trans gender its friday

we took parker and richmond in the ballpit

COINPOSTING!!

My depiction of The Coin from hit indie absurdist horror game Blaseball.

This is Parker MacMillan IIIII speaking

I am the Blaseball Commissioner

I'm not sure what's happening

I don't know if we can fix it

But I know She doesn't care what happens to you

She doesn't care where you end up

It's not fair

You deserve a say

But you gotta go fast

Don't give up

Help each other

We have a release date!

Hello everyone, and thank you all for your patience over the many, many months we've been wrangling things behind the scenes. We're happy to say we have an absolute, 100% set in stone release date for EXPANSION, our double album covering the Expansion Era of Blaseball.

EXPANSION will release on November 6th, 2026.

If you've already ordered the album, you'll be able to download from Bandcamp on the day of. We'll be organizing a listen party closer to to celebrate the release and have one last good old garages hang.

Our inbox is open for any questions, comments, concerns and such! If there's something about your specific order you want to discuss, shoot us a message, and we'll figure out the best way to sort things.

Thanks again to everyone for your patience. We're so excited to finally open up the vault.

PIVOT

Pivot was indisputably the first song written on Expansion. It’s a running joke amongst the garages that Bertie never misses, and I had the first cut of this song written maybe a week after the first kick off meeting.

That kick off meeting is important because we had a great pool of songwriters, and originally a double vinyl worth of time limit. So we’d allocated how many songs to a side, roughly how much time each song could have to fit on the vinyl, and the overall flow of themes from Blaseball that we’d touch at which points, then it was up to all the different songwriters to sort of preference what they wanted off the album.

And I was like “oh, I know exactly what energy I want to start this thing off with. Gimme that a slot 1.”

The actual pivot

Whilst the structure of that first draft has persisted to the final version, the evolution of the song took another couple of weeks. See, the first draft pulled a lot of influence from [REDACTED] and some initial feedback from an early songwriter’s listening party was that this sat quite at odds with the tone of the rest of the album, and perhaps drew too heavily on that source influence.

So, I pivoted and added more Bertie. This ended up adding more energy, which well… you’ll see.

The actual pivot… again

Remember how I said my fingers were all over this album. Well, I originally only had the one songwriting credit to the album, but along the ways we had a range of shifts in the album overall. There were songs partially written that had to get pulled (because song writers had become unavailable or had outgrown the people they were when the song was first drafted)… that’s life post-blaseball, right?

Well, one of those gaps eventuated in my other solo writing credit (and check those timestamps):

The thing is, that’s a lot of time interposed as a song writer, but even more importantly as a performer. The vocals on [REDACTED] eclipsed Pivot’s vocals (blaseball pun intended) so much so that it sounded like two different singers. So, in 2024 or 2025 (time blurs), I went back to Pivot and re-recorded all the vocals. And then more vocals. And then more. And then more.

And then more

I think this really summaries Expansion as a whole: so many times, we’ve individually and collectively wanted to give more. I shan’t dare trawl discord to count it, but the amount of times a songwriter would hear how someone had improved their song and responded with “well, fuck, how do I follow that?!” is … a lot.

Without big upping it too much, I think this album is really special because every track feels crafted in a way that we never could have had the time for in the original Garages blur.

But it’s also why it’s taken so long. I’ve never wanted to let any of the songs get left behind. At a certain point in the album process, I stepped in to take over some of the organisation and also took up mixing and providing production assistance to a decent chunk of the tracks as well. I’ll leave it to others to assess how much that has helped or hindered, but it does mean that all of these 21 songs (even the ones I haven’t touched directly) feel almost like my children.

And so as a tasty little treat, I’ll leave you with the (almost prophetic) opening lyrics to Pivot/Expansion:

“Bigger and better than ever before

13. B--t -n -he Biz (‘Biz’)

I’m fairly certain this was the first song that I provided production support on, which is to say, probably the second track I worked on. The songwriter had (fantastic) chords/melody/lyrics, but put out an open call to actually produce it into a full song. Checking the discord for timelines, I picked it up maybe a month after and started adding a few of the key design elements. My thesis was “vocal forward” and “throbbing”, take that how you will.

Another gosh dang pivot

Whilst there were innumerable delays that have contributed to Expansion, one of the biggest ones on my front was catastrophic tech failure:

My long term writing computer shat the bed entirely, and despite knowing better, I didn’t have backups of a lot of the projects. I also was in a position where I could neither afford to get it repaired or replaced, which meant it looked like it might have been curtains for Bertie’s contributions. My memory is a bit hazy here, but I’m fairly certain I never managed to recover the original project files.

The solve came many months later, when - unable to access the original computer - I started to reconstruct the song from scratch using an old buster laptop. This was slow and laborious as I had

vastly less processing power, requiring me to work track by track.

very few of my plugins (and even fewer of my ‘go to’ patches), requiring me to try and rebuild sounds from scratch

only one or two exports of the original mix to try and work from.

We’re somewhere at the 2 year point by now.

The process

Around another year later is when I stepped into the project management/co-ord role to try to assess the album and help get it all together. We’ve had a range of fantastic people across the album’s life (shout outs to Rain, Max, Yana and others) who had at various points taken on management, but had to step back due to life commitments or - I think it’s fair to say - the overwhelm of what this project entailed. I had just come off the back of a multi-year work project and had two powerful tools at my disposal: (1) a set of procedures and spreadsheets for tracking and managing competing work streams, and (2) hubris. I also had the ability to finally get a new computer, my first actual ‘brand-new, not second hand’ workhorse. So, three powerful tools I guess.

Anyway, as part of trying to land the proverbial plane, every song got categorised:

Those numbers of “awaiting mixing” are pretty key, because we had envisioned this album having a cohesive feel. Older garages albums typically had the individual artists writing and mixing their own songs, before submitting them to be mastered by a single individual. The closest analogue to this album’s process was some of the live albums, where individual performers would send in their parts (and videos) to editing teams.

In the end, we’ve ultimately decided against having the whole album mixed by a single person. That said, assuming everything progresses as expected it’s likely to be 5-6 mixers in total, with roughly 50% of the songs having been through me.

The mix

Biz was the first song other than Pivot that I mixed. Of the mixes I’ve done (so far) this album, this one also probably took the most revisions. I’d label each mix alphabetically for feedback from the artists, and the final version I have is ‘N’.

The challenge to this song is balancing certain elements that should feel ‘delicate’ and ‘intimate’ with other elements (often at the same time) that need to feel ‘powerful’ and ‘punchy’. Along the way I had to learn a host of new techniques, especially in terms of pinning the bass frequencies in place so they didn’t fluctuate and drown out other elements. For anyone who hadn’t mixed music before, your ears fatigue the longer you critically listen to music (especially in headphones as I do), but they don’t do it equally across the frequency spectrum. The high end goes first, meaning that if I mixed for too long, I could be totally missing what’s actually listenable.

I’m really proud of where this song landed, and there are certain friends of mine in the blaseball fandom that I actively cannot wait for their first take on this track in particular. @wooshofficial I’m staring you dead in the eyes right now.

7. The --oo- (‘Theo’)

This one should be a quicker post, mostly because I only came on board for the mixing stage of this one. Nevertheless, it’s something I’m extremely proud of.

Theo is a really classic song that sits right in the pocket of the songwriters’ style. The demos that we got to listen to honestly could have shipped as is, and so - and I didn’t make a big deal of this at the time (see hubris in post II) - it was genuinely intimidating to try and pick up this song and mix it. In part, that’s because I have historically treated a lot of my mixing with a Bertie shaped hammer (which is to say, everything ends up roughly the same shape when I banged it together).

By contrast this song really wanted to sound like it had been mixed by the original songwriter, but then just lifted into place against the rest of the album. So my thesis statement was:

Crunchiness

The big part that enabled the crunch was judicious use of blending raw stems provided by the artist with versions they already applied their effects to. The effected version gave the tone and characteristic of their style, whilst the raw versions I could surgically EQ or compress to round out the mix as a whole.

Vocals

This was probably the bit that had the most back and forth in mixing. The two vocalists - [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] - are two of my favourite vocalists in the garages, and their voices pair beautifully together. If I was a sommelier I’d have something to say here about tannins, but I am but a humble peanut butter and jelly merchant so I’ll simply say “all timer vocals”.

That said, the two sing with very different dynamic ranges. Whilst both powerful in their own way, one vocalist is quite consistent across the track, whilst the other had huge volume shifts across single words (let along a whole vocal phrase). So I spent a lot of time trying to pin these in place so that they felt harmonised and not stepping over each other.

In the end, I just copped the “work smart” tax and bought Waves VocalRider plugin to help level out some of those variations so my compressors didn’t have to work so hard.

Floaty

I think my final count was 13 different reverb or delay sends on this one. They all blend together in the end version that was sent for mastering, but yep, floaty.

The end product

Whilst the album wasn’t written deliberately this way, it’s organically ended up with certain characteristics unique to the four Sides (we’ll get to this in a future post). In my mind, Theo is the song that typifies side B.

Theo sits between two other songs that, when taken together, almost feel like they were written hand in hand with each other. They’re maybe the 3 most hopeful sounding songs on the album (which says something when you read the actual lyrics to Theo).

20. A Tr-n-mis-ion (Missy)

I didn’t work on this song, so I don’t have any production or mixing stories today. Instead, I’m going to talk about the songs that nearly were, and nearly weren’t.

I said way back in part 1 of this blog series that Expansion changed a lot over time, as did the artists. This song is almost unrecognisable from its first draft, whilst still being at its core the same emotional gut punch. Without speaking for the songwriter’s intent, the first drafts of this song were very much written in the 2021-22 era, when both Blaseball and the immediate Covid pandemic response were fresh. It was a real time capsule of where we collectively were, but also intimately a time capsule of where the songwriter was. However, when I took over project management, this song was at risk of being written off because [REDACTED].

Thankfully, Missy didn’t face the chopping block. I think it was a mix of the right collaborators stepping up to add to the songwriter’s vision, and in part because enough of the rest of us begged and pleaded with the songwriter to see it through if possible.

I honestly can’t imagine this album without Missy as the penultimate track, and I’m super thankful it didn’t slip into the immateria with three other songs:

2.5 -o-de- -ta——- bottom —— (ode)

Ode is an absolute funky jam that got overtaken by the songwriter’s life circumstances. I think it’s the only song on the album to have been removed and not had any kind of replacement, and its absence probably increases the “are you sure you’re ok?” average of the album significantly.

18.5 S- -on- (son)

Son was a first pass of a song by a songwriter that needed production to get it over the line. I jumped in to produce, but I think the direction I took it didn’t quite land with the songwriter’s vision, so it languished in stasis for a while.

Then much like Missy, the linear passage of time prompted the songwriter to write a whole different song in its slot (W—te). W—te makes me cry all the time, but damn if I don’t miss my Son (so much so that I added a lyrical call back to it in the album, which was added AFTER Son had already been cut).

15.5 —n-ow -i—- ——bo- -r-g— (borg)

This song was plagued by tech challenges and extremely high concept/execution challenges from the start, and so it never made it to the full demo stage. It was ultimately supplemented with 16 Sen-, but the songwriter has said it may still come out one day elsewhere. I hope it does, because it had possibly the most batshit crazy, exciting premise to a Parker-related song I’ve heard.

“We will Win.”

also, to the people who liked her previous piece, she would like to say: “thanks for all the support, glad I could share some of my art with you! drew one final thing for blaseday because I’m already getting hyped up for expansion :D

happy birthday blaseball!”

like looking back its like. Oh. The blessing that caused york to be one of the first two players Vaulted and the blessing that made jacob unvaultable and they were. Right next to each other.

“There's someone we want you to meet,” Eugenia says softly. Ziwa follows her into the room, and in their arms is something oozy and wiggling, full of snack wrappers and old Tlopps cards and chewed bubblegum and paperclips and so much more.  “Is that…” Hobbs trails off, stunned.  Eugenia nods. “Another offshoot of the garbage hivemind! I guess the more I become an independent entity, the more space is left for that to happen to someone else, too.”