, the entity commentating on the match, Lootcrates (rhymes with Socrates) had a little epitaph for them (they actually had one scripted for every player on the Rising Stars).

Some of these referenced events that had occurred to the players in-game, while others were a play on words based on the player's name (like Collins Melon being "ripe for the picking"). Only once did they give any kind of nod to fan-made lore, because generally The Game Band was *very* insistent that we there was no canonical appearance for players:

Can you post more pics of animals. I like the bird you posted

How does one never give up creatively? How does one get over an art block?

That first teaching job in 2019 was not in semi-rural new zealand. That happened because I got cold-called while wandering round a wildlife reserve in Wellington looking at takahe.

zealanda is great
everyone fawns over the takahe and the kaka but the pīwakawaka, toutouwai and other smaller birds are the best
what die hunde (ferg) doin?

Ferg's doing well. I was and likely still am the only one to give him anything approximating a regular brushing, which considering I lived three hours' drive from my hometown meant he'd get a drubbing-over every couple weeks if he was lucky. Still acts like touching his ass is an affront to god, even though that's where all the fluff accumulates.

One recent development (thanks to my mum who posts pet pics once in a while in the family group chat) is that him and our hermit cat, Betty, are finally getting along ok. Betty is very talkative and I generally greet her with "hello small black cat". She is of average size and all her roots are white, though she is relatively indisputably black at first blush and also a cat.

Betty's favorite person in the world is my mum, and I believe she would probably call me a pleasant enough acquaintance. She cohabits comfortably enough with the sausage dog, Bernadette. Mum claims it's cuz they're the same color and Bernie has cat energy, which y'know what fuck dude she sure does. Bernie's favorite sleeping spot is under the blankets of whoever happens to be reading or chilling in bed around the house, so if mum's in bed reading she'll have a cat in booping distance and a dog under the covers.

Fergus, meanwhile, is very much a dog's dog. He wants to play, but gets scolded when he looks at the cat funny. The cat seems warily interested, but bolts at the first sign of boisterousness and also they absolutely do not speak each other's "play language".

Hence why seeing a video from mum sitting up in bed, patting the cat while Fergus is chilling at the other end of the bed is a pretty solid development.

Can you post more pics of animals. I like the bird you posted

Uhhhhh so my phone of the time did not have an especially good camera, but here's footage of a bird called a Weka:

psyche. I'm actually chucking the link here because I'm p sure discord links rot, so go check it out in hawk-hq.

Weka are flightless dickheads occasionally referred to as "bush chickens" (derogatory). They're a member of the rail family, which includes crakes, coots, moorhens, swamphens, and also that big chunky boy I posted earlier in the thread (the takahe). There are four subspecies of weka; the western weka is the most widespread, has the largest population and is my local guy.

Like the takahe, weka are endemic to New Zealand and on the mainland it is illegal to catch, kill, or disturb them unless you've got your official nature-touching license. Unlike the takahe, weka did not get completely fucked up by the arrival of humans to New Zealand, mainly because it's smaller, more of a generalist feeder and habitat-er, can pop out babies much faster if conditions are good, and it was already a prey species to falcons and harriers so it's got slightly better instincts when an animal with pointy bits is up in its business.

Where I lived, weka were populous enough and doing a good enough job living alongside humans in semi-urban areas that it was easy enough to forget they're a protected species. Like you can see in the video, they wander round carparks in tourist spots giving nary a shit. While I never heard a student talking about catching or bothering one (and a good number of kids at the school were from outdoorsy families or into hunting etc), jokes about how they'd probably eat one if the opportunity came up were common.

---

My property was a rental, and the property managers were up in Wellington and basically doing the bare minimum to keep it habitable, so the fence at the back of the property was lichen-encrusted and the planks rotting from the bottom up. After rain (which was common because of geography n shit), when the sun would beam out because one thing I loved about the place was the weather really didn't half-ass things, the palings would steam as all the water they'd soaked up would evaporate away. There were a couple holes along the bottom of the fence which at least one family of weka used to great effect, mostly because they were trying to get into my neighbor's place (where chickens were kept and a vegetable garden ripe for the ripping to tasty pieces was).

During lockdown, I got to see a lot of these guys coming and going because one of them had had a family. Two chicks, and like most rail species the chicks are basically grimy balls of fluff on stilts. (pic from new zealand birds online)



In one corner of the verdant, slightly boggy meadow which was my back yard 90% of the time (couldn't be fucked getting someone to mow it, and I liked listening to all the insect life in the evening) were two sheets of rusted corrugated iron, stabbed into the ground about a metre and a half apart and once held upright by long-disintegrated posts. Between the two sheets was a compost heap, though really it was more of a compost sprawl because the weka would stop by most days and upturn its upper layers, scattering semi-decomposed grass clippings (and brassicas I'd let moulder in my fridge until I yeeted them in the pile's direction) across the rest of the lawn. It got to the point where the grass in a two meter radius around the compost hillock was, two weeks after a mowing, twice as tall as the rest of the lawn due to Nutrients.

One of them also wandered into my kitchen one time, because despite what I said earlier about them being a prey species with nominal survival instincts they're also nosey as shit.

Replying to post #10 by you Schazer (because the quote is just massive),

Wow. Amazing read. Have you ever considered writing a documentary for Blaseball? You recount the whole thing with such detail. I can't even remember basic details about things I did last week like that lol.

Also idk if it's just me or are the links to the Blaseball archive broken? I always get redirected to the home page :p.