Alternative title: wow I still miss blaseball from time to time
I honestly thought I won't be keeping that display name for this long.
On Twitter I set my name as "Aliya 🐟🐉". Aliya is a super common name, man, like everyone knows an Aliya (or an Alia, or an Alya), so in most places I suffix it with the initials for the rest of my name. Sometimes I get a little goofy and make it "aliya n/a" or so.
When Blaseball was big a few years ago— wait, back up I think I need to explain what Blaseball is first; it's been so long my oomfs might not be alive to see them back then. Blaseball was a fantasy absurdist game of baseball where randomly-generated characters fight other randomly-generated characters and you, a real life person, can bet fictional currency to guess who would win. At the end of a week, everyone can use those currencies to vote on changes to the rules, which can range from silly powerups to the sun randomly killing a batter with each hit to resurrecting eldritch gods. In the process, characters dies in flames and violence, gods were killed, deaths defied, and... you know, my memory is already pretty hazy, but it was a good time.
It genuinely was a good time. This was back when the pandemic was really raging, so people have a lot of time in their hands (for better or worse). Like a lot of people, I heard about Blaseball from all the outlandish tweets people were making about it. It was a nice thing to rally around: there's a match every hour and the Discord is always active so you can just pop in and you'll see the confluence of people's collective imagination and the random number generator as we cheer for our favorite players. There's A LOT that we formed about who and what these randomly-generated characters are like. (Here's a gallery of many of them!).
Anyway, like regular baseballs, these characters are divided into teams. Each time is a city in (mostly) the United States along with an emoji. You have to pick a team to support when you register and by mostly random luck, I picked the LA Unlimited Tacos 🌮 (formerly the Los Angeles Tacos).
"Random luck" that's a lie. I actually looked up the lore for this one first. The Tacos were apparently famous for picking the funnier option instead of the option that gives them more chance of winning. They once put their entire pitching roster in a peanut shell, for a laugh (and also to spite the Gods). I dunno I just vibe with them. I hang out on their Discord often, though probably not often enough for any of them to remember my name after this long. As a show of support, and mostly low-key signaling that I'm a Blaseball fan, I then put the taco in my name on Twitter: "Aliya 🌮".
Blaseball felt like it lasted a whole lifetime with everything that happened in it—with how much my mind was preoccupied with it, with how much love I put into it—but in the grand scheme of Time, it was really really really short. It was active only for, what, a year? I joined late 2020 and the last "real" season was mid 2021. After that there was a long drought as the devs say they were "working on a new more sustainable version of the game".
I kept the taco in my display name even after that, a show of faith, and also because at the time I was still thinking about Blaseball. I still wrote about Blaseball. I still hung out in the Infinite Taco Stand (the Discord group). At some point, I even added the Baltimore Crab to my name: "Aliya 🦀🌮", because I started looking up crab lore and it seems like something I vibe with.
Then weeks became months became years. It's not so much I lost faith that Blaseball will be back, and more that a part of me realised it's already over even if I didn't want to admit it. The pandemic lockdowns are over, after all. Life moved on. My brain found other things to latch on to.
Well, if you're a friend from Twitter you'd know the thing my brain latched on to was Arknights. At one point between then and now, I let go of the taco in my name, and switched it with my current favorite character: Mr. Lee, a Hong Kong detective who also happens to be a carp and a dragon (see: legend of the dragon gate). There weren't a carp emoji, and a dragon doesn't fit the vibe as well, so I added a fish in front of the dragon. A carp dragon. That's good enough right? "Aliya 🐟🐉 "
And I genuinely thought, at the time, "I'll just keep this until Blaseball is back, and then I'll go back to being tacos or whatever team I ended up identifying with." Deep down I know that's a lie.
The kicker is that Blaseball did return. There was an announcement and everything. NEW ERA, NEW SEASON. Except, well it's really not the same. Putting aside the fact that it was buggy, the interface was kinda worse, and in their wisdom they decided to shuffle all the players around (thus breaking up the lore that we've built for so long, making people feel conflicted about whether they should stay with their team or stay with their favorite characters), the world was also a lot different. I was different. I have a job now! I don't really have the time or energy to keep up with whatever's happening in there! I thought, "I'll just stay in the sidelines for now, I'll come back when the bugs are fixed and team vibes are more defined".
New Blaseball didn't even last a whole month. When they shut it down this time, they at least had the kindness to confirm that it was for good.
I still think about Blaseball, sometimes, like I think of a character I don't write stories for anymore: wisps of memories that's slowly disappearing. With no single "canon" to anchor it, with most of it so tied to a specific moment in time, there's no way to fully re-experience it again. Some of the sentiments I managed to catch: I wrote and posted one fic that attempted to capture the Discipline era! I have written about Blaseball a few times in this blog! Blaseball inspired a wholly original and unrelated short story that I'm still a little proud of (but can no longer guarantee the quality of).
And of course, hundreds of other people have written, made songs, and drew art for Blaseball. The wiki still has decent summaries of all those seasons. The Garages still play every now and then. There was a whole musical about the death of Sebastian Telephone.
Life moves on. Attention shift. Things continue to Happen. But I want to believe that every good memory stay with us even when we've forgotten about them. It's ok to let them go, make space for new memories. There is always space in you for the things (and people) you love.
