Okay it is possible you are seeing this while still awake, though if you are checking your email at this hour...I would be surprised. I had not planned to send this until the morning but I'm up and my sleep schedule is [redacted], so I'm sending this now :^)

-Erin

Happy birthday Miss Kyra !! It's time to rise and grind.

Sorry, I couldn't help myself. I hope your birthday, though mid-pandemic, does not feel like this picture, and that you are able to talk to your family and friends and eat some good food and enjoy yourself.

Anyway, beyond, like, an e-card, I didn't really know how to wish you a happy birthday remotely. But recently I've been thinking a lot about the kinds of online stuff that I've been enjoying these days, the things that are letting me forget about the whole global pandemic situation and just escape into something else - however actually enriching or completely silly it may be. So I thought maybe I'd just a send a couple things your way, and then it kind of devolved into what is now this list.

My goal for this is that these are for the most part unfamiliar to you, and therefore a little more interesting than your run of the mill THINGS TO DO WHILE INSIDE LOOK AT A MUSEUM'S VIRTUAL TOUR OR LEARN CODING YOU IDIOT list from Buzzfeed or whomever. As a kid who grew up thoroughly online (though I never, I must admit, snuck down to my wifi router in the dead of night after my parents had cut me off) in a very lame, albeit character building way, I've had ample time to find places to waste time online that are a little off the beaten path.

I hope these links can offer you some sort of mindless or mindful fun when you need a break :^)

Part the First: Games

• Animal Crossing Villager Creator

• Little Alchemy Idk if this is well known but it's my favorite browser game! Also very scientific, will probably help you with med school

• Doubloon Disaster (the best game on Neopets bar none)

• Flash Flash Revolution

• THE MCDONALD'S GAME I also played this in elementary school - most of these games are from elementary school - I feel like everyone knows this one it's fun

• Hot Dog Bush you're George W. Bush and you run a hot dog stand. Some games, like this one, are probably easier if you have an external mouse...another elementary classique

Poetry/Reading:

• The most important one: The Toast. I read The Toast religiously in high school. It's a sadly shuttered feminist literary/nonfiction/humor website with some of the best writing around. Probably best known as the birthplace of Daniel Lavery (née Ortberg)'s Texts From series. My mom and I have this habit of quoting one particular line from his Emily Dickinson one ("I went Out to Mount Holyoke", except we always misquote it as "I've Been to Mount Holyoke") since circa 2017.

Context:

let’s go out tonight okay
we don’t have to do anything big but I think we should go out
just for dinner or something
I think that would be a good idea
Go out, Again?-
I went Out to Mount Holyoke
for college
you went there for college thirteen years ago
And now I must rest.

Anyway the Toast's entire archive is excellent to peruse and blessedly back online after being defunct for a while. This will probably consume most of my time now that I know it's accessible again...

• Verse Daily (it's verse, daily!)

• The Offending Adam is now defunct, but has lots of great stuff in their archives and is my favorite place for poetry; Abridg'd Epic from their last update is one of my favorite poems

• Quarantine has got me feeling a lot like I'm back in high school, and I'm finding myself nostalgic for the time when I read a lot more and spent a decent chunk of my free time searching for the most obscure online publications I could find, and I read cool online publications with no Twitter/social media presence like Cloud Rodeo, which published dateless issues full of delightfully weird poems like these

• Love Letters you can read/rent from Archive online. Also this, which is my favorite letter of love of some sort.

• On A Sunbeam I think we've talked about this before, it's one of my favorite comics ever and I think you would definitely enjoy!!

Personality Quizzes (not mine, but all of these have been quality tested):

• This one is my fave: Which Studio Ghibli film are you

• Harry Potter House (this one is v long be warned)

• Who would you be in a heist crew

• Which teen movie archetype are you

• What member of Dead Poets Society are you

• Which genre of story are you the protagonist of

• Which artwork are you

• Which not gay but gay harry potter character are you

• Which fictional mouse are you

• which a24 film are you

YouTube:

• Odd Tinkering makes these very sexy videos of him restoring mostly Soviet-era metalware and they're the only ASMR I approve of

• Red Means Recording I saw a comment recently that called him the Bob Ross of Music; basically he's a musician who makes a lot of electronic stuff using little synths and Teenage Engineering gadgets like this one. He walks you through the process of how he puts together a song and even if you don't care for electronic music it's pretty satisfying to watch.

• Moomin

Music:

• This is probably one of the coolest websites I've ever used. It's meant to be a global playlist of obscure/unique music. You can select any country and filter by decade, tempo, and "weirdness." The webpage design isn't the most sleek and it's far from complete but it's a pretty fun place to noodle around and listen to some cool music
• Obscurify Music lets you find out how "obscure" the music you listen to on Spotify is as well as some other stats about your most listened and how "danceable" or "acoustic" your taste is compared to average (I apparently listen to 60% more acoustic music than average)
• Visualify also tells you your top artists and songs over periods of time but it told me my top song of all time on Spotify is a BTS song so....it may hurt your feelings fair warning
• And this one makes a playlist for you based on a "pet" that you invent, using your library to generate recommended songs

Cute Things: Idk if you think small children are cute...but if you don't maybe skip this section

• 1
• 2

• 3

• 4

• 5

• 6 (Tim Pearce from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History is the only thing getting me through the day sometimes)

This kid dressed like No Face for Halloween terrifying her classmate:

Miscellaneous:

• Here is access (which hopefully works) to the Smith Confessional in case you want to suffer and realize that all the mean memes you read about smith are 100% accurate

• Queering the Map River showed me this one. It's a huge interactive map made to "geo-locate queer moments, memories" and other ephemera of what one place meant to a person at some moment in time. Give this a couple minutes to load; it's huge. The notes, totally anonymous, are funny and sweet and sad and specific - my favorite so far is one in New York that just says: "You were right about the hat." There's only one in Norwood: "my first crush on a girl."

• Brutalist Sandcastles

• These two are from Colleen and they are both about moon-related conspiracy theories
• Library of Babel: This one is very weird, it's an online library where you can browse books. The conceit is that it is attempting to amass a collection of every single combination of characters in the Roman alphabet. Fun to noodle around with, a Lot to explore if you are so inclined.

• If you click on any link in this (increasingly long) email, please let it be this one. Passcode: SHAKEWHATFUZZYGAVEYA

Well, that's about all I could come up for now. I hope at least one or two of these can offer you some entertainment right now, because the alternative is that I keep photoshopping increasingly less-impressive pictures and force you to look at them and go "look how good this is!!!"

Have a great day dude, do what you can, stay safe, stay sane, be well.

Best,

Erin (Walsh)