The expanding universe of Lofi Girl

At least 13 million YouTube users subscribe to the channel Lofi Girl. Created by the mononymous French music producer Dimitri, Lofi Girl is a 24/7 livestream of an anime girl studying in her room and listening to lofi hip hop. For many, she's become the perfect study buddy, and the music may actually be helping concentration.

Endless Thread producer Nora Ruth Valerie Saks and co-host Ben Brock Johnson look at how the Lofi Girl phenomenon has expanded into a record company, inspired copycats, and prompted academic research.

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: Let producer Nora Saks and I…

Nora Ruth Valerie Saks: …introduce you to Kevin.

Kevin Weatherwax: My name's Kevin Weatherwax. He/him pronouns. I'm a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. 

Nora: When you hear Kevin's credentials, you might be surprised to, immediately after that, hear how hard studying and school work has been for pretty much his whole life.

Kevin: I had a really kind of atypical path through school. I was a high school dropout, and I got kicked out over and over again. And, you know, as a kid, I got all these, you know, diagnoses about what was wrong with me. And that kind of just pursued me through my life. And it was always this thing: Well, what's wrong with you? How can you be more like other people and stop being like you?

Ben: Kevin would eventually be diagnosed with ADHD, which was listed as the source of his academic challenges.

Nora: Kevin was a curious person and a hard worker, though. Eventually, in his mid-to-late twenties, he dove back into school. He says there was a lot of relearning he had to do.

Ben: Part of which was just learning how he could do work in the right way.

Kevin: Really early on, what I found is in my kind of work and study practices, it was really beneficial for me to sort of carve out, you know, feelings of anxiety and frustration, or worrying about the future and stay focused in my space that I was in. If I had some kind of ambient music, kind of low key stuff going on. 

Nora: Kevin was an early adopter of early internet-based ambient music listening channels, some of which were on YouTube. They used visuals often connected with anime, which helped, too.

Kevin: They made me feel calm and safe. And I would kind of curate my workspace to not just use the music, but I would include the visuals when I could.

Ben: As in, have a screen up with the actual visual, as well as listening to the music while he was studying.

Nora: Then, somewhere towards the end of his undergrad degree, or beginning his doctoral program...

Kevin: I always joke, like, Oh, I was working in the lab late one night — which was accurate — and I was... 

Ben: He was working in the lab late one night!

Ben: ...and he discovered the be-all, end-all of study buddies. A YouTube channel with a girl sitting at a window that looks out onto a European cityscape doing her own work and listening to lofi hip hop.

Nora: Kevin was far from alone. He was part of an exploding audience for a mysterious and popular YouTube channel, which would have several names but would be most commonly referred to as Lofi Girl.

Ben: I'm Ben Brock Johnson.

Nora: I'm Nora Ruth Valerie Saks.

Ben: And you're listening to Endless Thread from WBUR, Boston's NPR station.

Today, the story of a mysterious pal whose simple presence has turned into a phenomenon, inspired copycats, and probably has helped a ton of people get a ton of work done!

Nora: This is the Lofi Girl Multiverse.

Emily Heape, a 29-year-old marketing specialist and makeup artist from Cleveland, is a lot like Kevin.

Ben: So, how did Lofi Girl come into your life? 

Emily Heape: Oh gosh, I couldn't even pinpoint a year…

Nora: There is one stream of music Emily listens to on repeat. One that feels almost like her own personal soundtrack. The same one Kevin listens to.

[Music from Lofi Girl]

Emily: It got me through a lot of late nights of homework, long days at work, and I even listen to it now every night to go to sleep.

Ben: The YouTube channel is officially called "lofi hip hop radio 📚 - beats to relax/study to." It was apparently started by this young, mysterious French producer known only as Dimitri. It now plays an infinite 24/7 curated live stream of what's known as lofi hip hop, a type of mostly instrumental hip hop that features downtempo beats with some low fidelity elements thrown in that create a perfectly imperfect, kinda nostalgic, atmospheric, uberchill vibe.

Emily: And it really helps you focus and calm and kind of get in your peaceful place.

Nora: This stream has become massively popular. It has 13 million subscribers, a loyal following, and has been a huge force in underground music. And yet, somehow, it still feels like a secret, but one everyone knows about it.

Ben: Definitely an open study secret. Any time of the day or night you start streaming this channel, there are tens of thousands of people streaming, too. The animation transitions from day into night; the cityscape outside the window gets dark, and lights come on in other windows. Even if you've never heard of it, you'd probably recognize the animation that goes with it. The anime-style girl with brown hair, big eyes, wearing headphones, who's always writing in her journal or studying at her desk in her cozy little room, petting her orange cat while it stares out the window. There's just enough animation for it not to be static. It's a loop, but somehow it doesn't really feel like one. And it's been that way for years.

Nora: But then, back in April….

Emily: I was getting ready for work. I had worked from home that day. And I went on, as I do every single morning, and I put on my Lofi Girl, and she was gone. 

Nora: Meaning she was out of the room in the animation, which, if you're one of the millions who expect Lofi Girl to be in her place — turning her head, playing with her pencil on a loop like she always is — was a huge change. Emily was so rattled she started recording on TikTok…

[hoewhite93 (Emily) on TikTok: Hi guys, I just woke up. Everything is happening all at once. Let's go over the Lofi Girl lore because shit is happening with Lofi Girl right now.]

Ben: Before Lofi Girl and her cat disappeared from the animation, a blue light in a far-off window had started blinking.

[hoewhite93 on TikTok: And they turn their heads, and they look at it because that is not normal. Normally, she's looking at the computer.]

Nora: The shot zooms closer and closer to that blue window until it's inside. A door appears.

Emily: And that's when I started to realize that something a little deeper was going on.

Ben: So if you were on the Lofi Girl stream on April 12, instead of study girl doing her thing, you were zooming into this blue window, collectively staring at a door.

[hoewhite93 on TikTok: There's keys jingling! I was right! I was right! And he has a dog. Ahh!]

Nora: This is Emily's TikToked reaction to the expansion of the Lofi Girl universe — the debut of a whole new character and his own live stream. If Lofi Girl's aesthetic is chill study vibes, Lofi Boy, or Synth Boy, is chill gamer vibes. He's sitting in front of a computer, a Nintendo controller to his left, lava lamp to his right, with all kind of nerdy accouterments sprinkled around him. Fittingly, his channel is "synthwave radio 🌌 - beats to chill/game to."

Ben: There's no bong, pipe, vape, chubbler, nothing like that in sight, but you know it's around there somewhere.

Nora: Oh yeah, it's under his other controller for sure. So, in the end, Ben, Lofi Girl didn't disappear. She just gained a cute lil friend. And clearly, this was all still a very big deal to devotees like Emily.

Emily: Lofi Girl, like I said, has always been kind of in the background, just a fun little character. It's been part of my life for so long. And when something changed, it was then that I realized, like, Oh my gosh, I kind of do have this weird parasocial relationship with her.

Ben: Kevin defines parasocial this way.

Kevin: It's this idea that you can have an emotional connection to a character, or a space, or an idea that is presented to you in media that is not reciprocated or can't be reciprocated by the nature of the relationship, essentially.

Ben: Color me as skeptical, even as a podcast host, of the idea of value in parasocial relationships. But then again, I'm a fan of this channel, too.

Nora: Kevin says people who form parasocial relationships aren't weird. They know it's one-sided and aren't under any illusion that the other party knows they exist, let alone is going to return their feelings.

Ben: With the Lofi Girl stream humming along next to him, as he would start to lose his focus, Kevin would glance over at this short animated loop he's seen millions of times before. And this is part of how Kevin's interest in the channel transitioned from fandom to true academic study because he realized something.

Kevin: And I noticed that when she would get back to work in the loop, where she would sort of, kind of phase out for a second and then start again, I was finding myself feeling prompted to get back to my own work. And I started thinking, Well, this is really odd. Why am I taking behavioral cues from something that I know is going to occur every couple of seconds and is, you know, just an animated character? How is this prompting me to do anything to change my behavior?

Nora: So Kevin starts digging in, wanting to better understand "parasocial relationships in the live streaming of nonhuman agents ... their ability to influence human behavior in real-time, and the important facets of streaming environments that facilitate this."

Ben: That language is from an academic paper that Kevin co-wrote. He and his colleagues collected and analyzed data from the live chat windows, which is the main place streamers interact with each other, at least on YouTube. They also did lots of exploratory interviews with people who listen and watch assorted lofi music streams. And a clear theme started to emerge.

Kevin: And I saw a lot of this thing of people talking about, Oh, the Lofi Girl, she works and studies like I do. She's this kind of partner, this almost, not a friend, but like someone that you relate to. 

Nora: A safe companion that you don't need to expend any energy interacting with and yet helps you feel calm and stay focused. A key ingredient, aside from the music, are the environments the characters exist in.

Kevin: It's this idyllic space or spaces because there's lots of different types of them. But they do have that in common, that there's something inviting but not over-engaging. There's a degree of animation that invites somebody to feel part of the space, almost like this kind of window into this idyllic world. But it's not so engaging as to be distracting. Or to really encourage you to lose yourself in it.

Nora: And this connection to the character and/or their space seemed to hit on a feeling of nostalgia for people or an escape to a different time, or world. But briefly. And without the need for high engagement.

Kevin: You know, a lot of the stuff is rooted in Adult Swim bumps, late-night animation. You've got the anime aesthetic to it. A lot of the old original songs had loops from old Adult Swim shows in them or even little bump tracks that they play in Adult Swim. I don't know if you're an Adult Swim person.

Ben: Oh yeah, I'm smoking what you're rolling. 

Kevin: I would fall asleep to that every night. Yeah, every night for 10 years.

Nora: For the uninitiated, Adult Swim is like Saturday morning cartoons for big kids. It started as late-night, alternative programming on Cartoon Network, with special music from underground hip-hop artists, original shows, etc. Again, this is something we would love to talk to Lofi Girl's creator, Demitri, or Demitri's team about. Did Adult Swim inspire them? But they declined our requests. What we can say is that Adult Swim is very similar to lofi channels because of its distinctive vibe.

Ben: And a lot of these channels, Nora, seemed to connect to this nordic idea of coziness — or is it HI-gah? hi-GEE?

Nora: I thought it was HIGG-ah. But I think it's HYOU-gah (hygge). In addition to the hygge-ness and nostalgia-bathed listening and viewing experience, people in the chats also openly discuss stress, fear, or trauma they're dealing with from school, work, or just being a human on the planet.

Kevin: People in the chats, they go in there, and they leave just these positive comments: Hey, everybody that's doing this right now, you're doing great. Keep trying. It doesn't matter if it feels bad. It's a surprisingly nontoxic environment.

Ben: In his preliminary study, Kevin concluded that some users did form parasocial relationships and that this almost static animation and super chill lofi really does increase relaxation and focus. But Kevin has another theory, too, one that's shaped his research into this.

Kevin: I think part of what's useful about this are some of the people that are using this are neurodivergent like myself, and that something about this relationship to this character is almost like assistive technology for them. It's kind of co-opted or colloquial assistive technology. It's not designed with them in mind, but it happens to strike some specific chord that's helpful for people like me.

Nora: More on lofi music and brains after the break.

[SPONSOR BREAK]

Ben: So, as we said, Kevin Weatherwax has been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Nora: According to WebMD, it's the "most commonly diagnosed mental disorder in children" — one that can neither be prevented nor cured. It continues on into teenage and adulthood years and has lots of different kinds of symptoms.

Ben: Many of which feel very familiar to me. In fact, when Kevin asked me about how I ended up on this lofi journey myself…

Ben: It's a great question. I suppose it's always tricky to say this kind of thing, but I'm pretty sure I'm like undiagnosed ADHD. 

Kevin: Not tricky. I think anyone should be able to say that because it is hard to get a diagnosis. You have to be an extreme problem, especially to be in your 30s, 40s now and have a diagnosis — which I do from very, very young. I was a real pain in the a** problem — I'm going to do air quotes — to the teachers and the people I was around as a kid. I got slammed. But if you were functional or able to engage with the space, you weren't going to get it. And as an adult, you can't really. So it's like, what are people to do? 

Ben: Yeah. I do think that is like a fundamental part of my personality. Like I can hyperfocus, but I'm also extremely consistently and constantly distractible. 

Kevin: Me too, which is why I accidentally have two dissertation tracks that I'm having compete for, which one's going to be the final one. One is on my human-robot's interaction research, and one is on the lofi stuff.

Nora: When it comes to assistive technology for neurodivergent people, Kevin says he's observed a strong tendency for interventions that...

Kevin: ...seek to transform someone from neurodivergent to neurotypical or neurotypical behaving. Rather than being augmentative, which is what I really like about the lofi, my relationship to lofi as part of my work and study practice and what I see other neurodivergent people also having, which is that it's augmentative. It's not about making me not be neurodivergent or to behave as someone who's neurotypical. It just helps buttress some of the areas where I struggle while building up my strengths. 

Ben: Another speculation that's not backed up by data—yet:

Kevin: I think that there's a possibility that what these kinds of media channels do for people who are neurodivergent is allow them to participate in a kind of social coworking without expending social capital that can be a higher cost for neurodivergent people.

Nora: Another probably-not-coincidence? Emily Heape, the Cleveland Tik Toker we talked to, also volunteered that she has ADD. We should say this is how she described it, though these days, most people describe this disorder not as ADD, but ADHD. Either way…

Emily: It kind of tickles your brain the right way, if that makes sense. It just scratches that itch in there. And I'm like, ugh, it's perfect.  

Ben: Yeah. And I can keep working. 

Emily: Yes. Yes, it helps me focus so much. 

Ben: Maybe it's a pharmaceutical company that's behind it. 

Emily: Who knows? Maybe they're like, There's an Adderall shortage give them lofi. 

Nora: So we know, anecdotally at least, that these lofi hip-hop music streams help neurodivergent folks like Kevin, Emily, and probably others relax and focus. But not necessarily why or how. What's really going on up there, inside our noggins?

Ben: For that, we turned to Dr. Concetta Tomaino, a.k.a. Connie from the Bronx.

Dr. Concetta Tomaino: I am the executive director and co-founder of the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function. I'm a board-certified music therapist with a master's and doctorate in music therapy, and have been a music therapist for 44 years.

Nora: Connie is a pioneer in the field of music therapy and was a close friend and colleague of the late British neurologist Oliver Sacks.

Ben: Your uncle, right?

Nora: Yeah, not related at all. I wish. No Uncle Oliver in the fam.

Ben: Nora Saks's non-relative Oliver Sacks may be the only neurologist to ever have a big-budget movie made about his work. At least, one that stars Robert De Niro.

[Clip from Awakenings]

Nora: Over the decades, Connie has witnessed music work magic as medicine.

Ben: Is music a net positive on brain function? 

Concetta: Oh, absolutely. I think I could say that. I think the science supports that, too. 

Ben: There was the old man who had a stroke and couldn't talk — but then, all of a sudden, started singing "Old Man River."

Nora: And the young girl who had seizures every night before she was about to fall asleep until Connie created and prescribed a music track.

Concetta: The rhythm would gradually get slower and slower and slower, so it would ease her brain into a more relaxed state. 

Ben: Softer landing. 

Concetta: Exactly. And it actually worked. So I was very happy. 

Ben: Wow.

Nora: The reason music is used as/in therapy is because it engages all parts of the brain in different ways.

Concetta: And so we have a way of not only organizing the brain in a very purposeful way but stimulating and arousing the areas that may be a little out of sync.

Ben: Take someone with ADHD.

Concetta: The main thing is that there's hyperactivity in different areas of the brain. 

Ben: ...which makes it hard to focus...

Concetta: ...because there's too much noise and too much activity going on that distracts the type of focus that's needed to to learn or to do a task.

Nora: OK now listen up because this is the coolest thing ever, probably: Music doesn't only engage your gray matter. The rhythm of the music can actually entrain the rhythm of the brain.

Ben: This was like a galaxy brain explosion moment for me. Connie says entrainment is basically when one stimulus influences another.

Concetta: The pulse at which those rhythms take place is now influencing the pulse at which the neurons are firing. 

Ben: What that makes me think of is that music can serve almost as a metronome for the way that the brain is functioning and organizing information. 

Concetta: Absolutely, so think about how a musician uses a metronome. 

Ben: Yeah. 

Concetta: They use it to stay in time in their performance or to be able to perform the music with other musicians.

Ben: Sure. 

Concetta: The external rhythm actually does the same thing. In fact, that's why it's effective with somebody with ADHD is it's providing a steady beat and organizing brain rhythms that the person internally isn't able to organize. 

Nora: One of the reasons lofi hip-hop music is such an awesome metronome for folks with hyperactive brains is because it's slow.

Concetta: You know, 70 to 90 beats per minute, I believe, is the standard for lofi. So, that low rhythm in and of itself is producing a very relaxed state.

Ben: Also, Connie says it doesn't usually have a huge range of frequencies, or sudden changes in pitch, which also helps our physiological state get calm. And yet, there's just enough going on in the music to filter out background noises but also to engage your brain. All at the same time.

Nora: Scientists are still trying to figure out exactly how this all works on beta and theta waves and all that good stuff. For now, we can safely say lofi music does have an influence on brain activity.

Concetta: And again, I think it's because of that very regular rhythmic beat that is engaging the brain in such a way that helps regulate how the brain is functioning.

Nora: Another very exciting discovery. There's so much more to the lofi world than just our old digital friend Lofi Girl, and new friend, Lofi Boy.

If that channel was really the Big Bang, the lofi universe has just kept on expanding and diversifying.

Ben: Beyond other very popular and very similar channels, with almost identical names, like College Music's "lofi hip hip hop radio - mellow/chill/study beats."

Kevin: Any identity that you can think of for the most part. You can go on and look for that in lofi, and you'll probably find somebody who's made something for it. Muslim lofi, Christian lofi, left wing lofi, right wing lofi, Indian lofi.

Ben: Boomer Lofi! You get the idea. That's our Ph.D. computational media nerd, Kevin Weatherwax, again, by the way.

Nora: For funsies, we googled Jewish lofi...

[Music from "YOAVI - Jewish Lofi vol.1"]

Ben: ...Queer Lofi...

[Music from "Gay lofi hip hop 🏳️‍🌈 - lofi pride [ rainy night ]"]

Nora: And at Kevin's recommendation because it's one of his personal out-there favorites: Bernie Sanders Lofi.

[Music from "Bernie Sanders 8 1/2 hour Filibuster but it's Lofi"]

Nora: We could have done this all day and late into the night. The lofi universe really is infinitely expanding. Maybe even creating alternate dimensions. Pretty sure the pandemic had something to do with it.

Ben: I agree with that. We all had more time at home for chilling, and we also all really needed to chill.

As he and colleagues studied this expanding Lofi Girl multiverse, Kevin started to wonder something:

Kevin: Could there be a human, not a cartoon character version of this? And what I found was there is a very popular channel in South Korea called The man studying next to me, studying by me. And he's this young kid, must be in his early 20s or something, who essentially would do these longish live streams of himself studying, and then he'd turn those into really long loops.

Nora: Not exactly sure which channel he was talking about because there are so many of these.

Ben: Watching these and realizing the existence of so many flavors of lofi broke my brain. Are we clearly living in a computer program? Are we just incredibly inspired by other creations of chill vibes? What is happening?!

Kevin: I mean, it's such a labor of love to just build something that you're like, Oh, this other thing makes me feel really good. But I would also love to see myself in it, so I'm just going to make that.

Ben: Learning from Kevin and Connie from the Bronx about the Lofi Girl multiverse was really surprising for me as a low-key Lofi Girl fan. Learning that these channels are good for me and my brain is great. But I also had started with a more skeptical question, one that I told you about, Nora: Is Lofi Girl good for music? Or is it, in a weird way, part of this general degradation of artistry? Let the algorithms take over and remove the person behind the art, etc.

Nora: It's a good question. And we should say here that we tried our darndest to reach Dimitri or someone from Lofi Girl. Didn't get a response, except that they want to stay anonymous. We also contacted a bunch of their different artists around the globe, and they also seem not so into talking. But one was game!

[Music from Mondo Loops demo]

Antonio: So yeah, this is an upcoming track that I'm working on. Not quite finished.

[Music from Mondo Loops demo]

Nora: This is Antonio, a.k.a. Mondo Loops, generously walking me through a lofi hip hop song in progress. "Mondo" means "world" in Italian. And Antonio makes a lot of guitar loops.

Ben: Antonio is based in northwest England, and he's a full-time producer, mostly of lofi hip hop stuff. Also, chill hop. A lot of hops, really. You're hearing the music, so you get the idea. And now has started messing around with field recordings of things like leaves crunching and twigs snapping. Very ASMR.

["Visions In The Trees" by Mondo Loops]

Antonio: And before that, I sort of started off, uh, releasing guitar-based music, mostly instrumentals, just pure guitar stuff. And it sort of evolved into the sort of lofi thing quite naturally. It's quite a similar sound palette.

Ben: We wanted to talk to Antonio because, you know, again, I was just worried about this idea that maybe Lofi Girl was so in the background that it just removed the artist from the art, turning people into more faceless, nameless generator bots. But that was not the case for this young British producer. Actually, the exact opposite.

Nora: Antonio told us that a few years ago, very early on into his music career, he sent some demos to the team behind the Lofi Girl stream, who also now run a record label. Lofi Girl liked them. And dropped some of his tracks into their playlists on Spotify. This bumped his audience big time. In the region of...

Antonio: ...a few hundred a week to tens of thousands a week. It was a big jump.

Nora: Then, they asked him to write a song for this compilation album they released called 1 A.M. Study Session. Yep. They release whole-a** compilation albums of original music, all inspired by the original stream. They put it out on vinyl and YouTube. Since then, Antonio has released several albums with the Lofi Girl label and contributed to "loads" more compilations since. And he characterized the lofi scene as very international, very collaborative, and generally pretty open and sharing-oriented.

Ben: My first impression was that infinite live streams like Lofi Girl and a lot of its spinoffs wouldn't be great for producers like Mondo Loops.

Nora: But Antonio didn't seem to feel flattered or anonymous or like he was another lofi cog in the wheel or chill music generator bot at all.

Antonio: It works both ways because while it's not necessarily artist-focused, the sort of model that it runs off quite naturally works in the artist's favor financially when it moves onto streaming services. Not that it was the intention of the channel at all. With sites like Spotify, you get paid, obviously, per listen. And with a lot of artists, it can be a real struggle to get the sort of fan base and the following to get any sort of substantial earnings from Spotify and Apple and that sort of thing. You get paid like $3 or $4 per thousand streams. But when it comes to lofi music, you've got the financial element of people put it on in the background, and they'll listen to 100 songs, 200 songs while they're studying, which reflects in much higher streaming. And as an artist, it supported me financially to sort of make this my full-time career. Without this, I don't think I'd be a full-time music producer. I sort of — I owe my career really to Lofi Girl supporting my music.

Ben: Norah, you may not be a Lofi Girl superfan, but what do you come away from all of this with? Like, what does it make you think about?

Nora: Well, I'm not a superfan, but I've become a fan, where I wasn't one before, and I actually have found myself, like, turning to the stream sometimes and listening to more of Mondo Loops and other artists' music. And I mean, I love thinking about how my brain is being engaged and also freed to focus. And I'm not saddled with this burden of like, Oh, all the artists, you know, are just Muzak-ified, and this is bad for them. Actually, every time I stream them on Spotify or play it I'm actively supporting an independent artist on this record label, which feels good.

Ben: With a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a penny.

Nora: Yes, here's part of my penny for you. But then I told a lot of friends too, and everyone just seems somehow more chilled out and focused. It's weird.

Ben: I mean, did you discover that a lot of your friends knew about this?

Nora: Yeah, when I mentioned it, the name Lofi Girl didn't click, but then when I described the music and the stream and the animation, they were like, Oh yeah, I'm into that; I've been into that for a long time.

Ben: Yeah. To me, what's really interesting is the way you described it as "a secret that everybody knows about." It's like, we don't really talk about Lofi Girl — at least, most of us don't unless you're Kevin or Emily — but I think it's just this interesting thing that, like, is actually a companion for a ton of people who are not actually talking about that companionship, right? And then also just the idea that it has this positive community that it's created, where people are sort of supporting each other and also just, like, being together in this sort of weird internet space. I think that stuff is really interesting, But I agree with you that the entrainment idea of the brain getting sort of locked into a more productive state is really fascinating. And it's cool to get a glimpse of some things that we still really don't understand, thanks to people like Connie and Kevin, and Emily too.

Nora: Yeah, and to feel just like there's something good for the listeners and good for the makers in internet music is — it's a rare feeling I'm going to cherish and keep jamming to.

Ben: We did it, guys. We fixed it all. It's all fixed now. Everything's positive on the internet now. No problem. Everybody go home.

Nora: Go home and study/vibe/game/chill, OK?

Ben: Don't forget your chubbler.

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

This episode was produced and co-hosted by me, Nora Ruth Valerie Saks, with help from Endless Thread co-host Ben Brock Johnson. And Dean Russell.

Dimitri, we'd still love to talk.

Our sound designer on this episode was the super chill Paul Vaitkus.

The rest of our team is Samata Joshi, Matt Reed, Amory Sivertson, Quincy Walters, Emily Jankowski, Grace Tatter.

Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities, a lava lamp, an orange cat, and a game controller.

If you have an unsolved mystery or an untold history that you want us to tell, hit us up. Endless Thread at WBUR dot org.

Bye!