Friday Fun: Favorite Online Resources for Staying Connected with Yourself and Others?

[Shaun Sheehan]

Welcome to Friday, everyone! We've made it to another weekend! 

One of the things I was initially anxious about with our current stay-at-home situation was how to keep my brain active and healthy with limited resources and decreased social interaction.  But we humans are a very adaptable species.  I have been truly amazed at the boom in online resources and the creativity people have demonstrated in leveraging online resources to have fun, stay mentally active, and remain socially connected with others.  

What are your favorite online resources for staying connected with your team and with your inner self while at home? Bonus points if you have pics to share! 

I'll get us started: 

My Team/coworkers:

• Virtual Happy Hours - We use Microsoft Teams and try to schedule these every couple weeks. It's a great chance to relax and celebrate our teaminess (yes, I made that word up!) "away" from work
• Virtual game night - Below are a couple resources we've used that provide fun and diversion for the team. Have you tried any others?
  • https://spyfall.adrianocola.com/: Quick and easy. 1-2 people are the "spies" who have to guess where the team is located from questions asked before the team figures out who the spies are. 
  • Boardgamearea.com: Many popular board games here.  There is an option to sign up for premium, but there are a number of games you can play for free. Our team favorite is SushiGo!

My Inner Self:

• YouTube - There is so much amazing user content out there. You can learn about and how to do almost anything on YouTube.  I've learned how to make masks, do Qi Gong, and even found some great guided meditation videos.
• Creative Mornings Field Trips - Geared towards creatives and open to anyone, they have a ton of great free "meetups" on topics such as how to podcast, meditation, art-making, leading teams and more from facilitators around the globe. 
• Online recipes - Baking, baking, and more baking keeps me centered,  This two-ingredient bread recipe tastes amazing and you can use it to make bread, pretzels, pizza dough...super easy and no yeast needed!

[Monique vdB]

@Shaun Sheehan my friends and I are big Board Game Arena fans! We've been playing Sushi Go too, and also some heavier games like Seasons and Tzolkin.  My family group has been playing more casual games, like Cards Against Humanity online and Jackbox.tv games (Fibbage is really fun.)

I've been enjoying Let's Make Art tutorials, happy hours over Zoom, and socially distant neighborhood happy hours (we sit or stand on our porches with drinks and wave to our neighbors). 

[Shaun Sheehan]

@Monique vdB - I will have to check out Seasons and Tzolkin.  Does Jackbox.tv require any additional equipment or can it be played on a laptop or mobile phone?

There are so many great art tutorials online! If you have any pics, I'd love to see them!

[Thomas Schlegel]

We should build a Community Boardgame Arena Group! Might be a bit difficult with different time zones, but it would be fun!

[Jimmy Seddon]

Great post @Shaun Sheehan!

I have a group of friends and we have been using Roll20 to play a D&D campaign.  Normally we would be playing Baseball Thursday nights, but since ball has been cancelled and we have always talked about not having enough time to play we decided to give it a shot.  It's been a lot of fun even though it's virtual.

Personally, I've also been taking advantage of the fact that Pluralsight is free for all of April.  It's a great resource for developers to fine tune their skills or learn something completely new.  I've been working through some topics on Python.

[Shaun Sheehan]

@Jimmy Seddon - Hi! Pluralsight is FREE this month?  That's awesome.  We should have a thread dedicated to free online resources!  Admittedly, I signed up for a free week of Disney+ so I could binge-watch Mandalorian (baby yoda!!!). 

[Jimmy Seddon]

I only found out about Pluralsight because a couple of colleagues at work made a post about it internally.

The Mandalorian was fantastic!  Season 2 is supposed to be coming in the summer I can't wait!

[Dominic Lagger]

Hi @Shaun Sheehan  

My girlfriend and I found a really funny way to play mastermind on whatsapp :) 

This looks like this:

[Shaun Sheehan]

@Dominic Lagger - that is brilliant! And no additional tools required. 😍

[Kristján Geir Mathiesen]

Thanks for reminding me! I used to play 8ball on Facebook a bit and really loved it. For some reason, I stopped and forgot about it. But now I am totally starting that again :)  Happy weekend!

[Shaun Sheehan]

@Kristján Geir Mathiesen - this is a great time to go back and rediscover prior past times.

[Erica Moss]

I rarely cook, but I've tried at least *one* recipe that inspired me, which was this awesome ramen carbonara from the New York Times.

[Shaun Sheehan]

Yum!

[Valerie Palmer]

We had a craft night zoom call.... I'm not crafty at all but needed some interaction with other adults.  I ended up making a few face masks.  I wish I had a sewing machine!  

Other zoom initiatives have been gym focused.  

[Shaun Sheehan]

@Valerie Palmer  that's fantastic. What was the secret to making them without a sewing machine? 

[Adam Rypel _MoroSystems_]

We have virtual coffee with our colleagues at least once a week - since we were used to have regular time when to go for coffee in our office, we had to replace it somehow :) It's great to see each other not just because of work and just talk about how's it going, as we were used to.

And I also watch YouTube there is indeed a lot of things you can learn from there. Or just watch stupid content and turn off for a while.

[Soumyadeep Mandal]

The favorite online resources for staying connected with my team and with my inner self while at home are Joining Virtual meetups, and events on a different platform, Learning multiple new things, playing Fortnite on PC! ✌

[Suvradip Paul]

Great Post @Shaun Sheehan !

I might be commenting after a long while.

But, I can recall my experience last year. While working remotely, we used to have Friday Fun i.e. quiz sessions weekly through  Kahoot.

We also tried some dishes. I have pics of some those Indian dishes.