We are all nonplayable characters

The concept of a nonplayable character dates back to the early days of video games. By definition, it is a character — a merchant, mushroom, pedestrian, etc. — designed to exist in the background. You, the player, often do not interact with the nonplayable character, or NPC. Or, if you do, the NPC is only programmed to do or say a few things.

Earlier this year, a trend emerged on TikTok in which real people adopted the persona of NPCs. As if in a programming loop, they would livestream themselves repeating the same motions and phrases to mimic lifeless video game characters. Then, other users started paying them to keep doing it.

Endless Thread's Ben Brock Johnson brings co-host Amory Sivertson a look into the strange world of NPC livestreamers.

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Show notes

This content was originally created for audio. The transcript has been edited from our original script for clarity. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

Ben Brock Johnson: Amory, did you play a video game a lot? What's a video game you played?

Amory Sivertson: You know, the only video game I think I've ever played in my life was A Bug's Life. When that movie came out, there was a video game for A Bug's Life, and I just happened to be good friends with people who had video games, and they had A Bug's Life.

Ben: Do you remember any of the characters that you weren't really allowed to play? Like, you couldn't be that character?

Amory: There were a lot of bugs. I can tell you that. Ants, worms, beetles. I have no other memory of that. I couldn't even tell you what A Bug's Life is about other than a bug's life.

Ben: I didn't play this game, but I did look it up, and there do seem to be a good amount of other insects involved, like Slim, the very not-slim caterpillar. So this would be called a nonplayable character — or NPC — which is an idea that originally comes from Dungeons and Dragons but really took off in video games.

Amory: Nerd.

Ben: Correct. And when I think about NPCs, I think about a lot of classic video game characters. The first ever Zelda game had this old man and this old woman that you would meet in caves in the game.

[Cave music from The Legend of Zelda]

Amory: I know that sound. I recognize that.

Ben: That's the sound when you go into the cave and you talk to the old woman.

Amory: Of course.

Ben: You could have dialogue with these Zelda old woman and old man characters. You could buy stuff from them, which, in a way, made them kind of more interesting than the other video game characters, most of whom were just always trying to kill you.

[Sword sound effects from The Legend of Zelda]

Amory: Weren't there some mushrooms or something in Mario? Are those NPCs?

Ben: I had the same question!

Carly Kocurek: That's actually kind of an interesting debate because there's some argument about whether enemies are NPCs or not.

Ben: This is Carly.

Carly: My name is Carly Kocurek, and I live in Chicago, where I teach in the Game Design and Experiential Media program at Illinois Tech.

Ben: That seems like a cool job. Does it feel like a cool job?

Carly: Most of the time, yeah.

Amory: Except when she has to define basic video game terminology for someone like you or me.

Ben: Hey, we're just getting warmed up over here, just like the concept of NPCs, which Carly says has really been around for decades — ever since computer games or video games were just words on screens.

Carly: Even if you think about early text adventures, you're a character in that world, but there's lots of other characters in that world that are only being controlled kind of by the programming of the game.

Ben: Over time as computing power grows, so does the ability to not just have kind of simple main characters and enemies, but a whole host of different kinds of characters in a game. So those worms and beetles and, you know, those bugs that you remember. Video games start to kind of swarm with NPCs around the time of, say, The Sims.

[Sound effects from The Sims]

Amory: I watched people play The Sims, which is almost as boring as playing The Sims.

Ben: Oh man, you're saying so many controversial things right now; we're gonna get letters. It's gonna be great.

Amory: I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

Ben: For me, it was a really specific game that I started to be hyper-aware of nonplayable characters in.

Amory: And which game was that?

Ben: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Woo!

[Music from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City]

Amory: Oh boy, isn't that the kind of raunchy one? A lot of dudes being dudes?

Ben: I think it does have that aspect to it. You know, if we are going to gender it, it has some nihilistic chaos boy energy in it where you can go on missions, and there is a storyline of drug dealing and cop stuff. But there's also this world full of NPCs that you can mess with. And, you know, not unlike The Sims, you're almost encouraged to mess with them. You can pull them out of cars at stoplights and carjack them. You can get into fistfights with pedestrians.

[NPC sound effects from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City]

Amory: So these characters are just programmed to say a certain number of things, and this becomes like the soundtrack to your life? These voices repeating things over and over again.

Ben: Yeah. And if you play the heck out of Grand Theft Auto, you basically hear this stuff in your sleep. Repeating phrases over and over. They would also often have a set physicality to them, too. Like, they'd stand and bounce or bob in this kind of looping way. They would walk certain ways or run a certain way. And I think we sort of got used to NPCs around this time in the early 2000s. One of the most famous memes when I started looking at Reddit every day was the "took an arrow to the knee" meme.

NPC: I used to be an adventurer like you. Then, I took an arrow in the knee.

Ben: Is that familiar to you at all?

Amory: No.

NPC: I used to be an adventurer like you. Then, I took an arrow in the knee.

Ben: OK, so without going too deep into it, this is actually a phrase repeated by NPCs in Skyrim, like an Elder Scrolls game.

NPC: I used to be an adventurer like you. Then, I took an arrow in the knee.

Ben: NPCs often are really repetitive because, well, they're NPCs, right? They don't need that much programming. You're not playing them. They serve one or two functions as characters delivering information or color in a game.

NPC: I used to be an adventurer like you. Then, I took an arrow in the knee.

Ben: But repetition can breed fondness, Amory. People like Carly can now describe their favorite video game NPCs.

Carly: I did just play Pentiment, and I really love that all the villagers are really richly rendered. So there's the baker and his wife and their daughter, right? And I think that game actually does a really beautiful job because almost all the information you get about the world you get from NPCs.

Ben: Over time, NPCs became our friends. Or at least, familiars. We've had fun messing with them. But we have always been the main characters. And the NPCs have always been in the computer — until last summer when some of us stopped being the main characters and started being NPCs.

[Pinkydoll: Mm, ice cream so good. Mm, ice cream so good.] 

[Latinaqueencat: Brrrr. Meow! Animales!]

[Bunkstertx98: It's a the pizza, mama mia! It's a the pizza, mama mia!]

[Sietee_: Radio! Bzzzz! Radio! Bzzzz!]

[Ghostgirlcosplay2: So cute! Jinkies! Thank you, Awaken! Jinkies!]

Ben: What do you think, Amory?

Amory: What? These are people just playing the role of the NPCs?

Ben: A whole bunch of people started livestreaming themselves repeating the physical and vocal tics of NPCs. They were doing this on TikTok and some on Twitch. And a whole bunch of people started paying those people to do it.

Amory: What? Well, my first question was going to be, Why? And then if they are being paid to do it, now I just think we're broken. We need to turn ourselves off and on again.

Ben: Reboot!

Amory: Mmm, Endless Thread episode! So good!

Ben: Gang, gang!

Amory: Coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station. Today's episode?

Ben: "NPC Streams! So Good! Mmm, So Good!"

Amory: So good!

Ben: Now, for the record, I'm going to say that there was some resistance to tackling this topic in our show. I'm not naming names. But I want you to click on our Endless Thread subreddit post that I've given you here.

Amory: Okie doke. Subject line, post title: "I would die for an Endless Thread on NPC Influencers." Die? Don't die. Please. OK, we gotta give the people what they want. I'm not gonna argue with that.

Ben: FrolickingFawn — what a username — says, "There's a huge trend right now on TikTok of NPC livestreams where streamers take on an NPC persona and repeat lines over and over again, ad nauseum. I'm equally weirded out and completely fascinated by this trend, to the point where I find myself having to stop and watch them for a bit when they come up. For the sheer strangeness of it." This person wants to know where the trend started, what fuels it, how it is monetized, and who is doing it. Are you ready, Amory?

Amory: Hell, yes, I am ready.

Ben: So, we should start with who's doing it. The most famous NPC streamer right now is probably Pinkydoll, who, last summer, Amory, became popular enough to catch the attention of Logan Paul.

[Logan Paul: This chick's making bank. Seven thousand dollars a day!]

Amory: I do not know who Logan Paul is, but that's a lot of money. I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I am a Martian.

Ben: Well, I'll tell you, you may not know who Logan Paul is, but I can tell you he's a man who probably should not be judging anyone for using the internet to make money. I promise you that.

Pinkydoll is a Canadian Tiktoker. She started NPC livestreaming way back in January. Apparently, she was inspired by — shocker — Grand Theft Auto. But she developed a personality all her own.

[Pinkydoll: Mmm, ice cream so good!] 

Ben: Pinkydoll is apparently famous for a few things, including causing some controversy when she first appeared in person for the Streamys…

Amory:...an unfortunately named awards ceremony if you happen to have just drank a bunch of water.

Ben: Yes. And when Pinkydoll showed up, people said that she had been wearing makeup in her online videos that made her look a lot more light-skinned than she apparently is in real life. She says she just gets darker when she spends time in the sun.

Amory: Leave her alone! Even if I do hate watching the same thing over and over and over.

[Pinkydoll: Yes, popcorn! Yes, popcorn! Yes, yes, yes. ]

Ben: Yes, she does break character sometimes, by the way. Seemingly to yell at her kid, who messes with the dog off-camera.

[Pinkydoll: Do the dance, do the dance, ah, ah, ah, ah. Hey, stop! Leave the dog alone. Stop it!]

Amory: So, is she the star of NPC streamers, or are there others who are doing this just as professionally?

Ben: So, she's far from the only one, but at least here in the U. S., she is the OG, if there can be such a thing in ephemeral internet trends. Here's Washington Post technology columnist Taylor Lorenz.

Taylor Lorenz: Pinkydoll was sort of like the original viral star, and then everybody started doing it, and then it became kind of a meme. And then people started doing it in even more obscure places, like that guy in Soho that streams all day in New York.

Amory: Wait, there is a guy who sits in the city and just livestreams himself repeating NPC lines?

Ben: Yeah, he is an NPC streamer. So he's acting like a nonplayable character. And he is like doing this out in the streets of Soho, which are very busy and full. And so some people actually try to, like, when they see him streaming, they go and try to photobomb his stream. But yeah, there's a growing number of people that are doing this. And what is interesting to me here is that NPC streaming seems to almost be the latest development in an evolution of how humans are emulating video games, Amory. You know what cosplay is, right?

Amory: Uh huh.

Ben: When you're, you know, a cosplay character in a video game, or, you know, the character that the cosplay came from in some cases, they kind of like bounce and pose and move in a certain way, just like NPCs. And we do that when we cosplay at conferences. I mean, not specifically you and me because I don't think either of us are cosplayers, but you know, they behave in that way. And Amory, it's even kind of gone full circle here to its Dungeons and Dragons roots. Even though the vast majority of NPC streamers who seem to be successful are women — which we will get back to — I saw a video on Reddit earlier this month that was joking about how people in the 13th century would have been as streamers and sure enough...

[Sklumper: Cheese in my tummy! Cheese in my tummy!]

Amory: But what you're saying is that when these people are making money, they're making money because people are watching them repeat things like cheese in my tummy or popcorn — whatever she said about popcorn. They have chosen to spend their one precious life watching other people repeat things in a loop?

Ben: Yeah. And pay them for it.

Amory: And how do they pay them? How does that work?

Ben: So it's almost like microtransactions, like if you remember the blogosphere, Amory. We used to be able to send a little tip to a blogger, couple of bucks, whatever. In the video game world, you might buy an accessory and send it to the character or put it on the character, who then acknowledges that you've given them an accessory by moving a certain way or saying something. So Taylor says in this way, the real-life nonplayable character thing is kind of the same.

Taylor: You, you know, are on your app, and you buy an emoji or a little graphic icon that will appear on screen. Each one of those is worth a certain amount of money, and you can send it to the streamer that you like.

Amory: OK, which is why Pinkydoll is saying we make her feel like a cowgirl because we're, we're buying a hat that TikTok places on her head, or we're buying her an ice cream emoji.

Ben: So good.

Amory: So good. Yeah.

Ben: And the augmented reality aspect of this can really be good now where, yes, you would buy Pinkydoll a hat. And she's immediately wearing the hat in her own stream. And part of what is so good is that the streamer and the platform both get a cut of the money the viewer is spending on them.

Taylor: You're giving them a little bit of money for them to do something. And a huge amount of TikTok livestreaming is basically just that. It's paying somebody to interact.

Ben: Amory, Taylor makes this point that, in some ways, this is another example of a creator economy that is really liberating and democratizing. She says, you know, it's easy for trends like this to pop up and to get really frothy really quick because people can actually really make money easily.

Amory: But there's gotta be a downside of some sort, right?

Ben: For sure.

Taylor: These platforms can change their algorithms at any time. And it can be really hard on the content creators that make content for those platforms or streamers who are livestreaming on those platforms.

Amory: Today, you're making 7 thousand dollars a day saying the same thing over and over and popping fake bubbles. Tomorrow, you're washing dishes again with the rest of us.

Ben: Or maybe you go back to making adult-only content, which Pinkydoll apparently also does. Or did. Before she found out, NPC streaming was going to be more lucrative.

Taylor: I mean, like a lot of weird things you see on the internet, a lot of it's ultimately about a kink.

Amory: OK. You do you.

Ben: Apparently, she also raps. Wants to someday do a collaboration with Ice Spice. She has a song.

[Pinkydoll: Yes, yes, yes. Ice cream so good.] 

Amory: Everything's making less sense as we go on, not more.

Ben: Well, you're not alone. A lot of people, including, ironically enough, some of the Twitter users that ultimately made Pinkydoll NPC streaming videos famous last summer and launched a whole legion of similar NPC streamer wannabes in her wake, they felt the same way.

[joeybtoonz: Well, folks, if you ever wondered whether we were on the brink of the fall of humanity, get a load of this.]

Ben: But Taylor disagrees with this takeaway.

Taylor: There's something about this trend that makes people feel dystopian, but it's not very dystopian. It's the same as everything else. It seems weird, I get it, but it's not that weird.

Ben: Taylor's point is that, at its core, NPC streaming is a pretty familiar concept for the internet.

Taylor: You're paying money to have somebody on screen do something.

Ben: Carly, our game design professor might go a little bit further into the offline world with this analogy.

Carly: I was thinking a lot about human statue performers, which are always super cool. And that's so hard to be that still. And it's also uncanny and wild. And I actually find the NPC streamers — I have a very similar reaction where I'm like, this is really uncanny and strange, but also compelling.

Amory: I think I find people's fascination with it fascinating. I'm not going to yuck anyone's yum. If watching this makes the world and life richer for you, who am I to say, No, you're wrong; that's dumb. But from where I sit, I don't currently get it. I certainly want to know what people find fascinating.

Ben: I did ask Carly what she thought about this.

Carly: I think it's a pretty funny way to riff on pop culture that's around us, where, What if someone was literally an NPC? That's absurd, right?

Amory: Yeah. Can confirm that is an absurd idea — if we turned into NPCs.

Ben: Have you ever heard of NPC being used as an insult?

Amory: No.

Ben: So, it seems like the use of NPC as a slur in recent times belongs almost exclusively to the political right.

Amory: You mean they use it to attack people for repeating themselves?

Ben: Yeah, at least the political right online, which, as so many of these things do, goes back to 4chan.

Amory: If it's toxic, it goes back to 4chan.

Ben: OK, so there was a 4chan post in 2016 that basically equated liberals to NPCs as characters that can't think for themselves and are being controlled, and, yes, those are two characteristics of NPCs. But eventually, the term was taken back over in a non-political way and has been just generally used more often to mean dummy or a person who isn't thinking critically. Taylor Lorenz again.

Taylor: It's kind of a shorthand for almost like a drone-type person.

Amory: OK, that makes sense to me.

Ben: OK, but maybe there is something more here than an insult. It is part of this growing galaxy of video game-inspired memes and things that we all opt into over time like the "Choose Your Fighter" videos from a few years back.

[Super Smash Bros. Announcer: Choose your fighter!]

Ben: Did you ever see those, Amory?

Amory: Yeah, or I probably saw it as a meme, but yeah.

Ben: Right. Yeah, that's what it was with real people imitating battle game characters on deck for a fight. Also, you know, there's this thing where you can say "F" to pay your respects when someone is metaphorically killed by a vicious ribbing. And it's just like pressing the F key in a game to do the same thing. Carly thinks about this a lot. There's something about NPC streaming that's part of art imitates life, which then imitates art. You know, it's a cycle.

Carly: The Sims ready pose, right? Where the Sim is just kind of standing there doing this weird wavy dance, waiting to do things? How many of us feel like we spend huge chunks of our life weirdly waiting for things to happen? Where it's like, I'm waiting for a call. I'm waiting for the doctor's office. I'm waiting for the traffic light. I'm waiting for the mail. Almost like you're in this liminality all the time in day-to-day life because we don't have as much control over our own time as most of us would like. And yeah, it feels like you're in a weird little micro-limbo between activities.

Amory: Ugh, but this feels like we're giving in to that. This feels like we're saying, Oh, that's life. Let's create more of it.

Ben: Well, there's one more piece to this conversation that I'd like us to tackle. Because even though Pinkydoll may be the most famous NPC streamer in America, like so much of video game history, if we want to go to the real source of all of this, we have to go to Japan.

[Natsue Coco: TikTok live. NPC streaming.] 

Amory: You just said the magic words, my friend. To Japan!

Ben: Right after this.

[SPONSOR BREAK]

Ben: Alright, so Amory, we've talked a lot about NPC streaming, but you can't really talk about this trend without talking to the real originator.

Natsue Coco (via English-language interpreter): Hello, I'm Natsue Coco. I do TikTok live NPC streaming. My niche is "mute live."

Amory: Mute live. What is that?

Natsue: Mute live is a silent stream or "mugon haishin" in Japanese, but basically, it means communicating with reactions only and not talking.

Ben: We should say that this was a truly team effort. My brother, who happens to be fluent in Japanese — respect, big bro! — translated on the phone and afterwards for the call because Natsue does not speak English. The voice in English you are hearing is WBUR Podcast producer Frannie Monahan.

And, just so you get a sense of this "mute live" idea, here's one of Natsue's livestreams on TikTok:

[Natsue Coco video on TikTok]

Amory: OK, so people are sending her emojis, and she's nonverbally reacting with her expressions. Like when they send — is that a paw? She reacts in some way. And they send her fireworks, and she reacts another way. I honestly cannot keep track of what people are sending her, and how she's reacting, and what emoji triggers what reaction.

[Natsue Coco video on TikTok]

Amory: It's either so subtle that I'm missing it, or there's just a total disconnect for me with regards to what the hell is going on here. I mean, she's choosing to do it, but then other people dictate what she does. I don't know, man.

Ben: Yeah, it's a little weird, right? Men NPC streamers seem way less common — or at least less popular — than women NPC streamers, which makes it even stranger in some ways. I had asked Taylor Lorenz about this:

Ben: Do you feel like misogyny and NPC streaming are connected?

Taylor: I think misogyny all over the internet is pretty pervasive. I mean, the thing is, people can kind of feel like they're controlling a woman.

Amory: Yeah, I feel weird about it.

Ben: Here's what Carly has to say about this.

Carly: Women are subject to misogyny whether they try to make money off of it or not. So she can't opt out, right? This is going to be part of the background of her daily life, no matter what. So, yeah, if you can shake down some money from that, go nuts. It's late capitalism. We all got to survive.

Ben: By the way, to this point from Carly, Natsue is getting that money.

Natsue: I'm able to cover all my living expenses through NPC streaming. It's just this.

Ben: I also asked Natsue, as the person who apparently started NPC streaming back in 2020 before anyone else, I asked her about this, too.

Natsue: I don't see the discrimination you're referring to. I should also say that one area where I may be a little different than others is that Natsue Coco is set up where things like age and gender don't exist. If you were to ask, What makes you an NPC? It's that an NPC isn't anything or anyone. 

Amory: I hear the point of, like, Yeah, well, people are going to do this stuff anyway, so I may as well make some money off of it.

Ben: I should say that Natsue told us, in fact, that she had never been asked about this, you know, the controlling aspect of NPCs, the idea that they react to input but otherwise don't really have any agency, and how that might be part of a larger culture of controlling women.

Natsue: And so, the very concept of gender discrimination doesn't exist inside of me. So, when it comes to my character, there could be some misinterpretation [around assumptions about discrimination]. But this, too, is part of the social experiment of my livestream.

Amory: Ooh, OK, that's interesting. Social experiment. What's the experiment, would she say?

Ben: This was interesting. In some ways, when you watch Natsue's stuff, it feels very, I don't know, I want to say it feels very Japanese. It's inspired by manga and anime. She wears these perfect outfits. She's really done up very slick in its presentation.

[Natsue Coco video on TikTok.]

Ben: And she also says this was an evolution from the kind of livestreaming we all know well.

Natsue: For a long time, I used to do a livestream where I spoke to the camera. I got tired of talking. So, I decided to give mute live performance a try. From the varied experience others had and attached to my performance – of feeling like it was NPC, or like it was AI, or that it was like a robot – I committed to keep doing it.

Ben: Over time, people attached the NPC title to what Natsue was doing and related it to video games. She says in a way people projected the NPC idea onto what she was doing, but soon it became an important part of her identity as a streamer.

Natsue: I think it's very important that people see me as an NPC because it means they must then be the main character. After all, I'm not doing "main character live." The circular experience of the audience tuning in to see a thing where the main character is, by definition, not the main character, felt like something approaching art to me.

Amory: I want to know what she gets out of it. Money is the obvious answer. But does she feel like it's time well spent?

Ben: She told us she does. She really enjoys the adoration from fans, and she enjoys the artistic aspect of this, as she sees it. And while some people feel like this is a trend that has already peaked and broke, it doesn't feel that way for Natsue.

Natsue: I'll do it until I die.

Amory: Whoa. I don't know about that, man. I don't know. I haven't heard anybody talk about NFTs in a long time. I'm not saying they're gone, but one year, it's NFT; the next year, it's NPC; the next year, it's NBC. I don't know. I don't know.

Ben: She's serious about it. Obviously.

Amory: OK. Well, to that, I would say, listeners, please enlighten me. Like, I'm really open to what this is and what I'm missing out on by not consuming this content.

Ben: If you've ever bought an emoji for an NPC, listeners, we'd love to hear from you.

Amory: Totally. Totally. Because, you know, there are people that when, when, when televisions were in every home, people said like, Oh, what are we coming to? You know, and I'm not that person. I just want to understand it better.

Ben: Here's an idea that we talked about a little bit on the team, Amory, that really resonates for me.

Amory: OK.

Ben: There are all these people that we see in our daily life, and in a way, they're all nonplayable characters for us. But we are nonplayable characters for them. So, in a way, we are all both NPCs and main characters.

Amory: Yeah, and I guess I could also see — as small as this might be — that maybe as the world feels increasingly chaotic and out of our control, as small as this is, this is like one thing that we can control, and hopefully the people who are doing it because they keep doing it are, they want that to happen because they're getting money, they're enjoying the experience of reacting on cue. I don't know, but it is like this one tiny, tiny, tiny thing that we can control until the trend is completely gone.

Ben: Do you want to know where it's going?

Amory: Yeah.

Ben: Taylor did mention some new kinds of trends that are happening more now that feel like they're in some way connected to this continuum that NPC streamers are also part of.

Taylor: They are basically these interactive streams where you pay, and you can sort of subject the person on screen to various forms of light torture. I mean, it's usually loud noises, waking them up, it'll pour water on their head or, you know, it'll interact in those ways. It's very dark, and it always makes me sad for the people on the stream.

Amory: Turn us off. Turn us off.

Ben: Worst Black Mirror episode ever!

OK, ET homies. I have two assignments for you. Number one: Interact with a real-life NPC as you go about your day sometime. Don't pour water on their heads. We don't want you to get in trouble. Give a stranger a high five. Or give 'em a "Good day to you, sir!" Maybe offer them an ice cream? See what their programming has them do or say back.

And go on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and review our show. In your review, put an emoji. Or tell us the gift you're giving us. If you do this, in our next full Endless Thread episode, we will be good NPCs ourselves and react to everybody's digital gifts! It'll be great. Listen to the next full episode for our reactions to your podcast review gifts! Alright, that's all for now. So good!

Amory: Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston.

Ben: This episode was produced by me, Ben Brock Johnson, and Dean Russell...

Amory: ...and it's co-hosted by Ben and me, Amory Sivertson.

Ben: Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus. The rest of our team is Amory Sivertson, Emily Jankowski, Samata Joshi, Matt Reed, and Grace Tatter. Additional help from Frannie Monahan and my brother, Munro Johnson. Arigatō, bro!

Amory: Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between digital communities and whatever people will stream up next. If you've got an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or a wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up. Email Endless Thread at WBUR dot org.