Tedium Archives

2018: Continuous Tedium

The thing about tedium is that, as long as you're willing to look for it, you can always find more. And in our fourth year, we've continued to find it in ways big and small. Among the topics we mined unexpected gold in: Mechanical keyboard switches, CD longboxes, 50-year-old viral videos, and forgotten cable channels. Oh, and we made a zine.

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Tedium Archives

2018: Continuous Tedium

December 2018

Another Year of Tedium

The state of our Tedium in 2019 is a pivotal one if you love the idea of creating things online. Let’s talk about why—and what we can do to keep it safe.

Pato’s Game Theory Christmas

The tale of how a college engineering professor once used game theory to turn his holiday gift-giving into an experiment—complete with winners and losers.

Desperation-Tinged Gift Ideas

Every year, Tedium looks back and publishes a last-minute gift guide full of odd crap we found from the prior 12 months. Think we’re gonna change gears now?

The Bagdasarian Effect

How one man’s discovery of a clever sound effect gave us Alvin and the Chipmunks, one of the most enduring novelty musical acts of all time.

The Infomercial Game

From Kevin Trudeau to Miss Cleo, infomercial schemes of the past 40 years have a lot in common with the “dark patterns” of the modern-day app economy.

The Internet, Through A Filter

As content filters re-enter the digital conversation, a look back at the internet filters of the ‘90s, and the librarian who sold the Supreme Court on them.

When A Chain Breaks

What a blogger learned from a year of traveling to restaurants that used to be part of much larger chains before being forced to fend for themselves.

November 2018

Kicking Out The Jams

The unlikely rise and amicable fall of the world’s funniest alt-rock, DIY band—The Presidents of the United States of America, who only needed five strings.

Hometown Proud

The Independent Grocers Alliance (IGA), a loosely franchised grocery chain, is basically designed to allow locals to own their own stores. It's genius.

Corporate Casserole

Pondering Thanksgiving through an exceedingly corporate lens. Some of the holiday’s most important elements were brought to you by marketing and lobbying.

Hands-Free Horrible

Inspired by something I saw online, I bought Phone Relief, an “As Seen On TV” product that turns any phone into a hands-free phone—so you don’t have to.

Totally Tubular

The surprising modern status of the vacuum tube, a vintage technology that continues to maintain its value and use case in a world full of transistors.

Counting All Cars

Pondering the evolution of electronic tolling, the system that doesn’t slow you down even as it charges you to use it. It has roots in the theremin—sorta.

His Name Was Larry

The offbeat stylings of Larry "Wild Man" Fischer, an outsider icon with ties to Frank Zappa and a wild voice who generated a cult audience against all odds.

Beyond The McRib

Pondering the way that retired or obscure fast food menu items create cult followings. Had a Taco Bell Chili Cheese Burrito lately? Consider yourself lucky.

October 2018

Let's Overanalyze Fun

In honor of the 50th anniversary of the “Fun Size” candy bar, let’s highlight the time Mars tried to sue one of its largest competitors for using the term.

Bizarro Mash

Around the time of “The Monster Mash,” another icon of horror was getting in on the music game—and John Zacherle had his own take on the graveyard smash.

Doin’ The Mash

The history of the world’s favorite Halloween carol, Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s “The Monster Mash.” Here’s how a song about dead creatures came to life.

Simulated Crime

The evolution of the police training simulator, and how it directly inspired one of the most fascinating video game companies of the ‘90s.

Dual-Pronged

Pondering the staple, and separately, the stapler, as they came together over time to saddle a few stitches and inspire a few tall tales.

The Halloween-Industrial Complex

After the 2008 recession, commercial real estate firms had a ton of empty buildings. Fortunately, Halloween stores were ready to fill the gap—for a month.

The Lazarus Libraries

What happens when “lost” films and television shows become found once again—and what that does to the work’s cultural legacy.

Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too

Pondering “You Get What You Give,” the one-hit wonder recorded by a guy smart enough to realize that it would be a one-hit wonder. It’s a survival story.

Otis Nixon, the CD-i, and Me

An improbably true story of a baseball star at his career peak pitching a 10-year-old on the unspeakably bad Philips CD-i at an Atlanta mall in 1992.

Silicon Persistence

Decades after Silicon Graphics' heyday, its supercomputers have found themselves a new home with a small community full of enthusiasts—some just teenagers.

Extreme Googling

It’s easy to forget given its size, but Google fundamentally changed our relationship with information. Two decades later, we’re still feeling the effects.

September 2018

Super (Small) Models

Pondering the postwar scale modeling boom, as well as where scale model enthusiasts are getting their fix today.

Network Effects

For more than a decade, it's been a common sight in U.S. airports to see newsstand-style shops named for cable news networks. Why, of all things, this idea?

Giving Candy A Bad Name

The surprisingly true story of Ayds, a diet suppressant candy that was incredibly successful until its name became forever associated with something else.

We’re Making A Zine

If you’re a fan of Tedium in digital form, you should know that we’re going to create a physical form. But not just any physical form. Zine form.

VCR Plus Dice

From board games to stunted game systems, the many attempts to turn VHS into a platform for games ran into a big problem: There was only one way forward.

Close Your Open Tabs

A case in favor of browser tab minimalism, or closing the tabs you’re not using. Sometimes, information overload has its limits.

Keep Your Composure

What’s it like to be a film composer, anyway? An expert on the subject pads our knowledge of film composition, what might be cinema’s most subtle art form.

Double Trouble

How a court battle involving groundbreaking disk-compression software foreshadowed Microsoft’s status as an antitrust darling.

August 2018

Clippy Couture

Clip art gets a bad rap as an artform, in part because it’s everywhere. Let’s give it some grudging respect by filling in some historic gaps.

Trapper Keeper Contraband

The Trapper Keeper is a beacon of nostalgia, but generic branding and school rules have pushed it off to the side. Good luck finding a new one.