Feb 7, 2021

Emma and Gil chat with Sam Rosenthal and Stephen Bell of The Game Band, identified for his or her
weird cosmic horror sports activities sim Blaseball. We focus on the distinctive
suggestions loop between Blaseball’s followers and its creators, the
advantages of apophenia, and the way baseball was uniquely suited to
this remedy at this second in historical past.

SHOW NOTES

7m00s: The rating bug that Gil is
referring to is the graphic that seems overlaid on most sports activities
broadcast, displaying the sport’s rating and different very important stats. Gil additionally
refers to
exterior chest protectors that baseball umpires used to put on,
an icon of baseball from many years previous.

7m59s: The
Blaseball wiki.

10m00s: The music that Stephen refers to is literal fan-made
music. Fan canon says that the group the Seattle Garages are
truly a rock band pressured to play Blaseball. Fans have truly recorded and
launched these albums.

19m05s: Here’s
Cat Manning’s glorious Blaseball primer. It’s a great way to
get a way of the lore of the sport.

22m11s: We chatted with sport designer and vast receiver Adrienne
Smith in
Ludology 240 – Are You Receiving Me?

26m15s: Apophenia is the
tendency to make connections between disconnected issues. Game
designers can use it to make significant experiences and memorable
tales, however different individuals can use it for
very unhealthy issues.

27m42s: Kayfabe is a wrestling
time period that denotes the acceptance of the fictionalization of staged
occasions. In different phrases, a wrestling announcer working in kayfabe
will deal with a match as if it’s a genuinely-contested sporting occasion
with an unsure final result, not a scripted match wherein all
contributors know the winner forward of time.

Kayfabe could be very a lot one other instance of a magic circle. You can
hear Geoff Engelstein and Ryan Sturm focus on the magic circle with
sport designer Eric Zimmerman in
Ludology 79 – The Magic Circle.

29m34s: SIBR is the Society for
Internet Blaseball Research. Their identify is a reference to SABR,
the Society for American Baseball
Research. (In real-world Major League Baseball, SABR is the
group that devised “sabermetrics,” the superior statistics
that powered the Moneyball
motion.)

SIBR has written a number of tutorial papers
analyzing the consequences varied elements of Blaseball.

32m54s: Taskmaster
continues to be one in every of Gil’s favourite exhibits.

35m44s: Uncharted is a sequence
of video video games about uncovering historic mysteries across the
world, and killing plenty of unhealthy guys within the course of.

44m02s: More data on Twitch
Plays Pokémon. Also, Our Place, a
MUD.

48m17s: More data on the John Cage composition As Slow As
Possible (Gil misstated the title as “As Long As Possible”).
You can watch a video of one of many be aware adjustments right here.

Also, Gil ought to have talked about the 10,000 Year Clock, a Jeff
Bezos-funded clock that’s being constructed inside a Texas mountain that
can be designed to run 10,000 years with none human
intervention. This shouldn’t be the sort of scale people are used to
pondering in, which is what makes these initiatives so unusual and
intriguing.

53m04s: Welcome to
Night Vale is very advisable for anybody intrigued by the
thought of comedian cosmic horror. For instance…

“The City Council declares the
opening of a brand new canine park on the nook of Earl and Sommerset close to
the Ralph’s.

They want to remind everybody
that canine will not be allowed within the canine park. People will not be allowed
within the canine park. It is feasible you will notice hooded figures within the
canine park. Do not method them. Do not method the canine park. The
fence is inspired and extremely harmful. Try not to take a look at the
canine park, and particularly don’t search for any time frame on the
hooded figures. The canine park is not going to hurt you.”

55m51s: Baseball has a number of “unwritten guidelines” of decorum. One
of them is that bunting to interrupt up a no-hitter tends to be frowned
upon. It occurs each few years; in 2019,
a minor-league group broke up a mixed no-hitter within the ninth inning
with a bunt, which resulted in a benches-clearing
altercation. 

1h00m42s: Here is the Blaseball Discord
server.

1h05m40s: Gil is referring to Marcel Duchamp’s readymade
sculpture Fountain
(though there are rumblings that the piece was
truly made by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven).
Afterwards, Gil refers back to the Star Trek: The Next Generation
episode
Chain of Command, wherein a Cardassian tortures Jean-Luc
Picard by inflicting ache if Picard doesn’t declare he sees 5
lights when actually there are solely 4 in entrance of him (which
itself is a reference from a scene in 1984).

1h06m57s: “The Commissioner Is Doing A Great Job” is
a typical Blaseball meme. The Coffee Cup was the newest
season of Blaseball earlier than this recording, which was a knockout
match of nontraditional Blaseball groups as a substitute of a
“conventional” season (no matter which means).

1h08m03s: Twitter hyperlinks: The Game Band, Blaseball, Sam Rosenthal, and Stephen Bell. Here is
Blaseball’s
Patreon.

1h10m16s: Guess which
blaseball group Gil follows?