The Eephus Pitch, A Play Within A Play Within an MMO, and When Home Goes Read-Only
A couple of things all coalescing into the same general window of time has got me to think, not with any meaningful conclusion or anything, about what happens when communal spaces close for good.
The Vancouver International Film Festival took place recently and it happened to overlap with the closure of social media site Cohost.org. Everyone got a little over a month of heads up to give time to say goodbyes and let everyone know where they were heading to next but for the most part we got a month’s worth of mourning, posting through it, remembering the good times, and sharing stories of personal growth as it related to the site’s culture. It was where I made my home for the past two years and accepting that things were going to end was difficult, so having multiple movies a day for several days in a row was a welcome distraction. I try not to be the type who ascribes every bit of my self into the things I watch or play but some stuff hit serendipitously close to home and it helped me work through the grief of losing something so important to me.
Grand Theft Hamlet (2024)
One of the movies I saw, a documentary called Grand Theft Hamlet, is a chronicling of two actors’ journey to perform all of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in GTA Online during lockdown. The whole thing is filmed in-game mostly using the first-person camera and it’s an incredibly fun film of these two guys assembling a crew of performers for an admittedly complicated and daunting effort. They power through because it’s 2021, a second lockdown is in effect, and as stage actors they’re currently out of work. A bit into the movie they make a recruitment video for auditions in-game, post it to social media, and hold the auditions in an amphitheater for a mix of actor friends they know, random moms borrowing their nephew’s PlayStation, and in-game passerbys wondering why so many people are congregating in a single part of the map. They held rehearsals a lot but it was easy for everyone to instead vibe and enjoy each other’s company, something the documentary touches on a lot as everyone involved is stuck inside trying to stay social.
On Cohost, finding people or community was hard. Intentionally so for a handful of smart reasons but that doesn’t make it any less difficult to adjust to. A lot of people didn’t adjust to it at all and left. A lot of folks hear “algorithm” in social media parlance and think of it as “feed where you do not see posts reverse chronologically” but it’s a lot of stuff. “Who to Follow” is algorithm. “Suggested posts” is algorithm. “You Might Like”, “Recommended Follows”, etc. It’s all the respective platform looking at your data and trying to point you in directions because it doesn’t want you to struggle with anything. If you put zero effort in and immediately fill your feed with accounts, posts, and followers then the place seems lively and you’re encouraged to come back. But you’re not, like, really connected with any of those people, right? You might know some of them but you might not others. You didn’t “find” them. You were pointed to them. To find it, you have to look for it, and to look for it, you have to care, and if you care, then you’re not coming back because it’s busy, you’re coming back because you’ve created a connection.
My last film at VIFF was Eephus, a sports comedy about an amateur baseball league in a small New Hampshire town playing the league’s last game before the local field is demolished to build a school. The players are old, they’ve all got jobs, some have families. It doesn’t really matter, to them or to the film, because they’re all there to play baseball. It’s what they love. A bit into the movie, a townie shows up to the field and tells the guys in the dugout about how he used to play on the field all the time. He loved to pitch. Throws a mean Eephus pitch. The actor is actually a cameo by Red Sox player Bill “Spaceman” Lee, known for being one of the best Eephus pitchers ever. He shows up, throws a beast of an eephus pitch, has a laugh with the boys, and leaves.
Grand Theft Hamlet (2024)
A bit into the auditions for the play in Grand Theft Hamlet, a guy dressed as an alien in a chromed out Lamborghini shows up wondering why the hell everyone is gathered at the amphitheater. He’s not a native English speaker and mostly blurts out a random set of noises as the gang lose their minds over his whole, yknow, vibe. They ask if he wants to audition and he has no idea what they’re on about but he plays along for a while. He says he has ADHD and can’t pay attention long enough to act in a play but he’ll hang out and watch. The guy’s called ParTeb and he ends up sticking around for the entirety of the documentary just as a guy in the background who hangs out and occasionally shoots people. He’s a riot. He’s a textbook “life of the party” kinda guy. They gather for rehearsal and they don’t wonder about actors running late, they go “Where’s ParTeb?” Of course, when ParTeb shows up, it’s in a Harrier jet hovering above rehearsal. “He always makes an entrance doesn’t he?” When they successfully stage the play to a streaming audience, it’s all over. ParTeb logs off, the actors log off, and their story ends there.
A thing I really miss about my younger years is the freedom to just willingly throw myself into situations I have no meaningful experience in. Stuff like anime conventions, cross-country trips, long-distance dating… they’re all things now that I sorta don’t have the time or energy to do. Conventions are for work, cross-country trips are to see family, long-distance dating is really difficult when you have a lot of responsibilities. I also experience them now with a really cemented group of folks. Cons and trade shows are for seeing familiar faces, catching up, getting dinner and stuff. I’m not really going to an anime convention in Illinois on my own anymore wondering if someone I talked to on deviantART for a year will also show up.
Around the time I graduated high school, I was dating someone who lived in rural Iowa and I would spend my summers there by taking the bus from Montreal to Davenport, a trip that at the time was about 26 hours. They often were a slog but one year we stop in Kingston, Ontario, and pick up this guy who’s like a full foot-and-a-half taller than me, emo to the core, and sat right next to my seat at the back. We hit it off instantly. He was on his way to Chicago to also hang out with his online girlfriend. Chicago is the last major stop before Davenport so we ride the whole thing out together. We talk about life, family, dating online, the communities we spend time in, our hobbies, our taste in music. We stop in Buffalo, NY, and pick up a guy who sits in front of us and tells us that we need to be careful visiting in US. He takes his baseball cap off and shows us this insanely huge scar on his head. The guy got carjacked the year prior and was pistol whipped in the head. He bled out for so long that he came about as close to dying as you can before a pedestrian saw him and called an ambulance. He’s on the bus headed to Vegas saying he’s gonna live out the rest of his life like every moment could be his last. A couple hours later, we’re stopped somewhere around Toledo. It’s like 1AM and I have no money on me but I’m starving because I haven’t eaten the whole day. Vegas guy is outside chain smoking and sees the pain I’m in, I tell him I really need a bite to eat, and he goes inside the rest stop to get me a vending machine burger that sucked but tasted sweeter than anything else could have at the time. We get to Chicago in the early hours of the morning and I say goodbye to emo kid, a few hours later we get to Davenport and I say goodbye to Vegas guy. I never see or talk to any of them ever again.
The random encounter, in online games especially, is such a powerful, ethereal kinda thing. Some connections were never made to last but sometimes that can be the case in the brightest, most memorable ways.
Eephus (2024)
There’s a scene in Eephus where a promising kid is explaining to a benchwarmer what the Eephus pitch actually is and he describes the effect it has on the hitter. It’s this slow upwards-arcing pitch that perspectively looks so confusing that it mangles your sense of time. It’s thrown slow but it looks like it hangs in the air forever. And then it’s just gone. Strike. You missed it. The movie itself is broadly about this. This sense of space and time that seems never ending and then it’s just… over. You don’t see the end happen. You’re there, and then you aren’t. My time on Cohost felt a lot like that, in a way. Two years really flew by and even though we all knew the end was near, I think I just woke up one morning and it was just… over.
When the site closed, everyone kinda scattered. Some set up their own blogs and sites, some went to Bluesky, some are just gone forever. Everyone carried a handful of folks they met on the site forward with them through various means. Some of those connections might last a bit, some might well last forever, and some are already lost in the wind.
Eephus (2024)
There’s a recurring conversation between players in Eephus where they ask each other if they’re gonna join the league that’s a couple towns away. One of em’s thinking about it. A couple of em’ laugh the question off. The place stinks, literally. The sewer’s backed up in the left field. One of them groans at the thought because it’s a half-hour drive away. “You joining the league over there,” asks one. “I don’t know but I ain’t driving two towns over” replies the other.
That sentence has been stuck in my head since. The collective “posting through it” everyone on Cohost went through was such a surreal thing. Nobody wanted to leave, we all knew we had to, and there were no good options. Everyone figured out what was best for them in the end but there’s still a void there, I think. When you’re in it for so long and it’s just gone, what do you do? Where do you go?
I don’t know. But I ain’t driving two towns over.