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

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.

Thank you! I've never considered creating something in a documentary format, no. I don't think it's really my style, as opposed to being able to impart knowledge to people curious about the splort in a more conversational format.

I did, however, do a lot of documenting of blaseball through the Blaseball Wiki, my writing on which was probably my biggest contribution to the community. I really enjoyed the dry, "editorial" style of writing that a fictional in-universe wiki uses, and really liked using it not just to help record actual "canon" game happenings or community lore, but also as a platform in of itself to help worldbuild (especially the worldbuilding of Hellmouth). Here's a few of my favorite articles I authored:

Articles I wrote to highlight the absurdities of the actual game and the sim being silly:

• Affinity for Crows
  
• Bird Seed
  
• Clutch Wooden Rock Ring
  

Articles I wrote as lorebuilding exercises:

• Hellmouth Anti-Tourism Board
  
• Yagsnipes
  
• Basking Robins
  
• Battlesnake
  
• Archery
  
• Wolf
  
• Giant Scorpion
  
• Hahn Fox's Backyard Pool
  
• Sols Melodious, a sect of the sun-worshipping de facto Hellmouth religion HELIOLATRY
  

Kind of a bit of both:

• Birds
  
• Sun and Sun (real)
  

The reason I'm able to recall so much isn't actually because of my incredible memory skills (I have ADHD lol) but because of one of Blaseball's weirdest and most wonderful subcommunities, SIBR. Their name cribs off of real-world organisation SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research.

These Data Witches (gn) put in untold hours of volunteer work to preserve the game, mostly as a curiosity at this point but (during Blaseball's heyday) to provide accurate data for whatever number-crunching inquiries a curious person may have. I learned a fair bit about how to use their resources as part of a recordkeeping project I was doing for the wiki, and I guess I've still got those tools in my belt when I'm trying to remember who was pitching when in the Season 11 championship!

Their resources include the ability to view the site as it was at any point in Discipline+Expansion Eras, look at actual baseball stats for the players like RBI or OBP, check a text-based play-by-play of almost any game, visualise what stadiums looked like as Fans messed with their underlying arcane stats during the Expansion Era (that one is the Sunbeams stadium. We had a grind rail connecting 1st and 3rd base, which is not unusual. Our pitchers' mound was so far back they were more or less superimposed on the 2nd baseman, which is fucking hilarious).

They'd also released papers as they did regression analysis on the hidden stats of players, which let us figure out what stats did what exactly. There's actually one paper which had effects beyond blaseball, where three folks analysed the legibility and accessibility of different colors for roles in Discord. With 24 teams, making sure teams had a color which was viewable on discord modes while retaining team personality and allowing folks with common color blindnesses to be able to differentiate them from each other, it's actually a really cool paper!

I've also noticed that yes discord is a fuck and so is Before if I don't link it quite right. I'll see what I can do to fix that when it's not almost midnight.