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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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Card Sharks
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Card Sharks

The 1980s proved surprisingly fruitful for licensed greeting card mascots. It turns out American Greetings understood the Marvel playbook before Marvel did.

By Ernie Smith • August 12, 2026
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Vibe-Coded Flattery

I’ve seen a strange problem in my inbox that I haven’t been able to put into words. A saga involving a botched app release helped me figure it out.

By Ernie Smith • August 9, 2026

The Earnest Era Ends

When we lost Glen Hansard last week, his work still fresh and lively, it was a reminder that the world has changed more than we think it has.

By Ernie Smith • August 6, 2026

Put A Tag On It

The pricing gun should have been a dead technology years before it actually was. But state laws artificially kept it around as a shield against the scary barcode.

By Ernie Smith • August 1, 2026

Fa Fa

My brain-breaking trick for weaning off of Facebook involved creating a fake URL for Google News. Blame the home row.

By Ernie Smith • July 27, 2026

The Terminus

When a really long road ends, why don’t we do more to celebrate the staggering amount of collective work that went into it? The ancient Romans really outclassed the federal highway system on this front.

By Ernie Smith • July 17, 2026

Bring Back The Kiosk

With Sony clobbering the physical game market and Grand Theft Auto 6 eschewing discs entirely, it makes one long for kiosks that could make disks on demand—a model that actually once existed in the UK.

By Matt Lee • July 15, 2026

Boxed In

At what point do the creative limitations you create for yourself actually harm your ability to create? And what can ALF teach us about that?

By Ernie Smith • July 9, 2026

Bring Back Crappy Forums

Web forums were rough around the edges and faded in relevance as seemingly better options emerged. But what if we had stuck with them?

By Ernie Smith • July 1, 2026

Hazy Memory

Who’s to blame for the memory crisis that turned Macs and Steam Boxes into unobtanium this week? The memory-makers have a convenient answer.

By Ernie Smith • June 27, 2026
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