Earlier this year, I wrote a big thing about where self-hosting was going, and looked at a number of emerging software tools. One comment I heard as I went deep into all the competing tools is that some folks just kind of wanted a template to work with. Less magnifying glass, more 30,000-foot view.

This time, I’m going to keep it simple. Like last time, I’m doing this with the support of a review unit, the Acemagic K1. This particular unit is more of a modest player in the modern computing landscape, essentially an embedded AMD processor retrofitted in a mini-PC context. At the moment, this unit sells for $349 ($319 with coupon) on Amazon in its 16GB/256GB configuration. (There are faster processors with this form factor, generally hitting below the $500 mark.) Unlike the Kamrui machine I reviewed in the last piece, this isn’t overpowered for its use case. It’s good enough to do Plex and run a Syncthing server. That’s really all the average person needs.

I ran the installer on Windows, and it worked fine, and it handled my dock, even though the device does not support USB4, leaving it out of the Thunderbolt conversation. (My Dell Thunderbolt dock has a built-in chip to downstep to USB 3.2. I bought it cheap on eBay—best purchase in a while.) But if you buy this machine, be aware that it’s not a screamer. The Ryzen R2544 embedded chip outpaces Intel’s N150 processor, a common low-end chip in mini PCs, but you’re not buying this to game. You’re buying this because you need a device to drop somewhere, and you aren’t going to look at it more than a couple times.

(One general note on Plex, Jellyfin, and similar video-hosting tools: While this will certainly work, you likely want Intel or even a Mac Mini for that use case, because video encoding is a weak spot for AMD. But not every mini PC has to be a Plex machine or game console.)

That’s not much SSD space, nor is it maxing out your RAM, but it is enough to do some pretty basic self-hosting stuff. With that in mind, we’re not going to reinvent the wheel here. I’m going to recommend about half a dozen tools that can be hosted by just about anyone, that hit broad use cases, and that actually make sense for a low-end computer with 256 gigs of storage.

The tools in question:

• Immich, a very good Google Photos alternative
• Linkwarden, a link management tool akin to the late, lamented Pocket
• Vaultwarden, a password management platform based on Bitwarden
• Syncthing, a file-syncing platform that’s akin to a locally hosted Dropbox
• CryptPad, an encrypted office suite that’s hopefully less annoying to install than NextCloud
• Hermes Agent, because I refuse to put OpenClaw on this thing but realize folks are probably curious about this

These all cover various common self-hosting use cases, none of which require video or Steam. In the case of all of these you can technically host everything in your own little bubble, though in the case of Hermes you’re realistically going to be plugging it into an external LLM.

The idea with this is that I’ll set it up once, I’ll occasionally update it, and it will just do its thing, syncing data and offering a home for old photos and a backup repository for secure data.

Not blazing fast, but perfectly useful

Some notes about the machine: It is not a beast; it’s perfectly cromulent. Per my Geekbench test in Windows, it got a score of just 900 in single core and 3000 in multi-core. (It slightly bested those numbers in Linux.) That’s actually on the low end of performance for this chip. But it’s still a little faster than a Raspberry Pi 5 or an N150, though not by much. More notably, it’s also slower than an AMD Ryzen 3 4300U, which on paper, it should be faster than, as it has a higher TDP (45W vs. 15W), more threads, and a higher clock speed. But with the processor capped at 28W in the machine, it makes the device run a little more modestly. Alas.

Why does it underperform? Simply: the RAM is both on the slower DDR4 standard and there's only one chip of it in the machine. (You generally want two separate RAM chips for dual-channel memory.) To put another way: This is a solvable problem if you’re able to upgrade it.

How hard is that upgrade? Well, it’s very much possible, with a couple of notes. First, the screwholes, hiding under the rubber feet, are recessed in a way that a relatively standard iFixit screwdriver can’t easily fit inside, which made it harder to open than it needed to be. And second, the expandability is on the top of the board, not the bottom, which means you need to take the machine completely apart. (It’s not locked down like Fort Knox or anything, or even that complex a box, but that does complicate a simple upgrade.)

But the nice thing about mini PCs is that, once they’re set up it’s set-and-forget. And at a time when buying a computer costs more than ever, a device that hits around $300 still feels perfectly reasonable.

A normie distro, a normie self-hosting strategy

My first steps for this process involved installing the most normie of Linux distros, Linux Mint. (I specifically installed it so it automatically logs in, which is important for this use case.)

My goal: To set up the machine with a bunch of Docker containers, then set it up so those containers could be accessed on Tailscale and nothing else. Tailscale is available on basically every device you can think of, and you can even enable ssh for it. Once that’s set up, you can ssh in from another machine on your “tailnet” and do all your work on it, with the mini PC completely headless. But on those rare occasions you do need to hop into a GUI, you have Mint right there.

So, after doing some prep work in a virtual machine, including building out the docker-compose files I would be using, I copied those files from the VM to the live machine using scp. Big time saver, and one Tailscale makes particularly painless.

In terms of the Docker install, which has a couple modest bugaboos, I more or less followed the install process for Ubuntu. But instead of restarting the machine, something I obviously wanted to avoid given that I was in the terminal, I followed the post-installation process.

In the past when writing about these apps, I’ve at times courted disaster (see the nightmare I had to manage with Cal.com a few years ago). This time, however, it was relatively smooth sailing, thanks to a tool called dockge. It’s not packed with bells and whistles like Cosmos or as in-depth as Portainer, but it is simple and just kind of works. It makes launching a new container as easy as copying a bunch of docker-compose scripts and .env variables directly into a page on a Tailscale-provisioned website.

Some of my tools, like Syncthing and Immich, just worked. Others still required me to hit the terminal, particularly CryptPad, which presumes a two-URL setup to secure the stuff you’re working on. But given the hell that a NextCloud install can often be, it’s actually easier to set up than that mess of wires. I got Hermes working, complete with API wiring to DeepSeek and Xiaomi’s MiMo, and it did the job without taxing the device.

Yes, there were hiccups. CryptPad and Hermes-WebUI occasionally stuttered as I attempted to solve my https issues, with CryptPad in one case seemingly losing its data. (It might have been user error, to be fair.) The process of installing Docker containers is always full of bugaboos, and Tailscale adds a few.

I had to build custom scripts to get https to load over Tailscale, for example. They work, but point to a gap in Tailscale’s feature set; it should be smart enough to know that a Docker container is usually shared with https and account for that in its serving strategy. But instead, you’re having to reinvent the wheel every time you add a node to your tailnet, which feels counterproductive.

Your data needs a third place, too

You likely have friends and loved ones with nearby homes. Maybe you have an office. This computer could live in those places, and buy you some peace of mind. Because stuff happens. Your power goes out, and so does your homelab. But even if your normal sync machine is out of service, you can still save your data somewhere, just in case. With that in mind, I’m having this little box live offsite, because it’s just practical advice.

Could I take this build further? Very much so. I’m only sharing select data with this machine because, I don’t know if you heard, but SSDs are expensive these days. On top of everything else, I was able to get the remote-access tool RustDesk working on this device as well. There was a bit of setup involved, much of it more complex than a normal person might be willing to do, but I’m now able to hop into Mint and handle settings the graphical way if I so choose. Plus, there’s always the possibility of running the machine completely through a VPN. (Mullvad and Tailscale actually offer a service for this exact purpose, so you don’t have to choose or build a hacky solution.)

So how’d the Acemagic machine hold up to all this? Not bad! I didn’t see it choking at anything I threw at it. I was even able to get RustDesk to stream YouTube videos through it at 30fps, with completely synced audio.

It didn’t get hot or loud, either. A mini PC I’ve had for about five years frequently spins up and makes loud fan noises. I barely even noticed the Acemagic. It’s not high-end. It’s wrapped in cheap gray-and-black plastic. But it does the job, even if I have a sinking feeling that, in normal times, we’d never see a consumer device hit with this weird embedded processor.

This specific solution with the Acemagic machine is perfect for this kind of use case. It’s not a high-end machine—it’s light, and it’s got a pretty basic, barebones plastic design. But it doesn’t get hot. Plus, I have a feeling that if this was normal times we would see a better processor under the hood. But it’s more than capable enough with the right use case.

This is a step above a Raspberry Pi—and honestly, with all the price increases in the single-board computing world, it costs about as much as one. Things ain’t cheap out there, but you can still make a weekend project out of something like this.

Earlier this year, I wrote a big thing about where self-hosting was going, and looked at a number of emerging software tools. One comment I heard as I went deep into all the competing tools is that some folks just kind of wanted a template to work with. Less magnifying glass, more 30,000-foot view.

This time, I’m going to keep it simple. Like last time, I’m doing this with the support of a review unit, the Acemagic K1. This particular unit is more of a modest player in the modern computing landscape, essentially an embedded AMD processor retrofitted in a mini-PC context. At the moment, this unit sells for $349 ($319 with coupon) on Amazon in its 16GB/256GB configuration. (There are faster processors with this form factor, generally hitting below the $500 mark.) Unlike the Kamrui machine I reviewed in the last piece, this isn’t overpowered for its use case. It’s good enough to do Plex and run a Syncthing server. That’s really all the average person needs.

I ran the installer on Windows, and it worked fine, and it handled my dock, even though the device does not support USB4, leaving it out of the Thunderbolt conversation. (My Dell Thunderbolt dock has a built-in chip to downstep to USB 3.2. I bought it cheap on eBay—best purchase in a while.) But if you buy this machine, be aware that it’s not a screamer. The Ryzen R2544 embedded chip outpaces Intel’s N150 processor, a common low-end chip in mini PCs, but you’re not buying this to game. You’re buying this because you need a device to drop somewhere, and you aren’t going to look at it more than a couple times.

(One general note on Plex, Jellyfin, and similar video-hosting tools: While this will certainly work, you likely want Intel or even a Mac Mini for that use case, because video encoding is a weak spot for AMD. But not every mini PC has to be a Plex machine or game console.)

That’s not much SSD space, nor is it maxing out your RAM, but it is enough to do some pretty basic self-hosting stuff. With that in mind, we’re not going to reinvent the wheel here. I’m going to recommend about half a dozen tools that can be hosted by just about anyone, that hit broad use cases, and that actually make sense for a low-end computer with 256 gigs of storage.

The tools in question:

• Immich, a very good Google Photos alternative
• Linkwarden, a link management tool akin to the late, lamented Pocket
• Vaultwarden, a password management platform based on Bitwarden
• Syncthing, a file-syncing platform that’s akin to a locally hosted Dropbox
• CryptPad, an encrypted office suite that’s hopefully less annoying to install than NextCloud
• Hermes Agent, because I refuse to put OpenClaw on this thing but realize folks are probably curious about this

These all cover various common self-hosting use cases, none of which require video or Steam. In the case of all of these you can technically host everything in your own little bubble, though in the case of Hermes you’re realistically going to be plugging it into an external LLM.

The idea with this is that I’ll set it up once, I’ll occasionally update it, and it will just do its thing, syncing data and offering a home for old photos and a backup repository for secure data.

Not blazing fast, but perfectly useful

Some notes about the machine: It is not a beast; it’s perfectly cromulent. Per my Geekbench test in Windows, it got a score of just 900 in single core and 3000 in multi-core. (It slightly bested those numbers in Linux.) That’s actually on the low end of performance for this chip. But it’s still a little faster than a Raspberry Pi 5 or an N150, though not by much. More notably, it’s also slower than an AMD Ryzen 3 4300U, which on paper, it should be faster than, as it has a higher TDP (45W vs. 15W), more threads, and a higher clock speed. But with the processor capped at 28W in the machine, it makes the device run a little more modestly. Alas.

Why does it underperform? Simply: the RAM is both on the slower DDR4 standard and there's only one chip of it in the machine. (You generally want two separate RAM chips for dual-channel memory.) To put another way: This is a solvable problem if you’re able to upgrade it.

How hard is that upgrade? Well, it’s very much possible, with a couple of notes. First, the screwholes, hiding under the rubber feet, are recessed in a way that a relatively standard iFixit screwdriver can’t easily fit inside, which made it harder to open than it needed to be. And second, the expandability is on the top of the board, not the bottom, which means you need to take the machine completely apart. (It’s not locked down like Fort Knox or anything, or even that complex a box, but that does complicate a simple upgrade.)

But the nice thing about mini PCs is that, once they’re set up it’s set-and-forget. And at a time when buying a computer costs more than ever, a device that hits around $300 still feels perfectly reasonable.

A normie distro, a normie self-hosting strategy

My first steps for this process involved installing the most normie of Linux distros, Linux Mint. (I specifically installed it so it automatically logs in, which is important for this use case.)

My goal: To set up the machine with a bunch of Docker containers, then set it up so those containers could be accessed on Tailscale and nothing else. Tailscale is available on basically every device you can think of, and you can even enable ssh for it. Once that’s set up, you can ssh in from another machine on your “tailnet” and do all your work on it, with the mini PC completely headless. But on those rare occasions you do need to hop into a GUI, you have Mint right there.

So, after doing some prep work in a virtual machine, including building out the docker-compose files I would be using, I copied those files from the VM to the live machine using scp. Big time saver, and one Tailscale makes particularly painless.

In terms of the Docker install, which has a couple modest bugaboos, I more or less followed the install process for Ubuntu. But instead of restarting the machine, something I obviously wanted to avoid given that I was in the terminal, I followed the post-installation process.

In the past when writing about these apps, I’ve at times courted disaster (see the nightmare I had to manage with Cal.com a few years ago). This time, however, it was relatively smooth sailing, thanks to a tool called dockge. It’s not packed with bells and whistles like Cosmos or as in-depth as Portainer, but it is simple and just kind of works. It makes launching a new container as easy as copying a bunch of docker-compose scripts and .env variables directly into a page on a Tailscale-provisioned website.

Some of my tools, like Syncthing and Immich, just worked. Others still required me to hit the terminal, particularly CryptPad, which presumes a two-URL setup to secure the stuff you’re working on. But given the hell that a NextCloud install can often be, it’s actually easier to set up than that mess of wires. I got Hermes working, complete with API wiring to DeepSeek and Xiaomi’s MiMo, and it did the job without taxing the device.

Yes, there were hiccups. CryptPad and Hermes-WebUI occasionally stuttered as I attempted to solve my https issues, with CryptPad in one case seemingly losing its data. (It might have been user error, to be fair.) The process of installing Docker containers is always full of bugaboos, and Tailscale adds a few.

I had to build custom scripts to get https to load over Tailscale, for example. They work, but point to a gap in Tailscale’s feature set; it should be smart enough to know that a Docker container is usually shared with https and account for that in its serving strategy. But instead, you’re having to reinvent the wheel every time you add a node to your tailnet, which feels counterproductive.

Your data needs a third place, too

You likely have friends and loved ones with nearby homes. Maybe you have an office. This computer could live in those places, and buy you some peace of mind. Because stuff happens. Your power goes out, and so does your homelab. But even if your normal sync machine is out of service, you can still save your data somewhere, just in case. With that in mind, I’m having this little box live offsite, because it’s just practical advice.

Could I take this build further? Very much so. I’m only sharing select data with this machine because, I don’t know if you heard, but SSDs are expensive these days. On top of everything else, I was able to get the remote-access tool RustDesk working on this device as well. There was a bit of setup involved, much of it more complex than a normal person might be willing to do, but I’m now able to hop into Mint and handle settings the graphical way if I so choose. Plus, there’s always the possibility of running the machine completely through a VPN. (Mullvad and Tailscale actually offer a service for this exact purpose, so you don’t have to choose or build a hacky solution.)

So how’d the Acemagic machine hold up to all this? Not bad! I didn’t see it choking at anything I threw at it. I was even able to get RustDesk to stream YouTube videos through it at 30fps, with completely synced audio.

It didn’t get hot or loud, either. A mini PC I’ve had for about five years frequently spins up and makes loud fan noises. I barely even noticed the Acemagic. It’s not high-end. It’s wrapped in cheap gray-and-black plastic. But it does the job, even if I have a sinking feeling that, in normal times, we’d never see a consumer device hit with this weird embedded processor.

This specific solution with the Acemagic machine is perfect for this kind of use case. It’s not a high-end machine—it’s light, and it’s got a pretty basic, barebones plastic design. But it doesn’t get hot. Plus, I have a feeling that if this was normal times we would see a better processor under the hood. But it’s more than capable enough with the right use case.

This is a step above a Raspberry Pi—and honestly, with all the price increases in the single-board computing world, it costs about as much as one. Things ain’t cheap out there, but you can still make a weekend project out of something like this.

The scheme that Columbia House used to actually make money from its for-a-penny business model

Don’t think about Columbia House as a mail-order business for a second. Instead, think of it the same way you might think of a SaaS business. That business relies on your subscription in exchange for its services.

These services annoy the hell out of people. Just last night John Oliver was on HBO calling out the fact that subscription services are so hard to cancel.

It’s an innovation that arguably dates back to the days of Columbia House and its longtime competitor BMG. There was one big difference, though: It had to try to make this model work with checks, credit-card numbers over the phone, and the ever-awkward mail system. So what’s a company to do?

If you thought the answer to that not-so-rhetorical question is “something sketchy,” you’re on the money. Essentially Columbia House and similar “of-the-month clubs” utilized a technique called “negative-option marketing,” where you were essentially sent a product with a bill, even if you didn’t ask for it. The free CDs were a lead magnet targeted at middle America, and they worked extremely well.

But here’s the thing about negative-option marketing in the case of mail-order goods: You never signed a contract when Columbia House sent you that random country album that you weren’t interested in. And as a 2009 Federal Trade Commission report made clear:

Negative option marketing can pose serious financial risks to consumers if appropriate disclosures are not made and consumers are billed for goods or services without their consent. With the explosion of Internet marketing over the past ten years, negative option offers are as much a fixture of online advertising as in any other advertising media.

Obviously, this kind of marketing has become even more of a problem online. (If a service charges you for a full year of service without warning you, it’s the same concept.) But fortunately, you have some legal precedent in your favor. For one thing, you don’t have to pay for unsolicited merchandise according to federal law.

An example of this is a book service with a similar model, Bottom Line Books, which renamed itself a few years ago. In 2012, Consumer Affairs reporter Mark Huffman wrote about situation where a reader of theirs received a book they didn’t ask for, along with a bill. He recommended sending Bottom Line Books and similar companies a letter.

“While you are not obligated to send a letter to the company stating your intention to keep the merchandise as a free gift, it’s usually a good idea to do so,” he explained at the time. “Your letter may stop the company from sending you repeated bills, and if it’s simply an honest mistake, the letter may help clear the air. You should send the letter by certified mail and keep the return receipt and a copy for your files.”

That story is a bit old at this point, and the modern internet basically has a thousand examples of similar things sitting in your inbox. But it nonetheless reflects the scene that Columbia House swam in.

Put a bonnet on it: How American Greetings created a farm system for original kid-friendly characters

The early 1980s are often seen as the heyday of animated TV shows, and for good reason. The concepts were creative and vibrant, if not quite so educational. Plus, they had the nice side effect of creating a halo around which millions of dollars worth of toys could be sold.

But that also meant identifying properties that could actually translate to a TV setting. And surprisingly, the greeting card industry was extremely well-positioned to take advantage of the growing popularity of cartoons.

While the industry wasn’t exactly known for animating stuff, it did foster numerous graphic artists, including a few that found significant success in popular culture. Most famously, Robert Crumb parlayed his early career as a staff artist for American Greetings to build a second career at the forefront of the underground comix movement. He took advantage of the company’s lax remote-work standards to build a name for himself. (Admittedly, the animated feature based on his Fritz the Cat character would not be a good Saturday-morning option.)

Meanwhile, Crumb’s boss Tom Wilson had found huge success—and a merch opportunity for his employer with Ziggy. And not to be outdone, former Hallmark artist Russell Myers had launched a strip of his own, Broom-Hilda, which had already been adapted in animated form more than once during the 1970s.

Put simply, there was already evidence that the greeting card industry could generate ideas that might have a life beyond greeting cards. The sector just needed to lean into the opportunity.

The Cleveland-based American Greetings, as highlighted by Wilson’s existing success, had the inside lane. On top of Ziggy, the company had already seen success with Holly Hobbie, a young girl dressed in rags and a bonnet who loved cats. (Presumably she helped popularize the “crazy cat lady” meme.)

The company soon doubled down by taking those two characters and developing a third from the ground up. The idea started off in the early ’70s as a simple, cute illustration on a greeting card meant for a granddaughter. Holding a giant daisy and wearing a bonnet with strawberries on it, it evoked a certain kind of cuteness that made it hugely popular. Clearly, it was something a smart greeting card company had to capitalize on.

And capitalize American Greetings did. After a bit more R&D, along with a redesign to make the bonnet more central to the character’s whole vibe, that drawing became Strawberry Shortcake, which first appeared in 1977. It quickly outpaced Holly Hobbie, growing so successful that by 1979, the company had already set up multi-million dollar marketing deals with Kenner and General Mills. A Plain Dealer piece from that year noted that Kenner predicted that Shortcake toys would outsell Star Wars toys, which sounds like a bold bet, indeed.

In a recent interview with Cleveland Magazine, Muriel Fahrion, the artist who designed Strawberry Shortcake, credited General Mills’ Bernie Loomis for the question that led Strawberry Shortcake to blow up. His ask, per Fahrion: “What do you have that’s for girls which will be just as big as Star Wars is with boys?”

The gritty B-movie that inspired the series Breaking Bad.

It paid off quickly: Per one 1981 story, Strawberry Shortcake drew more than $100 million in sales in its first year and $300 million in its second year, much of that coming from toy sales.

A bolder bet came in March 1981, when, on the heels of Strawberry Shortcake successfully raising the glucose levels of the American public, American Greetings launched a sub-brand just for product licensing called Those Characters from Cleveland. Wilson, who arguably kicked off the trend, was made co-president of the endeavor.

It turns out, a big part of the reason they did this is that they had something huge on the horizon, way huger than anything the company had ever launched before.

A bull market for bears: The huge bet American Greetings made on the Care Bears

A few weeks before the creation of Those Characters From Cleveland, American Greetings executives met with officials from Kenner to show off a new set of characters it was working on. The Care Bears effectively were a bet that teddy bears could be updated for the ’80s, one developed with a toy company, Kenner, and a food company that also made toys, General Mills. And it basically nailed its audience to a T.

When Kenner saw the bears, developed by cartoonist Dave Polter and greeting card artist Elena Kucharik, it immediately felt like a slam dunk.

“They loved it right away. It was an undeniable concept,” recalled Ralph Shaffer, the subsidiary’s co-president, in an interview with Cleveland Magazine.

But a successful concept is one thing. The secret to making it all work is the execution. And for the Care Bears, the plan was surprisingly complex.

A 1982 Cleveland Plain-Dealer piece described a complex, high value plan to launch the concept to the public. American Greetings wasn’t just launching it themselves, but had already gotten a number of other companies on as licensees. Rather than putting all its eggs into a single basket, American Greetings was flooding every retail channel it could.

It didn’t even matter if you liked the Care Bears. In 1983, you knew everything about them. Their various cartoon series, starting with a pair of specials before expanding to a full series, aimed for a particularly young audience of viewers, perhaps the same audience of youngsters that might have watched Sesame Street.

An R-rated scene from the action-packed, brutally violent movie Pulp Fiction.

That meant that when the inevitable movie came out, it created an interesting set of circumstances. It turns out that in the mid-’80s, in the years immediately before the Disney renaissance, there just weren’t many movies targeting six-year-olds. (Anyone who knows the history of the MPAA’s G rating probably isn’t surprised.) And as a result, the film’s release became a relative hit in the spring of 1985, scoring $22 million in the U.S. alone, about $68 million with inflation.

(Not to get all Professor Coldheart over here, but like many young boys of the era, I didn’t see the appeal.)

The reported initial spend on all that Care Bears merch? An eye-watering $122.5 million, well above that of Strawberry Shortcake’s initial outlay. A solid $6 million of that alone went to advertising in print and broadcast mediums. American Greetings bet on Care Bears like it was a sure thing, and the American public responded by proving them right. By the time the first movie came out (there were three during the original ’80s heyday), it was already a billion-dollar business all on its own.

Why did Care Bears pop off so much? It’s worth noting that, at this time, a desire for personalization was starting to creep into our toys. Another major trend picking up speed in 1983 was the Cabbage Patch Kids. That doll’s signature feature was that each face was unique and came with a certificate and name, playing into the idea of adoption. Care Bears didn’t go quite that far, but the many types of bears meant that there was one for every disposition. Plus, it’s worth noting that teddy bears were the archetype of the modern toy, so there was already a built-in market of people ready to buy lots of stuffed animals.

A scene from Care Bears: Unlock the Magic, or as I like to think of it, Inglourious Basterds.

As juggernauts go, it made Ziggy seem kind of like a ripple to the massive splash the Care Bears made—one strong enough that there have been constant revivals over the years, both in film and on television. There was even a long-running recent revival of the series, Care Bears: Unlock the Magic, which ran for over five years.

While other American Greetings properties have had success over the years—Strawberry Shortcake has also seen a number of revivals—it’s Care Bears that have set the high watermark for greeting-card franchises.

Unfortunately, that means that the rest of the industry had to pick up the scraps.

Raccoons with shirts: Why Hallmark’s greeting-card characters never hit Strawberry Shortcake’s heights

It’s worth noting that Care Bears got much of the attention in the 1980s, but there was already a similar line of well-established characters on the market by then, the Shirt Tales.

That set of characters, created by Hallmark around 1980, was the company’s first real merchandising success after a number of attempts. And unlike American Greetings’ own properties, which relied on Canadian animation houses, one-off specials, and TV syndication for much of their run, the Shirt Tales had a Hanna-Barbera pedigree and were surrounded by a similar megahit: The Smurfs.

Behind-the-scenes of the band GWAR hanging out in their dressing room.

Unfortunately, while successful greeting cards, the Shirt Tales series didn’t quite connect in the long run. The show ran for two seasons—paling in comparison to The Smurfs, which ran for eight and were taking up a 90-minute block of NBC’s Saturday mornings. And while I did own a Shirt Tales drum kit as a kid, I’m sure (like Josh Groban) I’m part of the only generation that had one of those.

In his 2018 book on Hanna-Barbera, cultural historian Jared Bahir Browsh slagged the series and pointed out that American Greetings more or less beat them at their own game—while giving Canadian animation houses an inroad into the U.S.:

The low-quality animation and the basic if not illogical storylines that often found the characters wandering into precarious situations with no one, although they lived in a populated community hurt the series. Shirt Tales was also scheduled against Pac-Man and Warner Brothers shorts, The series was largely ignored during its surprising two-season run on NBC.

Adding true insult to the injury that was the failure of the Shirt Tales cartoon series was the fact that The Care Bears, a series created by the “Those Characters from Cleveland” division of American Greetings, starred in their first special in the Spring of 1983 in conjunction with a highly successful plush toy line produced by Kenner.

One reason the Care Bears blew up and the Shirt Tales ripple was a bit less pronounced, according to Browsh? “These series, particularly the Care Bears, attracted young females, an afterthought for many animators.”

But another factor might actually be that the concept of the Shirt Tales wasn’t built from the ground-up to be a media empire in quite the same way the Care Bears were. American Greetings essentially built the franchise from the ground up to include cards, toys, and cartoons. Meanwhile, Hanna-Barbera essentially had to invent a storyline for a bunch of animals who had nothing in common other than that they wore T-shirts. That led to some left-field choices to fill in the gaps, like making Bogey Orangutan talk kinda like Humphrey Bogart.

To be clear, if cartoons made out of disparate intellectual property were going to work, the early ’80s were the time for it. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, built around a collection of toys, had the thinnest of source material before Filmation got its hands on it—and it still became one of the decade’s biggest media franchises. But put simply, Those Characters from Cleveland more or less killed it because its animators and business team treated the process of character development like an R&D shop, not as a happy accident.

An old horror movie that they only pull out when Svengoolie needs a break.

That said, Hallmark had other properties it was more than happy to lean into. Its Rainbow Brite franchise, launched with a model closer to the Care Bears, saw somewhat more success in mediums outside of cards, in part because it actually had a story and a coordinated marketing strategy. Anything to prevent a world without color, right?

But while it has seen revivals over the years (a fresh one is apparently in the works), it’s no Strawberry Shortcake or Care Bears on the public-perception front. Unlike Care Bears, which lasted numerous seasons, Rainbow Brite found an audience based on just a 13-episode run and a 1985 movie. Shirt Tales had more episodes, but Rainbow Brite is the product line Hallmark still makes.

I can’t make any good jokes for this one, so you’re stuck with a boring old cutline.

More recently, Hallmark has found success with the Flash-era personalities Hoops & Yoyo, which were big enough in the 2000s and 2010s to have prime-time holiday specials. But Hallmark’s brand has traditionally been less character-driven than American Greetings.

Which is to say that, while other greeting card companies tried building brands, this was really American Greetings’ lane. The company had successful launches later in the ’80s with My Pet Monster and Popples, and American Greetings even created its own successful line of toys, Madballs.

But you know one thing that American Greetings never had that Hallmark does? A hugely popular, widely viewed cable channel—one that Rainbow Brite has barely appeared on.

I remember when I came up with my first idea that I shared with the world.

It was a dating site for people who didn’t want to share photos of themselves, but build text-only connections. I didn’t know what I was doing; I only really knew HTML and CSS at this point. The idea, so esoteric, died on the vine; I often forget about it myself.

Eventually, I found another idea that I thought had real potential. But I had a different reason for building it: Beyond having been laid off, I hated not finishing projects, and I wanted to understand what it would feel like to see something through.

So, I did. That became my site ShortFormBlog. It was a lot of work, and a lot of heart went into it. At the time, there were always new, weird things that emerged online.

This spirit of creation is what gave us interesting sites like Hacker News and Product Hunt, where something new is always on display.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I’ve seen a sudden surge of emails highlighting various new projects, some seemingly personal, some clearly the start of new businesses or viral plays. And I don’t want to take away from that spirit of creation, which has given me so much over the years. But I think there’s a danger in how much AI gets used for these projects. I’m not going to name names, nor attack any one user, but I do want to note that it’s often quite clear, when these projects land on my doorstep, where they come from.

Generally, they start with a message that attempts to flatter my work or highlight just how much of a fit their thing really is with my thing. But when I click in, it’s clear that so much of what’s been built, soup to nuts, is AI. Even the email is AI, which is why it’s so flattering. I’ve been around long enough to know that it’s often not a personal note, but a hustle of sorts.

Unlike in the 2010s, when a new startup pitching a thing felt like a PR email, these messages instead come across as being of the spirit that I created my projects. And given that it’s messaging like a personalized can-do project while actually being a PR email, it has started to bother me.

I haven’t been able to figure out why I’ve been feeling this way about these messages, but a story that blew up over the weekend I think really made it clear.

Did Claude copy an app idea wholesale?

Earlier this year, Terry Godier won a lot of fans among techies for suggesting a new approach to RSS readers, which became his Mac and iOS app Current. He’s continued to build ideas like that, along with an impressive blog, when he ran into a bit of a snag with his latest app, an astronomy app named Dark Hours.

The app was blocked from the App Store after a review, with Apple citing the app’s astrology content, a category it has long banned. Astronomy isn’t astrology, you’re thinking, right? That’s what Daring Fireball’s John Gruber also thought when he wrote a full-throated defense of the app, based in part on a behind-the-scenes conversation with Godier. Turns out, it started as an astrology app, only to become an astronomy app. (Weird leap, right?) That undermined the entire point of Gruber’s post, and led to a rare retraction from Gruber.

If that was all, that’d be one thing. But the app, built with the help of Claude, appeared to be a close copy of another open-source app built with Claude. The creator of the existing project called Godier out, and shit really hit the fan at that point. Godier responded by stopping distribution of his app and encouraging people to use the existing open-source Dark Hours.

Some are skeptical of Godier’s explanation of what happened, given that he appears to have misled Gruber. Godier denies even being aware of the other app, but he used the same name, and the developer shared specific examples of ideas copied from the existing tool. The optics ain’t great.

I’m not going to credit malice, as I’m not close enough to say whether he did anything wrong. But it does dovetail into the problem that I’ve been seeing in my inbox.

When you can’t trust the weekend tinkerer

Technology has long been a space of hustlers, of people who want to impress. By that standard, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are two of the greatest hustlers that ever lived. But my heart has always been with the people just getting started and trying the new thing, as that’s always the mode I’ve seen myself in.

Which is why I’ve been at least mildly optimistic about vibe coding helping make room for new types of creatives. I’ve never liked the “learn to code” gatekeepery stuff and I certainly don’t want to gatekeep people who just want to see an idea through. But there’s clearly a problem when people building new things, going through the steps of launching it and sharing it with the world, can’t even write the email announcing the thing themselves.

I’ve been clear in my views of AI, the bionic arms of it all. I don’t think it’s necessarily dangerous if you’re being honest about what you’re doing and why. But if you’re building a thing, there has to be a point when the tool stops and you begin. I don’t mean that you even have to code the damn thing if you don’t know how; I reject gatekeeping every day of the week and refuse to take a knee-jerk approach to artificial intelligence. (If gatekeeping is bad in one situation, it is bad in every situation.) But I do think it needs to reflect you, your passions, and your creativity.

If the Dark Hours situation is true, and Claude did end up copying an existing open-source project and turning it into an app, the whole idea of whether you created it becomes an open question. But even if it isn’t, an infusion of your own interests and personality go a long way to make that story yours.

That spirit of creation, which got me so excited about the internet when I first got online, is real. Back in 2009, I helped a random site that I thought was interesting but was poorly coded with a redesign, just because I thought it would help make it successful, and because I thought it could bring me traffic. (It did, on both counts. I didn’t ask to be paid for it, I just liked scratching someone else’s back.)

I’m seeing email after email suggesting these users built a thing they’re truly passionate about. But if we can’t trust that this passion is real, legit, and from the heart, we’re in trouble.

Take a step back. Is this thing you built a reflection of you?

A few months ago, when I was walking around a mall on a ninety-something-degree day. I made a claim to my wife that I thought profound, but she kind of saw through pretty quickly.

“If you walked through a mall 20 years ago, everyone would basically look the same,” I said, noting that fashion has barely shifted since the mid-2000s. She called bullshit, noting that folks simply wearing T-shirts and jeans and khakis wasn’t enough to say we still dress the same.

But when we caught Nirvanna the Band The Show the Movie recently, I felt some modest vindication. The entire time-travel plot of the movie only really works because of this point I highlighted. If the characters found themselves in 1995, the fashions would be dramatically different; but in 2008, little would change, minus the kinds of phones in their hands.

However, it’s clear that something did in fact change since then, and Glen Hansard’s recent passing highlights the lingering background subtlety. Throughout the 2000s, a crop of extremely earnest singer-songwriters found an audience through various means. Dudes like Damien Rice and Damien Jurado come to mind, as do dudes like Josh Rouse and Josh Ritter. (As well as people who don’t share first names.)

On the indie-leaning end of things, Iron & Wine, Devendra Banhart, Fleet Foxes, José González, and Bon Iver gave this organic, folky sound a sense of ambition. (Some, like Mark Kozelek, leave us with deep senses of regret.) If you were a white guy with a beard and wanted to express your feelings in song, there were many lanes for your acoustic guitar in the mid-2000s.

Hansard, who busked his way to success in his home country of Ireland with The Frames, didn’t look like he’d make it to the mainstream in America. (Like Ritter, he was initially huge in Ireland and basically nowhere else.) But a chance opportunity to revive a latent skill he had picked up in the 1990s, acting, accidentally became a breakout moment. Once, the film he starred in with Markéta Irglová, was a revelation, and one that largely holds up after two decades. And yes, it both won an Oscar and had a memorable acceptance speech.

You think people playing music on their phone while riding the bus was annoying? You clearly haven’t been on a bus where a dude was playing a guitar.

That said, though there are some points of discomfort with the film today. The 18-year age difference between Hansard and Irglová, who became a couple during the film’s production, would likely come off as more scandalous if it came out today, especially given Irglová’s young age. (More recent awards favorite Licorice Pizza faced that kind of controversy.) Also unfortunate is the extended motorcycle scene, which sadly means that the film has a built-in reminder of how Hansard died.

As The Swell Season, Hansard and Irglová had continued their partnership off and on over the past two decades, in between Hansard’s solo career and the occasional Frames reunion. But their romantic partnership ended long ago in a too-much-too-fast rush. The music stayed behind.

Eventually, this acoustic sound expanded into the “stomp-clap-hey” side of indie that infiltrated the 2010s. That sound has gotten some harsh criticism in retrospect. But I think as well, our desires for new musical voices, in more ways than one, began to emerge.

These days, when a dude picks up a guitar, there’s a lot of production behind the playing because it’s easier to access said production. With modern production equipment, it’s easier than ever to get a specific sound from any era in the past 50 years.

But in the mid-2000s, the earthy sound, while not sounding dated to modern ears, was familiar and comforting. Alas, it was too often a thousand shades of the same thing. One of the most important musical trends of the 2010s was that singer-songwritery music expanded beyond the white-male-centric construct that Once exemplifies. Artists like Adrianne Lenker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Waxahatchee have built the kinds of admirable artistic dynasties that Hansard did in the ’90s and 2000s, but arguably with more underlying complexity. (Irglová, who now lives in Iceland, also has a pretty solid solo career of her own.)

The full-band version of “Falling Slowly” could have absolutely dominated in an alternate-universe 2006.

It’s worth noting that our image of Hansard as a king of the buskers is not a complete image, even if it’s the one that’s gonna stick with him. It’s overshadowed now by his post-Once work, but The Frames initially had more in common with the Pixies than Snow Patrol.

Pondering Snow Patrol for a second here: The Cost was mining a very similar sound to what Snow Patrol, a Northern Ireland band and Grey’s Anatomy favorite, was doing in 2006. It was arguably better, but it was Snow Patrol who dominated American radio. The Frames could have bubbled over just as easily as Once eventually did.

Folk never died; its sound just gradually shifted. It hits differently than it did in this mid-2000s era when it seemed like a dude with a guitar and an earnest story about a challenging relationship could change the world.

Now, we seem to expect something different from our acoustic musical icons. The sounds are still tradition-steeped, but the messages are often more tied to our digital era. Dudes like Jesse Welles are soundtracking the news and talking about politics rather than relationship politics; the colors aren’t quite the same.

Going back to my metaphor about malls not changing, I think music production hasn’t changed much since the late ’90s. Or, it doesn’t sound like it has. Cher’s “Believe” is like some dividing line. Every big radio single that came afterward can feasibly hang on radio in 2026. But a clean digital sound is like the jeans and hoodies of music production. We’ve settled on a norm, and odds are, it won’t go out of style.

What has changed is the message and heart in that sound. As a twentysomething music nerd, I was obsessed with musicians like Hansard, and in a way, I still am. But the earnestness that sucked you in? It’s there, but it has a different vibe.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’m gonna miss the guy and his earnest music. It’s of a different, arguably better era.

The pricing gun: Where the hell did it come from?

It turns out that searching for something called a “pricing gun” is kind of tough to do. As our search engines have declined, anything with the word “gun” on it is suspect, even if it’s for something fairly innocuous.

But the pricing gun is nonetheless an excellent example of a device that has helped millions of people identify shifting prices, yet is only truly used in one context: Retail. You can clearly see the roots of where it came from by taking separate, unrelated ideas and combining them. You can look at things like combination locks, typewriters, and rubber stamps, and see how they were combined in novel ways to produce an iconic piece of supermarket kit.

In many ways, the pricing gun, which at its root takes a sticker with self-stick adhesive, prints a price on it, and tags it on a product, is a synthesis of multiple ideas that, together, created something new. We talked about one, self-stick adhesive (terrible name upon its initial release BTW), six years ago. Great innovation by the adhesive giant now known as Avery Dennison, but not one that was designed to scale. Imagine putting a label on every single product in a grocery store, by hand, writing the prices out, cutting the stickers, and so on. It would be the definition of Tedium.

But there were other lanes for price labeling that were already starting to emerge. Consider the printing process, for example, which essentially involved pressing metal or rubberized content onto ink, then taking the ink-stained surface and pressing it onto a sheet of paper. These were once parts of giant machines, but they could also be made handheld or somewhat more portable. The first commercial typewriter, the Hansen Writing Ball, feels like it could’ve been used for price tags if put in a slightly different context. All of this fed into the idea of the handheld “rubber stamp,” which gradually gained a “self-inking” capability, which meant that you didn’t even need an inkwell to dip them in.

Meanwhile, innovations in the combination lock during the 1870s began to bleed to similar tools. If you make the numbers on a combination lock lean outward rather than inward, the wheels could be used not unlike a printing press. So you can see where this is going!

All of this led to the Bates Automatic Numbering Machine, a press-down device Edwin G. Bates patented around 1901. While intended for checks and similar documents, the approach is fairly similar to how a price tagger works. You set the number, you press down on the page, and then it goes to the next number for the next page. This device helped to reshape the legal industry in particular, as pages could now easily be numbered, and became known enough that “Bates numbering” became a common business-world shorthand. In fact, some later versions of the device could keep the same number for multiple stamps.

This was clearly the path that led to adjustable price tagging, though other inventors took the helm. At the turn of the 20th century, Frederick Kohnle of the Automatic Pin Ticketing Machine Company effectively brought this process to price tags of the kind that might be attached to clothing, rather than to stickers. (It wasn’t quite handheld, but you can see the DNA bleed through.)

Another inventor working in the same area, William G. Metcalf, developed a pricing ticket machine, and as The Price Gun Store notes, the patents ultimately came under Kohnle’s ownership.

Kohnle has a lot of patent filings to his name around pricing tagging technology, so while he didn’t necessarily create the pricing gun, he likely created the environment that led to its eventual creation. His innovations live through to the modern day in another company he founded, Monarch Tag and Label—which is, of course, now owned by Avery Dennison and specializes in pricing guns.

Monarch, which also spent time as a subsidiary of Pitney Bowes, developed one of the most important direct predecessors to the modern pricing gun, the “Dial-A-Pricer,” in the 1950s. But it wasn’t the only one. As the 2023 book Fixing Prices: A Century of Setting, Posting and Adjusting Retail Prices notes, a number of related solutions started to emerge around the same period, most notably the Garvey price stamper, invented by Ed Garvey in the 1950s.

What’s interesting is that Google Patents appears to have a full-on example of a pricing gun patent filed in the 1940s, predating Monarch’s own gun-shaped attempts. But there’s no evidence that the device, developed by Robert S. Kafka for the Midland Equipment Corp., ever meaningfully made it to market—literally no information about the invention, beyond a defunct-company listing in the Robert D. Fisher Manual of Valuable and Worthless Securities, exists beyond the patent. Other companies eventually developed their own versions, including Monarch and Garvey, along with the Japanese company SATO.

But Kafka’s innovation is definitely worth our time, as it diagnoses the problem thoughtfully:

In stores, and particularly in stores where large numbers of articles are to be price-tagged, the labor of affixing the price tags is very great. For instance, if 1,000 glasses are to be labelled “$.39,” it is necessary to take a thousand labels, write, print, or type the price upon each one, after which the operator is required to separate the protective backing tape from the adhesive side of the label and apply the label to the glass. This entire operation is done by hand. The complexity of the operation is immeasurably increased by the number of articles that are to be labelled for sale and by the variety of prices at which the articles are to be sold.

It is an object of this invention to make a hand labeller which will print the proper price mark and apply a price label by adhesive to an article.

If you can label a thousand cans just by setting a price and hitting a button, you’ve turned a multi-hour process into something that can be done in a matter of minutes.

If Kafka didn’t commercialize his invention at a large scale, many other companies soon did. Fixing Prices co-authors Franck Cochoy, Johan Hagberg, and Hans Kjellberg credit Monarch for spreading the innovation far and wide:

However, the Monarch company did much more: it paved the way for rebalancing prices and qualities on item labels, reunifying the scattered languages of manufactured qualities (on product packaging) and retail prices (on store shelves), and thus reagencing product labeling in favor of the grocers. This development took several decades and relied on a number of innovations to come fully into fruition, along a complex process of qualitization, digitalization, and paperization of shelf labels.

Let’s think about what they wrote for a second: If grocers can label devices by the hundreds in a matter of minutes, that means they can raise or lower prices much more quickly than they could before. It’s not quite automation; someone has to put their mark on all those cans or pairs of pants. But you can put a price label on top of the other price label and all of a sudden a $2.00 can of food can jump in price to $2.99.

(Plus, it allowed retailers to put their mark on the products, literally. Old price tags, some of which can be seen on Flickr, are often seen as a great way of determining a sealed object’s age and vintage.)

In this light, the barcode, which was printed on the product by the manufacturer rather than the retailer, could be seen as a way to put the product seller back in charge of their MSRP destiny. But oddly, the relatively manual process of price tagging actually became something of a rallying cry for consumers and unions, rather than the retailers or manufacturers.

Which leads us to the 1970s, when retailers attempted to innovate past them.

How Michigan became ground zero for a price-tag debate

In the late ’90s, as I’ve written many times, I started my first job at a grocery store—and immediately came to hate the bottle machines. Those machines, which attempted to automate bottle deposit laws, were not unique to Michigan but emerged thanks to some unique quirks in state law.

But one thing I did not realize at the time was that Michigan law was also onerous in another way: With pricing. Thanks to state law, my grocery store had to have employees go around the stores and do nothing for hours but put price tags on tens of thousands of items. These items each had to be tagged individually, even though there was a price listing near the original spot on the shelf.

But it’s not like we had phones on us at all times when we could spot check the price, like we do now. So there was a certain logic to it, even if retailers did not like it.

The law, passed in 1976, came about despite the fact that the barcode had emerged at this time. And honestly, it emerged because of it, in part because of union concerns.

“There is an attempt being made to replace clearly marked prices on items with unintelligible lines that can only be deciphered by a computer,” said William C. Marshall, the president of the Michigan State AFL-CIO, in a 1976 wire story. “This would make comparison shopping in the supermarkets impossible and could become the greatest ripoff of consumers imaginable.”

(Other states passed laws too; Massachusetts actually had a “sticker law” on the books a year longer than Michigan did. And many states require shelf labels. But no states required stickers on quite so many things, quite as strictly, for quite as long.)

It’s not hard to see how this in practice helped to protect jobs while also protecting consumers. After all, if each individual item needed to be tagged, that meant someone needed to do the tagging. Any retailer that failed to tag its items was on the hook for an up to $25,000 fine. That was enough to bring in part-time reinforcements.

While pricing guns were quite fast and could tag a lot of prices in a short amount of time, it was still a lot of work that wouldn’t exist if not for this law.

Grocery stores, over the years, grew increasingly opposed to the law, in part because of that labor pressure, which, among other things, required repeated retagging of items as things went on sale or prices naturally increased.

“To individually price those items on a daily basis takes a tremendous amount of labor,” a D&W Food Centers spokesperson told the Grand Rapids Press in 1993.

(Granted, it was a lot less labor than before the pricing gun was a thing, but hey, let them be mad.)

In one wire story, the home improvement retailer Builders Square estimated that one-tenth of the total cost of its labor in the state went to price tagging, a cost of $2.4 million. It was a cost, one that came with added labor concerns, but not ones so significant to, say, ignore the Michigan market.

Despite periodic pressure from grocers, the law didn’t actually get removed from the books until Obama was the president, well after most other states got rid of similar laws. In fact, by the time it did, the pricing gun was more or less of a relic from another time, although one people still saw around from time to time.

Old habits die hard, and the one that led to this post died a lot harder than some of the others.

Recently, I made a realization: I have been unwillingly addicted to Facebook for a long time, and it’s not even because I like Facebook. Rather, it’s because I find it an extremely easy URL to type into a modern web browser’s omnibar. This sounds crazy, but the first two letters, f and a, are on the home row, and I don’t really rely on bookmarks, but my browser’s history function to type in URLs.

This creates a sort of recency bias. If I type in the same URL a lot, it’s the one that pops up the most. And so, if I’m at a browser with no clear idea of what my intent for the next page I load up, I inevitably type in “fa,” which would suck me in.

Over the years, Facebook’s bad content has gotten worse and worse, and despite my dislike of the company, I’ve kept it mostly out of desire to keep connected with a small number of people from real life. In the past I’ve used an extension designed to hide specific Facebook features on the desktop, most notably reels, and I have limited my Facebook access to my mobile app. But I still loaded the site, even though I hated the company and everything it represents.

To put it in terms of Guster’s 2000 single “Fa Fa,” I was always clicking somewhere I swear I’d never click again.

It’s an infuriating problem that really shows how far dark patterns go. If you type in a URL as a force of habit, inevitably you type it in even when it’s the last place you want to go.

Recently, I came up with a solution which appears to be deeply effective, and I’m hoping sticks long-term. Essentially, rather than fighting my tendency to type these two characters in my omnibar, I neutralized it. At first, this involved just blocking Facebook in the hosts file, which prevented the website from loading entirely. However, I found this too disruptive, as it gave me nowhere to click. Plus, immediately after I did that, I inevitably had a task that required me to use Facebook.

So, what I ended up doing was creating a URL that does nothing but forward to Google News. (You can supply any domain you’d like, as long as it starts with “fa.” Wanna go to fatberg.com every time you load your computer? Or maybe faxtoy.net? Up to you.) At the same time, I went through my entire history in Vivaldi and removed every reference to the Facebook website. The result is that whenever I type in my new Facebook URL, I go to a news aggregator, which is inevitably what I was using Facebook for anyway. A week later, and my Facebook usage has gone down considerably, and I’m now fully aware of how far downhill Google News has gone; open to suggestions there. Kind of shocked that’s all it took, actually. (I will admit that I did just start on a GLP-1, which is known to ease addictive behavior, but that’s a story for another time.)

I think addictive behaviors can be really difficult for anyone, no matter how well meaning, to get past. For whatever reason, this one was particularly hard to defeat. I’ve used similar strategies in the past. One of my go-tos: When I need to focus on something creative, I switch my YouTube account to a curated feed that leans on instrumental music. If I start looking up random junk, it ruins the feed. So I’m discouraged from looking up random junk if I’m listening to vintage jazz or higher consciousness music, as I am right now.

At this point in time, I think this is something that I’m really trying to get a grasp on. I think that so much of the work we do on computers requires a good sense of flow and rhythm, but if that flow leads to things that take us away from our work, does it really serve our needs?

In the case of a browser for example, wouldn’t it be great if the browser detected obsessive behavior like this and called it out for you, rather than you having to call it out for yourself and adapt accordingly?

We should be challenging our technology experiences and letting go of things that make our tech worse. And if it means I need to trick my brain to look at the news instead of my Facebook feed, I guess that’s where we’re at.

I guess what I’m saying is that I should switch to a Dvorak keyboard layout so I don’t mindlessly go to Facebook.

The God of Boundaries: The word “terminus” has a hell of an origin story

So, that point I made about the terminus being a surprisingly boring part of the federal highway system? Turns out that the term itself came from a not-so-boring place.

See, terminus is the Latin term for “boundary marker,” and that term eventually inspired a Roman god who would protect boundaries from all wrongdoing. What did that look like? Let’s refer to an Encyclopaedia Brittanica entry from 1911:

Terminus, in Roman mythology, the god of boundaries, the protector of the limits both of private property and of the public territory of Rome. He was represented by a stone or post, set up in the ground with the following religious ceremonies. A trench was dug, in which a fire was lighted; a victim was sacrificed, and its blood poured into the trench; the body, upon which incense and fruits, honey and wine were thrown, was then cast into the fire. When it was entirely consumed, the boundary stone, which had been previously anointed and crowned with garlands, was placed upon the hot ashes and fixed in the ground. Anyone who removed a boundary stone was accursed and might be slain with impunity; a fine was afterwards substituted for the death penalty.

Put another way: They took their boundary markers pretty seriously, largely thanks to Numa Pompilius, the Roman king (active from 715 to 672 B.C.) who is responsible for, among many other things, the Roman calendar. Also on his list of things he offered—the idea that there was a God named Terminus worth celebrating.

There was probably a deeper motive behind making boundaries something that needed a God, admittedly. According to Plutarch’s The Parallel Lives, Numa’s goal was to encourage peace:

He was also the first, they say, to build temples to Faith and Terminus; and he taught the Romans their most solemn oath by Faith, which they still continue to use. Terminus signifies boundary, and to this god they make public and private sacrifices where their fields are set off by boundaries; of living victims nowadays, but anciently the sacrifice was a bloodless one, since Numa reasoned that the god of boundaries was a guardian of peace and a witness of just dealing, and should therefore be clear from slaughter.

(Call it Roman-era soft power or something.)

The result is that these boundary stones had more weight to them than the road signs that end our long highways. In fact, they even had a festival on, of all days, the 23rd of February. As the Roman poet Ovid wrote of the celebration:

When night has passed, let the god whose marker separates fields be celebrated with the customary honors. Terminus—be you a stone, or a stump buried in a field—you too have divine authority from ancient times. You are crowned by two owners on opposite sides; two garlands and two libations are offered to you. An altar is built for you: here a rustic farm-woman brings fire that she has taken herself from the warm hearth on a broken pot. An old man cuts logs and skilfully piles up the chopped wood, and struggles to fix branches in the hard ground; then she kindles the first flames with dry bark, and a boy stands by holding a broad basket in his hands. Next, when he has three times thrown corn into the middle of the fire, a young girl offers up cut honeycombs.

Others hold jars of wine, and each one in turn is poured on the flames; the crowd, dressed in white, watches and respects this with silent tongues. Communal Terminus is sprinkled with the blood of a slaughtered lamb, and doesn’t complain when a sucking pig is offered to him. The simple folk of the neighborhood come together and celebrate with a banquet, and sing your praises, sacred Terminus. You mark the ends of nations, cities and great kingdoms: without you, the whole countryside would be full of disputes. You don’t go round trying to influence people, you are not corrupted by money, but with law-abiding good faith you guard the land entrusted to you.

I’m a guy who has never constantly thought about the Roman Empire, but I guess that’s about to change now that I know how these dudes party with boundary markers.

The massive road with no major cities and four termini: The story of U.S. Route 2

There’s not a U.S. Route 0, but that’s because we named it U.S. Route 2. Based on the rough grid system we use for interstates and federal highways, you can’t get much further north than this road, which hugs the Canadian border pretty much the entire way across.

Occasionally, it gets a chance to run into some famous friends—and in one case, it shares a terminus with one.

Interstate 95 and U.S. Route 2 end at around the same spot, at the border between Maine and New Brunswick, Canada. I-95 is perhaps one of the most famous highways in North America, flowing through Miami, Jacksonville, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, among many other major cities.

The story of U.S. 2, however, is the definition of a long drive for someone with nothing to think about. The largest city it hits on its entire run is in Spokane, Washington (population: around 200,000), which is only five hours from its western terminus in Everett, Washington (population: around 100,000), where it hits another extremely notable major interstate: I-5. That road touches Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and San Diego. U.S. 2, which ends about an hour outside downtown Seattle, is the northern connection between two of the most important interstates in the country, and it touches each near both coasts.

But there’s just one problem with that: Oddly, after an excursion through mostly unpopulated parts of Idaho, Montana, and North Dakota (where it hits Grand Forks and Minot, two modest-sized cities), it runs into Duluth, Minnesota. Duluth is a fairly small city by most standards, but it’s the third-largest city on the entire highway. From there, it briefly clips Wisconsin before hugging the southern part of the Upper Peninsula, where it ends at another major freeway, Interstate 75. That road hits Tampa, Atlanta, Knoxville, Lexington, Cincinnati, and Detroit. I-75 represents what I guess we can call its Midwestern terminus.

And as is the case with many termini, it ends with little fanfare. R.I.P. long, boring road. (To be fair, the Mackinac Bridge, located directly nearby, is a pretty beautiful destination. Wouldn’t want to upstage it.)

Except, and here’s the interesting part, it comes back at the tippy top of Upstate New York, nearing but not quite touching the Canadian border. That’s the job of U.S. Route 11, a road that (minus a short excursion between Bristol, Virginia, and Knoxville, Tennessee where it splits into two separate highways, 11W and 11E) goes all the way to New Orleans.

But we’re talking about U.S. 2, and U.S. 2 is in New York for less than a mile before it hits the Korean Veterans Memorial Bridge and then transitions into Vermont. The highway only hits one reasonably large city on this entire section of the route, Burlington, though its Upstate New York terminus was only about an hour away from Montreal, a city of 1.7 million people. With apologies to Seattle and Vancouver, it’s the largest city within even shouting distance of U.S. 2.

From there, it glides through a handful of lightly populated parts of New Hampshire and Maine before it hits its final terminus, the quiet connection it has with I-95, perhaps the most important north-south highway in the country. (Apologies to I-69, which I hear is gradually building out and making a name for itself.)

Of course, I-95 didn’t used to be there, and previously, it had a Customs & Border Patrol location of its own, according to U.S. Ends.

So, why does this highway, in a largely rural area of the country with few population centers, appeal to me so much? I think it’s because I remember crossing the Mackinac Bridge as a child, reading atlases, and finding the idea that a highway just randomly stopped and then started back up again 700 miles away to be fascinating. If you wanted to connect the two halves of U.S. 2, you could always flow up I-75, make your way to the Trans-Canada Highway, and take that most of the way there. It’s a 12-hour drive, though. You might be better off flying.

Where did this road come from? Well, it has its roots in one of the first transcontinental highway systems in the country, the Theodore Roosevelt International Highway. First built in 1919, the goal was to have the road connect Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon. While the modern U.S. 2 hits neither city, stopping in Washington State and instead hitting Bangor, Maine, it did create the blueprint for the modern highway, which is the northernmost cross-country U.S. highway in the United States. (Even if it does presume that you’re going to go into Canada for a solid third of the drive.)

While no longer named for him, Roosevelt’s memory and legacy loom large over this road. When it was completed in 1931, a large obelisk was built for him in Montana, at the Marias Pass. In a way, it’s the road’s spiritual terminus, if not its literal one.

If we think of termini as vertical, I guess it’s the highway’s tallest point, technically.

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? How about the Nintendo 3DS, the Wii or even the Sega Genesis?

Over on GameStop’s website, you can buy games for nearly every console released in the US since the mid-’80s. But good luck picking up a copy of Wii U Fit or Link’s Awakening in an actual store.

Keeping physical products in stock is hard, and harder still when you have to support so many platforms. Yet, the majority of the consoles sold since the mid-’90s are disc-based, supporting CDs, DVDs, or Blu-ray discs. Even Nintendo’s flirtation with discs have some grounding in standards: The GameCube uses mini-DVDs while the Wii and Wii U use a format based on DVD and Blu-ray respectively.

Given that these formats are standards-based, why couldn’t GameStop just create discs on demand, with the help of a digital kiosk? Not only could GameStop support the various PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo disc formats, such an approach could support older games, too. Imagine: The store could just burn a 3DO, Jaguar CD, Sega CD, Sega Saturn, or Dreamcast game, whenever you wanted? (And the publishers get paid?!?) Take this a step further and license these kiosks to independent retailers too, and you’d have a hell of a system that would surely be attractive to many game publishers. Figuring out who owns the rights to many of the older games would surely be the harder part.

When I was growing up in the early 1990s in the UK, we had a similar problem. Consoles hadn’t really taken off yet, and home computers were the norm for gaming. The Amiga, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, and Commodore 64 were all still commercially viable. MS-DOS was starting to see some releases, and even the MSX was a going concern too. As an Amstrad CPC owner in this era, it was often hard enough to find games on cassette. But if you wanted games on Amstrad’s not-quite-proprietary 3-inch disc format, you were out of luck. At the same, the image files for these games are relatively small, as anyone with access to an emulator can attest. The solution? Supply the image files on CD-ROMs to the stores, and duplicate games at the point of sale. Want a copy of Treasure Island Dizzy for your Amstrad CPC on 3-inch disc? No problem.

Enter Software on Demand Ltd, a company out of Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire who created the EDOS system. The Electronic Distribution of Software platform leaned on a giant, hulking IBM PC clone with a case that included multiple floppy disk drives, a pair of caddy-loading CD-ROM drives and, in the middle, a high speed cassette recorder. It was capable of copying software from all of these platforms and others, including MacOS.

From their own sales catalog: “Electronic Distribution of Software is a new way to buy games software. EDOS stores are provided with this special equipment, which permits them to duplicate games for you on the spot.”

More than 20 companies distributed games through the EDOS system, based on a catalog from 1991. The brands were pretty well-known to UK gamers of the era, including Alternative Software, Codemasters, Titus, and Ocean Software, along with some up-and-coming software houses.

(The scheme might remind some gaming fans of Nintendo’s own attempts to build a kiosk-based platform in Japan with the Famicom Disk System, but one major difference was that the EDOS system was cross-platform. Nintendo Japan later brought the basic idea to the Super Famicom and Game Boy with its Nintendo Power cartridge-copying service. By the way, did you know that there’s a Game Boy cartridge with a Super NES game on it?)

At the center of the scheme, and driving its interest, was the British retailer John Menzies.

Formed in 1833 as a bookseller in Edinburgh, John Menzies had a significant retail presence throughout the UK and especially in Scotland. (Case in point: If you’ve seen the movie Trainspotting, the opening shot has the lead characters running from a Menzies store on Princes Street, having just robbed it.)

While the retail outlets would eventually merge with rival WHSmith in the late ’90s, the company was known for supplying independent newsagents with magazines and newspapers. Given all that, it’s not hard to see why they thought they could have some success with this endeavor too.

One clear benefit of the EDOS approach? It was designed to make things as easy for the stores as possible. It seems a lot of care was put into the duplication process by the company to reduce the number of returns too, with each duplication verified by the machine and self tests running on each of the duplication drives daily.

In the end, the story of EDOS is a pretty compelling what-if story of a company with a clever idea that perhaps was a few years too early. With the advent of games on CD-ROM just around the corner the system itself would need greater storage to store the images, but as gaming evolved, that seems increasingly possible. With dual-layer Blu-ray discs capable of storing around 50 gigabytes each, it’s possible this could have kept up with the increasing size of games as well.

Maybe Valve’s next piece of hardware can be a 3-inch disc drive for the Steam Machine?