Warning: This episode contains multitudes! Hosts Ben and Amory explore how viral clips of DOGE staffers' video depositions found a new life online after a judge temporarily ordered them removed. They also dabble in a Reddit thought exercise with a potentially dubious origin

Show notes:

• DOGE staffer who flagged grants for 'DEI' struggles to define the term (The Independent)
• LPT: I started pretending my life is a TV show and it made me more productive (Reddit)

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Maybe you can't judge books by their covers. But can you judge people by their books? Reddit's bookshelf detectives say yes. Producer Kalyani Saxena guides hosts Ben and Amory through the stacks and offers a picture of her own bookshelf to the Reddit detectives as tribute.

• r/BookshelvesDetective (Reddit)
• Started seeing this guy. What does it say about him??
• (r/BookshelvesDetective)What do my wife's bookshelves say about her? (r/BookshelvesDetective)
• What’s his bookshelf say about him? (r/BookshelvesDetective)
• Snoop our bookshelves! (r/EndlessThread)

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A woman sitting blissfully on a vibrating laundromat dryer. A faked pregnancy test to dump a bad boyfriend. In 2019, the internet was abuzz about bizarre ads for a mobile game called Lily's Garden. The ads were only about 15 seconds each, but they evoked a whole universe of drama amongst a cast of zany characters that inspired countless YouTube videos and copious internet chatter.

The thing is... the story in the ads had almost nothing to do with the story in the game. In this episode of Endless Thread: creative differences, the wilderness of mobile games, and where the Lily's Garden game-world and the ad-world diverged.

Show notes:

• Lily's Garden on the App Store
• Lily's Garden on Google Play
• "I hate Lily's Garden and her teeth" (PewDiePie, YouTube)
• How Tactile Games made marketing and diversity core to Lily’s Garden’s $500 million success (Pocket Gamer)

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