filed by Agent O
The Spies conclude the first half of this Circuit with a total record of 40 wins to 44 losses. This balanced the Spies on the exact edge of whether we are capable of entering the Midseason Fiesta, which is supposed to be the twelve worst teams. We barely made it, only one space below the threshold: at 13th.
We were looking forward to the parties the Fiesta would grant us. Then it got canceled. Spies refuse to party so hard it breaks reality?
…Regrettably, Wednesday
Despite the fact that your writer doggedly refuses to believe in any sort of Wednesday curse, ey are forced to admit that the Spies nosedived from a positive record into a negative record on the correct day of the week to reinforce the superstition.
As to stats, the Spies this Circuit have acceptable pitching, and batting that is… uneven. Okay, maybe a bit worse than uneven. Gaal Crypt was the worst player in the entire League until the Guest of Honor nomination made them Party three consecutive times. Which makes them merely a mediocre batter instead of a spectacularly awful one!
Meanwhile, the Mexico City Wild Wings and Atlantis Georgias have really good teams this season.
Peanutted
On Wednesday, a player called Loner Shelley ate a peanut and had a… yummy reaction? Those exist again, apparently. The Nutling showed up and rejoiced, then called this “A SNACK” and “A TASTE OF THE INFINITE”.
Like in the Discipline Era, yummy reactions are an entire Infuse’s worth of stat boosts: which is to say, 20% to every single stat category. I was going to describe this as absolutely nuts. Then I realized what I was saying.
A number of other players were peanutted throughout the rest of the week, with both yummy and allergic reactions. Other weather is also up this Circuit: two feedbacks, a lineup reverb, four Night Shifts, and an Incineration have occurred, along with far too many snowflakes and player freezes to count.
Gifts and Prizes
Due to the large number of tiny elections instead of the big midweek one, the Spies decided to just do emoji polls (single messages where you use the “reactions” feature of Discord to click buttons underneath the message itself) for favorability on the Squid Gifts, rather than trying to make a zillion secret-ballot polls and spreadsheets based on their contents.
For unclear reasons, the first Squid Gift was pushed back 24 hours, thus pushing all the other gifts back 24 hours as well. Bees Manhattan, on the Hades Tigers, received the first Squid Gift of a Confetti Cannon. Boat Hamless of the Kansas City Breath Mints, after winning Dancing Shoes from the second Squid Gift, allegedly received a Cool Necklace from a later Prize Match, though we’re not sure where it went, as they retain the Shoes – and the Necklace is nowhere to be seen. The third Squid Gift, of a Glow Stick, was awarded to Duncan Rhodes of the Hawaii Fridays. The fourth Squid Gift, a Smoke Machine, has yet to be distributed.
On the 76th, a prize match between the Tokyo Lift and the LA Unlimited Tacos was scoreless for 23 innings (a record for number of consecutive scoreless innings), spilled over into the next hour, and ended with the LA Unlimited Tacos shaming the Tokyo Lift with… a single run. Despite this spillover, though, the next hour’s games started immediately after this game finished, at the :06 of the hour, rather than at the top of the next hour as they previously did. This is absolutely a feature and is in no way a bug.
Near the end of the week, the New York Millenials’ Irene Fashion acquired a Jersey of Invitation. It turns out that Invitation causes players to become Haunted… resulting in prime timeline player Conrad Vaughan, who is Rogue and therefore is not even properly dead, inhabiting Irene Fashion. Another haunting was Uncle Plasma IX.
Too Many Games
The Squid told the twelve better teams to “siesta go to sleep”, then brought the “losers” to “fiesta”.
The Microphone picked up “[CROWD NOISE]”. This was the introduction of Cheering – you can now send emotes that show up on everyone’s screen. The emotes available for this are 😱, 💀, 🎉, ❤️, and two more randomly chosen out of {🤔, 😐, ⚾, 🏈, 📎}. (You can reroll the randomly chosen ones by refreshing the page.) We have no explanation as to why a paperclip is in there.
The first games of the Midseason Fiesta began with a number of parties. How many parties? All of them. Okay, so not literally all of them, but more than a dozen in each game. On the second ingame day of the Fiesta, the bracket had multiple teams, including the Houston Spies, visually replaced by another copy of the Seattle Garages. This did not initially result in anything particularly interesting happening mechanically, but did result in the Garages’ joke of “expand band” reappearing.
And in the third set, instead of having four games, we saw… six? The same teams were playing in two different games. Loner Shelley (yes, the one that ate a Yummy peanut) won two games on the same day. During game(s) between the Breckenridge Jazz Hands and the Philly Pies, two separate timelines of freezes and night shifts were applied to the same team simultaneously.
By the next set of games things were rapidly spiraling out of control, with games where teams were scheduled to play themselves. As well as an inexplicable Kiss Kiss Bang Bang game where we were scheduled to play the other team that was paved over by the Garages, the San Francisco Lovers? This is when the devs pulled the plug, since teams playing themselves was not a funny bug (which would have been left intact) but instead would just straight-up break the tournament.
The Commissioner declared a “Fiesta siesta”. The Squid apologized for the cancellation:
noise complaint
crashed the fiesta
seeing double
had to shut it down
The Squid then arbitrarily picked the “winner” of this tournament:
can’t leave empty handed
so uh
moist talkers?
sure why not
The Canada Moist Talkers, being the very last in the entire league, were then awarded something only described as “shiny”.
…Hang on. Is that a Title Belt?