2023 Tedium Highlight by Ernie Smith: The article that might ensure creators a better 2024. 

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Ernie Smith’s 2023 Highlights

December 2023

2024: Live Another Day

Tedium embraces year nine with another look-ahead. No, we didn’t make our own wall calendar this year, but we’ll still complain about wall calendars anyway.

The Open Letter Still Works

Our final year-end Tedium award honors an open letter that hopefully encourages more creator-economy activism in 2024.

Not The Name That You Call Me With

The year-end Tedium awards continue with an excellent, breathtaking feature on Elliott Smith’s high-school bands. Yes, multiple.

The Great YouTube Epic

To kick off this year’s year-end Tedium awards, we honor a video that may have done more good for creator culture than anything created before or since.

Fake Festive Vs. Real Thing

The tale of the modern Christmas tree is a concept that constantly passes through a tale of sustainability, whether the tree is real or fake.

Fall Of The Mouse House

With less than two weeks to go before Public Domain Day 2024, signs are already emerging that creators are ready to rethink Steamboat Willie.

Self-Checkout Game Theory

There have been a lot of takes in recent years slagging on self-checkout as a failed experiment or an expensive waste. I may lose my cool-kid card for saying this, but: I’m actually a fan.

Give Up? Gift Up

A few last-minute gift ideas you aren’t really thinking about. (But really, an excuse for us to look back at 2023 in Tedium.)

Waking Up The Regulators

While regulators have long struggled with how to attack big tech, a landmark ruling and a big disclosure suggests that big tech is finally getting noticed. Finally.

An Incomplete Picture

A recent scandal around a popular YouTuber’s nonprofit foundation has created a lot of drama, but what it’s missing are voices that understand the nonprofit sector.

Interference Wars

The electric vehicle finds itself in the middle of the big debate over the future of AM radio. Could the AM dial get pushed off to the side?

Diet Facebook

A browser extension I’m using has me really surprised about how much junk Facebook feeds me. I hate that we’re stuck with it.

Stealing Passages

Plagiarism is often seen as an insignificant problem in online culture, but an epic Hbomberguy video essay proves that regular folks do in fact care about content theft.

In Search Of New Lows

Why did seven-string guitars become a nu-metal staple in the late 1990s? It turns out they nearly went forgotten—but a guitar nut in Bakersfield decided he wanted to follow a specific sound.
November 2023

A Note On Note Apps

You shouldn’t rely on a SaaS-based note-taking application, in my view, and if you buy something, buy it outright. Here’s why.

Once More With Feeling

That AI-generated pop song sounds terrible, but it reflects a long legacy of letting machines manipulate or even generate our musical output.

Weird HTML Hacks

Many of these code quirks shouldn’t work, but somehow they do. We’re highlighting 10 hacky website coding strategies—some big, some small.

Bubble Busters

The recent security drama caused by an iMessage workaround on Android shouldn’t minimize a simple fact: This is Apple’s fault.

Ruminating On Replies

The “reply guy,” the internet-native take on Florida Man, has started to cause problems in the fediverse, and it comes down to ideology.

Making Magnetic Media

Pondering the legacy of 3M as a high-profile creator of magnetic media—a memorable business for the manufacturing giant that it gave up nearly three decades ago.

When Tools Unlock New Paths

Don’t just keep doing the same thing hoping that something is going to change. If you want to truly be creative, try a different tool sometime. You’ll thank yourself.

Slamming Into Painted Boulders

In the wake of the near-cancellation of yet another film, the creative community calls out Warner Bros. Discovery’s warped priorities.

An Innovative Lapel Pin?

As we get ready for the launch of the first lapel pin mobile phone, let’s consider lapel pins for a second. Are they usually vessels for innovation?

… And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Pink-Slipped

On a particularly bad day for digital media, a thought about where we should go next. Hint: Let’s stop talking about scale.

Jell-O In A Sack

Google claims that its Core Web Vitals initiative has saved users 10,000 years of collective waiting time. The problem is, they sloughed those costs and headaches onto developers.

California Nearly Killed HBO

The surprisingly true story of how the state that has arguably benefited the most from the pay-TV industry … once voted to ban it. Blame an effective slogan.

Charged Debate

Is Panera playing with fire by putting so much caffeine in its fruity beverages? A new warning, spurred by a lawsuit, suggests yes.
October 2023

Give ’Em Less Data

What if the problems with the news ecosystem could be solved by shutting off the data pipeline to the advertisers? After all, they’ve spent the last 30 years aggressively exploiting it—and us.

Spooky Database Relations

A discussion of the least-on-brand thing to ever happen on Halloween: The Halloween problem, a database querying issue with a long legacy.

Permanent Unicorn

The reason Apple needs a cheap MacBook in its lineup right now is simple: It always needs a device in its lineup that costs less than you expect, but does more than it needs to.

Enemies At The Gates

We’re at an era of internet creation where it’s becoming increasingly clear that gatekeepers, too often, just get in the way. We need to build tools and strategies that allow creators to succeed without them.

Yes, He Did That

Discussing the ’90s comedy Family Matters from the context of the incredible comic persona work Jaleel White was doing as a child.

Making Way For Wayland

With recent moves made by prominent players, Wayland seems closer than ever to being the ultimate path for Linux users—but, let’s be honest, X11 will never truly die.

The Post Of Revelations

Sufjan Stevens shares a significant part of his life in a single Tumblr post—a message that powerfully reshapes his already-powerful art.

Tune-In

Laugh-In creator George Schlatter finally gives his long-lost show Turn-On the official release it deserves. He loves that the internet noticed his white whale.

Your Phone Will Ring Soon

Ahead of the high-profile EAS test taking place today, here are a bunch of fake EAS videos on YouTube to entertain you.

RGB Revolution

RGB lighting is designed to stick out like a sore thumb—and it especially does in a courtroom, it turns out.
September 2023

The Science Oven

A reflection on the microwave oven, perhaps the most important invention to come out of a World War that sparked a lot of them.

Next-Gen Roadblock

A patent holder successfully gets one of the biggest advocates of next-gen television to retreat, and other companies could be next.

Kill It With Fire

Lessons on a summer with a smartphone-enabled itch-killing device. Yes—it works, even if a smartphone is a weird vessel for the Heat-It.

The Modem Tax

How a real-life attempt to charge online services for using the phone line became an infamous internet legend. The “modem tax” was a chain-mail boogeyman.

Network Lobotomy

After nearly two decades as the primary broadcast channel for teens, The CW, under new ownership, wants to be something else. It may be a hint at what’s next for linear television.

The Obvious Warning Sign

The decision by Unity to screw over its developers, even if they reverse it, points at deeper unresolved issues in the digital economy.

The Cash Machine Is Blue And Green

Selling people on the idea of a machine that spits out money was obviously not easy. But then a freak weather event happened, and everything began to click.

Something To Sneeze At

The FDA may have just cancelled a whole category of over-the-counter drugs. Has anything like this ever happened before?

Based On A True Interpretation

How bothered should we be by the BlackBerry film fudging the truth? Honestly, I think we should embrace Jim Balsillie’s good nature about it.

The Sad One

The squonk doesn’t exactly carry itself as a particularly scary cryptid—a deeply depressed one, really—but its story has proven a lasting source of tall-tale inspiration.

The Barenaked Truth

When an artist brings up cancel culture, it’s usually because they’re super-edgy or deeply political. So why are the Barenaked Ladies doing it?

Art Fights Back

A comic artist took a journalistic dive into the knotty debates around generative AI—and found artists worried about the people even more than the tech.

Dead-End Hardware

Hardware and device concepts that seemed like good ideas, but ultimately led to nothing but tears. You probably know a few of these.
August 2023

Lightning’s Lost Spark

We’re near the one-cable-to-rule-them-all point, but odds are that further battles will emerge from here. Let’s consider the state of port standards in the waning days of Lightning.

Not All Music

Trying to determine exactly why Bryan Adams no longer has a presence in the all-encompassing music industry database AllMusic.

Pricing Out Your Legacy

The company behind WordPress decided to offer a service that promises to pay for your web hosting for a century, long after you die. Sticker shock aside, I don’t hate the idea.

Pretty Darn Fascinating

The story of the PDF, the portable document format that’s become one of the internet’s defining information formats. It’ll be with us after we’re long gone.

The New Chart Game

The recent emergence of an out-of-nowhere chart-topper offers a great opportunity to talk about the music industry’s new favorite trick for gaming the Hot 100.

Sorry State

SSD prices are insanely low right now—but manufacturers focused on bottom line have built computers designed to prevent consumers from leveraging this trend.

Magalogs & Mailboxes

Once upon a time, before the internet, there were attempts to combine magazines and catalogs together. The weird part? For a while, it worked!

The Hamster Wheel Scales

A YouTube controversy around one of its largest channels reflects the complexity of maintaining editorial standards, or even integrity, when you’re producing with quantity in mind.

The Story Of Sixto

The tale of the just-departed Rodriguez is a story of technology and culture shaping a musician’s life. And we’re all a little better that it did.

In The Age Of Culling

Discussing the dumb thing CNET did in an effort to please the Google Gods: Don’t cull old news content to improve your SEO ranking. That’s your history!

Corporations, Share Your Patents

By choosing to share a credit card skimmer detector with other retailers, Target proves that corporate altruism isn’t totally dead.

Hot Dive Summer

In praise of Dave the Diver, the video game that made me realize that harpooning sharks in the middle of the ocean, then turning them into sushi, is extremely fun.

Turn-On’s Turning Point

The infamous cancelled-during-the-first-episode show, a lost-media legend, is on YouTube, which makes it the perfect time to analyze its legacy.

A Dylanesque Negotiating Strategy

One of the news industry’s biggest, longest-standing problems is that they do not value the work they create at the level it deserves. They should take a cue from the music industry’s biggest stars.

The Curator’s Code, Reconsidered

Was building a language to properly give people credit a bad idea? If no, why did it get so much pushback? Let’s re-assess one of the most controversial ideas of the blog era.
July 2023

The Lines Blur Further

The music industry has had to navigate the choppy waters of royalties, ownership, and inspiration well before AI-generated music became the hot new thing. And not just because of sampling.

Tales Of Type

A discussion of the ways that large tech companies helped to define the evolution of computer typography. One battle made the CEO of Adobe really mad.

Floppy Flop

The company that gave the world the 5-and-a-quarter floppy was quickly acquired, and its founder quit on bad terms. But his follow-up firm became a computing giant.

Tamper Evident

Why there’s a giant button in the middle of your salsa jar, and why baby food jars had it first.

Running With The Devil

The tale of the Jersey Devil, a cryptid whose background moved from feudal byproduct to museum hoax to sports-team mascot in the span of about 250 years.

Message In A Bottle

The current splintering of social media across networks is creating a problem eerily reminiscent of the early battles over instant messaging. Here’s what we can learn.

Let The Internet Be Grimy

Meta’s take on mimicking Twitter feels like it was built for brand safety first, and you don’t get fulfilling internet experiences when you build for brand safety first.

Crack One Open

How the modern-day aluminum beverage can was made safer and more eco-friendly by one man’s invention—a riveted tab that opened the can, but stayed attached.

The Gloss of Americana

Our latest set of glossary entries, on the nature of American culture, aims to move well beyond the stars and stripes. American culture is way too nuanced for that.
June 2023

The Squeal of Data

The through line between the telegraph and the computer is more direct than you might realize. Its influence can be seen in common technologies, like the modem.

A Splash of Impatience

Discussing the legacy of splash screens, those annoying windows that appear when you’re trying to load up a giant program on your desktop machine.

Freeloader Culture

Reddit seems to be crumbling under the weight of a big controversy. The reason? It didn’t account for its free-riders.

A Seismic Stock Shift

Stock photo services like Shutterstock or Getty Images helped source the models used by tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. But stock photos are not perfect—and if the two models can’t work together, one could disrupt the other.

Tuned Out

Why children’s radio—a format once important enough that Disney undermined a competitor to dominate the radio dial—has largely disappeared from the airwaves.

Friction, Baby

In a world where technology is trying to make things increasingly easier, make things a little harder on yourself. You’ll get better results.

Bad News Beepers

Considering the reputation that pagers and beepers had as a tool for drug trafficking, especially in schools. Did it smother a legitimately useful technology?

Manufactured Gloss

Our continuing journey to write a Tedium glossary takes us through the manufacturing process—and the weird products it sometimes led to.
May 2023

Social Network Drift

Maybe the reason why social networks fade away over time is as simple as different generations wanting different experiences. Picnic, an emerging social network, exemplifies this point.

Reviving a Dinosaur

Nearly two decades after its final version, the Silicon Graphics community has deep hopes for bringing the platform’s operating system back to life—the hard way.

Dress Down

Thoughts on dressing up in a world where members of Congress are trying to get away with wearing sneakers inside the Oval Office. Hoodies in the Senate? Sure!

Consider the Jackalope

How a happy taxidermy accident created the jackalope legend. But it’s a legend that might have some real-world grounding. Jackalopes may have even helped us solve cancer.

Make Digital Preservation Easier

If major companies think it’s too hard or costly to leave up user-generated content, perhaps we need to change the motivations.

The Artist and the Amiga

Andy Warhol was enamored with the first computer he ever owned—and he didn’t seem all that worried about the risks of disruption.

News of the Monoculture

For those who weren’t there, a quick explanation as to why MTV News was once something worth giving a crap about.

The Cover-Up

How screen protectors became a part of our lives, and the weird reason some early cathode ray tubes needed them.

Social Gloss

In continuing with our long series of glossary entries, let’s take a look at some online-community-related terms hiding in the archives.
April 2023

Switching Pad

OnePlus’ first attempt at a tablet makes a strong case for iPad users to make the move to Android. Does it stick the landing?

CISC-y RISC-ness

An unusual type of processor from the early 2000s seemed to offer the best of all worlds—and may be the most inventive approach to the CPU ever developed.

The Next Chapter

Online culture sure feels like it’s in a transition phase, doesn’t it? In an attempt to understand what we learned this week, let’s compare it to some prior internet-era shifts.

Textbooks of the Air

Long before there were podcasts, there were attempts to use the radio as a way to distribute educational programming.

Socket To Me

Why the processor socket, an important part of most desktop computers, lost its upgrade path as computers became smaller and more integrated.

The Whole Stack

Substack got an unexpected wave of momentum last week that threatens to upend the game for people who just want email to be email. What should indie newsletter publishers think of that?

Hiding in the Basket

A conversation about Easter eggs hiding in software, why they’re fun, and why they might not always be seen as good things by IT admins.

Mile-High Productivity

Making room for in-flight productivity has long been a source of both consternation and electronic interference. But for some reason, it persists.
March 2023

A Side of Gloss

Tedium continues on its long journey to fill its glossary with hundreds of entries, and today’s list takes a long, hard look at all things food-related.

When Atari Was Politicized

The story of how the “Atari Democrats” came to shape the way politics and technology work together, for good and bad.

Appetite for Destruction

The history of the paper shredder, a device that’s most important when you have something to hide. Not all shreds are alike.

Field of Bankruptcies

It’s hard out there trying to do something new, which is why we want to look back on some of the notable failed sports leagues.

On “Ernie”

Having learned that Baidu is about to steal my first name for its AI chatbot that’s launching this month, let’s talk about the name Ernie for a bit. (Can I stop them?)

Point, Shoot, and Forget

Before Instagram, the disposable camera helped pave the way for digital photography. But the basic idea was a century old by the time it went mainstream.

Self-Host All the Things?

In a world where every service wants to put you on a subscription forever, is now the time to start self-hosting your apps instead? Let’s look at the landscape.
February 2023

Robot Hand is the Future

What I learned about YouTube’s algorithm from creating an account that only watched videos related to Elliott Smith. I fought hard, but the algorithm won.

The Hayes Code

The obscure command set that gradually helped us move past acoustic couplers and brought dial-up modems into the mainstream. For a while, at least.

Old Archives, New Controversy

The New York Times has the most robust online archives of any newspaper, but it’s proving difficult to square their handling of a recent controversy with the quality of those archives.

A Layer of Gloss

Tedium is slowly working on its glossary over the next year, taking time to develop definitions for the literally thousands of things it’s discussed since 2015. Today’s starting point? Software.

Bridge To Nowhere

Trying to understand why bridge is an influential enough game that the BBC felt it was deserving of its own dedicated video game console in the ’80s.
January 2023

Films on Wheels

Pondering the under-the-radar legacy of the TV cart on wheels, a simple object as known for its substitute-teacher value as its risk as a tip-over hazard.

The Chris Gaines Shuffle

Discussing the evolution and popularity of alter egos, particularly those that aren’t very successful. If we don’t talk about the bad ones, how are they ever gonna learn?

When Money Doesn’t Look Like Money

A roundup of unusual types of currency, many of which don’t properly fit into a world of dollars and cents. Would you like your change in tea bricks or giant stones?

So Many Itches To Scratch

The sometimes-innovative power of things that can be scratched, one of our lesser-appreciated forms of physical interaction.

Turner Tunes

That time Ted Turner tried to compete with MTV by launching a competing music network of his own. It lasted five days longer than CNN+ did.

The Year Canada Recalled Pop

Resurfacing that time, in the summer of 1979, when the Canadian government recalled every large soda bottle on the shelf because the bottles would literally explode when shattered.

The Pioneers

Now that everyone seems interested in blogging again, here’s a list of early and influential bloggers that helped to shape the genre. Maybe you can borrow some pointers.

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