Image: a Yemeni shepherdess wearing the traditional madhalla headwear and abaya. Source.
Hello All!
Thanks to everyone who gave my Kill Your Darlings piece a read.
This week I gave my presentation for uni, which was on LGBTQI activists and NGOs operating under repressive governments. My teacher said that I put everyone into sombre self-reflection when I was finished, so a job well done, I guess.
Writing an academic paper to accompany the presentation was a challenge. I had to shift gears and pretend to have a strong grasp on the technical language of the topic. The paper read a little more stilted than my usual prose, but ho hum.
This week I came across a new online game that I know will be a pleasurable time dump for me (and maybe you, too?). A few years back, a similar game was released called Geoguessr. The game puts you somewhere in the world using images taken by the GoogleMaps cars and you have to guess to the nearest metre where you are on a map — points are given for speed and accuracy. I was on it in its early days when there were limited places and the quality of the images varied. Now, it’s a full blown empire making players pay to use all its features. It also has YouTubers dedicated to the game, showing off just how worldly they are, like my favourite, GeoWizard.
The new game — ‘City Guesser’ — is a part of a site called Virtual Vacation. The site promises to let you “experience the world from home!” with walking, driving and flying tours of over 100 cities. Presumably, volunteers from around the world took the video footage and sent it in to be aggregated. ‘City Guesser’ follows the same conceit as Geoguessr — you land somewhere in the world and guess where you are — except the video allows you to also hear the city around you. The video image is much clearer than the GoogleMaps stills, too, which makes following your virtual tour guide’s stroll around the city quite pleasurable. There’s also no time limit or point system, just a small cheer for accuracy. Give it a go and test your geography deductive skills (before it, too, gets a paywall)!
Round up of everything else this week:
Bleak Laughs: Funny Commentary of the Presidential Debate;
Telling Time Around The World
A North Korean defector has a channel where she shares her opinions on the ‘West’ and the DPRK (the comments on this channel are a dumpster fire and worth a critical analysis alone):
And a new single out by my favourite Ukrainian band, ONUKA, with an expected stunning video to accompany it:
That’s all from me this week. Have a good weekend!