Entertainment
11 Readers Share Mood-Boosting Winter Activities
How’s your winter going? This season has been cold and intense, so we asked readers on Instagram how they’re keeping up their spirits, and hundreds of replies came rolling in. Here, 11 readers share great ideas for staying upbeat…
Above: “I’m a teacher in Minneapolis. During these months of ICE operations, we are hugging and caring for our students, staff and neighbors to the max. Here’s me and my bff, Otis, barely managing. Thank you so much for giving our community the attention it deserves.” — Mel
“Museums are big for my daughter and me. They get us out of the house, slow us down, and remind us there is beauty everywhere. We recently saw the Monet exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. Watching my daughter take in the colors made the experience feel so joyful.” — Fariha
“My friends and I went all out to plan an Ina Garten themed dinner to celebrate her birthday. We even dressed up as Queen Ina, complete with bob wigs. The dinner itself was delicious (shoutout to Ina for the recipes!) and included tomato crostini with whipped feta, balsamic roasted beet salad, orange-roasted rainbow carrots and baked rigatoni with lamb ragù, and brownie pudding. I showed up in a big denim shirt exclaiming ‘how easy is that?!’” — Tenley (second from left)
“Five years ago, we moved to the Pacific Northwest. Be prepared for the rain, they said. Yeah, yeah we get it, it’s wet. No, but for real — it’s dark and cold and rains so, so much! Solution: sauna. All sorts of studies that talk about the health benefits, but wow does it warm you up and make you feel great. Bonus? Selfies in the sauna are hawt.” — Rosalyn
“Three of my neighbors and I have been hosting an art night where we teach each other crafts. A few months ago, I taught linoleum block printmaking. Before the holidays, we did pinch pots and sgraffito with my potter friend. Next up, jewelry making and felting. It’s been wonderful to spend time with women of different ages, and these meetups have inspired so much laughter and community.” — Susan
“My husband and I first tried cold water swimming during the pandemic. I just wanted to…feel something. I immediately got addicted to the high, he was like ‘that was fun, never again!’ Now, I’ve been doing it for six years, and my swimming friends and I call ourselves the North Fork Polar Bears. I’ve trained myself to stay in the water for 15 minutes. Learning to stay is a whole other art, and it’s just that: staying. Before I go in, I feel excited and nervous, and when I get out, I feel a rush of dopamine.” — Leah
“I bought a few Himalayan salt lamps, and I love turning them on and lighting all my candles. I’ve reframed the narrative: instead of ‘ugh, it gets so dark so early,’ I’ll say, ‘It’s time for my mood lighting.’” — Destinee
“Our Run Club has been going strong for 10 years. We lace up in the early morning, two or three times a week, year round. But the real power of Run Club shines in winter. Slogging through snowy sidewalks, jumping over puddles, and running in the dark on a 10° morning leaves us feeling alive! We end our runs with a coffee and gab session before dashing off to work or home to help with the morning kid shuffle. Knowing there is a gaggle of gal pals waiting on the sidewalk at 6:30 a.m. donning Yaks Traks and headlamps, gets us out of bed and through the season together.” — Sara
“My kids play travel hockey, so we are often doubling down on the cold with weekday practices and weekend games. We’re all excitedly following the Olympics, especially hockey and speed skating.” — Clothilde Ewing
“Out of nowhere, I have become a suburban bird watcher. It has been very cold here in Stockholm, so I randomly put up a bird feeder in the apple tree in front of our kitchen window. We’ve fed birds before, but I was never that interested. Now I’ve been spending weekends standing by the window and looking up common winter birds in Sweden to identify them. My husband seems as perplexed by this as I am!” — Mina
“I live in a particularly wintry Canadian city: Ottawa (hello, Heated Rivalry, season two!). I usually spend the season cross-country skiing, but now with a baby, our weekly highlight has become Mom + Baby Aquafit at a local pool, which I was delighted to discover is heated! Bliss! It’s very soothing on sore muscles from rocking and carrying the baby everywhere. Some babies get so relaxed that they even fall asleep.” — Fiona
We’d love to hear your ideas for beating the winter blues, if you’d like to share. Thank you so much! xoxoxo
P.S. Ten readers share their winter outfits, and 14 (more) ideas for staying upbeat this winter.
Entertainment
Hurdle hints and answers for April 19, 2026
If you like playing daily word games like Wordle, then Hurdle is a great game to add to your routine.
There are five rounds to the game. The first round sees you trying to guess the word, with correct, misplaced, and incorrect letters shown in each guess. If you guess the correct answer, it’ll take you to the next hurdle, providing the answer to the last hurdle as your first guess. This can give you several clues or none, depending on the words. For the final hurdle, every correct answer from previous hurdles is shown, with correct and misplaced letters clearly shown.
An important note is that the number of times a letter is highlighted from previous guesses does necessarily indicate the number of times that letter appears in the final hurdle.
Mashable 101 Fan Fave: Nominate your favorite creators today
If you find yourself stuck at any step of today’s Hurdle, don’t worry! We have you covered.
Hurdle Word 1 hint
The edge.
Hurdle Word 1 answer
BRINK
Mashable Top Stories
Hurdle Word 2 hint
Moody.
Hurdle Word 2 Answer
POUTY
Mashable 101 Fan Fave: Nominate your favorite creators today
Hurdle Word 3 hint
America’s bird.
Hurdle Word 3 answer
EAGLE
Hurdle Word 4 hint
A platform.
Hurdle Word 4 answer
FORUM
Final Hurdle hint
Cheapskate.
Hurdle Word 5 answer
MISER
If you’re looking for more puzzles, Mashable’s got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
Entertainment
Star Trek’s Most Ambitious Villain Helped Create The Franchise’s Most Complex Hero
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
When Star Trek: Voyager first came out, the most fascinating character was the Doctor. While Robert Picardo’s performance was superb, it’s fair to say this character was mostly fascinating on a conceptual level. We had seen things like hypercompetent Starfleet captains and exotic aliens before, but what we hadn’t seen was a fully holographic chief medical officer. Voyager’s Emergency Medical Hologram seemed like the perfect embodiment of the Star Trek ethos. He’s a technological strange new world and new life, all rolled into one.
However, what casual audiences didn’t realize is that the Doctor wasn’t completely unique. Long before Picardo’s character ever sawed bones in the Delta Quadrant, Captain Picard dealt with another extraordinary hologram: Moriarty, the brilliant foe of the famous investigator Sherlock Holmes. Over on The Next Generation, Geordi LaForge accidentally created this villain as a sentient hologram when he asked the holodeck to create a challenge worthy of the android Data. Later, Star Trek: Voyager executive producer Jeri Taylor revealed that, in-universe, the holographic Doctor was created because Starfleet took advantage of the same accidental breakthrough that created Moriarty!
It all started in “Elementary, My Dear Data,” the Next Generation episode in which the titular android and Geordi LaForge recreated Sherlock Holmes’ adventures on the holodeck. Thanks to his positronic brain and his encyclopedic knowledge of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes novels, Data is able to easily solve every mystery that is thrown at him. That’s when Geordi makes a seemingly simple request. He asks the Enterprise computer to develop a holodeck foe that could actually defeat Data, one of the smartest beings in the entire galaxy.
The computer obliges and creates a sentient version of Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’ greatest foe. Following Geordi’s instructions, the Enterprise computer included much of Data’s vast programming, which resulted in the holographic character becoming self-aware. Moriarty ended up threatening the Enterprise on two different occasions, and Picard eventually got rid of him by trapping the unknowing villain in a simulation where he thought he had left the holodeck and could explore the stars. This was meant to be a happy ending for Moriarty, but in the show’s typically bleak fashion, Star Trek: Picard later showed us a different, more hostile version of this character created by a malevolent Section 31 AI.
How A Villain Created A Hero
What does all of this have to do with Robert Picardo’s holographic Doctor on Star Trek: Voyager? Elementary, my dear reader! Very early in Voyager’s development (the show didn’t even have a name yet), executive producer Jeri Taylor was inspired by Moriarty to create a new character. As reported in A Vision of the Future-Star Trek: Voyager, Taylor wrote down notes for a holographic doctor “who, like Moriarty, has ‘awareness’ of himself as a holodeck fiction. He longs for the time when he can walk free of the Holodeck.”
A few days later, she wrote down additional notes that contain a startling bit of Star Trek lore. “The Holo-Doctor represents a new, state-of-the-art technology which has capitalized on the serendipitous incident which created Moriarty, and has programmed a holographic character which has self-awareness of his situation and limitations.” While Moriarty is name-dropped on Voyager a couple of times, the show never mentioned what Taylor’s notes seem to confirm: that Lewis Zimmerman could never have created the Emergency Medical Hologram program if not for Geordi LaForge accidentally creating Moriarty on the holodeck.
From Villain To Leading Man?
If that’s not strange enough, there was a period of time when Voyager’s producers were considering making Moriarty a mainstay character on the show. As reported in Star Trek–Where No One Has Gone Before, Taylor’s notes mentioned that “everyone agreed that was a little too broad, and we couldn’t figure out why anyone would take him along.” After dismissing the idea, they decided “that having a holographic doctor with the full consciousness of being a hologram might be fun, and we’d never done anything like that before, except for Moriarty.”
There you have it, gentle reader. Without the character of Moriarty on Star Trek: The Next Generation, we’d never have the Doctor on Voyager. In this way, Trek’s most ambitious villain helped create the franchise’s most complex hero. Thanks to Jeri Taylor’s notes, we also know that, in-universe, Lewis Zimmerman would never have been able to create the Doctor if not for Geordi accidentally creating a sentient Moriarty so Data could have fun. In retrospect, this does make Zimmerman’s arrogance that much weirder. After all, he has a lot of attitude for someone who owes his entire career to the two biggest book nerds in the galaxy!
Entertainment
Moon phase today: What the Moon will look like on April 19
After days of almost (and complete) darkness, the Moon is finally starting to reappear. We’re currently in the Waxing Crescent phase of the lunar cycle, which means each night until the Full Moon we’ll see it get more illuminated from the right side.
What is today’s Moon phase?
As of Sunday, April 19, the Moon phase is Waxing Crescent. Tonight, 5% of the moon will be lit up, according to NASA’s Daily Moon Guide.
Despite more of it now being illuminated, the percentage of surface is still too little to be able to spot any surface details. Check again tomorrow.
When is the next Full Moon?
The next Full Moon is predicted to take place on May 1, the first of two in May.
What are Moon phases?
NASA states that the Moon takes about 29.5 days to orbit Earth, during which it passes through eight distinct phases. We always see the same side of the Moon, but the amount of sunlight reflecting off it changes as it moves along its orbit, creating the familiar pattern of full, partial, and crescent shapes. We call these the lunar phases, and there are eight in total:
New Moon – The Moon is between Earth and the sun, so the side we see is dark (in other words, it’s invisible to the eye).
Mashable Light Speed
Waxing Crescent – A small sliver of light appears on the right side (Northern Hemisphere).
First Quarter – Half of the Moon is lit on the right side. It looks like a half-Moon.
Waxing Gibbous – More than half is lit up, but it’s not quite full yet.
Full Moon – The whole face of the Moon is illuminated and fully visible.
Waning Gibbous – The Moon starts losing light on the right side. (Northern Hemisphere)
Third Quarter (or Last Quarter) – Another half-Moon, but now the left side is lit.
Waning Crescent – A thin sliver of light remains on the left side before going dark again.
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