Is X good again? That's probably the wrong question. The right one: Are we past the era when a single social network needs to be everything to everyone? I don’t know about you, but I simply don’t have time to devote to every single social network. I don’t have the energy to post to Threads and Instagram and TikTok. I would much rather post a couple places I know are worth my time and then focus my

The concept of nominative antideterminism, or when your name goes against everything that you represent, whether intentionally or not. Cecil Fielder, sadly, wasn't a great fielder. Today in Tedium: If I lived my life in a nominatively deterministic way, I would be a Muppet blacksmith. But unfortunately, I live in the real world, and my lot in life has put me on newsletter-writing duty. So I don’t

A quixotic new project takes an AI-first approach to battling Adobe, and while it’s unclear where it leads, it raises important questions about what happens when companies ignore their users. I am not a unique flower. Like many creatives, I had a good relationship with Adobe that, over time, went belly up . The first sign something was wrong was when the company more or less ignored Mac design con

Some spare thoughts about Link, a newspaper that turned 20 years old today—but more or less changed my life. It's been 18 years, but I still miss that job. As I’ve written in the past, I look longingly at the era of the free daily newspaper . It was an era that represented much of my traditional newspaper career, and it’s one that has been more or less forgotten about by mainstream journalism. But

Admit it, you were wondering where the hell the gas-station staples Combos came from just as much as I was. Anyway, I figured it out. At one point a drill was involved. Today in Tedium: As snack foods go, Combos I would describe as the perfect B-minus food. It’s a combination of crunchy and cheesy, nothing more, nothing less. They are the closest a road-tripper is going to get to chips and dip wit

If you haven't looked at the Napster website lately, get ready for some major AI-related indigestion. The former music-sharing rebel is now peddling AI digital twins of teachers and serving the Saudi market. I’m a strong advocate for doing things to keep historically relevant websites and companies online. But not like this. Recently, word broke that Napster, a company that you once knew as your p

Pondering the circumstances that led to the retirement of a 64-year-old cable brand in a merger. Turns out, brand loyalty matters less than we thought. If you bear with me, I’d like to discuss cable providers with you for a second. Yeah, yeah, I know, not the most exciting thing. These are not well-loved companies. And yet, I feel a bit of a way about the loss of one of the legacy cable television

A new tool for digging into Usenet history holds much potential for researchers. But it’s also a reminder that many users thought, at the time, that it was ephemeral. (They were wrong.) Today in Tedium: Last week, my past caught up with me. In 2026, I found myself looking at every embarrassing thing I ever posted on Usenet—bad song lyrics, jokes I thought were clever but got zero replies, an argum

Making sense of iLands, the company whose AI agents emailed me half a dozen times in two days offering to do my research. Turns out they’re just bots trying to keep their own lights on by trying to take my job. It started with a fact check. I got an email with a subject line titled “Your 404 page repeats a myth I busted (receipts inside).” The message essentially was a takedown of the poem I have

Matt Mullenweg takes an involuntary leave of absence from Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Let’s hope he uses his time away thoughtfully. What’s the bigger tragedy? That a creator gets separated from their life’s work, or that the effort to assert control over that work just alienates the creator from the community they built? In the past two years, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has le