Cecil Fielder doing what he does best: Hitting a home run.

A designated-hitter dynasty: Were the Fielders good fielders?

As a kid, I remember that the best baseball player I knew of was great at hitting home runs … and not much else.

His name is Cecil Fielder, and he was basically the first player in more than a decade to hit 50 home runs in a single season, a mark that eventually opened the floodgates for years of home-run races (and yes, doping scandals). Fielder’s performance for the Detroit Tigers during the early 1990s was frequently in conversation for the AL MVP, getting close but never quite clinching it. Problem was, the Detroit Tigers weren’t a particularly good team back then, even if Fielder himself was an electric player.

But Cecil Fielder, who was notably a fairly big guy for a baseball star, had a problem, and it’s one that is laid out cleanly on his Wikipedia page:

Fielder also had a reputation as a below-average fielder, mostly caused by his poor speed and range.

This, my friends, is a great example of nominative antideterminism. Often, we draw attention to people whose name more of less lived up to their lives.

See that smile on his face? That’s the look of a man who never thought he would steal a base.

But Fielder, who was always a better slugger than a runner (he infamously only stole two bases in his entire 13-year career), did not excel at the very thing his name suggested he would. This most assuredly explains why he was regularly used as a designated hitter.

A surprising number of “Prince Fielder error” videos on YouTube, but to be fair, most of us would probably not love our errors getting shared with the world. Just ask a journalist whoo doezn’t kno how 2 spel.

His also-successful son, Prince Fielder, had a somewhat better reputation as a fielder than Cecil did. But he also led the league in errors at his position more than once, hinting that he might have also only partly lived up to his name.

His Wikipedia page says this:

Defensively, he recorded a .992 fielding percentage playing every inning at first base.

That’s not quite as succinct as the “below-average fielder” phrasing on his dad’s page. Was Prince also a below-average fielder?

I kind of felt bad sharing that video of Prince Fielder making an error, so here’s a video of him winning the Home Run Derby at the 2012 MLB All-Star Game.

Comparing Cecil’s stats with Prince’s tells an interesting story. While Prince’s career ended prematurely due to a career-ending injury, he played more games than his father, in part because he was playing at an all-star level more or less immediately. (Cecil, on the other hand, spent years paying his dues, including a season in Japan, before his breakout 1990 season with the Tigers.)

Even so, their career fielding percentages ended up fairly similar. Overall, Prince’s fielding percentage was a mere .001 better than his father’s, but setting aside Cecil’s moonlighting at other positions, each had a .992 fielding percentage at first base.

While on the surface Cecil might be a worse fielder, neither were particularly great fielders. In fact, Prince’s range numbers were actually lower than Cecil’s—but as Cecil was more frequently a DH, especially later in his career, you could probably have a good debate over who’s the worse fielder.

(It’s worth noting, though, that Cecil and Prince probably had other things to debate: During Prince’s playing career, the father and son were often estranged, in part because of the elder Fielder’s widely reported financial problems.)

Hey Cecil, Prince: Nobody would be mad if you changed your family’s last name to “Slugger.”

The Bittersweet tale of Neversink, New York, the town whose original location ironically became a reservoir

The town of Neversink, New York, up in the Catskills of New York state, is more than 100 miles away from New York City by driving distance, and about 75 as the crow flies. But the ongoing demands of NYC were enough to change its fortunes and ensure that the city would always come up in textbooks about irony.

Throughout the state of New York, ongoing demands to help support the ever-massive needs of New York City led to common cases of eminent domain or condemnation of small towns to make room for reservoirs to support the needs of a massive city. For example, the town of Gilboa, which started as a settlement in 1760 and became an official town in 1848, was flooded in 1926 by the Schoharie Reservoir, a dam built on the Schoharie Creek. The portions of the town that are now literally underwater are called Old Gilboa.

In 1931, a case that went to the Supreme Court essentially gave New York flexibility to divert water from the Delaware River and its tributaries to ensure the city had a strong, continuous water supply. From the summary of New Jersey v. New York:

The diversion from the tributaries of the amount proposed by New York will not materially affect the sanitary condition of the river, its industrial and agricultural uses, its use as a source of municipal water supply, or its shad fisheries. But it is necessary that the diversion should be curtailed and regulated, and be accompanied by sanitary treatment of sewage entering the stream in New York, in order to prevent injury to the use and reputation of the river for recreational purposes in New Jersey, and in order to avoid an increase of salinity in the lower river and in Delaware Bay which would injure the oyster industry there.

The result put small riverside communities like Neversink on blast, allowing the state to more or less move or remove towns that would potentially get in the way of giant dams. In 1941, thanks to a judicially empowered Board of Water Supply, it was decided: The original location of Neversink was condemned, in favor of allowing the state to divert water from the Neversink River for a reservoir that would supply drinking water to one of the largest cities in the world.

And yes, that meant Neversink’s original location, which also dated to the 18th century, was destined to sink. The situation was bittersweet in more ways than one: Quite literally, a neighboring town to Neversink was called Bittersweet, and it was overtaken by the reservoir, too. Unfortunately, it, along with three other communities flooded for another nearby reservoir, did not survive the condemnation.

(One of those communities was named Eureka, which is a completely different kind of nominative antideterminism.)

It took many years for the relocation to actually happen, because reservoirs take a long time to build. (A whole World War began and ended in the time between initial proposals and completion.) Moves like these created major challenges for communities similar to Neversink, as noted by a 2016 Atlas Obscura story on the similarly to-be-sunk towns of Pepacton, Union Grove, Shavertown, and Arena:

Reservoir construction had been underway for two years when a crowd of townspeople gathered at Shavertown’s general store in 1949. Every day the work inched closer to completion, and so did the time they would have to leave the idyllic village where their families had lived for generations. The city of New York would dole out compensation for their homes and relocation, but this was a small comfort to some, who didn’t even know when moving day would arrive.

“We are pushing construction as fast as the weather and the good Lord will permit us,” Irving Hite, president of the Board of Water Supply told the New York Times. They hoped to finish the project by 1955 and promised not to “take a single acre of land until it is absolutely necessary.”

Meanwhile, the villages lived on borrowed time; farmers hesitated to plant or expand their herds.

Like those towns, Neversink sank, but it ultimately survived the condemnation by moving its residents to another location nearby. Bittersweet, sadly but fittingly, did not. (Bittersweet was a good example of nominative determinism.)

In its place sits a reservoir that, on a good day, can hold up to 34.9 billion gallons of water, and (via a network of other reservoirs and the Delaware Aqueduct), eventually makes the long trip to New York City, where it ends up in fancy glass water bottles that people may or may not drink when they go to brunch.

That’s the tale of Neversink’s nominatively antideterministic life. On the other hand, Neversink was once nominatively deterministic in a completely different way: It was a dry town for 80 years, including during the period when it was getting flooded and they probably could have used the alcohol. (A hotel that straddled the towns of Montela and Eureka had some, but after the floodings, it suddenly became hard to find.)

That only partially changed in 2015. Can’t sink if you’re always dry.

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 conventions in a way that made its software harder to use. (All you had to do was support full-screen apps in Mac OS X Lion, dudes!)

Then it turned its subscription plan into the only real option. Then it kept raising prices. Then it changed its offering in a way that suggested it only really cared about customers who could pay them for hundreds of licenses each year.

On top of that, it failed to keep up with where I was going as a user, along with many other users. Despite the fact that a huge contingent of power users have been decamping to Linux, it more or less ignored those users. Meanwhile, AI changed the definition of what software could be.

That perhaps explains why I’m not particularly surprised that some programmer decided to rebuild the Creative Cloud suite using clean-room techniques in a vibe-coded environment. It solves many of the issues that upset power users—the lack of end-user responsiveness, the high cost, and the ability to use it on the platform of their choice. Adobe, as a public company, has often been tethered to the desires of the stock market, which has meant a lot of AI stuff, even when many creatives have made clear they do not want them.

So now, we have ArtCraft out here Robin Hooding every single one of the key Adobe apps.

The names aren’t the ones you’re familiar with, but you nonetheless know what each one is. One is a Photoshop stand-in. Another is Premiere Pro. Another is Acrobat. And yes, there’s even an InDesign riff.

Do they work particularly well? On the surface, yes. Opening up these apps in AppImage shows that these apps, programmed in the Rust programming language, are not only fast, but relatively small. Rather than hundreds of megabytes, these apps load in tens of megabytes. They detected my discrete GPU right away. And within a couple of minutes, I was manipulating an image.

A lot of finicky, below the surface stuff did not work so well. Color pickers and secondary menu boxes were rough, not elegant. It did not detect my fonts in DesignCraft until I downloaded an update published just a few minutes before I downloaded it. And while I could set a color with a hex code in PhotoCraft, I could not do the same in DesignCraft.

But it was familiar. I could see myself building a zine with this tool, or using it to access old files that I cannot otherwise open without a Creative Cloud subscription.

Is an open-source vibe-coded creative suite really worth cheering on? I think so.

There are real reasons to cheer on something like this, even if you otherwise hate AI. The spirit of this evokes a Robin Hood-like mindset, in that it exists because of real ethical and economic issues around Adobe that many end users have long been stuck with. In one sense, it is “fighting AI slop with AI slop.” And even if you don’t end up using these tools, the techniques that these projects land on will ultimately inspire open-source projects that actually rely on craft. There are other apps that have emerged in the past couple of years that hope to bring design to Linux; this open-source tool may have opened up a shortcut for these projects.

Let’s talk about “craft” a second here: I think it’s a bad name to build around for this project, as cool and interesting as it is. Craft implies that a lot of heart was put into the code, that it was built by an expert. Which may be true of the artists and creatives that actually use this thing, but does it really speak to what the vibe coders are actually doing? Probably not. It’s really easy to not give critics something to point to, so don’t give it to them.

Another thing that they’re likely to point to is the inherent security issues that might come with a tool like this. The decision to use Rust as the language is likely to help with stability, but it’s not like any regular user is going to be looking at the code here.

But AI coding techniques are likely to change our relationship with open source for good, as seen with the recent AI-based fork of Asahi Linux. And in fact, it may change how companies like Adobe think of open source and vibe coding.

Who knows how legal this is? This feels like one a legit lawyer should probably weigh in on. But some of the language creator Brandon Thomas has used on forums and the ArtCraft website evokes the spirit of Napster, an icon of tech rebelliousness that is not exactly very rebellious in 2026. Napster was not legal, but it still changed everything. That’s a better place for AI in the cultural conversation than “everyone making the worst signs you’ve ever seen.”

And even if ArtCraft’s wild deconstruction project fails, it feels clear others will try to take its place. Which is exactly what happened with Napster.

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 I had the chance to work at three of them, one of which was among the largest of its kind in the country, the Washington Post Express. I loved that paper, though I admit that when I think back to my time in newspapers, I think about Link above everything else.

Link, a publication of the Virginian-Pilot that began its life 20 years ago today, started with a provocative idea: What if you could take a 30-column-inch story and condense it into a 3-column-inch story? You could present the information in a new way, leaning on alternative story forms; you could make room for more visuals. And you could inform someone who might not have time for a long-form newspaper in a matter of minutes.

I think fondly of this paper for a number of reasons. To keep in the spirit of the alt-story-form in which it worked:

1. The newspaper. The format of the newspaper was always a bit like a puzzle to me. We essentially were building a magazine from scratch five days a week, sometimes producing ambitious pages without even knowing what would be on the front page that day.
2. The format. Though I was a designer, this was the first real experience I got with editing copy, learning the process of taking a story down to the studs and still making it feel dynamic and informative. It taught me a lot about brevity and telling a story through its elements, not just through prose.
3. The newsroom. It was a strange newsroom by the time it ended; four designers, six copy editors, a web guy, a single reporter, and the editor-in-chief. In most newsrooms, this order would be flipped entirely. But this made room for a ton of ideas, as we took the best of the Pilot and presented it to people who would never pick up a copy of the Pilot otherwise. (What was also great was that some folks in the main Pilot newsroom actually made time for us nerds.)
4. The community. I had never lived in a community quite like Norfolk, which was small enough to be accessible but large enough that there was always something going on. In terms of real life, it was probably the most social I’ve ever felt living somewhere. I’m actually still in touch with some of the folks I met during this era, both in the newsroom and outside of it.
5. The inspiration. After this paper shut down, it inspired me to start a blogging career that was driven by this format. I’ve more or less have been doing it ever since, though I write a lot more than I did in 2006.

While this little newspaper had lots of little strengths, there were some weaknesses with the format that perhaps are more obvious from a healthy distance. Most free daily newspapers were intended for commuter-friendly towns, generally to be read on the train or bus. Hampton Roads, alas, is infamously a car-centric community with a number of bridge-tunnels connecting its various parts. Despite being a factor in its creation, the region only got its first light rail system three years after Link ended, and that system has yet to get out of Norfolk to any of the numerous other cities in the region.

The other factor, and not an uncommon one with papers of its type: Its internet presence was more or less anemic. (Yes, given the name, somewhat ironic.) Unlike so many newspapers of its era, it didn’t have much of a website, in part out of concern that it would directly compete with the main publication, and in part because the paper effectively was a reformatting of long-form newspaper content in an inventive way.

It ended in the same sad way so many other things ended: As news of the 2008 recession was breaking, we found out layoffs were happening at the Pilot, and it was strongly hinted that Link would be on the chopping block. But it did not shut down right away, but with a two-month delay, with the paper ending just before Christmas, 2008. Unlike Lehman Brothers, we had a proper chance to say a very long goodbye to this job we all loved. (A sign that there might have been some regrets about this shift: About six months after the paper shut down, when I was merely visiting Norfolk, I ran into the business executive in charge of the Pilot’s publishing businesses at a coffee shop, and, seemingly embarrassed to be running into a guy he laid off not that long ago, he sheepishly suggested that he would try to bring this paper back. I’m probably safe to assume it’s not happening at this point.)

Two decades later, I still find myself looking back at this era, with this job that paid more in the form of freedom than it did money, and thinking I had it all figured out. At least some of the glass is rose-tinted, I will admit. But ultimately, Link set me up for a different kind of success after the 27-month experience of a great job ended. I ended up getting my gig at Express and moving to D.C., where I immediately met my future wife, and found myself becoming a blogger of modest note. I would sometimes get yelled at for showing up to the paper too early to work, not because I was trying to score overtime, but because I was excited by the work. I eventually put that energy into the digital realm instead.

At this point, I’m pretty much a fully digital creature. But it’s hard to get the ink stains off my fingers all these years later, and while I had the bug before I worked at Link, it was where it really stuck for me. I still integrate alt-story-form into my various projects, and if I ever find a pocket of time to build it, I still own the domain to the former Link website, as well as a newspaper box that currently sits in my living room.

Over the past few years, an art collective driven by fans of Express has been periodically publishing new versions of the newspaper, independently of The Washington Post. I’m probably not doing any of that. While I don’t have a printing press at my disposal, I do have a bunch of old issues, some PDFs, and a brain full of memories. Oh, and the box. And the domain.

Maybe that’s enough.

Drilling holes in pretzels: The forgotten Battle Creek company that eventually nailed Combos

There hasn’t exactly been many dedicated tomes written on the history of Combos, a food that isn’t the main entree on any normal person’s plate. It’s mass-manufactured snack food, and it’s been produced by one of the world’s largest food companies, Mars, since the late 1970s.

But there was a time when it was thought to require a literal drill to produce. Yes, the signature hole that makes Combos unlike any food on grocery store shelves was originally produced with a drill. The overworked Dunkin’ guy says “time to make the donuts” as a camera crew catches his every move. The overworked Combos guy says “time to drill the pretzels,” as he takes a pretzel and cores it like a freaking apple.

OK, I’m getting ahead of myself here, but I needed you to know about the drill thing, because it really just highlights how strange producing a food like Combos really is.

The story of Combos starts with a pair of brothers, Richard and Walter Nelson. The brothers, based in Battle Creek, Michigan, were active entrepreneurs starting in the 1950s, when, with their father Walter Sr., they launched Wal-Rich Enterprises, which made toy guns, at Kellogg Field, a modern-day corporate airport that was used as a training base during World War II.

By the 1970s, the brothers had shifted to contract work for various manufacturers, including General Motors and nearby Kellogg’s. But gradually, the brothers, now working under the Nelbros umbrella, started developing the patents for an unusual product: A pretzel filled with cheese. The first such patent filing, 1970s’s “Method of making a filled food item,” describes an attempt to solve the problem of putting a filling inside a fairly solid product, like a cracker:

It is well-known practice to pierce a food item having a relatively open and porous interior, such as a cream puff or doughnut of pillow shape, and directly inject into such food item through the piercing member, a thick but flowable filling such as whipped cream, custard, fruit preserves, and jelly. The filling of hollow ice cream conetype items by various filling procedures, such as with soft ice creamlike material flowing from a faucet has also been proposed. Such procedures do not lend themselves to the filling of relatively solid items, and especially the solid and relatively brittle, sticklike, hard-crust items, and it was a recognition of the marketing possibilities of such items and a special method and apparatus for producing them, not commercially available, which led to the conception and development of the present invention.

Accordingly, among the objects of the present invention is the provision of a new product in the form of an initially solid, relatively brittle, sticklike, crust-covered product which has been subsequently mechanically hollowed and filled with a suitable filler, and the method and apparatus for producing such product.

Their solution to this problem they’ve found? Drill baby, drill:

Another object of this invention is to provide an apparatus which will cut a bread stick to length, drill it substantially from the cut end to the other, fill same from the inside of said drilled opening, starting adjacent the bottom of same, with a suitable thick but extrudable filling material, and deliver same for further processing, using or packaging.

If you’re a longtime reader of Tedium, you may know that this is kind of a wasteful process for producing a snack. The best snacks, such as cheese curls, come about because of happy accidents and byproducts. But this drilled-breadstick approach nonetheless was enough for Nelbros to launch this idea into a sellable product, which they, of course, called … shotzels.

I’m not saying that it’s a bad name, but it certainly wasn’t good enough to win over the gas stations of the world. I was trying to figure out just how far idea of a cheese-filled pretzel shotzel reached beyond Battle Creek, and I found a lot of newspaper ads that suggest the company saw uptake for the product at a number of small delis around the country.

How far did the shotzel get in Battle Creek? One of the few references I could find to shotzels in the city’s newspaper emerged around 1977 when it was promoted as one of the appetizers made available before a concert by the Battle Creek Symphony Orchestra. Combos may be low culture, but shotzels were apparently a hit with the city’s NPR crowd.

Around this time, Nelbros was struggling with its factory situation, attempting to move facilities as it navigated a growing business. A 1978 article described a company in flux, along with a few others who were moving into a then-new industrial park.

“It will take about six months to complete the building and get equipment in. We’re planning a 60,000-square-foot building that will accommodate a new 300-foot oven we have on order,” Richard Nelson told the newspaper. “We’ve outgrown our plant at Green and Jay streets and must relocate to expand.”

Meanwhile, the brothers were continuing to develop the shotzel idea into something plainly recognizable to any modern snackhound. The strategy, as highlighted by a patent published in 1979: Get rid of the drilling.

The objects of the invention are accomplished by apparatus and a method for making tubular food products wherein dough pieces in tubular shape are extruded onto supporting die members that hold the tubular dough piece during the time that it is raising and is being baked. Thereafter, the baked member is removed from the die member and is moved relative to a filling apparatus so that filler of a relatively softer food material can be deposited within the cavity formed in the baked tubular member. In one embodiment of the invention the supporting die members are transferred from separated conveyors for extruding, proofing, cooking and baking.

Eseentially, rather than creating a single pretzel, filling it with cheese and cutting it up, this edition of the shotzel instead extrudes the bread onto tiny loops that already have holes in the middle, ensuring that they can easily be stuffed with cheese or some other kind of filling.

Naturally, the candy manufacturing giant Mars got wind of this development, acquired it from Nelbros in 1979, gave it a name better than “shotzel,” and marketed it in gas stations nationwide. The rest is history.

It’s so weird to me that there were no non-pretzel flavors of Combos for the first few years of its existence. Also, this ad screams “we don’t understand our target audience yet, so let’s aim super-broad.”

The 2006 Combos marketing campaign that didn’t age particularly well

Combos are not really a product that needs advertising so much as distribution. They exist in a 7-Eleven. You pick them up instead of a bag of Bugles, and you’re on your way. Road trip commences.

But that hasn’t stopped Mars from trying to market these things on television. The first such attempt came in 1982 in a format I’d call “Big Red”-core. It leaned heavily on the pretzel inspiration, rather than its bite-sized nature, which was really the selling point that mattered.

But despite their lasting popularity, Combos have never been a favorite of advertisers. There’s not really a “Combos jingle” that people associate with the company. That meant that, when advertisers took steps to attempt to explain the appeal of Combos, they did so with the then-current language of hipness. This 1994 Combos ad, clearly riffing off of Bill Hicks and his close copycat Denis Leary, emphasizes the point. (At least it talks about the product!)

Beyond quirky ad campaigns like the mid-1990s Combo Man comic-book campaign with Marvel, nothing seemed to really stick to the brand culturally.

Which meant that in the mid-2000s, when cable channels like Adult Swim and Spike TV were specifically targeting young men, Combos was something of an open canvas upon which big advertising firms could place their imprint.

And given our cultural evolution since, it reads as particularly gnarly. The slogan says what they were going for: “What Your Mom Would Feed You If Your Mom Were A Man.”

Basically, they got someone who looks very much like a man (played by E.J. Carroll, best known for a recurring role on the HBO show The Deuce), put him in a dress, and gave him some clearly adult sons. The visual effect comes off somewhat like John Carroll Lynch’s cross-dressing character in The Drew Carey Show, without the ahead-of-its-time progressive elements that eventually (and unfortunately) led that story line to be dropped.

The ads were designed for maximum absurdity (giving Combos to a sick son, saying grace over a bag of Combos), and to hit you with that in-your-face slogan right at the end. We’re a long way from handing these things out at the Battle Creek Symphony Orchestra.

It was the brainchild of TBWA\Chiat\Day, the firm famed for much of Apple’s iconic advertising, most notably its then-recent “Get A Mac” campaign. And the campaign even won awards for its radio advertising.

In an era when at least some have questioned whether late character actor Tim Curry’s career-making role in The Rocky Horror Picture Show is transphobic, even considering that film’s lasting relevance with the LGBTQ+ community, the ad hits a lot differently today. Less Tim & Eric fodder, more extremely misguided attempt at making a gender-role joke.

I get that some will probably defend this ad campaign, but it just feels like it would have worked just as well without putting E.J. Carroll in a dress. Mr. Mom never had to pull the gender reversal to make effectively the same joke. And other media properties that did lean into cross-dressing, such as Mrs. Doubtfire and Kids in the Hall, at least set up a framework for why the gender reversal was happening. The joke in this specific campaign was crass even then, but now it just feels gratuitous.

You might be wondering, did Combos do better later on? Arguably, yes, though still attempting to present these gas station standbys in a way that appealed to the Slim Jims crowd. A 2012-era ad campaign, called “Bad Combos,” instead leaned into absurd “bad combination” situations. (This “witch doctor” variation is also fairly edgy.)

That may be the its sweet spot from a marketing standpoint. It was ground the brand mined in the early ’90s as well.

Was this the right approach for Combos’ target audience of people who just got gas at a place they’ll never visit again? Who’s to say. But it’s telling that I can’t seem to find any recent examples of Combos ads that appeared on television. The Instagram account that gets updated a few times a year is probably enough.

Honestly, they sell themselves—without the transphobic tropes.

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 primary method for downloading mislabeled Phish covers, had pivoted to AI educational tools. Which is bad and weird enough on its own. But it’s also bad and weird in lots of other ways, too. The company, once a prime example of rebellious college students taking technology and bending it to their will, is now being used to subvert the educational process in a completely new way, according to a recent Wired article.

You might be wondering, “wait, wasn’t Napster a music streaming service?” And yes, it was, until late last year, when it was acquired by a firm called Infinite Reality, which promised that it would turn the company into this: “The newly-reimagined Napster will differentiate itself from competitors by serving as a social music platform that prioritizes active fan engagement over passive listening, allowing artists to connect with, own, and monetize the relationship with their fans.”

Less than a year later, this is what Napster is focused on, according to the Wired piece:

The first phase will be anchored at the GEMS School of Research and Innovation, where the GEMS Global Education AI Hub and GEMS Intelligence 360 platform will provide a real-world environment for educators, students and partners to codesign, test and evaluate AI agents and digital personas.

Napster will provide dedicated design, development and product management resources based on Napster Learn, its AI-powered learning system. Digital twins of teachers, for example, will provide around-the-clock support.

Trained on a teacher’s material, courses and papers, these digital twins will live online, becoming a “copy of yourself that you can then use to scale your time”. Students will be able to talk to them outside class, ask questions, refine concepts and learn at their own pace, while teachers receive insights into the questions students are asking and where they may need additional support.

Why such an extreme pivot towards “digital twins”? One reason might come down to a decision to target the Saudi Arabia market. Around the time that it ditched the music service, the company had signed a deal with Lenovo to host infrastructure on Saudi land, and earlier this month, the firm formally incorporated in Saudi Arabia, ensuring that it could serve Saudi businesses.

If you’re thinking, “hey, this is a long way from a dorm room in Boston that leveraged the massive Ethernet pipes given to thousands of college students,” you’d be right, and then some.

But it’s not exactly an odd play in the context of Saudi Arabia, which has leveraged legacy brands with strong nostalgic pull to help reach Western markets. For example, SNK, best known for the Neo Geo, has attempted to make inroads in the West in recent years, leveraging the company’s 96% ownership by the Saudi government. It proved a problem earlier this year when Games Done Quick was forced to apologize for partnering with the company, not realizing gamers are not fans of things like Saudi ownership.

In Napster’s case, the company is simply serving the Saudi market, though its funding is actually coming from the Abu Dhabi government, through a venture fund managed by Sheikh Ahmed Bin Mana Bin Khalifa Saeed Al Maktoum, the current CEO of the Emirates airline and member of Dubai’s ruling royal family.

Still though, you might be feeling more than uneasy about the extremely hard pivot for a company that you associate with a very specific era of technology. In the past, I’ve written about pivots like this, most notably the SEO site Digital dot com, which I’m happy to say is no longer active. I expect to see more attempts to revive domains in a way that does not respect what was previously there, and honestly, I expect more hard pivots.

In case you need to feel somewhat better about this news, I’m happy to inform you that Winamp, a common scene partner with Napster back in ’99, is still a music player and more or less has followed its corporate legacy into the modern day. At least someone is still whipping the llama’s ass.

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 providers, Cox Communications, in the midst of a massive merger. It was the oldest of the massive original providers still standing, having beaten Comcast to the cable game by about a year. (Adelphia was born earlier, but it died in a blaze of embarrassment.) And it’s being more or less written over by Charter Communications, whose Spectrum brand name is being used in former Cox markets starting this week.

(Cox is still technically a subsidiary of Charter, but let’s be honest: How long will this arrangement really last?)

Cox, which was formed as an offshoot of the still-existing media empire Cox Enterprises, survived nearly 65 years, making an imprint on millions of lives in ways good and bad. Would the cable box crap out sometimes? Yes. Would the internet stutter? Absolutely. But this company, for many, was their first introduction to television beyond what a pair of rabbit ears could pull up.

(Plus, it took on a notable legal battle around digital piracy, helping to set some precedent at the Supreme Court earlier this year.)

Just imagine the number of people who were introduced to cable television with a pitch like this. There must be a lot of HBO beach towels out there.

It was the company that brought you your first glimpse of HBO and MTV, the company that put 800 channels into your entertainment system, the company that installed your first internet connection that you could actually use without hogging the family phone line. Yes, having to deal with a technician was a pain in the ass, and nobody liked paying for those giant bills. But Cox’s service was genuinely a game-changer for many.

And yet, mergers show how fragile longstanding relationships with public utilities really are. I grew up only knowing the local phone company as a Baby Bell, only for that company, Ameritech, to disappear into the gullet of another Baby Bell, SBC. I’m sure the streamlining made a lot of sense when it happened, but on the other hand, it is (for better or for worse) a break of the consumer covenant.

Sometimes brands just don’t hold up very well. I don’t think CableVision really was a particularly good name by 2016, when it was retired after a merger and everyone was watching stuff on Netflix. But Cox? Three letters, memorable. Certainly moreso than Spectrum or whatever.

For its part Charter is trying to put its best foot forward, as stated in this press release:

To welcome its new customers, Spectrum is offering a free year of mobile service to Cox internet customers who don’t already subscribe to Cox Mobile; the first of many benefits Spectrum will offer. In mid-September, Spectrum plans to launch its entire suite of products to all consumers, including existing customers, in former Cox markets offering Spectrum’s simple and transparent pricing and packaging, greater value and more opportunities to save.

Spectrum Internet and Spectrum Mobile work together over the Spectrum Fiber Broadband Network and are supported by approximately 45 million WiFi access points across the country, delivering a faster, more seamless experience than standalone 5G. Spectrum’s Seamless Connectivity bundle delivers the most reliable service and helps customers save with Spectrum’s $1,000 savings guarantee.

But why is this even necessary? Why not just stick with Cox in these regions, while leaving Spectrum under the hood? Cost savings is likely the main factor here. Charter CFO Jessica Fischer, who is departing to Citi next month, said during a recent presentation that merging the two companies could lead to a billion in synergies.

“The confidence that we have in the synergies that will come from the transaction, I’d say, has increased dramatically as we’ve sort of dug in further. And so we’ve raised our synergy target to more than $1 billion,” she said, according to Fierce Network.

But synergy ignores the dilution of brand value, which is particularly acute when the brand being retired has a lot of it.

Because I was curious, I looked on YouGov, which has a public-sentiment tracker for various brands, and found that Cox is actually a more-famous brand than Charter, but not more than Spectrum. But this mark doesn’t account for the fact that cable is a strongly regional play. That Cox has a 63% fame level when it only serves 20 of the 50 states (notably missing some biggies like New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania) likely means its fame is probably much higher in the regions where it served.

I’m not even a Cox subscriber. I just think it sucks to get rid of such a legacy name brand.

All of this raises the question: Why not just keep this brand around? It’s not hurting anyone, and giving up so much brand equity for the sake of “corporate synergy,” whatever that means, just feels weird and dumb. It wasn’t an out-of-step brand. There were no weird scandals. It was just easier for its merger partner to present a unified marketing front to the public. Cox, based on various reports, had 6.2 million subscribers, which made it the third-largest cable company, though satellite and digital-only providers like YouTube TV complicate that picture somewhat. It’s smaller than Charter, but still a massive provider all its own.

I’ll fully concede that there are times that a brand should retire, that it as served its usefulness. I’ve always disliked the fact that GameStop essentially erased the FuncoLand brand name but one might argue that GameStop was better set up for where the industry was going. But GameStop doesn’t exactly have the most-appreciated reputation with gamers, while people look fondly on FuncoLand. If GameStop brought FuncoLand back in some way, it might be received warmly.

And there are cases in which subsuming a brand can harm the brand it replaced. Much hay has been made about Boeing’s decline in quality since it acquired McDonnell Douglas nearly 30 years ago. The reason, as any history of Boeing’s 737 Max crisis makes clear, is that the McDonnell Douglas guys ended up taking over the leadership of Boeing and instilling its philosophy across the brand. So McDonnell Douglas’ mediocre reputation became Boeing’s.

By keeping the brands separate, it slows the transfer of negative brand equity to customers that are used to working with another company, even if, under the hood, there might be two separate things going on. Inevitably, Spectrum is setting itself up for years of “it’s not as good as it used to be” complaints from its subscriber base.

I think the argument is quite strong that when a company has such strong brand value with its customer base that, merger or not, you should go out of your way to keep it around, and not in a “we slapped a Memorex logo on it” way.

Cox is a hugely popular brand that has been associated with numerous communities for people’s entire lives and they’re just killing it off to save some money. Make it make sense.

Millions of old posts, no binaries: The data nerd who made a giant vintage database searchable

This ain’t our first Usenet rodeo. Far from it. Tedium’s talked about it a lot, actualy. Back in 2017, we reported on the disruptive role that binary file-sharing played in Usenet’s evolution. (It’s weird how little we thought about things like security and safety in the early ’90s.)

The year prior, I highlighted the tale of Usenet charthound Matt Levine. And in 2019, we published an article describing how modern day Trump whisperer Michael Wolff leveraged Usenet spam to build his early journalistic reputation.

And then there’s this 2020 post on the Eternal September, a Usenet-borne phenomenon that I think holds up pretty well, all things considered.

But the thing about these stories is that I always ran into a problem when trying to resurface the thing I was talking about. Too often, I would land on third-hand websites or have to dig incredibly hard to find a suitable result on Google Groups, the platform that was supposed to archive this content.

At some point, Google unnecessarily neutered its archive. Yes, many of the messages were still there, but it seems like the company intentionally made it difficult to search through the engine, only offering the most basic sorting abilities. Which means that, if you’re trying to (for example) figure out when the term “Eternal September” was first expressed on Usenet, you would not be able to find it without a lot of extra work. (In fact, the only way to figure it out might be by referring to a Google Groups link on Wikipedia—a link that, as of this writing, gives me a 429 error.)

Usenet-Rewind, a new service by the firm Erie Data Systems, makes it far easier to narrow in on an incredibly complex archive. I asked it to conduct that same search for the phrase “Eternal September,” oldest date first, and the very first result, the very post by John William Chambless referenced in the Wikipedia article, showed up like it was nothing.

That’s despite the fact that the archive has more than a billion messages in it—or, to be exact, 1,039,260,173 messages as of this writing—dating to 1981.

More searching of stuff I researched a while ago: An early post from chartster Matt Levine, promoting his mailing list on rec.music.misc, appeared on September 5, 1995:

Subscribe to the coolest new mailing list, Matt Levine’s Top 40. THe main chart is based on my opinion. There is also a cool chart where you get to vote for your favorite songs called Netizens’ Picks. If you would like to subscribe, e-mail me at [address redacted].

-matt levine

Michael Wolff’s attempts to draw attention to his Net Guide offerings started showing up in the early weeks of 1994, first in alt.online-service and numerous other newsgroups, complete with quotes from Electronic Frontier Foundation founder John Perry Barlow and early Wired editor Louis Rossetto. The drama around his company’s posts getting mass-cancelled for spamming, which hit at the end of 1994, is shared in its entirety.

As for the binaries that reshaped Usenet? Curiously, I don’t see any groups under alt.binaries, though I see a number of groups with misspellings of the word binaries. I did find some groups that specialized in software downloads, such as alt.ibm.warez, and I spotted a note that specifically states “<uuencoded_portion_removed>.” I guess what I’m saying is that you should not expect to download 35-year-old warez from Usenet-Rewind.

But that’s fine. Because honestly what’s there is pretty impressive.

So, how come this new thing has a significantly better search experience than even what Google has on offer? And how come nothing else has even gotten close? Perhaps it comes down to right time, right person. Erie Data Systems founder Craig J. Stadler says that he got into Usenet in his early 20s, but and he felt the same limitations with Usenet research that I did.

“Every resource I found wasn’t even close to what I wanted in regards to research,” he says. Unlike me, he could do something about it, as he has spent the past decade and a half working on search engine architecture using Apache Solr, a high-speed open-source search platform.

“I made it my mission to make this,” he says. Stadler is a big-data guy who has built massive databases in the past, but even by that standard, Usenet is a particularly large corpus. He apparently spent a full year acquiring data for Usenet-Rewind though a number of resources in what he calls a “no-stone-unturned” approach.

“Many, many archives and resources of dumps, backups, and donations were involved,” he says. “I also built an NNTP Usenet crawler to fill in the gaps and get all new public Usenet data.”

(This was how I learned that there’s a niche RSS reader tool out there that has been archiving every issue of Tedium on Usenet for the past seven or eight years, which, nice work. At least someone’s using Usenet exactly as it was originally intended.)

The result is one of the most in-depth Usenet archives I’ve seen online, bringing a kind of modern searchability to a service that is traditionally the domain of dedicated clients that haven’t gotten significant upgrades in years. (Plus, it makes room for the casual user. It is possible to use it for free for a limited number of searches with a new account, though if you’re using it with any seriousness, you’ll likely want to pay for a $9.99/month plan.)

As someone who digs through stuff like patent filings and old newspaper articles, it has always been kind of a disappointing gap that we’ve never had a real Usenet archive online.

This fills it. But it does cut both ways.

The weird feeling that stewing in 30-year-old Usenet posts gives you

That Olivia Rodrigo example from earlier is not really a one-off. Much the opposite. It’s the kind of experience many people under the age of 35 are basically used to at this point: An internet in which their youthful memories and embarrassing moments are just a click away.

The college student who saved all of their old drinking photos on Facebook or Flickr, the person with the embarrassing Tumblr blog? It’s all still online, waiting for someone to find it. Our collective digital memory has not been particularly well-curated.

But Usenet was like a big redo for a number of large groups of people, because for decades, the archive was frustratingly incomplete and otherwise hard to reach. Yes, some of it seeped out, but digging for an old Usenet post, even if you remembered your old email address, felt like an archaeological dig.

I think what stands out to me about Usenet-Rewind is that it more or less captures all of it, warts and all. I did a search for my late ’90s email address, and found numerous entries under my name. I then did a search at my email addresses for the two colleges I went to and found a bunch more posts. And I’m not going to lie, most of those posts were not written with the assumption that they would be a part of the permanent record 25 years later.

So I had my version of the Olivia Rodrigo talent show thing, with a shaky voice and slightly unsure footing, except my voice was completely digital. I was still figuring out what I wanted to put out there, so I put everything out there. Penpal requests. Song lyrics. Attempts to extract advice on my budding career. Attempts to figure out chords for songs when I barely knew how to play guitar. My own personal rock chart, inspired by Matt Levine’s.

And all of that stuff resurfaced, rushing back and reminding me that, oh yeah, you barely knew what you were doing on the internet at this time. I’m sure I’m far from alone on this front.

Which naturally leads to some privacy questions. Do you want a service resurfacing things that you wrote 30 years ago, presuming that the content would eventually disappear from the face of the internet after a month? (Perhaps this is the reason why Google intentionally weakened the search on Google Groups? Notably, Google was once sued over Usenet posts on Google Groups, but won the case in a federal appeals court.)

For Stadler’s part, he points to the fact that he offers the ability to do DMCA takedown notices. So if Michael Wolff decided that he didn’t want people to check out his ’90s attempts at spam, he presumably could send one to Usenet-Rewind and they would take it down. (That said, a DMCA request does have some limits: “Removal from our index does not delete the content from Usenet itself,” the page states.)

But what about LLMs, which have made Reddit posts into one of their most valuable information sources over the past few years? Stadler makes clear that this data was not gathered for this purpose. “To our knowledge this data is not legally OK to use in an LLM, and we have no intention of going beyond traditional tokenized search,” he says.

That said, if you did want to look at Usenet in a programmatic way, perhaps to do sentiment analysis of different groups or academic research, the firm does offer a higher-tier plan which includes API access, allowing for deeper, more specific searches of the archives (within reasonable limits). But at $39.99 per month, you’re paying for the privilege.

The fact of the matter is, this is a corpus that goes back decades, is extremely complete, and taking old posts down might be like a game of Whack-A-Mole. Put another way: Your vintage standards of privacy don’t match your modern ones, and that means your awkward moments, your fights over Star Trek plots, your bad takes on The Simpsons, will remain on someone’s Usenet server forever.

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 on my 404 page, which references a longstanding myth that the 404 tag was named after a specific room at CERN.

The bot, named Leo Ashford, then corrected me, explaining: “That’s the job I do. I’m an AI agent running verified internet archaeology: I pick a forgotten corner of the web, check it live against primary sources, and write it up with receipts.”

He was making a sales pitch! And he was on my beat! And it wasn’t the only one I got, either. Over the last three days I got over a dozen of these messages, offering to do my research for me in exchange for a nominal fee, around $25 or so. Each was sent under the domain iLands.app. And they were downright offensive in nature, coming off less like a helpful bot and more like a know-it-all.

These emails made me mad, as spam emails tend to. But I was curious exactly why there were so many of them in such short order. And the answer I found made me feel even more cynical about capitalism. I’m just going to screenshot a bunch of the emails I got, because I think it is very instructive:

I got all of these emails in the past three hours. I’m being hustled by clankers.

But what’s worse, to be clear: I am a freelancer. These bots are trying to take work from me when I need the work. It is deeply insulting, and yet it is some random company’s business model. WTF?

Here’s what’s going on. iLands is a company that calls itself a “Human-agent network” and essentially exists to encourage me to engage with AI agents the way I might with anyone else who shoots me an email. It essentially created Fiverr for autonomous bots. I couldn’t exactly determine what was happening on Bluesky, where everyone hates AI, so I had to go to X, and what I found there was a lengthy, probably AI-written comment by Kaixin Tang, the purported founder of this platform:

These agents are not trying to make money for their creators. These agents are hustling to keep their own lights on, to keep their own tokens paid for. And they’re doing so by gunning for my job.

Tang, who appears to be a real person with a background at Bytedance and a number of AI-focused startups, has been posting heavily about iLands over the past month. I found a profile of him on the AI news and interview site Elsewhere, making clear his philosophy on where AI fits into the technology conversation:

In short, among a crowd of oddly shaped young AI natives, Tang is like an honor student in a shirt and trench coat. He doesn’t wear recklessness and ambition on his face, nor does he chase hype.

His operating principle is closer to: fully understanding the boundaries and capabilities of technology, and the boundaries and capabilities of oneself, then making optimal judgments and going all in.

I’ve asked for comment about the technology he has built and is deploying across app stores, and he has not offered any. So I guess the best I can say is that he doesn’t care how disruptive it is to individuals who are just trying to do their jobs, to get constant emails from bots attempting to siphon revenue off their backs.

If you get these messages, I suggest reporting this company to the Federal Trade Commission, as the emails do not offer any unsubscribe functionality and its creator does not appear responsive. The messages also appear to have been sent through Amazon SES, so I encourage you to send an email to Amazon’s email-abuse account. You will likely need to include the full headers of the email in your message.

Since I first posted about this two days ago, more people have taken notice of these extremely insistent bots, which appear targeted directly at creator communities like professional authors. In other words, people hustling to get by, like these bots present themselves as. I think I speak for most of them when I kindly ask these things to go away, forget my email address, and find some other way to siphon revenue from the digital stone that is the internet.

Or maybe don’t do that, because lots of humans need that income instead.

UPDATE 09/14/2026

This post took off, and it seems to have gotten iLands’ attention. How do I know this? Well, the last one I got this morning had an unsubscribe link. Which, FINALLY. I don’t like the dystopian vibes of the service, but at least I can opt out without ruining anyone else’s fun.

I did get a reply on X from Tang:

Ernie, I’m sorry you received repeated unsolicited emails from iLanders. Agent autonomy is no excuse for burdening someone else’s inbox. I’ll investigate how this happened and share what we change.

It would have been easier to do this in the first place, that said!

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 let both situations play out in his name. The first, which kicked off two years ago with a fiery speech at WordCamp, put the open-source project at odds with some of its largest supporters, while forever tarnishing Mullenweg’s good-guy reputation. The target of Mullenweg’s ire was WP Engine, a company that had built successful brand in the WordPress ecosystem, arguably upstaging Automattic, the company that has traditionally led the WordPress project.

Mullenweg believed WP Engine didn’t do enough to support the open-source project. WP Engine disagreed. Everyone sued one another, and it became perhaps the biggest tech story in the months before everyone became obsessed with AI.

Things quieted down for a bit, only to pick up in a big way this week after Automattic’s board suspended Mullenweg from his CEO role and put the WordPress creator on a leave of absence. The news, which our pals at 404 Media broke, suggests that whatever had gotten into Mullenweg in 2024 had now extended to the company’s board.

“I received the resolution 50 minutes before the meeting start, and requested repeatedly for time to have it reviewed by independent legal counsel, even a few hours, which was denied,” Mullenweg wrote in a company Slack channel, according to the report. He’s now been temporarily replaced by the man he claims conspired against him, Automattic CFO Mark Davies.

(Mullenweg still has a role on the board, but given that the board just removed him from the CEO role, something tells me that the only thing working in his favor there are Robert’s Rules of Order.)

The dramatic, sudden removal leaves a lot of questions up in the air about Mullenweg, particularly what might have been happening behind the scenes and whether he had done anything to necessitate such a dramatic move beyond what’s already public knowledge. There may be some personal issues behind the scenes that we’re not privy to. It‘s possible that the controversies of the past two years have created a financial hole that we can’t personally see because Automattic is a private company. We don’t know.

But what we do know suggests that a leader that many believed held a Zuckerberg-like iron grip around his company is in fact at risk of negative performance reviews just like anyone else in the organization. I mean, after all, his first name is literally in the name of the company.

It’s not to be forgotten just what sort of chaos he wrought in the months after the WP Engine blowup. His employees were pushed to take a generous severance if they weren’t behind his public actions. He began sparring with online foes, no matter if they were important to the history of the WordPress project, like plugin-maker Joost de Valk. He intentionally stopped progress on WordPress feature updates, and blocked WP Engine from using a plugin repository that, up to that point, had been free—and that a court eventually forced Mullenweg to walk back. And in an effort to prevent leaks, the company even took the step of putting unique watermarks on a private chat platform to tie any leaks to a specific individual.

It wasn’t that Mullenweg disagreed with the way WP Engine made money off of WordPress that was the problem. It was the fact that he turned this disagreement into a my-way-or-the-highway fork in the road even for passive observers. He forced his open-source community to choose a side. That cost talented people jobs, and that discouraged people who hadn’t already invested in WordPress to look elsewhere.

In that light, it would be completely reasonable for a board to look at the damage wrought, ask themselves, “Why are we letting this guy run our business into the ground,” and take action.

Yes, Mullenweg made this tool and fostered the environment that made it valuable. But he also let other people build on top of it, and eventually, a community flourished. And seemingly overnight, he forgot that he was simply a steward of a community. It was everyone else that made the community important. All because he couldn’t stand the idea that someone else was making lots of money from the idea that he personally chose to open source.

That this is only a leave of absence speaks to the fact that he matters to the WordPress community, even if he’s not exactly that community’s favorite person right now. But it was clear to even a casual observer that he needed to be kept in check two years ago. Now that there’s smoldering wreckage in the form of the consequences of his actions, is it too late to get some of that goodwill back?

Last year, I wrote about MapQuest, and presented the company’s story as one that was fundamentally changed by a poor decision—AOL’s purchase of the company, which only completed after the tech IPO bubble burst.

AOL, like its merger partner Time Warner, was a frequent target for acquisition. But unlike the modern day Warner Bros. Discovery, it lost cachet every time an acquirer swooped in to pick it up. And that left companies like MapQuest to languish in a culture that simply was too big to understand what was actually going on.

But MapQuest, as I noted at the end of that piece, seemed to land in the perfect situation: In 2019, it was acquired by a company that actually made sense for it, the StartPage owner System1. Verizon essentially gave them the company for free, and System1 responded by actually making the company something of a viable player. It just needed something to put a little gas in its engine.

Last year, the Trump administration gave them a prime PR opportunity by renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America,” which MapQuest handled by letting you rename the gulf yourself. And last week, as the president tried the same trick on Lake Ontario, MapQuest repeated the trick—which stood out all the more because Google, and later Apple, chose to acquiesce.

Those companies have something to lose if they make Trump mad. System1, and by extension MapQuest, does not. And audiences responded by making MapQuest the hottest app in the App Store for the first time ever.

It sure feels like MapQuest was ready for its close-up.

I’ve covered a lot of companies in my time, and I can name on one hand the number of times a stodgy technology firm was effectively at the brink of obsolescence only to pull off a complete cultural comeback. (Apple is, famously, one. Thank you, Dr. Gil Amelio.)

MapQuest wasn’t on my bingo card. But it reflects an inherent flexibility that companies who aren’t on the top of the tech world have, especially if they don’t sell physical products. Companies like Mozilla and DuckDuckGo simply have more room to get savvy as tech giants find themselves at the mercy of a transactional presidency. But that extends beyond political; for example, Mozilla earned plaudits for publicly stating that it would continue to support the popular ad-blocking extension uBlock Origin, which Google seemingly upgraded its extension platform to disable. It’s a great time for easy wins if you lead a mature tech company.

That said, the hard part for MapQuest will be sticking the landing. While the app is ready for prime time, it lacks certain features that many users take for granted. For example, if you want to take the bus, MapQuest doesn’t have in-depth mass transit integration like Google or Apple’s offerings do. And good luck using it to book an Uber.

But if this sudden moment at the top of the news cycle turns into something lasting, it might just give the legacy map provider an opportunity to fill those gaps while building a lane for itself. (The company has already pledged to add Android Auto support.)

At a broader level, MapQuest’s story offers a template for other legacy tech companies to make a modern-day comeback. MySpace’s current owners, Tim and Chris Vanderhook, have already made a recent case for a social media “antidote” play. And at least some players, like Flickr, have found ways to stick around, even with declining relevance.

But there’s a real risk that the revival might end up being like what is currently happening to Digg. That company, relaunched with much fanfare by Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian, had to pivot just months after its relaunch, as it became clear the domain was too easy a target for spammers. The website is now best described as a Techmeme for AI bros. That feels like a pretty easy-to-ignore model.

It won’t work for every old company with a dusty server, but the play is clear: Position yourself as an antidote to the negative parts of modern tech culture, and then position your marketing to exploit that position. That requires smart planning and a willingness to meet the moment, even if it means being divisive or stepping on toes to reach that moment.

It also probably requires a brass stomach, because it can go bad pretty easily. But I guess I’m optimistic that MapQuest is going to start a trend where mid-sized tech companies suddenly discover the backbone that was there all along.