CONDITIONAL ACCEPTANCE

Good… whatever this is, I guess??

Awful Takes The L

Today’s Fall began with the teams themselves falling into divisions… with some notable deviations. Unfortunately, we have not retained the spaceship divisions; Desert Bus for Wrath will recede into distant memory.

We are in the Awful Evil division alongside the Atlantis Georgias, Breckenridge Jazz Hands, Chicago Firefighters, Core Mechanics, and Dallas Steaks.

We can finally be in a division with the “Jazz” portion of the player trade and feedback vortex sometimes dubbed the “Jazzspybeams”, the other Texas team with which we can hold a Steakout, and the Core Mechanics’ own disorganizational structure. Also, is it “awful” as in “bad” or “awful” as in “awe-inspiring”?

However, something other than the L in Lawful was missing. Two of the teams that fell were the Kansas Breath Mints with the “City” conspicuously absent –

And the Moab Sunbeams.

For context, one of the first things that happened when we opened the Forbidden Book was the Moab Desert being swallowed by a Hellmouth, thus damning (?) the Hellmouth Sunbeams to a life of being one of the largest fanbases due to their apparent lack of geographic location.

Between the Chaotic and Lawful, Good and Evil, and the apparent return of Moab –

Is this a return to prelapsarian times?

Yunie’s Keys

Our player this week is Conditional Yuniesky: a player who previously hailed from the unlored shadows of the Charleston Shoe Thieves and was briefly captured in the Seattle Garages’ Gachapon.

In this particular case the details I have been given to attempt to identify them are especially numerous and contradictory, to the point where I was completely unable to figure out who this player was at all. Suggestions include:

Conditional is either an honorific, a job title, or a humming black monolith of a server that may or may not live on a pushcart and is only probably sentient.

Yuniesky is probably the name of a person, but could be a codename. “Yunie” (as was immediately proposed and adopted as a term of affection) is likely of Cuban heritage and may or may not be a sysadmin, a put-upon IT person, or an information security specialist who does penetration testing.

For context on this last one, “pentesting” or “redteaming” (as it is sometimes called) is the practice of what might be called “hacking” by the uninformed: but it is done with the full knowledge and agreement of the target, on dummy accounts that have no private information or actual users, and for the express purpose of reporting the security issues that the tester found so that they can be fixed. Probably the Agency held a CTF or something.

Elsewhere in the League

All right. Here’s the sitch. The Keepers of the Blaseball main Discord have shut the main server down for the holidays, sending all talk squishing out the edges to sideservers like as much jelly on a sandwich.

They have also taken the radical step of banning all lore discussion, thus making transferred players and lore handoffs far more difficult to observe. The Spies have embedded agents on other teams and listening posts in other sideservers, so the Debriefings will continue to pass along what intelligence we have, though it may not be of the fidelity and detail previously known.

• The Philly Pies, having received Chet Takahashi, are in the amusing but also slightly awkward position of trying to do lore about the Egg Thief… when the Pies’ only real presence in a sideserver is on the fringes of the Boston Flowers’ Garden.
• The Core Mechanics have received Comfort Septemberish, who has fallen from the Black Hole as an Alternate which is to say they are probably getting a character overhaul? Details uncertain.
• Evelton McBlase II has fallen to the Breckenridge Jazz Hands.

As to elsewhere in the league:

• Sexton Wheerer, notable for being the sole survivor of the Snackrifice, has turned up in Hawai’i with the Fridays.
• The New York Millennials have been speculating on the relationship between the just-fallen Peanutiel Duffy and Loner Shelley, fellow peanut-touched player, despite Shelley technically being from the Short Circuits.
• The Moab and/or Hellmouth Sunbeams have another Eugenia. Garbage instead of Bickle, though, this time.

Misspellings?

Finally, we received a number of enigmatic Falls:

C
Adelphia
Hellmouth
City

(This last one remained “stuck” for quite a while.)

It was rapidly identified that these were “typo“ fixes:

• The Commissioner once mentioned the Brekenridge [sic] Jazz Hands.
• The Philly Pies are missing the latter part of their city’s formal official name, resulting in not a few jokes about “Phillyadelphia”.
• As previously mentioned, the Moab Sunbeams were missing their Hellmouth.
• The New York Millenials hail from New York City.
• The Commissioner threatened to withhold the “City” part of the Kansas City Breath Mints’ name until he received a call from Joel Clark, thus continuing the Commissioner’s habit of leaning on the fourth wall.

Also, remember those enigmatic defensive positions? Someone finally figured them out.

See you next unknowable unit of time, and happy whatever holiday you don’t celebrate. The Firefighters have requested that I tell you to keep your tree watered.