filed by Agent Pony
Agent O’s going to do the debrief today, but I wanted to talk about the Library, since I didn’t get a chance to do that earlier. Because oh boy, there’s a lot to unpack here.
From The Roots
As mentioned on Friday, the Reader came in swiftly after the end of day 98’s set of games and unveiled new books in the library, under Root. They were named “The First Day, Zeroth Edition” (is zeroth a real word?) and “An Ascension”, both glowing in the Reader’s familiar purple. These books were quickly unredacted because they only contained a combined 9 redactions (maximum cost was around 90,000 coins), being very new made them a good focused target for upscaling, and people thought it might be important to uncover to see if they had any hints as to how we could save Blaseball.
Thus we start with The First Day, Zeroth Edition, which opened with commentary? from Lōotcrates:
”An Opening”
Followed by the following entries, from Gods’ Day of Season α (Alpha):
[TUMBLEWEED SOUND]Sands Shifted.Waves Crashed.Strange Attractors Evolved.Rules were Read.Apophenia sprung forth.The Book was Found.The Book was Opened.Play Began.
In the second book, An Ascension, Crates says:
”A Raise”
What follows starts out similar to the first book, but it quickly differentiates itself from the former.
[TUMBLEWEED SOUND]Sands Shifted.Waves Crashed.Names sprung forth.The Rules were Changed.Play Continued. [the last two lines repeat two more times]A Wager was Made.The Pillars were Stacked.The Stakes were Raised.Play Continued.
From what I can infer, these collections were from the very beginning. Relating to how it’s called season alpha, in a software development release cycle, the Alpha phase is usually where proper software testing starts, and we all know the site we know is in [BETA].
The First Day, Zeroth Edition
First of all, let’s talk about [TUMBLEWEED SOUND]. This wasn’t the first time we’ve seen that phrase! We first saw it when the Atlantis Georgias reached the cactus field on the top of the Depth chart and blaseball0 during season 21’s Throwback Thursday.
Another interesting point is the mention of “Strange Attractors Evolved.” and “Apophenia sprung forth.” A strange attractor is math that is sometimes used to program random number generators, and apophenia is the perception of meaningful connections among unrelated phenomena. Is this a callout to us? On how we create stories and lore out of this horrific random number generator with funny names attached?
What also concerns me is how the Rules were Read before The Book was found and opened. How do you even read something without having it opened first? Were The Rules the same thing as The Book?
Screw it, I’m moving on. I still have to wade through more of the red string maze that is the library here in HQ.
An Ascension
I have no idea if I’ve actually gotten a good grasp of this part. I guess running on exclusively coffee will do that to you. I think I need a vacation after this season.
I overheard some of the others talking about how it’s like programming. When you write a program you run it to check to see what it’s doing, and then fix it afterwards, and then you run it again, and this repeats.
The Pillars are definitely the thing Crates keeps talking about. The ones that get eroded by memories or something. Agent O said that they “might have something to do with” the nebula called the Pillars of Creation, which is filled with “EGGs” that hatch into new stars. Ey then studied the walls, put even more red string around me, and left. Hey! I have to work here, and I can’t do that if I can’t move!
The wagering is probably the beginning of the betting system, which was the core mechanic of the original idea of Blaseball.
So the whole thing is probably about the early development of Blaseball, in allegorical terms.
Sun Alternates
It looks like A Sun in the library has a new unredacted entry. After Sun 1 was refilled by Namerifeht:
Sun 1’s alternates were called.Sun 1’s alternates were bridged.
But according to the Decree text from the last few elections, all the other Suns were made using “meiosis”?
Is Sun 2 an Alternate of Sun 1?
Is Sun 1 being refilled with other universes’ suns, making them more likely to explode while saving ours?
What’s the deal with Namerifeht anyway? I cannot for the life of me, spell Namerifeht without writing Thefireman first in a sticky note, then typing it backwards…