filed by Agent O
Fellow agents: it has been announced that the next threeson will be the final threeson of the Expansion Era. Afterwards there will be an extended siesta, though hopefully it won’t also last half a year. The plot is approaching its peak, and we are looking down, and the ground looks so terribly far away.
Over the last …whatever time has become, we have won 10 games and lost 14. And as of day 79, we are officially in partytime.
Unsustainable Growth
The Coin introduced this latesiesta with a complaint that Ratings are low and Consumers can’t reach us.
Given Our generosity
Given all We’ve done
Your Position is disappointing
Then she decided to blast us with another sudden election change: three decrees will pass, rather than two.
I suspect that the Coin doesn’t know how eDensity and credit ratings actually work. She understands that runs, wins, and renovations seem to make teams heavier, but she does not appear to understand the ways in which the Fans have taken advantage of game systems to mitigate the effect of eDensity. She is throwing more and more stuff at us in increasing desperation, to try to weigh us down, and it hasn’t been working.
Meanwhile, About The Herring
The Blaseball Beat official newsletter for Season 21 says:
[T]he Ohio Worms jumped on the hook in Season 21, smashing the Bad Gateway and unleashing a school of Red Herring on unwitting Fans. […] the seafood instead provided visions of Eras past, allowing Fans to skirt security protocols and leak highly sensitive information deemed inappropriate for public consumption.
The Bad Gateway, eh?
Meanwhile, the Squid has given up on trying to eat all the herring itself, and has concluded that it has to “offload this herring before it goes bad”. Herring is now available to purchase for 10,000 coins. Each. Yeah, I was shocked too. There’s also a few new detective entries you can use to get fish: Liquid Friends XI and XVI have both “sense[d] a Deep Darkness…”
Like I said the last time this happened, be careful with which entries you upscale; there are numerous entries whose meanings can be gleaned from context, and many more entries that are available to a little more dedicated sleuthing with in-code word lengths. Herring is most efficiently spent on uncovering entries that cannot be deduced from context at all. Blaseball’s main Discord has plenty of billboard campaigns for you to join in on.
If you want to absolutely maximize your efficiency, though, I’d actually recommend #library-fk-speculation (it is labeled FK because it uses word length information, there’s nothing deeper there) in the Unlimited Tacos’ Discord server. (If you do join them, please do it as an overt agent, not a covert agent! The channel is accessible to people who are not identified as Tacos, so “infiltration” wouldn’t accomplish anything beyond breaking their server rules.)
Two’s Company
The Stalk Market’s collapse, and the resulting currency deflation, has caused renovations and gifts to be significantly harder to come by. This is actually good for us, as it is far easier to select two options we like, rather than three.
We have received two gifts: Fireproof and Bargain Bin. Fireproof, despite not doing much for us, kept us from getting a replica we didn’t want. Bargain Bin granted us Hard Mesh Blood Shoes for Plums Blather. Plums is reported to have said, “They’re messy, and tracking blood through the library is deeply irritating to both me and the janitors, but I’m not allowed to turn down gifts from the ILB.”
The Renovations we built were Flood Balloons (eDensity reduction when Flooding occurs) and Phantom Thieves’ Guild, the latter of which was immediately ratified.
Rings Around The…
Despite off-the-record assurances from ILB staff, the Bargain Bin contained a Chorby’s Soul after all, which landed on the Chicago Firefighters. A siesta was promptly called, during which the ring had its eDensity removed, leaving an indeterminate void where it was supposed to go. Rush Valenzuela is now the proud (?) holder of the ring Chorby’s Uncertain Soul.
Over this same siesta the One Ring, the one Bennett was somehow wearing simultaneously with four other pitchers, was also disentangled from its weird quantum superposition. Bennett now has their own copy of the Clutch Wooden Rock Ring.
New Megan Ito II has revealed that Traders are capable of trading items for nothing.
Visiting Parker MacMillan the original’s page reveals that every nine days, Parker has attempted to Roam, only to be gripped by the Force Field. If my calculations are correct, assuming Parker has been doing this ever since the modern ILB’s re-establishment, Parker has now failed to roam nearly 300 times.
Meanwhile, the Blaseball Beat says:
League Officials condemned the recent [shark punching] violence and insiders suggested that, barring a drastic improvement in job performance, a change in Gift Shop management might be rapidly approaching.
Phantoms Passing in the Night
The Phantom Thieves’ Guild, now, has been revealed to activate only when a team loses a game by at least 9 runs. When this condition is met, the Thieves’ Guild will steal an item or player from the opposing team’s Shadows.
Most of the item steals are inconsequential, except for the Yellowstone Magic’s thieves stealing a Chorby’s Soul (and yes, this is the superheavy one) from the Atlantis Georgias, which ruins the Georgias’ plan to remain afloat with their eDensity-inverting team mod.
On day 73, the Guild stole player Beans McBlase from the Philly Pies’ shadows and gave them to the Mexico City Wild Wings. The heisted individual seems to be picked completely at random (without regard to stats or items).
This may well benefit us. Our Shadows roster is enormous, most of it is not very good, and we have a particularly good (lore) reason to send shadows players on: as long-term embedded agents. Mind you, we do still run the risk of losing our fax/voicemail relievers, but there’s not much to be done for that. There is, however, one thing I want to say:
Interteam player trades build interteam communication. They create alliances. And we will need these alliances to survive what is to come.