I didn’t do a newsletter last Wednesday because I went for a walk on Tuesday. This is what my covid recovery is like. If I do anything physical, it wipes me out when I’m doing it. Earlier this week it took me 45 minutes to change the sheets on my bed wtf! So I have to pace myself which is so boring, but that’s how things are at the moment.
My favourite -dle games that are not Wordle
I play Wordle every day because I feel like being able to get the word is proof that my brain hasn’t totally succumbed to the ravages of covid. But Wordle isn’t even my favourite.
There are all these other games that take the Wordle premise of “guess something in a small number of steps” and apply it to other concepts.
There’s Worldle, which is all about guessing the silhouette of countries. From this, I have discovered that I have good knowledge of North America, Europe, South-East Asia and the Pacific. Less so the rest of the world. And while I am not at all mad that I did not recognise that outline of some icy French island in the southern Atlantic, just north of Antarctica, I am mad that I don’t know African countries as well as I’d like. So that’s some homework.
My other favourite is Heardle, which is music based. With each step, it plays one second of a song, but it’s always songs that have non-lyrical introductions. What’s the one that starts with echoing footsteps then a cheeky laugh? Yo, I’ll tell you.
Heardle includes both pop classics and more recent tunes, so it’s a good way of getting to know music that you might have otherwise overlooked because ur old.
Hamilton’s siren song, it tempts me?
It occurred to me that I haven’t been to central Hamilton in years. If I go to Hamilton, it’s usually to my hairdresser, the hospital — both hovering around the edge of the centrum — and Te Awa the giant mall right on the northern outskirts of the city.
But the last time I went to central Hamilton — Victoria Street, Ward Street, Garden Place — was maybe in 2017.
I feel like I need to rectify this. Central Hamilton is weird right now. For years the city council encouraged malls and business development to happen all over the city and — surprise, surprise — everyone left the central area for the newer and cheaper buildings on the periphery.
But now there’s an effort to get people back in the city centre, which isn’t a bad idea because central Hamilton isn’t entirely shit and it has a lot of potential. It’s just that it feels like a bit of a ghost town at the moment/
Rosalía has long fingernails, the kind that make you consider your every move
Last month Spanish singer Rosalía released her third album, Motomami. As part of the promo, she did a special for TikTok where she did live-to-tape performances of album cuts.
That doesn’t sound particularly especial, but consider that it was designed to be viewed on a mobile device. The instructions at the beginning of the later YouTube upload advise viewers to lock their screen orientation and hold their device with both hands. It’s a wild ride!
The camera isn’t content with just keeping landscape or portrait mode. It goes where it needs to go and it’s up to the viewer to orient their phone to keep up. Or not, should you feel that Rosalía is best viewed upside down.
The only thing that didn’t quite work was YouTube interrupting the 28-minute video with ads, including one for Vogel’s bread feat. Chris Knox’s “Not Given Lightly”. It was jarring!
It’s weird that we don’t see more projects like this that mess around with orientation. It’s much more engaging and it’s also a nice artistic middle finger to people who are highly irritated by watching portrait-orientated video on their landscape-oriented computer screen.
Motomami is a dope album and is looking to be one of the big albums of 2022. My favourite track is the supercool "La Combi Versace", featuring the Dominican raptress Tokischa.
I had to write this edition in two sessions because my brain got tired.