This week on The Deep Dive: When cozy games cross over into the uncanny valley of real life, the jarring LEDs of late-2000s lighting, a story about two guys who thought they could disrupt knitting after one trip to Michael’s (I’m being serious), why we can’t stop watching TikTok edits, and it takes a village to raise a child but the villagers don’t feel like helping you and also they hate your kid.

And if you want more, upgrade to The Rabbit Hole! This week on the podcast, I ranted about the water bottle trend cycle, my theory about Solo Stove’s CEO, and my favorite non-video essay YouTube content of the week. Last week, I shared my many, many thoughts on the new Mean Girls movie.

As always, don’t forget to catch up on The Deep Dive’s YouTube playlist and shop The Deep Dive merch here! 🐰

GAMING

The Beautiful Illusion of Cozy Games by Zoe Bee (18:30)

Don’t worry, you’re still allowed to love Animal Crossing. But as a lover of cozy games myself, boy oh boy, was this an absolute read. If you’re an Animal Crosser or Dreamlight Valley resident, you’ll know that the underlying theme of all your quests is to buy, sell, and consume in order to build, flaunt, and accumulate the stuff that will help you achieve your goals. In this video, Zoe Bee examines the popularity of cozy games, the degenerate utopias they represent, and whether games have to be realistic to be fun. How did The Sims go from critiquing consumerism in its gameplay to feeding into it in its most recent version, which allows players to be landlords and join the military? Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to playing Spiritfarer.

DESIGN

Why every kitchen suddenly got cold by Kendra Gaylord (21:18)

Almost a year ago, one of my living room light bulbs burnt out. Did I replace it soon after? Of course not. I only got around to it last week, which led to days on end of me obsessing over the light emitting from it and whether it looked cooler or warmer compared to the other light bulbs in the room. I eventually, finally, moved on – and then this video popped up on my feed. In this video, Kendra Gaylord points out a genuinely disturbing change in lighting on Gilmore Girls that rears its cool-toned head around season 6. Did Gilmore Girls just get a new lighting team? Or does the change in lighting on Gilmore Girls mark a shift in lighting trends from incandescent to LED bulbs which emitted brighter, blue light and sparked (heh) a new style of home decor that centered on white-and-gray color schemes? I’ll let you be the judge.

This issue of The Deep Dive is sponsored by:

Get 40% off Ground News: check.ground.news/deepdive

Ground News lets you see the story behind the story using data-driven analysis that looks at the political bias, reliability, and ownership of news outlets. Dedicated to identifying media bias and improving media literacy in a time of political polarization, Ground News is unlike any news site, as it shows you how breaking news is being covered across the political spectrum.

I’ve recently become interested in copyright laws and Disney's efforts to prevent its flagship mascot, Mickey Mouse, from entering the public domain. This year, Disney lost the copyright to an early version of the character, inspiring the creation of a horror film that features Mickey. With Ground News, you can compare how this news was covered on left, right, and center-leaning media.

Ground News features tools like Bias Distribution (above), which gives you a visual breakdown of the news sources covering a story to see where they fall on the political spectrum, a Factuality Score (above), which looks at the reporting practices of a news publication using a combination of ratings from third-party news monitoring organizations, the Blindspot Feed (below), which highlights which stories are being underreported by one side of the political spectrum, and more.