Riley

Nala looking concerned about Simba hiding something about his past, a comparison:

i have every single confidence now that the transmascvoicesproject was made by one of these users.

The thread was made specifically to target specific transfems on Tumblr, and specifically have had mousidy, missforcefem, pocket deer belly, puppet, plaidos, Patricia taxxon, and others primarily in their sights over the fact that they exist.

I cannot stress enough reporting transmascvoicesproject for spam on every post, blocking, and disengaging.

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.

imagine being on your lunch break, and your supervisor comes over to your table, tells you to stand up in front of everyone. they draw everyone's attention to your thighs. they tell you that you have broken the dress code because of the length of your shorts. they tell you to go change (so you do not get the rest of your lunch break). they do this every single day at lunch. every day. so you read the whole dress code front and back, and you choose your clothing carefully to not break it. you bring a cloth tape measure with you to work because they will not believe you. this time when your supervisor tells you that you're breaking dress code, you pull out your tape measure and show that you are within the limit. your supervisor says "I bet you wouldn't want me to bring you to the boss and let him measure it, would you?" it's clearly a threat: if you don't obey then you will be put alone in a room with your boss and he will touch your thighs. you don't know how to respond. you're taken out of lunch again.

TME PPL DO THAT TO US ALL THE FUCKING TIME.

The number of abuse stories I've heard that end with "and then my abusers told everyone I'm abusing them and my entire social circle and support network evaporated literally overnight without me even knowing why nobody would talk to me anymore" is too damn high, and its almost always TME people AFAB weaponizing peoples perception of them as harmless and of us as dangerous to dispose of their victim after they're done with her.

sometimes a trans woman wins against a cis woman. sometimes a cis woman wins against another cis woman too. yet only one of them is allowed to win without facing consequences.

Singling out a specific woman to channel harassment? Check!

Implying transfems are identical and treated identically to cis men before coming out? Check!

Belittling childhood trauma and calling a feminist a "bitter" hag? Check!

Believing in misandry? Check!