What’s WLLA Staff Doing This Weekend? Here Are Our Faves

Every week since we’ve been ‘Safer at Home,’ We Like L.A. has tried to offer some of the most interesting things to do indoors. We aim to appeal to a wide variety of interests. This week, we found 52 fun virtual activities. But what are we actually doing ourselves? We decided to let you in on our team and what we’ve been up to while also social distancing.

Christina Champlin, Co-founder of We Like L.A.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B-nBYGtFB8R/

I don’t know why it took this long for me to discover the SNL Instagram account. So here I am, getting my laughs in while scrolling through my feed filled with pictures of home-baked bread, positive affirmations, and quarantine outfits. SNL is helping me break up the monotony with uploads of best sketches from recent and past shows. “Narnia” will always be my personal favorite, along with “The Californians.” I also found the recent John Mulaney skits laugh-out-loud funny.

The Daily Stoic podcast with Ryan Holiday on Spotify has helped me stay calm and reflective during these uncertain times. I turn it on every morning while I make my coffee.

Skinny Fish, a keto-friendly sushi concept, launched this week and I found it to be a refreshing disruption from my own home cooking. I’m no expert in sushi making or slicing up fish so this was a real treat for me. A delivery-only concept, Chef Ei Hiroyoshi was a former head sushi chef at Sasabune. Skinny Fish offers carb-free bowls and rolls made with sustainable fish, locally-sourced vegetables, and a very savory handmade cauliflower rice. The impressive proprietary rice recipe took Hiroyoshi about a year to develop and adopts traditional sushi rice techniques. This is not the kind of cauliflower rice you’ll find in the frozen aisle at Trader Joe’s.

Juliet Bennett Rylah, Editor in Chief

At the onset of Safer at Home, I joked that I might use this time to watch every Hellraiser movie. Three weeks later, I have watched all 10 Hellraisers (1 is the best, 9 is the worst). I suppose I’m a horror-fiction-brings-me-comfort person, which might be why the game I’ve been enjoying the most is Grim Dawn, a dreary hack-and-slash RPG about a hero trying to bring peace back to a world overrun by monsters. I guess this is my Animal Crossing. It’s an older game (so, it’s cheaper) and it’s easy to play over Steam with friends, so you can chat about how you’re feeling while simultaneously fighting back hordes of the undead. Plus, the maps are huge and there are plenty of expansions, so maybe by the time I’m done with it, I can go out again.

I baked L.A. Times cooking columnist Ben Mims’s blueberry muffin recipe, which uses cinnamon and almond extract to “bolster the aroma of blueberries.” I do not have a muffin tin, so I turned the recipe into a loaf. If you’re tired of baking loaves of sourdough, give this one a try. (Can’t find flour? I got a 5-pound bag from Go Get ‘Em Tiger’s pantry. You order online and then pick it up from a stand outside.)

I used to play trivia at Verdugo Bar on Tuesdays. Now, our ‘team’ is logging into King Trivia’s livestreams. They do them on Twitch on Wednesdays and Sundays. They’re not particularly competitive considering the host can’t tell if you’re just Googling all the answers, so if you’re the type of person who plays to win, this may not be for you. But if you’re like my friends and me and it’s just an excuse to get together once a week, you may enjoy meeting up online all the same.

Brian Champlin, Co-Founder of We Like L.A.

For my picks, I’m going with something old, something new, and something… Zoom?

For the new: This month, Netflix released a new documentary called LA Originals that centers around the cultural impact of L.A.-based tattoo and graffiti artist Mister Cartoon and photographer/music video director Estevan Oriol. The film chronicles the pair’s rise to luminary status in the worlds of Chicano street art and underground hip-hop. Full disclosure, I haven’t seen it yet, but I will make time for it this weekend. Reviews have been overwhelmingly positive (if you put stock into things like Rotten Tomatoes). Also, Snoop Dogg and Eminem apparently loved it, so there’s that.

For the old: I’m going to be boring here and pick something else on Netflix, only because I’ve been obsessed lately. The show is Star Trek: The Next Generation, which I’m not ashamed to admit I absolutely love. The whole series is available on Netflix, but I’ve skipped around a lot over the past few weeks (first season, pretty bleh…). I guess TNG‘s general overwhelmingly optimistic view of humanity is much needed right now. If I could only recommend 90 minutes of TNG viewing, watch the two-parter Best of Both Worlds, comprised of season 3 episode 26, and season 4 episode 1.

(As an aside, the new Picard show was pretty good, but the CBS All-Access streaming service itself was incredibly clunky. I canceled the free trial soon after I finished watching the show).

As for something Zoom: I’ll be joining old friends for a Zoom meetup on Saturday night, which almost seems passé by now. But I will have a cocktail in hand, and I will attempt to make use of the app’s background possibilities. If I’ve learned one thing about successful Zooming over the past couple weeks, it’s that your background game needs to be on point.