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Risk, Reassessed
Hey all, Ernie here with a piece from Andrew Egan. A few years ago, he wrote a piece for this tiny little newsletter about a topic that took him on one of the craziest road trips I had ever heard...
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No Nunchucks
Today in Tedium: There’s a platform in the first home console version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that throws everyone off. With a narrow hole and a low ceiling, it was seemingly designed to be as...
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Social Reunion Tour
Today in Tedium: About five years ago, I made a decision which I’ve never really regretted—I dropped a popular project of mine that I felt had run its course, something that, when I would think about...
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Marketing in Ernest
Today in Tedium: Recently, I got a chance to meet Ernie and Bert inside of a Muppet exhibit in a museum, an opportunity I took advantage of to take a selfie with Bert … and shade Ernie. I kid, I kid....
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Pressure-Fried Patents
Today in Tedium: The talk of fast food in recent weeks has been two seemingly unrelated phenomena. The first is the growing interest in realistic vegetarian meat such as the Impossible Whopper and the...
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Innovation Versus Preservation
Today in Tedium: The world of technology has a problem, and it’s not something that we’re talking about nearly enough. That problem? We keep making old stuff significantly less useful in the modern...
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Jumping-Off Point
Today in Tedium: The language of the internet is ever-shifting. But that said, it’s not often I come across a term from the days of the early internet that I’m completely familiar with. Usually this...
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The Wires Barely Reach
Hey all, last week’s piece about planned obsolescence—and some of the response it drew—got me thinking about connections to the internet, or lack thereof. With that in mind, I pulled this old piece...
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The Free Ride’s Over
Today in Tedium: Working in journalism in the age of the internet, you naturally see shifts in the field—the “pivot to video,” as annoying as it was, could only be considered a blip in the grand...
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Record Refresh
Hey all, Ernie here with a fresh piece from Andrew Egan, who last hit us with a thoughtful piece on paramotoring and risk. Today, he has some thoughts on his mind about the record books. Today in...
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Compact Disc Duality
Hey all, Ernie here with another piece from David Buck, who has been on an audio-collector kick of late. Last time, he brought us his musings on crate digging in the streaming era. Today, he’s back...
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Doing Things The Wrong Way
Today in Tedium: Back in college, possibly the most important book I read during the entire time I was there was extremely short and very opinionated. It wasn’t even long enough to be a novella. But...
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All Penn, No Teller
Today in Tedium: Penn & Teller are fascinating figures, as celebrities go. Already hugely famous for their magic by the mid-1980s, their act—emphasizing a no-BS persona with a heavy focus on...
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I Love LAMP
Today in Tedium: A huge portion of the internet is brought to you by open-source software, and a good chunk of that open-source software doesn’t get its due outside of programming circles. Programmers...
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The Remote Part
Today in Tedium: Your average flight from Washington, D.C. to St. Helena Island, located in one of the most remote parts of the world, would be a very arduous affair, a flight that would take nearly...
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Taboola Before Taboola
Hey all, with the recent news that Outbrain and Taboola had decided to merge into a super-chumbox of sorts, I felt that now was a good time to resurface this classic Tedium piece on a company that had...
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Surf Like A Shark
Today in Tedium: One thing that should be clear from a close reading of Tedium’s archive is that tech ephemera springs eternal. There are always new things around the corner, somehow weirder then the...
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After After Hours
Hey all, Ernie here with a piece from new contributor Calvin Kasulke, a ShortFormBlog alum who followed a strong interest in a certain kind of body wash well past the store shelves to surprising...
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Historic Digital Places
Today in Tedium: When an old site announces a shutdown, here’s what generally happens: People flood the site trying to save their old content, it draws a bunch of attention, people reminisce,...
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The Hissing of Vintage Tapes
Today in Tedium: Audiophiles may hate to hear this, but I love noisy recordings, particularly those with background noise and tape hiss. It’s such a perfect way to accentuate a rawness in the way...
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