Tedium Newsletter

Today in Tedium: What does it mean for a road to end? Particularly, a big, imposing one that represents an essential connection for millions of people across an entire country? Often, major highways take up massive numbers of lanes, become both the primary path and bottleneck through which people travel. But that’s usually in the middle. Often the terminus of a big road, no matter how important or influential it is, can be anticlimactic in nature.

Hey all, Ernie here with a quick piece from Matt Lee, who, like most of the rest of the internet, has been looking at Sony’s recent moves around physical media with dismay. He has an idea … If you were to walk into a GameStop today, you might find the platform choices deeply lacking. Certainly you could find games for the latest consoles from Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony, but what about Windows? Mac? Linux? The previous generation of systems from the console companies too?

One look at Paul Fusco’s IMDB page makes clear that he has not worked on anything but ALF since the early 1990s. He has essentially played one character for most of the past 40 years. It’s a good character, and given my elder millennial status, one that I remember fondly. I was one of the millions of people who loved ALF back in the late ’80s. But at what point do you realize, holy crap, you’ve backed yourself into a snarky alien corner?

Today in Tedium: Recently, I passed 20,000 followers on Bluesky, which I didn’t really say anything about. Sure, I thought about it, but then I had decided to myself, what’s the point? Soon, there will be another mark I can point to and feel weird about. The thing about social media these days is that the good stuff all too often pulls you in, but at the end of the day, you end up feeling hollow.

If I was Micron and everyone was hating on my company for making life just a little more unaffordable, I might try looking for a scapegoat, too.

Currently, I’m in the midst of writing a big post about the roots of web forums, but I hit on an aside weird enough that I decided to stop writing that and work on a separate post. Because I think it actually explains a lot about the way people use the internet. Essentially, here’s the deal. Around 1995 or so, a high schooler named Matt Wright decided to launch a website that shared some basic website tools that he programmed.

It’s hot. It’s kind of heavy. And on my computing weapon of choice, it’s hard to set up. But honestly, I love that it exists. Recently I’ve been taking a look at an eGPU, the Gigabyte Aorus RTX 5060 Ti AI Box, which is essentially a desktop GPU in a relatively small case. I’ve always been really curious about eGPUs, in part because they presumably offer the best of all worlds in many situations.

Two companies that have enabled literal decades of creativity have both landed on the same question around the same time: Who owns a vibe? One makes $5,000 guitars. The other makes software that they’d charge $5,000 a year for if they could. And creatives, as ever, are caught in the middle. Is it a Strat? Is it a knock-off? We’ll never know. (DepositPhotos.com) First up, we have Fender, the originators of one of the most important guitar designs of the past century, the Stratocaster.

Two companies that have enabled literal decades of creativity have both landed on the same question around the same time: Who owns a vibe? One makes $5,000 guitars. The other makes software that they’d charge $5,000 a year for if they could. And creatives, as ever, are caught in the middle. Is it a Strat? Is it a knock-off? We’ll never know. (DepositPhotos.com) First up, we have Fender, the originators of one of the most important guitar designs of the past century, the Stratocaster.

Today in Tedium: When I spent two hours of my time, working against a deadline, deciding that I needed to build a workaround hack for Google’s AI overviews, I had no expectation as to what that would end up being. Two years later, the site is still online, despite people constantly telling me Google would kill it any day now. But meanwhile, Google has gradually let its golden goose decline over a vague belief that chatbots are the new search. (That belief got more specific at Google I/O this week.