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Deep Purple
Can you build a brand while working around one of the oldest sites on the internet? The answer appears to be yes. Since 1994, a guy named Jeff Abrahamson has run the website Purple.com, a domain name...
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Seek And Spell
Today in Tedium: We live in a world where facial recognition has become so sophisticated that we’re being forced to ask very serious ethical questions about it. (In the U.S., the depth of the FBI’s...
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They Stopped (Sorta)
Last summer, I wrote an impassioned plea in favor of embracing the singular “they,” which I called “the Rodney Dangerfield of grammar.” Basically, this word use, which has no simple singular equivalent...
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Boom, Roasted
Today in Tedium: We have a hard enough time wrapping our heads around a Pizza Hut or a Taco Bell, let alone a combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. But co-branding practices like this are often quite...
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Tiny Data
These days, we have a whole lot of options for portably collecting information that needs to be put in a computer. But in 1960, that wasn’t always easy. Usually, this meant paper—but considering they...
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We Were Promised Skynet
Today in Tedium: As the recent vote in Congress over online privacy rules reminded us, people tend to hate their internet service providers. Case in point: Offbeat rocker Todd Rundgren once wrote and...
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Around the World
When you find an outlet that creates a sense of adventure around something as pedestrian and overexposed as online music, you know it’s worth a bookmark. The French website Radiooooo, an online time...
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Like A Rock
Music executive Tim Quirk is best known for his band Too Much Joy, but his big problem these days is that there’s not enough joy—at least when it comes to the music of Bob Seger. Last week, Quirk made...
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The Internet of Food
Today in Tedium: You know something you can’t get through the internet’s wires, at least not on its own? Food. We’ve been working on it for years, but no, we’re not at the point where we can deliver...
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COBOLed Together
If you’re a regular reader of Y Combinator’s excellent mini-Reddit aggregator Hacker News (as I am), you start to see some trends arise. Programming languages and frameworks become incredibly popular...
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Lickety Split
Today in Tedium: Considering all the money that the greeting card industry spends on making really interesting looking cards (but not as interesting, of course, as they were when Robert Crumb was a...
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We’ll Send Him Cheesy Movies
Recently, I had a reader send me a zip file full of old ideas I had for a website I worked on nearly 20 years ago. It was an unusual bit of digital archaeology, in part because I didn’t actually...
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Total Edutainment Forever
Today in Tedium: Forcing education and entertainment together is a great way to ensure you don’t really do either all that well. (Case in point: The Jack Hanna repeat wasteland, targeted toward young...
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Hurricane Ned
If you haven’t been following the modern metal scene, you’ve apparently been missing out on a lot of bands pigging out on pop-culture references in the best way possible. Last month, a trio of bands...
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CMYK All The Way
Today in Tedium: In the 1990s, after much delay, the newspaper industry’s largest and most prominent newspapers finally started printing most of their pages in color on a regular basis. It was a much...
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A Warped Mindset
What if we reported on the past like it was happening in the present day—not reflecting on it nostalgically like I do at Tedium, but literally trying to cover the past as if you had no knowledge of the...
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Operating In Obscurity
Today in Tedium: Operating systems are the cockroaches of the digital revolution. They’re everywhere, hiding in low-level crevices, and most of the time, you don’t really notice when they’re...
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Addicted To Spectrum
You know a tool that’s proved incredibly useful to the theater world? The wireless microphone. It sounds small, but it’s actually a really huge improvement over what they previously had. These devices,...
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Why Are Trains Always Late?
Today in Tedium: Recently, airlines have gotten all the chatter about how terrible they are, and I was in that category, too … on Twitter. Tedium is a different beast, and it requires me to not jump...
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Stating The Seemingly Obvious
Utah is a great state, but with its historic ties to the Mormon religion (and that religion’s hard-to-ignore political clout), it occasionally runs into some head-scratching situations—especially when...
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