Clik here to view.
The Keys To Success
Today in Tedium: Of all the reasons for the video game crash of 1983, perhaps the most unappreciated might be the fact that computers were finally starting to gain a place in many households—and they...
View ArticleClik here to view.
An Extra Serving
What a day! My article on Vice's Motherboard this week about the history of NESticle—the Nintendo Entertainment System emulator whose early success paved the way for people to play vintage games on...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Secretly Made With Meat
Editor’s note: In honor of Guinness’ recent move to full veganism, I’m reviving an old post of mine and getting it up to date. It wasn’t an easy task with all those fish bladders. "Wait, fish...
View ArticleClik here to view.
“It's Weird That it Didn't Seem Weirder”
“A Bloodlust game was clearly a Bloodlust game,” Bloodlust visual artist Ethan Petty told me. “Some people loved it. Some people thought it was visual torture. I was with the second group, but hey—we...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Clone Wars
Today in Tedium: Often, retrospectives on computer history focus pretty intently on the IBM PC era and how that system’s many clones helped to democratize computing by centering most...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Our Lives In Fabric
When Amory Blaine decided to pack a T-shirt before heading to boarding school, he set in place a piece of literary history. Amory, the protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, was...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How The Cookie Crumbles
Today in Tedium: The Oreo cookie, tasty as it is, gets way too much attention from the public, in part because Nabisco is so good at marketing. That’s not to say that it doesn’t deserve at least some...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Four-Minute Villain
One of the best parts of the streaming era is that you can avoid watching a ton of commercials if you don’t want to. And in some ways, TV is responding to this change. Last year, Turner announced it...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Invisible Puzzle
Today in Tedium: Barring our constant debates on net neutrality, one of the places where the Federal Communications Commission has the largest footprint is with our wireless spectrum. It’s a spectrum...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Special Delivery
As I highlighted recently, Amtrak trains are rife with delays—which can be blamed on a combination of failing infrastructure and a lack of track ownership. We can’t solve the problem of Amtrak very...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Building Blocks, Literally
Today in Tedium: We talk a lot about technology in this newsletter, but the fact of the matter is that if you zoom out a little bit and think about it, we’re really telling the story about how we got...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Swearing In Code
Unless you’re listening to a numbers station for work reasons, odds are that you aren’t going to need Morse Code for any good reason. Which means that, if you want to take advantage of the lack of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
86’ed
Today in Tedium: Why did Intel move away from naming its widely used microprocessors after numbers—you know, like the 286 and the 386? They were perfectly succinct, along with easy to remember—what’s...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Plotting A Takeover
Of all the artificial monopolies created by government and standards bodies, the one created for the graphing calculator by standardized testing bodies is perhaps the most disappointing. If the TI-84+...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Out Of Our League
Today in Tedium: Despite our interest in sports as a society, for whatever reason, we can’t seem to handle more than a handful of specific professional team sports at any one time. Clearly, there’s an...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Weirdly Honest
Located smack dab in the middle of flyover country, Weird Wally—born Wally Rex Smith—never earned the notoriety of Crazy Eddie, his East Coast contemporary on the oddball advertising front. But while...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Universal Themes
Today in Tedium: The remote control was an important invention, not just because it saved the average person a couple of steps, but because it shares a clear lineage with every other handheld...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Iceland’s Latest And Greatest
Iceland is one of my favorite countries. Always has been, always will be, and not because I’m a Björk-head, really. Really, I think it’s because of its beautiful simplicity, relatively isolated...
View ArticleClik here to view.
You Spin Me Right Round, Baby
Today in Tedium: Hard drives may be the most fundamental building block of the computer revolution. Hitting the perfect balance between size and cost, it was a defining piece of computer history, one...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Floating Fast Food
The other night, I took a bit of a swipe at McDonald’s for its poor track record in the Icelandic market. Ray Kroc and company, I apologize and admit that your sausage biscuits give me modest joy....
View Article