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Message In A Bottle
Today in Tedium: There’s a certain problem I’ve noticed with social media recently, and it has something to do with the last issue I wrote, regarding Threads. Basically, there are so many emerging...
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Running With The Devil
Hey all, Ernie here with a continuation of our partnership with Mountain Town Coffee Roasting, in which we dive into different types of cryptids based on the coffee they sell. If you love this series,...
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Tamper Evident
Today in Tedium: As we pointed out in our recent piece on beverage cans, a lot of innovation had to get into place to get us to the point where we are today, where you can open a can with another can,...
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Floppy Flop
A quick note to readers: Tedium is changing its format starting the week of July 31st. We will publish two shorter quick-hit pieces a week, possibly three depending on mood and news cycle, along with...
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Tales Of Type
Hey all, Ernie here with a piece from the archives. In honor of Twitter’s decision to torch its brand identity by using a character in the Unicode set that is intended for math problems, here’s a 2020...
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The Lines Blur Further
Hey all, Ernie here with a piece I recently wrote for the Substack publication NEWART. It’s published by the folks behind Pessimists Archive, and ponders creativity in an AI-generated world. This...
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The Curator’s Code, Reconsidered
Hey all, Ernie here with a fresh take on Tedium. We are still working out the kinks, but we will be publishing between three and four times per week, with a couple of short-to-mid items during the...
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A Dylanesque Negotiating Strategy
I’m really struggling to wrap my head around how media executives score deals with large tech companies. There has to be a science to it, right? But what I’ve seen from the recent deals OpenAI has...
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Turn-On’s Turning Point
Today in Tedium: There will likely never be a show quite like Turn-On ever again. It was built at the peak of a willfully weird era, and it was willfully weird and designed to upset the existing...
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Hot Dive Summer
If you told me, at the beginning of the summer, that I would become obsessed with a video game where a fairly rotund diver spent his mornings harpooning random fish and his evenings managing a sushi...
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Corporations, Share Your Patents
About a decade ago, the retail chain Target experienced one of the worst data breaches in history, an incident so large that tens of millions of people had their data stolen. That highlighted the ways...
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In The Age Of Culling
Today in Tedium: In the past, I’ve been effusive of my praise of CNET, a news outlet that (along with Wired) pioneered digital journalism, for one specific reason: Its archives have been kept safe...
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The Story Of Sixto
I can tell I’m starting to get up there in years because the people that are dying are folks I considered heroes in one way or another. To me, the singer-songwriter Rodriguez was a unique case, a man...
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The Hamster Wheel Scales
One of the reasons I started moving my newsletter to this more frequent but shorter format was because I was very concerned about burnout. Publishing two massive newsletters twice a week worked well...
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Magalogs & Mailboxes
Today in Tedium: We live in a world where the lines between marketing and journalism are constantly blurred. Sometimes content drives marketing; sometimes marketing drives content. Trying to find an...
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Sorry State
In a perfect world, the price of data-driven mediums should always be on the decline. As I pointed out in a piece about an infamous 1980s RAM shortage, when the market is working, the...
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The New Chart Game
Over the years, I have put a lot of focus on attempts to use the Billboard Hot 100 to game chart position, something that has taken on a lot of forms over the years. The most recent form highlights...
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Pretty Darn Fascinating
Hey all, Ernie here with a refreshed piece from 2018 that I’m refreshing in honor of John Warnock, the cofounder of Adobe and the key figure behind the creation of the PDF format, who died last week....
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Pricing Out Your Legacy
Hey all, Ernie here. I saw something so interesting today that I felt compelled to write a weekend issue of Tedium just to get my thoughts out there. Hope this is welcomed and not scorned. So here’s a...
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Not All Music
I have been running Tedium long enough at this point that some of my early stories are starting to look kind of like golden oldies. And one of those golden oldies is a 2016 piece I wrote about...
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