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Tedium Archives

2017: This Thing Keeps Growing

Could you imagine telling people that they'd be getting articles about sorting checks in their inbox, and they'd actually read them? Apparently, a lot of folks noticed, as the newsletter got a mention on NPR's Planet Money in February of this year. Some of our biggest hits from 2017 include a piece on the scary archival phenomenon of disc rot, a retrospective on the email program Eudora, and a very in-depth take on R. Stevie Moore by a novelty music obsessive who started contributing in 2017, David Buck.

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2017 in Tedium

December

November

October

September

One Month, Much Tedium

**Looking for a starting point? This is a good one.** This month features a whole lot of variety, including [planes](/2017/09/26/combi-planes-cargo-history/), [trains](/2017/09/05/kartrak-railroad-barcode-history/), [horses](/2017/09/19/horse-ownership-nyc/), [vintage software](/2017/09/28/eudora-email-history/), [obscure video games](/2017/09/14/game-boy-knockoff-consoles/), and [the wales of corduroy](/2017/09/07/corduroy-trend-history/). There’s enough to keep you busy for hours. Possibly minutes. If I was reading my own stuff, I’d probably start here.

August

July

June

Stunt Reading

**One of the greatest dichotomies I run into** when writing about stuff on the internet is the fact that the internet's nature as a potentially ephemeral medium often means digging into its history is harder than it could be. While we have the Internet Arcive to help with stuff after 1996 or so, stuff that was online before then is much harder to follow. Which means you need to research it with books. [My piece diving into a book on free internet sites](/2017/06/29/90s-internet-books-history/) led me to a whole lot of broken links.