Winter Jellyfish

December 1. What to do at home on long winter evenings?

Today, December 1, is the first day of the calendar winter. Winter is in some way a wonderful time when ~~a peasant, triumphant, renews the path on the woodsheds~~ you can make snowmen, play snowballs, go skating or skiing and have fun preparing for the New Year and Christmas (or even two, if desire). But still, it is worth recognizing that, in general, winter is a very long, cold and dark time, most of which we will all have to stay at home one way or another. And this is a great excuse to watch or read something that you have been putting off for a long time. And not only. Here's what you can do (warning, the list is long, enough for at least half a winter, save it to the wall so you don't forget).

📺 Something to watch . Of course, winter is the best time for TV shows. This year, first of all, it makes sense to pay attention to the very cool third season of The Crown , and from the new products - to The Morning Show , His Dark Materials and Watchmen . Do not bypass Russian TV series - there are many worthy among them this season . Well, if you don’t want anything fundamentally new, but want something old and proven, then the end of the story of Jesse Pinkman will do (and at the same time you can review Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul) or even the recently launched last one (yes , this moment has finally come) the season of Supernatural. And most importantly (it’s probably worth starting with this in general) - look at The Irishman . Firstly, it's Scorsese with Al Pacino and De Niro, and secondly, it's interesting, if only in terms of the fact that this attempt by Netflix to release a big-budget film not for showing in theaters may be the beginning of a new era in the industry.

Well, in addition to TV shows in winter, it’s great to watch sports broadcasts. Yes, there is nothing interesting in the Champions League until spring, and the Russian championship will soon have a break (although tonight there will be a powerful match between Zenit and Spartak), but in the championships of England, Spain and Italy almost every weekend all winter you can find at least one supermatch. Yandex this season shows all the NHL games for free - and by the way, on weekends they regularly come not only at night, but also in the evening, which is sane for the European part of Russia. And just the other day the Biathlon World Cup began, where this season Alexander Loginov has every chance of winning the final.

🎮 Something to play with . If for some reason you haven’t yet, then be sure to play the two main hits of this fall - Death Stranding by Hideo Kojima and the new Call of Duty (there, however, is that classic case when the hype around the game is cooler than the game itself, but no less). And if you don’t have a console, but only a computer, then perhaps you are even luckier - after all, just a month ago, Red Dead Redemption 2 finally came out for PC, and perhaps this is the case when it makes sense to play, even if you don't usually do it - just for the sake of feeling part of the great.

If you play often and have long passed all of the above, then here and here are our reviews of other new products of recent months. In any case, do not forget that December is the main month of sales in online game stores: at the beginning of it there are huge discounts due to Black Friday, and at the end - because of Christmas. And besides video games, remember about board games, which are more fun to play with family and friends in the winter.

📚 Something to read . Books are probably the winteriest activity in the world (yes, even more wintery than TV shows) - sometimes it seems that winter evenings are specially created to wrap yourself in a blanket and read some interesting book. Especially now, when there is something to read - for example, in recent months, new (cool) books have been published by Michel Houellebecq , Michael Ondaatje and Mikael Niemi . Well, and a lot of other good things - look at the recent reviews of our literary critic Galina Yuzefovich here , here , here and here , and you will surely find something interesting for yourself.

Well, you should never forget about the classics. Take a couple of our quick tests - do you remember what happened in War and Peace ? And do you even remember which of the Russian classics wrote what ? If it turns out that it is not, then it makes sense to urgently re-read Tolstoy (although even the long Russian winter may not be enough). Well, or Pushkin, it is shorter.

🎧 Listen to something . If you are interested in the trends of modern popular foreign and Russian music, then be sure, if you suddenly missed it, listen to the new albums of Kanye West and the Shortparis band - strictly speaking, they are not that fire, but it makes sense to get acquainted with them in order. And if you're just interested in listening to "something new", check out our new playlists of the latest weeks - here , here , here , here and here . And if you are tired of pop music, but you still want to listen to something, listen to podcasts. There are a lot of them on Meduza, the most diverse - the legendary paternal “First give birth” , the pragmatically useful “Calculator” , the most scientific “History of the disease” , extremely tasty “Complicated cabbage soup” , and a whole bunch of others .

✅ And the best (forget everything you read above!) is to learn something . Watching and listening to what others have done is always interesting, but even more interesting is learning to do something yourself. Learn a programming language (or just a language), learn to cook, cross-stitch, clay sculpt, take a singing or drawing course, finally understand quantum physics or study the wildlife of the Indonesian jungle (it will help to survive, if suddenly you'll be there one day). Thanks to online courses, educational channels on YouTube and other Wikipedias, now more than ever we all have more opportunities to learn something new and interesting without leaving our apartment (and often even for free), so take advantage of this! After all, in the spring and summer you probably won’t have time for this again.

I spend long winter weekends writing lyrics 😏. Grisha Levchenko