White Flight
There are plenty of short little comedian-based web series online, but White Flight stands out on the strength of its premise: It’s 2042, and all of America’s white people—save a few—have been transported to Canada, leaving only minorities and select white “emissaries” behind. Matt Braunger plays one of those emissaries, Gary, who’s barely up for the job, though he does his best. As Gary struggles to both deal with his neighbors’ requests and the constant badgering of the all-white Dan Corporation, he learns to both find strength in himself and to never trust that people—spoiler alert!—actually exist. The entire series takes about under an hour to watch, and Braunger is joined by comedy luminaries like Hari Kondabolu, Solomon Georgio, Beth Grant, Ian Edwards, and Parvesh Cheena. It’s both funny and slightly thought-provoking, and manages to walk the line between goofy farce and political satire in a mostly successful fashion. [Marah Eakin]
Candy Claws
Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist, the batch of algorithm-curated tracks delivered each Monday, has quickly become the highlight of my week. My playlist is routinely filled with songs I’d have probably never heard otherwise, but even better, with songs that sound like cocktails made up of the other stuff I already like. No wonder the equation spat out Candy Claws, a Fort Collins, Colorado-based dream-pop duo whose music synthesizes shoegaze, lounge, and Brian Wilson-style baroque pop as if it was composed specifically for me. I haven’t been able to stop listening to the Claws’ newest record, 2013’s Ceres And Calypso In The Deep Time, and 2009’s In The Dream Of The Sea Life is pretty excellent too. The hippy-dippy naturist lyrics are a little precious for my taste, but luckily they’re buried under so many layers of gorgeous noise, I barely notice them. [Joshua Alston]
Pictomania
It’s a common problem among those who play lots of board games: What do you bring out when the mood in the room is positive for a new game, but no one wants to commit to learning a Euro-style bruiser with a rule book as thick as Anna Karenina? The answer is to have an option on-hand that’s easy to learn and quick to play, with a set of rules that, once learned, apply to every round of the game. One such game is Pictomania, which can be described as “like Pictionary, but everyone draws and guesses at the same time.” It’s also a much better game than Pictionary, because of the scoring and timing, but mostly because of the cards: Players must draw a term from one card, but the terms on each card share a theme, making it important to both draw your term and differentiate it from the others. Cards range from easy to very difficult: The first round might ask a player to draw either rock climbing, sky diving, or ballooning, while the final round progresses to such conceptual terms as order, theory, and fate. Creativity and imagination is more important than artistic ability, so it really doesn’t matter if you can draw well or not. It’s over after five rounds—one game averages 20 minutes or so—making it low commitment and low stakes. But I have yet to introduce Pictomania to a new group without playing at least two games in a row; it’s so quick and fun that one last game before turning in for the night always turns into two, if not more. [Caitlin PenzeyMoog]