Isolation Chronicles: I Spent An Hour On Livestream Tonight Having People Bet On How Many Trains Would Go By My Apartment Window
I've been avoiding crowds for a bit now and haven't traveled far in days (besides work yesterday evening to square away a couple things), but today was the first day I decided it was best to fully stay put from here on out... and it might be cliche to say at this point but it really sunk in that for however long this is our new reality.
At Barstool we're sending in our clips for the Snapchat show, working on creating Stool Scenes, podcasting, and blogging all from home now. I realize how lucky I am to have a job that wasn't put on hold and I don't want to get lazy or complacent with this privilege. I keep looking around my tiny studio apartment thinking, "What the Hell can I do in this little square that will keep people amused??" To which my cat does not answer.
And while there will probably be waaaay more misses than hits as the days go on, I want to use this time as a challenge to see how creative I can get.
My first experiment tonight was running a live-stream on Periscope of train betting from my apartment window.
I got about 90 bets Tweeted in to me before 6:30pm which isn't bad considering I sent that out with only 7 minutes until the start time...
The first three minutes were an unexpected wildcard of activity… trains flyin' all over the place. At this point I decided it would be a good activity to finally give the Periscope streaming app a whirl.
Between trains I downloaded the app & logged on with the tech skills of a 10,000 year old rock. The entire hour is captured on these two shaky, awkward streams below… The first stream before my phone died (I'm an idiot) had nearly 12,000 people watching me watch trains go by & tally them. What a world!
Even if people hadn't put bets in ahead of time it was fun asking those on the stream with me to guess which train would be next (N or W) and whether it would be going left to right, or right to left. At one point a rogue Q train rolled through and people were losing their marbles…
"Q TRAIN FROM THE CLOUDS!!!! OH MY GOD!!!!"
And in another electric moment two trains passed each other at the same time. The crowd went WILD.
The hour flew by & at 7:30pm the final tally was in. 23 trains in one hour.
I scrolled through the now nearly 100 Tweets who had placed bets for the hour and of them all only ONE person got it right!
Huge congratulations to @Ploski525. Real skill.
I'm either onto something HUGE here, or there are thousands of people in the same boat as me floating in a sea of boredom. Whatever it is I'll probably have to think of better participation prizes.