Tedium | An Offbeat Digital Newsletter

Tedium. The newsletter all your other newsletters look up to.

Since 2015, Ernie Smith's Tedium has been hunting for the end of the long tail, and we've yet to find it. But we'd sure love it if you followed us on our journey. Especially now that we're ten friggin' years old and we're still using a Street Fighter II slogan as our subscribe button. Validate the use of obscure video game slang as a successful subscription strategy. Click the button.

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Tedium. The newsletter all your other newsletters look up to.

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Lights Out

Tom Bodett, the legendary cheap-motel pitchman, sues his primary client, Motel 6, for non-payment. What a sad way for a great ad campaign to end.

The Narrative

Whether intentional or not, an attempt to paint Bluesky as one type of thing has taken hold in the press. A bad narrative is hard to shake, even if it’s unfair. As a user, don’t be afraid to push back.

Stumbled Into a Discount

Cheap Tickets, one of the first big digital travel companies, has a hell of a corporate history—one with nothing to do with the internet.

The Exit Strategy

After two decades, Apple has announced its final version of MacOS for Intel. Guess that means Hackintoshing is done, too.

Let The Fans Have It

A YouTuber makes an interesting pitch for the legendary Commodore brand: Instead of letting it die on the vine, make the brand accessible to the community for cheap.

Not Universal Enough

Microsoft attempts to make the USB-C port live up to its name by trying to force manufacturers to follow a standard. But you know what they say about standards.

New Verse, New Story

There was a certain type of song that seemed to keep cropping up in the mid-’90s. Here’s my attempt to figure out why that was.

Arc Of The Broken Covenant

We have at least two recent belabored examples of companies bewilderingly dropping beloved products for seemingly no good reason. Let’s not make it three.

Explaining The Vibes

AI gets a lot of hate these days, and it often frustrates me too, but let’s be clear about what it can realistically do. Here’s my attempt to explain by example.

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