You are cordially invited to this week’s brew of High Tea, your dispatch of 🔥internet culture served piping hot, but first a PSA.
We may not be on the frontline with you, but we’re in your back pockets, trying to offer some light relief for your eyes, heart and soul. Our readers represent a diverse and wide reaching pool of exceptionally talented people; from students to funders, journalists to blockchain enthusiasts, artists, creatives and anyone with an inquisitive mind who has joined us for this wild ride so far: thank you. Even though it’s far from business as usual, we’re pulling our proverbial socks up here at High Tea to weather this storm out together and keep your inboxes topped up with our dispatches.
Drink up 🐸☕️
what we’ve been sipping on:
We get the HSM reunion we never knew we needed, NYC goes all Coach Carr, and John Legend serenades us live on IG, with Chrissy Teigen lounging on the piano in a towel (obviously).
Let’s pour one out for the best things on the internet this week.
couple of minutes to spare, mate? 👋
With the majority of the world under necessary quarantine, virtual communication has become the *only* key to our inside world. Never did we expect Zoom to become the next social network, with $ZM rising by 5.5% this Friday. What does this mean? The ‘consumer social’ doors are wide open.
Source: The Information
Enter: Glimpse. Fresh out of Y Combinator, last Thursday the new social app managed to facilitate 8000+ conversations over the span of 2 hours. Brainchild of Duke grads Helena Merk and Brian Li, Glimpse works by connecting friends and friends-of-friends within the same room for 2 min chats at a time. For students sent home from college for the foreseeable, Thursday’s ‘quaranteen’ room in Glimpse provided much needed social connection between college friends at such an uncertain and isolating time. We caught up with founder Helena after the event to debrief:
“I participated in a lot of these Glimpse video chats myself, and a lot of what students are going through re moving back home, are things I dealt with. The loneliness is hard, the boredom is frustrating, but fighting through it builds creativity into you.”
“After participating in the large room setting, people created their own smaller rooms to use the same format with their friends. These more intimate Glimpse rooms have been an even larger hit. Meeting new people over and over again is exhausting, but short conversations in a fun format is lovely and refreshing with people you know already.”
Want to recreate those water cooler conversations in your office, or simply want to create a private group to catch up with your close pals to ease cabin fever? Get Glimpse.
pass the controller 🎮
It’s been a weird one for football fans. First, having to sit through those rather odd behind-closed-doors matches without a spectator in sight (hearing the players’ voices echo through the empty stadium was nothing short of bizarre), to the Euros being postponed to 2021. Something *had* to happen and it did ofc, in the form of EA’s FIFA. Spanish league (La Liga) players, Borja Iglesias and Sergio Reguilon took matters into their own hands this week after their much anticipated derby match between Sevilla and Real Betis was postponed due to COVID-19. Rather than twiddling thumbs, both players hopped online to play out the game in full via a Twitch stream and invited fans along for the ride.
There’s two amazing things about this story: 1) Over 60,000 people attended the stream (more than could actually fit in the entire IRL stadium) and 2) after battling it out Iglesias led Betis to a 6-5 victory and actually scored the winning goal with his own avatar. God, we love the internet.
quarantine cooks *chefs kiss* 👨🍳
Hello fresh? You up? Nothing beats a home cooked meal, that’s why we’ve been glued to one particular creator on TikTok (listen, we just really love TikTok okay?) who, quarantined with the rest of his family, has been entertaining the masses with inventive ways to spice up the rigmarole of family dins. Our fave is a tough toss up between hibachi night and the airplane basement special. ICYMI: it’s pomp and circumstance...and then some.
For those heroes on the frontline who are at the bedside when time for supper rolls around, we’ve been bowled over with community organising (with less of the slap and more of the dash) across Twitter to get meals on wheels to those most in need. h/t to Hunter and Alex for putting this on our radar:
in the tea leaves:
🐶puppy love What do you do as a sports commentator when your livelihood gets shut down? Life commentary, that’s what. Nick Heath flipped the script on his social distancing this week to bring us a little joy while in a dog park.
🎵your TikTok songwriting camp has landed. Nina Nesbitt aka your fave Scottish singer/songwriter, subject of an Ed Sheeran song (or three) and all round SoMe baddie, has been passing her time in social isolation with a TikTok songwriting masterclass using the sounds of quarantine: bog roll, a kettle and a pair of freshly washed hands. See it for yourself and get ready to memorise the “chorus”:
🔮should I go out? In what is possibly the shortest NYT op-ed ever, we have to raise a glass to Tala Schlossberg and Liriel Higa for writing this...we’ll just be raising one behind closed doors, straw and face mask not included soz. IG also hopped on the bandwagon by creating “Stay Home” stories that prioritises your friends’ quarantine stories before others. If you’re still left guessing on the stay home/go out dilemma, it’s time to check your horoscope stat.
👨🍳I feel like Gordon Ramsay how I flick my wrist. Did someone say lamb sauce? The parent/child collabs are the gifts that keep on giving on TikTok during this quarantine era and they’re certainly running thick and fast. Following the success of the eponymous ‘Gordon Ramsay’ TikTok banger which went viral last summer, our favorite sweary chef is back and we simply love to see it. Tilly Ramsay, we salute you.
Okay you made it. How can High Tea help you? Our DMs are open, Zooms are on and if you want an address to send love letters...well, you just have to ask.
Stay safe, stay inside and most importantly: wash your hands.
ttyl,
YASSS, GLIMPSE HAS BEEN THE 🔥🔑!!!!