Tedium, but less.

Now that Substack has turned into a social network, I feel the need to be here. Might as well mine the archives.

A GIF from one of Tedium’s first issues, circa January 2015.

If you told me that six years ago, the guy who reached out to convince me to turn Tedium into a paid newsletter was going to end up launching the network that was going to have the best possible shot of destroying Twitter, I might have given Substack more of a chance. True story: I was asked to join Substack at a time when it was literally Bill Bishop and Daniel Lavery …

… and I said no.

Given what has happened since in the newsletter space, you might think I was crazy for that! But the thing is, I had been burned by another large platform a few years earlier, and I prefer the open Web over centralization. I didn’t want to give my life’s work to another platform, even one that seemed friendly and untested.

Saying no gave me some advantages. I have emerged as something of a consistent critic of Substack over the years. I’m sure whenever Hamish sees the Google alert after I go on a rant, he sighs loudly.

But ethical qualms put aside for the moment, I look at Substack Notes, and keep thinking about it, and ultimately, I can’t get past the truth: I need to embrace Substack in a real way, one that actually meets this place halfway while allowing me to keep my independent thing.

Substack Notes is good, and I want to be part of that community because a lot of people I respect are there. Despite my discomfort, I will get past my frustration that this platform can’t handle the fact that some writers can f&*!ing code.

I am also in a new stage of my career and recently went full-time freelance for the first time. I want content to share on this new social network. And I don’t want to have my tires stick in the mud so aggressively.

So hence, I am going to take a dive into the Tedium archives. I have covered so many thousands of things over the years on Tedium that I can feasibly turn some of them into quick-hit, 200-word pieces and make them palatable to the masses.

This is going to be a 100% free newsletter, one you will never be asked to pay for. It is here to show my support for the social network, and if it doesn’t work, it may disappear. But I will at least try it.

I may link back to Tedium, but the goal of this newsletter will never be to fill your inbox with junk. Just old content. Maybe a link to a sponsor from time to time. But you, me, and a weird fact I wrote in a weird story five years ago. That’s it.

Anyway, subscribe if you feel like it. Maybe this’ll be fun.