Tedium - Giving Without Restraint 🎁

It’s kind of dark that someone goes to the trouble of making a heart-shaped pizza and the first thing they do with it is cut it into little pieces, right? (Muskogee Times-Democrat/Newspapers.com)

We had a few pretty successful pieces this year, with one of the early big hits a Valentine’s Day-themed tale about heart-shaped pizza, where it came from, why a couple of mega-chains have taken the concept over, and a discussion of the fact that it’s pretty dark that the first thing you do with a heart-shaped pizza is cut it up and eat it in little pieces. (Who said romance was dead?) Since I trust that you’re already looking for ways to knock the socks off of your significant other in just about two months, may I suggest making your own pizza, with a heart-shaped pan? It can be deep-dish, just like your love for your loved one, and it is a strong sign of preparedness when you buy tools for future holidays before the current one is here.

» Risky eBay alternative: After reading that, you might ask yourself, “Well, I can’t cook, Ernie. What am I supposed to do?” And I might suggest buying a heart-shaped-pizza-shaped-jigsaw-puzzle from the eBay site, because the pizza you would make would probably taste like cardboard anyway.

It’s pretty funny that I wrote the piece about failed social networks in June, rather than November, when it would have been a lot more culturally relevant. But hey, sometimes the calendar year generates surprises all year long. From a gift standpoint, now feels like a good time to look back at some of the stories around the formation of prominent social networks—Nick Bilton’s Hatching Twitter feels like a good one for someone who wants a little irony in their life, as does Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires, a title that is funnier now that we’ve seen what said accidental billionaire is spending all of his company’s money on, legs. Also worthy of the list is A Very Public Offering, which tells the story of theGlobe.com, which hit on the Facebook idea while Mark Zuckerberg was still in middle school, but imploded on the stock market.

» Risky eBay alternative: If, like Christina Warren, you collect the merch of failed companies, you might enjoy this postcard featuring branding from the forgotten social site SixDegrees.

In case you ever doubted my online-junk-sleuthing skills, you should know that I was able to put them to good use a couple of months back when I surfaced an online network created by USA Today that even people who work at USA Today didn’t even know existed. One of the things I learned when writing about this piece is that floppy drives are somewhat sensitive, so it might be good to back up the disks before using them. So if you have a vintage computer hound in your life, I recommend buying them a couple IDE-to-SD adapters, which can take the place of a hard drive in an old computer and even moved over to a modern machine that is capable of handling the stored data through emulation. Plus, unlike CompactFlash, you can actually still find SD card readers on reasonably modern devices. You never know when that old floppy drive is going to eat a disk, so in the words of an unsigned postcard I got yesterday, stay vigilant.

» Risky eBay alternative: If you have a vintage software enthusiast in your life who want a copy of this thing, yes, there are a couple on eBay, of varying quality. The boxes are still shrink-wrapped, but don’t be afraid to open them up if you want to experience the nostalgia up close.

I guess I should probably close out by spending a few minutes talking about what I think could be best described as an eight-year itch, as we are now nearing the end of year eight of this grand experiment in writing about basically whatever we feel like.

Are things still working after all of this time? Is this still a viable model? I think the answer is yes—people still like reading this, and it still maintains a presence in the mainstream conversation. Hey, it was like three weeks ago that our story found interest from the folks at NPR.

I think though that the two-days-a-week model is a bit limiting in terms of our ambitions, given that nearly every other newsletter of this depth publishes weekly, and the email space is significantly busier than it was when we started.

My idea, long-term, is to take the time spent on the second newsletter and put it into bigger projects, such as collaborations with other writers and creators under the Tedium brand, as well as bringing back the zine as a regular product, probably quarterly. We did a recent pop-up newsletter on MidRange that was well-received, and I think there is an opportunity to leverage interesting projects like that with this brand if I can come up with a way to balance the value of what we do with the grind of it all, so the creative output is at its strongest and that grind is more like buffing the edges rather than sanding them off.

I would also like to figure out a way to make this less predicated on sponsorships and advertising, while still reaching the ultimate goal of making everything we build freely accessible online. So yes, I’m thinking about a paywall of sorts, but in a way that doesn’t just lock history behind a key or leave people out. I always hated when sites do that, which is why I never got into the Substack thing, but I think there’s a way to add value for those who really love reading Tedium without taking it away from the average reader.

I’m still nailing down the details of what, exactly, this looks like, but in my deep-seated interest in making sure I’m not shaking up the apple tree unexpectedly, I figured I’d raise the question to you, my longtime reader. Feel free to reply to this. Tell us how our driving is.

And may you have a great art-meets-commerce holiday season.

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Find this one an interesting read? Share it with a pal! And if anything sounded at all interesting in this list, check out our Amazon Idea List for this year’s gift guide; maybe you’ll somehow get inspired?

P.S.: We have now added Mastodon share buttons to our website and newsletter. May they prove helpful as you share content outside of a corporate network.