Best ways to stay connected and entertained while at home

With all classes now online, I’m sure you’re like me: stuck at home, going to work, then stuck at home again. Being inside all of the time along with a sudden change of schedule can leave you feeling in a rut. During times like these, it’s important to stay entertained and try to socialize in any way that you can. Here are some ways that I keep myself entertained with my friends over the internet.

Discord is an amazing, free application to use for voice-chatting, listening to music and sharing memes. You can download it on your phone or computer and start a server for you and your friends. Once there, you can add bots to the server to do pretty much any meaningless, funny task. My friends and I added one that responds to every single message with “Hi ______, I’m dad!” They’re amazing and exist for no purpose other than to mildly amuse you. Once in voice chat, you can add a bot that plays music and do my favorite thing to do on Discord: wait for your friends to queue up music and then put in the weirdest Youtube video you can find in the middle of the queue.

If you’ve ever wanted to try and play Dungeons & Dragons but don’t have friends to play with, Discord is a great place to start. There are plenty of communities looking for a new player. If you do have friends and getting together is the problem, with Discord, no one has to even put on pants to play.

Discord is also a great way to find new friends or join new communities. There’s a server for just about any video game that exists, and there are a million more servers of friends just having fun. Discord is a really easy way to relax and talk to people in the background or talk to new people that you never would have met otherwise.

Another way to stay entertained with friends is a Google Chrome extension called “Netflix Party.” It’s a lot like Rabbit, if you’ve ever used it. Users are able to stream Netflix with friends while you all share a screen. Watching things with your friends is really fun, but the most fun you can have is watching something really bad with your friends. My recommendation right now is Click or Bee Movie. You can watch only those two movies for the rest of the semester and have a new joke every day.

If you’re looking for a new free game, Hearthstone is a really fun card game by Blizzard. You can download it to your computer or on your phone to play anywhere. It’s super easy to pick up and fun to play.

The important thing to remember is to make sure to keep being social. Being by yourself is fun, but it’ll quickly get boring and can become bad for your mental health. Fresh air is also important, so when you can, do some of this outside. Netflix, Hulu and Hearthstone can all be brought outside, into the sunshine.