People across the world have been hunkered down in quarantine for an extended period of time, which means boredom and anxiety have most certainly set in. To pass the time, there have been a flurry of coronavirus social media challenges. Those challenges range from the mundane, like shooting hoops with laundry, to the skilled, like showing off your dance moves =, to the downright ludicrous, like the handstand t-shirt challenge.
If the name wasn’t already a tip-off, the handstand t-shirt challenge involves putting on a t-shirt while doing a handstand and it sounds like a great way to get seriously injured. Marvel actor Tom Holland might have started it, I don’t honestly know. He did post a video on his Instagram of him huffing and puffing his way into a t-shirt while upside down.
whoever invented this “handstand tshirt challenge” and got Tom Holland to flex shirtless on insta stories… thank u very much pic.twitter.com/RlHu79aBx9
Now, this might be a gift for the Holland stans, but it’s also really freaking extra. Holland tagged his Spider-Man Far From Home co-star Jake Gyllenhaal in the challenge as well as Ryan Reynolds and a few others.
Gyllenhaal took the bait and tied up his long hair so he could also show off his ripped abs and upper body strength.
Anyway, the handstand t-shirt challenge should be left to trained actors or possibly skilled gymnasts, otherwise, it seems like a great way to take a trip to the emergency room.
Another way to have fun without being in the same room.
While researching my list of fun games and activities you can do on Zoom or Google Hangouts or other video conferencing services while you’re stuck at home, I found out — via a friend’s invitation — that there was an easy way for us to watch Netflix together virtually as isolation and social distancing continues.
There’s a Chrome extension called Netflix Party you can install and use to share with your friends and family to watch shows on the popular streaming service.
The useful thing here is you can all watch the same thing at the same time without having to start the same show at the exact same moment, or have it streamed through those aforementioned video chats (although you COULD do this on video, it’s better to have a chat typed out than people interrupting the sound from what you’re watching).
So here’s what you can do (only if you have Chrome on a desktop/laptop AND only if everyone in your group has a Netflix account):
3. There will be a red NP in your address bar. Hit it, “start party” and share the link with your friends. You can also select “only I have control,” which allows the host to pause, rewind or fast-forward.
4. Have your friends click on it. Then, chat n’ watch!
In the constant search for social interaction and fun during isolation due to the coronavirus pandemic, people have taken to video conferencing to catch up and have fun.
They’re using services like Zoom and Google Hangouts, which we’ve reviewed to tell you which ones are best. But it turns out you can do a lot more than chat on camera.
There are fun games and activities you can do (besides putting a funny background on in Zoom) to have a laugh or two to pass the time. So here are a few ideas we’ve seen put into action over the last few weeks:
1. Jackbox Games
We’ve been over this one. If someone has purchased Jackbox, he or she can share their screen and allow others to remotely log in to play. As long as everyone can see the screen, they can use their phones to play along.
I just got invited to my first Netflix party using, well, Netflix Party (which is a Google Chrome extension that allows people to watch a show/movie at the same time with a chat attached).
5. A talent show
Shout-out to my family for suggesting this one for our next big call.
H/T to Elite Daily for this idea. You can use a Zoom whiteboard for it:
To use Zoom’s whiteboard, you’ll want to click the share screen button located in your meeting toolbar, select the whiteboard, and click share. You should then see annotation tools that will let you use your mouse to draw as you would for Pictionary. You can take turns sharing the screen’s whiteboard depending on who’s turn it is, and you can put some in charge of keeping time for the person who is drawing.
8. Yoga
Have one person share screen on a YouTube class, and there you have it.
Well. March was quite a YEAR — not a month — wasn’t it?
As my colleague Nate Scott detailed, a lot of stuff happened in March that we probably forget because the coronavirus pandemic and social distancing and isolation and quarantine and EVERYTHING has become our new reality.
At least it’s April 1 — and please, no April Fool’s jokes, thanks — and that’s led to a new meme sprouting up. People are posting photos of how they or celebrities or athletes might have looked March 1 and how they look now. I attempted an example with Julian Edelman above.
NBC Montana reporter Deion Broxton was just trying to do a shoot from Yellowstone National Park when he looked over and saw a herd of bison heading in his direction.
So he did what anyone would do in that situation: he uttered, “Oh no, I ain’t messing with you,” packed up and bolted. Smart man.
He then uploaded the footage to Twitter — by the way, he did end up with a shot of the bison in question! — and became a viral star, and of course that means he became a meme.
Here’s a sampling, including some sports takes on the video, starting with the original footage:
A good way to have fun while you’re doing social distancing.
The other day, while on a video chat with a pair of my friends, one of them mentioned that we could totally do a night of trivia for our next conference call by using something called Jackbox (which made it to our super-helpful list of 34 video games you should be playing to get through quarantine).
I had so many questions, and it seems like a lot of other people do, and that’s where this comes in.
It’s a series of trivia games put out by Jackbox Games that you can play, and by using Jackbox TV, you can actually connect and have the host screenshare the game on a video meeting service like Zoom or Google Hangouts. Here are the steps:
1. Someone needs to have purchased a Jackbox title
Let’s call that person the “host” to make it easy to describe. That person should launch the game on their computer.
2. The host should share their screen on their favorite video meeting service
Hangouts, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, whatever. If you’re the host, find the button that shares your screen with the other people on your call.
A definitive ranking of some of The Office’s best moments turned GIFs, which are all over the internet.
“Sometimes, I’ll start a sentence and I don’t even know where it’s going. I just hope I find it along the way.”
Well said, Michael Scott. That’s the perfect way to introduce For The Win’s tribute to The Office, the NBC comedy that celebrates the 15th anniversary of its premiere this week (March 24). For the show that’s still so embedded in American and internet culture, we’ll break down everything from the best sports moments to the best couples. Because, as Wayne Gretzky Michael Scott says, “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.”
Whether you’re a diehard Office fan or have never really watched the show, if you spend any time on Twitter, you probably know The Office is ubiquitous. It seems like there is an Office GIF for every situation or mood — good, bad, goofy, clumsy, irked, terrible, embarrassed, angry, delighted, melancholy, distraught, annoyed, ecstatic and on and on. And that’s especially true when it comes to sports.
So we decided to rank our top 36 favorite GIFs from The Office. Obviously, this entire list is subjective, but the ranking is based on the character(s) and the moment, along with how funny and applicable to real-life situations they are.
Obviously, Michael utters these four words so many times throughout the show. But no moment stands out quite like when he yells it at Jan during the painfully awkward “Dinner Party” episode.
Dolly Parton is the true GOAT and I don’t think anyone would argue against that.
But if you need one more line for her extremely long resume, here you go: she started a meme — I’m not sure it was intentional but either way, so awesome! — by posting a quartet of photos of herself, labeling them as if she was posting them on various social media platforms. There’s the more formal one you’d use for LinkedIn, a more artistic-looking one for Instagram and so on. “Get you a woman who can do it all,” she wrote.
And now, people are working 9 to 5 (I’m contractually obligated to make that joke, sorry not sorry) to take on the Dolly Parton Challenge.
