Endless Thread
Hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson dig into the internet's vast and curious ecosystem of online communities to find untold histories, unsolved mysteries, and other jaw-dropping stories online and IRL.
Episodes
Kashif Hoda was getting onto a Southbound train at Harvard Square when a young man said he recognized him. The doors closed before he got a chance to ask the young man how, or who he was. A month later, the answer came in the form of a viral video.
Harvard students AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardefyio modified Meta's smart glasses so that you can search someone's face quickly, almost without them knowing, and pull up personal internet...
Ben and Amory share two stories about some out-of-the-box internet trolling. First, Amory tries to untangle a web of rumors surrounding an unusual dish from New Zealand. Then, Ben takes us aboard Terri's Tourz, an alleged Everglade tourist attraction claiming to offer the nation's first ever tours of the South Florida Detention Center known as Alligator Alcatraz.
Show notes:This November, we're playing some of our favorite episodes from the past alongside new stuff, so that newer listeners can experience our back catalogue. And LoFi Girl is one that holds up, big time!
If you've ever searched for "chill beats for studying" or some other form of lean back, endless playlists without vocals and with a consistent vibe, you've probably come across "Lofi Girl."
A livestreamed Youtube channel featuring a l...
While some people find Labubus terrifying, millions of others find their big eyes and furry features irresistibly adorable. Why? From Labubu dolls taking over TikTok, to emoji taking over our text messages, cuteness is all over the internet. Ben and Amory talk to Joshua Paul Dale, professor at Tokyo's Chuo University and the preeminent cuteness expert about how cute has conquered all.
Everybody get up, it's time to slam now... again! Yes, we're revisiting our episode about the website for the 1996 movie "Space Jam," which is still up and functioning nearly 30 years later.
Amory and Ben talk to the hilarious team behind this digital artifact and hear the unlikely story of its continued existence.
Show notes:
- The Space Jam website
- 'Space Jam' Forever: The Website That Wouldn't Die (Rolling Stone...
In keeping with Endless Thread tradition, Ben and Amory are celebrating spooky season with another installment of "Endless Dread." This time, we're bringing you along on both an actual haunted hayride — thanks to McCray's Farm in South Hadley, MA — and a digital one, through a handful of spooky stories from the internet.
Ben introduces Amory to a TikTok commentary on recent ICE raids disguised as a parody of consumerism.
New to Endless Thread? Wooooo! We're revisiting some favorites from our archives to welcome you.
First up: The cover art for the 1976 paperback edition of Madeleine L'Engle's classic, spooky sci-fi/fantasy novel "A Wrinkle in Time" — featuring a rainbow-winged centaur and a green, glowering, red-eyed face — is iconic. And yet, for nearly 50 years, no one has known who illustrated it. Well, not NO ONE. Not anymore... Endless Thread...
The final episode of Hidden Levels explores the story of SEGA developer Tez Okano and the bizarre, meta-game he created: Segagaga.
Okano joined SEGA in 1992, witnessing firsthand the company's tumultuous experience in the "console wars" against Nintendo and Sony.
In the mid-1990s, SEGA struggled to make hardware that kept up with its rivals. The SEGA CD, the 32X, and the Saturn were all commercial failures. For Okano and many dev...
Video games are arguably the antithesis of nature; highly constructed worlds, synthetic, inorganic. If you grew up gaming, you may recall grown-ups telling you to shut down the console, go outside, and touch some grass.
These days, though, touching grass isn’t something you have to do outside. As gaming has grown into a 200 billion dollar industry, the boundary between screen and soil has muddied. New technologies and types of pla...
Dr. James "Butch" Rosser was a pioneer in minimally invasive surgery in the 1990s. When he credited his surgical skills to video games, people dismissed him. The prevailing narrative was that kids who played video games became killers, not doctors. So Butch set out on quest: to show how video games can help make better doctors.
Show notes:
- The impact of video games on training surgeons in the 21st century (JAMA Surgery)
- S...
Machinima — a portmanteau of “machine” and “cinema” — refers to movies filmed inside video games. The art form had a renaissance in the 1990s, and many thought it had a future in Hollywood. Among the early pioneers were the New York animation collective the Ill Clan, who puppeteered characters in real-time inside the video game Quake, bypassing traditional animation rendering. This technique exploded i...
Today, Stef Sanjati is a creator on YouTube with over half a million subscribers. Her content mostly focuses on her two greatest loves — makeup and gaming — often combining the two with her otherworldly video game-inspired beauty tutorials.
Growing up in small-town Ontario, though, Stef was a quiet, introverted kid who was bullied a lot. For one thing, she looked different from her peers. Having been born with a rare genetic condi...
For decades, the U.S. Army has been on edge about recruitment, hitting its goals for a few years, only to miss them again. As part of their strategy to combat recruiting concerns, the Army has turned its focus online: to the world of gaming and competitive eSports.
With nearly 80% of Americans between the ages of 13 and 28 playing video games weekly, the Army has identified this community as a vital demographic for potential recru...
In this second episode of Hidden Levels, Amory traces the history of the humble-yet-genius joystick — from early 20th century aviation, to 1970s video game consoles like the Atari 2600, to the Nintendo 64 thumbstick in the 1990s, to what some consider the joystick's greatest implementation: the dual-thumbstick controller.
This optimal interface has changed the game, and not just the video game. The modern dual-stick controller is ...
Welcome to our all-new collaborative series, "Hidden Levels," in which we team up with 99% Invisible to explore how the world of video games has impacted the world beyond. We’ll dive deep into how games are made and designed, exploring everything from the history of the joystick to the faithful recreation of nature in digital spaces.
Whether you are a lifelong gamer or have never picked up a controller, "Hidden Levels" uncovers ho...
Have you ever jumped on something as you're moving through the real world, and heard that Mario bouncy sound in your head? Or maybe seen someone acting like an NPC when they're a real person? Maybe you know that the first real "in-app" purchase was actually a weapons store in an arcade game version of Double Dragon 3.
Wherever you go in the real world, you can find signs of the influence of videogames. But you have to know where t...
You've heard of the "Freshman 15"... how about the "DOGE 15"? This is how some federal employees have referred to the stress associated with the establishment of the Department of Government Efficiency back in January and the "restructurings, realignments, and reductions in force" that came with it, as announced in an email sent to nearly all federal employees with the subject line, "Fork in the Road."
Ben and Amory share stories about potential pettiness from Reddit. Ben shares a post from r/weddinshaming post about a bride who changed her wedding to a weekday in another state. Amory counters with a teacher who used AI to foil his student's cheating. Petty or just? You be the judge.
Credits: This episode was produced by Frannie Monahan. It was co-hosted by Amory Sivertson and Ben Brock Johnson. Mix and sound design by Emily Ja...
In 2020, Jenna Marbles — one of the most popular YouTube creators of all time —posted her last video. Five years later, her devoted fanbase still wonders: where is she, and is she okay? We investigate the mystery behind one of YouTube's biggest disappearances, and why people still care so much.
Show notes:
What is your relationship with the trash heap of digital history? Can you still connect your old hard drives? Still sifting through your old photos in the cloud? Do you ever low key snoop in the old electronics of other people, searching for treasure?
That's what Noah Simmons was doing a while back when he discovered something compelling in its simplicity: a homework assignment document, on an old laptop picked up at an estate sal...
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