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Goodbye, blaseball

This is the farewell message to blaseball I posted before maincord shut down. Goodbye, blaseball. You were never as good as you could've been. I miss you.

i joined blaseball after the season 6 elections- basically, i heard a baseball simulator did necromancy and decided that was something i should be into. chose the breckenridge jazz hands because i liked the name and instantly fell in love with the players, particularly campos arias and kath math (who was definitely more trouble than they were worth, but i enjoyed the ride). i saw the end of the playoffs streak, baby doyle's precog, pothos' shutout streak, the origin of the tower. also, we snackrificed the tacos and ate god.

expansion era jands had the highest highs (shoutout to collins melon and the season of crime), the lowest lows (we got wrecked! three times! also we crimed too hard and lost our lineup) and a ton of towering, camaraderie and lowe forbes posting. it was also the community which got me through the weirdest year of my life and which also got me back into visual art.

after ee i burnt out pretty badly and needed a refresh, so i ended up joining the flowers for the short circuits and coronation era. i found a wonderfully chaotic second home and while i never saw as much play on the flowers as i'd have liked, it was an honour to siesta with you all. i'm forever glad we ended it on a championship run.

i think the saddest part is how likely all of this is to be lost media. even with the best attempts at archiving, everything we've built is going to be harder to find as people drift away, accounts are abandoned and tools stop being maintained. an archive would never really convey the experience of watching blaseball as it happened anyway.

ultimately, it's been a wild three years! i wish we could've had more time (riv zelda highway, you would've been so good at base stealing if you'd had the chance). the blaseball community is truly something unique and i hope i'll be part of something similar again some day.

we're the flowers. that's jazz, baby

Out of Touch Thursday

Look, I have a neocities - it isn't a surprise that I have some reservations about the current state of the net. But as a student with more time and mobile data than anything else, I also spend a large amount of my life on my phone and computer. Social media is boring and time-sucky - even though I've curated my tumblr feed to be full of art and bloggers I find interesting, it still feels bad to surface from the cycle of scrolling and reblogging to realise almost an hour's passed and I've run out of time to do the more enjoyable but less immediately rewarding thing I was building up the energy to do. And not to mention those weirdly hypnotic 5 minute crafts videos on facebook, which I know are a waste of time while I'm watching them, but somehow I can't look away...

I can't give up screens (at least, not without a PA to field texts for me lol) but I'm consciously trying to find new and better things to do with my screen time. Which is all to say, here is a list of ways I've used my screentime on this out of touch Thursday, while avoiding tumblr, youtube, facebook etc.

Scrolled through other people's neocities. One of my favourite parts is finding other people's art and photography in the wild. I also like the little games/applets people make, like Shishka's No Follow game.
Read a ton of wikipedia pages about the surface of Mars. Did you know that Mars has a giant canyon system which is only surpassed by Earth's mid-ocean rifts? Or that a massive avalanche of ice, dust and other debris was observed in 2008?
Downloaded an ebook on Libby. I'm about 20% through, will report back if I enjoyed it :P
Went through my hoarded links and graphics and updated my website. I usually scroll tumblr on my phone, so all the interesting websites/graphics I find have to wait until I get around to opening them up on my laptop. This is definitely a factor that keeps me trapped in the scroll. It's like phones are designed to only be good for the time-sucky parts of the internet >.<
Called my friend on discord while working on some digital art :3

Anyway, yeah, this has been a pretty good day! And despite spending about as much time on screens as usual, I genuinely feel like I spent my time better (I'm also halfway through that book, since I needed something to look at instead of social media whenever I picked up my phone)

Edgy Scout Blanket

I've had my current rucksack for four years now and I have fun adding things sometimes (title comes from a friend's description, u know who u are <3). Sorry for the crusty stuff at the bottom, it's superglue from an old patch that fell off.

1: The first patch I bought for this bag! It's a souvenir from a college trip to Rome (I also bought a bobblehead Julius Caesar, but that seems to have gone missing).
2/3: Muse patches, from the Simulation Theory tour. I'm ambivalent about the album, but they went off with the aesthetic.
4: The Bureau of Balance logo from The Adventure Zone. The paint colour is (naturally) pink tourmaline.
5: Wooden buttons, bought from a second hand stall while visiting my grandparents.
6: Bird patch from Etsy.
7: My handmade The Shelled One patch! I'm definitely proudest of this, it's my first time handmaking a patch and I'm really happy how it turned out.