Month: March 2020

Stardew Valley Twitch Stream FAQ

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird

Every evening this week, I live streamed my play of the very soothing, very satisfying game, Stardew Valley, on twitch. Instead of a regular newsletter for this week, let me tell you more about how and why I’m doing this.

During the stream, we talk a lot about books, games, podcasts, and food we like. I’ve been collecting the recommendations here, in a google doc.

Stardew Valley close screen

Why are you live streaming? During this time of social distancing and self-isolation, live streaming presented itself as a sane antidote to anxiety and loneliness. I had started making videos for my now online undergrad humanities class, so I was already beginning to reframe my relationship to an audience that is distant, and thinking about how to create active community when individuals cannot gather together physically. (Certainly, I have a lot of experience with this — twitter has been a place of community building for me for a long while now, and I had a long history with the internet even before that. But these new circumstances do change things: not having the option to meet physically adds a certain urgency to online community.) When we made the collective decision to isolate, I started thinking about the “tend and befriend” stress response phenomenon described by Rebecca Solnit in The Mother of All Questions (2017, pp18-19):

“Words bring us together, and silence separates us, leaves us bereft of the help or solidarity or just communion that speech can solicit or elicit. Some species of trees spread root systems underground that interconnect the individual trunks and weave the individual trees into a more stable whole that can’t so easily be blown down in the wind. Stories and conversations are like those roots. For a century, the human response to stress and danger has been defined as ‘fight or flight.’ A 2000 UCLA study by several psychologists noted that this research was based largely on studies of male rats and male human beings. But studying women* led them to a third, often deployed option: gather for solidarity, support, advice. They noted that ‘behaviorally, females’ responses are more marked by a pattern of “tend and befriend.” Tending involves nurturant activities designed to protect the self and offspring that promote safety and reduce distress; befriending is the creation and maintenance of social networks that may aid in this process.'”

It strikes me that some things which, under normal circumstances, are considered superficial are right now truly vital — and probably always have been vital. Spending time with people — in whatever ways work best for you (I say this because, despite my need to perform, I am otherwise mostly an introvert) — is not a luxury but a necessity. We are all right now focusing on public health. And mental health is health. So we should be making sure to find and make opportunities for socializing not because we want to but because, actually, we need to. I come from the world of academia where there are few models of contentment and happiness — indeed, we default to the image of performative suffering and punitive self-restraint. In that context, unhappiness is virtue. However, I urge you to take this moment of global distress to shed some of the scripts that we have been running even unwillingly. I quote here the wise words of Adrienne Maree Brown in Pleasure Activism (2019, p14): “When I am happy, it is good for the world.” In this stream, I am consciously trying to activate interconnected goods: 1) the social is good; community is good, 2) play is good.

What is Stardew Valley? Will you be playing any other games? Stardew Valley (2016) is hit indie game originally produced by a single developer, Eric Barone (@ConcernedApe), who had at the time never made a commercial game before. To describe it simply: it’s a farming simulator. You wake up every day, plant and tend to your crops, and the seasons pass. There is a town nearby, where you can buy supplies and talk to people. There is a beach. There is a mine. There is a community center (inhabited by forest sprites). But there’s so much more to this game. Barone designed it as a deliberate meditation upon productivity (I recommend the Vulture article by Jesse Singal on this topic), and as a protreptic towards the disruption of notions of productivity (which is why I keep talking about Jenny Odell on the stream, whose work, How to Do Nothing, I have written about in the newsletter several times). And on top of that, it’s an extremely chill game. It both looks and sounds beautiful, and there are many opportunities for a meditative moment. It is the right game for right now. I might play other games in the future, but for now this is it. By the way, if you want something to help you relax right now, you can also play Stardew Valley even if you don’t consider yourself much of a gamer. It’s currently available on a wide range of platforms, including your phone.

When are you live streaming, and why that time? I’ll be streaming for a couple of hours every weekday starting at 8pm EST. I’m streaming in the evening not just because that’s a natural time for both me and you to relax, but because I wanted to make sure I did not torture myself with the news right before heading to bed. As is becoming clear by now, I am doing this as much for myself as for others — streaming this week has been the thing which gives me the greatest sense of relief, and puts a pause on the dread which I — we — naturally feel right now.  I will also sometimes be streaming in the morning during the weekends so that I can hang out with my UK pals: the first morning stream will be Sunday 22nd March at 11am EST/3pm GMT.  Currently things are a bit ad hoc, but I see a regular schedule emerging very quickly.

How do I tune in and take part? All you need to do to tune in is head over to my twitch page at 8pm EST: https://www.twitch.tv/hecvb. If you are fine with simply watching or listening (it’s usual practice to have a twitch stream on in the background, maybe while you yourself are playing video games! rather than the sole point of focus), you don’t need to have an account. If you want to join the chat (which I encourage you to!), then you should make one. The chat is where it’s at. Talk to others and to me, and I’ll respond to all the hijinks going on there.

Will you be talking about Classics? Not really, aside from the incidental reference here or there. There are twitch streamers out there who take a more academic approach, but I am doing this to relax, not to make more work for myself. That said, if there’s some aspect of academic work and life that you want to talk about, you can certainly raise the issue. Mostly we talk about nothing of consequence, and it’s amazing.

Do you have any particular goals in mind with your game play? I am not setting out to make the perfect farm. Indeed, quite the opposite. This is going to be a meandering, explorative play, not a goal-oriented one. This is the chill stream.

I am one of your current or former students, is it okay for me to join in? Yes. I understand if it might be strange for some to see me in a less formal environment, so I get it if you don’t want to take part. But you are certainly welcome.

What tools do you use to stream? Can I do it too? I am playing Stardew Valley through Steam on my Mac, and I’m using OBS (free and open source) to broadcast the feed. It probably took me about half an hour to set up the stream on the night I decided to do it. Honestly, I just googled “twitch stream on Mac” and the rest came together quickly. So yes, you can and you should!

Which other twitch feeds should I be tuning into? Deirdre Donlon is a cast member over at WanderingDM. Professor Steel has been playing Apex Legends and Control. Hamish Cameron started streaming the Classically themed Apotheon last night. Earlier this week, frequencydata was live streaming the composition of ambient music. Daniel Libatique streamed some of Pokemon Shield earlier this week. (Please help me keep this list updated!)

*Note: Solnit (p19) later adds: “Not only women do this, but perhaps women do this more routinely.” Solnit’s emphasis on “tend and befriend” as the behaviour of women comes out of the fact that in this piece she is trying to shine a light on the alternatives to traditional theorization of speech, thereby showing that women have always had their own communicative strategies, even if they have been by necessity operating under the radar. For my purposes here, the gendered aspect is not necessary. All of us can tend and befriend, and benefit from it.

New York visit; “Countryside, The Future”; Will Allen on farming; tempora cum causis (18)

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird

Ancient. This week I was in New York visiting the Classics department at NYU. On Thursday (5th March 2020), I talked about my primary research interest at the moment, Cicero and the Latin poets. Big shoutout to the NYU Classics grad students who invited me and are doing very important work right now to make the field more inclusive. Handout to the talk below:

While in New York, as well as stopping in at ISAW, I headed over to the Guggenheim, which is currently showing a very interesting exhibit, “Countryside, The Future” by AMO/Rem Koolhaas. This is an installation which looks at the earth from a global perspective and underlines the necessity that human beings living right now closely examine our relationship with the ecosystems into which we have inserted ourselves. It’s an ambitious and important project which turns the interior of a major art museum in one of the most monumental and complex cities on the planet into a microcosm of what’s happening outside of cities right now around the world.

A careful observer will find a number of classical referents throughout this exhibit. The invocation of the Roman concept of otium (i.e. time off from duty) in the countryside, paired with the contemporary ancient Chinese idea of xiaoyao (“blissful repose”), represents, for the creators of this exhibit, moments of human history where reverence for the creative and contemplative spaces of the countryside facilitated respect for its rhythms and boundaries. In the modern era, they suggest, these ideas of restful contemplation have developed into intensely rapacious spatial practices, where the natural world is cannibalized under a commodified idea of “wellness.” The inclusion of ancient testimonia in this exhibit does something that Classicists often fail to do — namely, to situate our understanding of antiquity in broader movements of not only textual transmission, but environmental processes. Naturally, there’s a sense of urgency to this exhibit. (And I experienced it through a further layer of complexity — walking around with hundreds of other people while holding within me anxiety surrounding the spread of the coronavirus.)

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Modern. So here’s a question which I find myself struggling to answer. Are academics allowed to “be themselves”? An unspoken aspect of scholarly training is that, in addition to developing the various skills and deepening your research interests, you are also expected to internalize certain social practices and academic ways of being. I have already written about how much I despise the “professor” trope in pop culture — one that, sadly, is consciously reenacted by some flesh and blood professors, who present themselves to the world with horn-rimmed glasses and elbow patches despite the fact that they are 35 years old. Listen. It’s not actually the aesthetic that I have a problem with. It’s the fact that this is a costume which we feel that we have to put on to do our jobs properly, to be taken seriously as scholars, even to be identified as scholars.

The trouble, of course, is that if you don’t look and sound a very particular way, it’s impossible to bridge that gap. I’m a younger woman and even if I put on some elbow patched tweed, it would still never be enough for some people to ascribe intellectual power to me. This happens to women, of course, and it happens if you’re not white, if you deviate in any way from perceived gender norms, etc. etc. (Actually, this brings up an old New York memory. I was walking in Central Park when an English woman, who turned out to be an academic, asked me directions which I, of course, couldn’t give. When she realized I was visiting too, she asked if I was a student. “No,” I said, “I’m a Classics professor. I gave a lecture at Columbia last night.”)

And obviously the academic “costume” goes far beyond dress — it includes what your interests are, how you talk, and, basically, everything about how you interface with the world. Okay, so. Given that there is no physical way that I can present myself in the form which is considered authoritative, my question is this: will people want to hear from me in the way that it is natural for me to communicate? I have come from my own particular circumstances, had my own particular experiences, and all of these things, of course, have an impact on my intellectual powers. So to some extent denying what comes natural to me in order to constrict myself into a very confined space, one which I could never fully occupy anyway, is not just a moral problem but also an intellectual one. Scholarship wants — or it should want — intellectual plurality. This makes the work more interesting, and, frankly, it makes it better. But it’s going to be hard to achieve this if we keep constricting ourselves into these artificial shapes in order to be identified as a scholar in the first place. It’s going to be hard, but we — all of us — have to do some work to widen our field of vision, and put effort into consciously ascribing authority to those whose faces, bodies, and voices do not look or sound like the models of the past.

Internet. 

Excerpt. Will Allen, The Good Food Revolution (p18): “Farming had taught me to have trust in the unseen. You plant for a harvest that you hope will arrive but that is never guaranteed. The opening of Will’s Roadside Farm Market required a similar kind of faith. I hoped it would be rewarded. Yet farming had also taught me to expect the unexpected. Two days of heavy rains could wash away a crop that you had worked on for weeks. A cruel drought could choke your plants, and they would come up stunted or withered. I didn’t know yet what would become of my dream.”

Daily life. A different writing perspective than usual.

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Forms of focus; tempora cum causis (17)

~ Hannah Čulík-Baird

In The Content of the Form (1987), Hayden White discusses the Annals of Saint Gall’s chronicle of events from the 7th-10th centuries CE. White focuses upon entries for the 8th century CE (pp-6-7):

Saturday.jpg

This year-by-year list of events is interestingly selective. Many years have no entries despite the fact that, presumably, things did happen during that time. But not ones considered necessary to include. The criterion for inclusion also embraces different kinds of event, particularly moments of destruction: bad crops (but also…”great crops”), flood, death of elites, battles. In 732 CE, there was a battle “on Saturday” but no other information is given — not date, not month. The significance of these events is indeed emphasized by such selectivity — the act of omission puts these particular moments in sharper focus. But it’s hard to look at this and not see anything other than a partial record.

In Allusion and Intertext (1998), Stephen Hinds described how focusing upon an aspect of a whole has a “fragmentizing” effect (p103):

“A reading of Virgil which ‘fragments’ the Homeric model into discrete events ‘alluded to’ may reflect nothing more (and nothing less) than a basic interpretative imperative felt by the Virgilian reader to ‘freeze‘ Homer, to hold him still for a moment so that he can be contemplated from a Virgilian point of view.”

Here we have the idea that discussing, or in any way narrativizing, a point of reference is to freeze and hold that referent from a particular point of view, but also to break it off from its original context. An equivalent might be: pressing pause on a video shot from one person’s perspective. So despite the fact that we might be longing for wholeness — indeed, might even be subjected to a kind of wholeness on a daily basis — our perceptive and intellectual faculties create a kind of fragmentation even when we simply try to engage with the reality which surrounds us.

This week, I read (or rather, inhaled) Jenny Offill’s Weather (2020), which has just come out. (A few weeks ago I read about it in the New York Times review by Parul Sehgal.) This novel captures the dread of living in the present moment as an individual facing a future fragmented by climate change. The book itself proceeds in fragmented form, each entry a small paragraph:

These paragraphs might remind you of a number of things. Diary entries. Tweets. Words scribbled on the back on an envelope, or into the notes app. Offill’s novel, proceeding fragmentarily, argues like Hayden White: there is reality, it is happening, but our telling of it is distinct from that reality, and can only ever capture something partial. All narratives, White would argue, have to reckon with this. But Offill’s novel dramatizes this narrative problem, using it as a tool to bring to the foreground the movements of a internal human psychology as it responds to a variety of threats, from the banal of the everyday to the threat of climate destruction.

In my ancient women class this week, we were discussing the fragments of Sappho. Sappho (7th c. BCE) is an interesting figure, of course, because she has loomed so large and for so long in the imaginations of so many, despite the fact that, historically, her readers have only been able to access her work in partial forms. On twitter, there is a bot (@sapphobot) which periodically sends out verses of Sappho as translated by Anne Carson; these tweets are fragments in a number of senses — fragmented by textual transmission (via quotation or shattered papyri), by translation from Greek to English, by twitter’s character limit. In class, the students argued that fragments are more alluring than surviving wholes, and they are right. One student noted that people like “bite-sized” things now, miniatures of culture which can be easily consumed, and easily shared. The combination of ephemerality and immortality is potent. A fragment of Sappho can contain an expression of desire so profoundly human (it can also be a banal list of things). A tweet, an instagram story, captures something real (or something insignificant), and then it’s gone. Text and technology reflect the inherent process of fragmentation via focalization.

 

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A newly made piece of papyrus in the foreground; fragmentary papyrus from the 2nd c. CE (P. Oxy. 2288) containing Sappho poem 1.