Endless Thread - Snacktime: Zelda And Zebra Plants

Episode Date: August 13, 2020

Author John Boyne and Jeff the zebra plant take center stage in this edition of snacktime. Also, Ben and Amory realize they share an affinity for... melon ballers?

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the I-Lab at WBUR, Boston. Amory. Ben. What's your summer snack? What's like your top summer snack? Frozen grapes. Frozen grapes. Have you had a frozen grape? I have, but it's been a long time. We recently talked about this. You got to get back on the frozen grape train. It's so good. Like just refreshing and delightful. And when you run out of ice cream or popsicles, they're there for you.

What about you? I really like the cubed watermelon with fresh lime juice squeezed over it and frozen. I was picturing, for some reason, you said cubed, but I was picturing those little melon ballers. You know what I'm talking about? Oh, yeah. Like the little mini, mini ice cream scoops almost. that you make little melon balls with.

Yeah, melon ballers are baller. Someday we'll grow up and have melon ballers of our own. Christmas is a coming, Amory. I know what I'm sending you and I know what you're sending me. We can get them engraved. There you go. And the engraving should just say stay baller. These are good.

frozen healthy snacks, I feel. And also, we have some refreshing snacks for you in the form of snack time Reddit stories, where we just kind of talk about stories that we like from Reddit. I've got one for you. Are you ready? I'm ready. Okay, so this one, this one is interesting because it kind of comes from Twitter. It was like on Reddit and then it went to Twitter and then it sort of went back to Reddit. Okay. So Amory, do you know who John Boyne is? No. Okay. So John Boyne is kind of a big deal. He's like an author that has sold a lot of historical fiction novels. Okay. One of them, The Boy in the Stripe Pajamas is history set during the Holocaust. So this guy, he writes like pretty serious fiction. It's very kind of well-sourced, well-written. It's supposed to live in a historical time. It's supposed to, you know, feel accurate to that time.

right? So there's a Twitter user and podcaster named Dana Schwartz and she tweeted recently, okay, this is a thread, but it's worth it, I promise. On Reddit today, user no, no, no, underscore oh, oh, oh, posted a page from acclaimed Irish novelist John Boyne's latest book, a traveler at the gates of wisdom. And she has this picture of a page from the book and Circle then underscored is this one paragraph that's about dye making in the book. Die making? Yep, dye making. So.

Like D-Y-E. Yep. Okay. So the dyes I used in my dress making as the book reads were composed from various ingredients depending on the color required, but almost all required nightshade, sapphire, key swing, the leaves of the silent princess plant, octarock eyeball, swift violet, thistle, and high-tail lizard.

In addition, I employed spicy pepper, the tail of the red lizle floss, and four Healyen shrooms. Okay, so do any of these ingredients sound familiar to you? No, I mean, they sound like straight out of a fair, fantasy novel. It's interesting that you say that. Let me give you one more hint.

Okay. You ready? Yeah. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Is that ring any bells for you? No, but that was beautiful, Ben. I really enjoyed that. I'm glad.

Okay, so this is what Dana Schwartz writes. If those ingredients look weird to you, it is because they are straight out of the Zelda game, Breath of the Wild. Oh, no. My husband's going to be so mad at me. I actually don't know Breath of the Wild, theme music.

That was the original Zelda theme music I was singing, so, you know, I don't know. In her thread, she says, is it an homage, an Easter egg? Hmm, the book is not a fantasy. It is a historical drama set in the real world. I had a hunch and tried a Google search. She searched ingredients, red dye, clothes.

And the top result that Google serves up is from Zelda. So, Dana goes on to say, while John Boyne was doing a perfunctory Google search for how to dye clothes read, he found a site listing monster parts and accidentally put them in his very serious book. I am very embarrassed for him,

and this is my nightmare, but it's also very funny. Oh. How did this happen? Well, she says, that's what she's telling us. You just Google it. And then you put it in your serious historical drama book and then somebody catches you on it. But how do you even get that far to get to having it published? That's a great question.

And I don't know if we know the answer to that. But we do know that John Boyne tweeted back. Are you ready? Oh, yeah. LOL. That is actually kind of hilarious. I am totally willing to own it. Something tells me I'll be telling this anecdote on stage for many years to come.

Crying, laughing face. Oh, man. I don't know. I feel like an editor somewhere along the way there should have, that's what editors are for, right? Yeah. So a lot of people love this, of course. because a lot of people love Zelda.

And it is kind of hilarious, you know, just the circumstances of it. Because we all, you know, we all have these kinds of fears, right? Like, I search stuff all the time in the process of making the show. And then I try to get to the original source. But, you know, sometimes I'm, you know, moving quickly and I don't think about things that I look up and I have to go back. And when I fact check it later, I have to undo it because, it's wrong. And we all struggle with those things. And I think that it's just hilarious to me

that because of like Zelda fandom and the Google algorithm, this whole thing came to be. And I'd like to celebrate that piece of it. Redditors discovered this incongruency and exposed it. And I think that's cool. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics. Country music. Hockey.

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That's my only. I hope it's been sourced. It's been sourced. And it takes us back to June of 2016, a simpler time, when a redditor named Tyler Wood, or on Reddit he's Tyler J. Wood. He asked his fellow Redditors to help him take care of Jeff. Ben, do you have any idea who Jeff is? Jeff.

Ooh, is it a plant? Yes. Yes. Jeff, Jeff was a zebra plant. And Tyler, Jeff's human, created a whole subreddit called Take Care of My Plant. And his first post read, I'm pretty bad at taking care of plants. Can you help me take care of my plant? And Tyler created a bot of the same name, Take Care of My Plant.

And every morning at it was like midnight mountain standard time, the bot would sticky a post to the subreddit, just called Daily Water. And Redditors could vote yes or no on whether to water the plant that day. And then every night at 8 p.m., the bot would tally the votes from the daily water post and then would decide whether or not Jeff should be watered that day. Tyler also created a website, Take Care of Myplant.com, where you could check in on a a plant cam that he had on Jeff. And Tyler got more and more sophisticated as the project went on because he was a self-taught programmer and he was using Jeff and this subreddit as a way to kind of develop his programming

skills. And he hooked Jeff up to something called a raspberry pie. Do you know what that is, Ben? Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, I didn't, but now I do. It's like a small, single board computer sort of thing. Yeah, programmable sensor.

or yeah, yeah. Yep, and this little computer controlled the watering schedule for Jeff, and a pump would automatically switch on this water pump to water him or not water him. And then Tyler added more sorts of techy things to it. He added sensors to monitor the moisture and the temperature and the light and the humidity. So Redditors could check in on those kinds of vitals for Jeff. He had little enamel pins made for Jeff the plant, sold out. And I'm picturing someone finding one of those Jeff pins decades down the line and

kind of like our Guitous episode from last year being like, what does it mean? Who is Jeff? Who is Jeff? So Jeff made it about two years in Redditors care. Wow. And then, yeah. And then in the spring of 2018, Tyler moved to a different state and Jeff didn't survive the move. Oh, no. Which is kind of, I know, which is kind of appropriate.

That as soon as Redditors were not taking care of Jeff, because he was presumably in like a moving van or something going across the country, he kicks the bucket. But the people in this subreddit were pretty devastated. That this thing that started as a humble experiment that no one expected to succeed was really building a community. And Jeff was thriving for a while. Someone commented, fly high, my sweet Jeff, I will continue to wear your pin proudly.

Oh, man. Wow. But then came another plant. It wasn't totally over. Freya, another zebra plant that the subreddit started taking care of. And the subreddit grew to almost 19,000 people taking care. Oh, my gosh. I know, right?

But then just five months ago, he made a post that said, Hey, Gardner's, it is with a heavy husband. heart that I must announce this project is coming to a close. What started as a fun way to learn more about programming grew into one of the best little corners on the internet, but now with more and more of life's demands popping up around me, I don't have the time or mental energy to dedicate to keeping this thing running smoothly. I would never want to put into the hands of 19,000 Redditors whether or not I get water. That terrifies me. But, you know, You know, I think it's really cool that the plants lasted for a long time.

There were a lot of doubters in the beginning, I should say. People who thought that Jeff was going to die a swift death in the hands of Redditors. I would have been among them. I would have been among the doubters. Yeah, but no, 19,000 people. And one person at the announcement that this was all ending, they were talking about the impact that this project has had on them. They said it had, quote, more of an impact on my life than almost anything

else. With the risk of turning this into a sob story, when life was dark, there was always the need to wake up tomorrow, vote on watering, keep the plan alive, keep the project running. The untimely death of Jeff hit me harder than anyone would have expected for a plant online. And the rebirth of the project under Freya was like the birth of a new child. Oh. I'm a house plant lady. I name my houseplants, so I get it. And I just think it's great that this little experiment took off and rest in power, Jeff. Viva LaFrea, who Tyler says is just going to get the good old fashion watering can now. And I hope Redditors come up with something else that we can work together on like this. All right, that wraps up this week's snack time. We will be back next week with a more

full-throttle episode. Water your plants, people.