Here today, tabs tomorrow

November 4, 2021 2:03 PM

Today in Tabs. You may want to read the Tabs newsletter (took a break in 2016 but came back this year on Substack) (written by Rusty Foster, of Kuro5hin/MeFi's own note for some) for a broad round up in recent Internet on-goings. Or, if for example, you want to read about the AP quoting Doug, the potato, and possibly the world's biggest potato, discovered in NZ (since corrected):

“We put a hat on him. We put him on Facebook, taking him for a walk, giving him some sunshine,” Doug said. “It’s all a bit of fun. It’s amazing what entertains people.”

Or maybe, from yesterday:

Elijah Wood is an actor best known for his star turn in 1998’s “The Faculty” along with Josh Hartnett and a pre-Daily Show Jon Stewart, but he also appeared as some kind of agrarian Munchkin in a New Zealand adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s unbearably boring fantasy travelogue “The Lord of the Rings.”

(The rest of that story is mostly depressing.)

An older interview touching on the Kuro5hin connection and other things.

(Previously.)

posted by skynxnex (10 comments total)

Thanks for the post! I am a Today in Tabs fan and had no idea Rusty (whom I do not know) has a history with MF. Cool!
posted by Bella Donna at 2:34 PM on November 4, 2021

To be honest I mostly posted this for the potato news but I realized sharing stuff about Tabs is good too since it normally has at least one thing that makes me smile.
posted by skynxnex at 2:51 PM on November 4, 2021

Bob: Am I the only person who subscribes that knows you from Kuro5hin? What’s the overlap, and how has the community experience differed between the two?

Rusty: There’s a little overlap, but not as much as you might think, or as much as I expected. I started Kuro5hin in 1999, which was a billion internet years ago, and I was a completely different person then. In some ways this is the anti-Kuro5hin? It’s almost point by point the opposite of what I did there. It’s just me writing instead of a community thing. I don’t really encourage discussion directly–people do take things to Twitter and talk about them but honestly I prefer when they just make off with the links and ignore where they found them. And I made the syndication deal with Newsweek at least in part because I was determined to sell out as quickly as possible, before I had a chance to get all precious and lofty about Tabs, because that is the kind of thing I do.

There were some dark times with Kuro5hin, which were entirely my own fault. So I guess I’m a little gun-shy about really engaging with an online community to the extent I did there.

Nothing wrong with doing a mailinglist instead of a site, but count me as thinking this is a bit unfortunate. I was on K5 back in the day, and always thought Rusty was trying to really push the envelope of what an online community could be; and even if K5 wasn't successful commercially or in the sense of being self-maintaining, there were still a lot of lessons learned. I've always wondered what form a modern attempt at the same thing would look like, taking into account what we know now, from K5 itself, Metafilter, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, etc. over the years.

Or maybe the answer is: "it would look like a mailinglist."
posted by Kadin2048 at 3:01 PM on November 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

Oh cool I needed a new feed to read (substack has rss for all their newsletters, this one is at todayintabs.substack.com)
posted by cali at 4:02 PM on November 4, 2021

I love Doug the world's biggest potato. Have him bronzed and send him to a place of honor in Ireland's Tayto Park.
posted by mermayd at 4:13 PM on November 4, 2021

Hah, just about a year ago I was thinking "it would be good to do a publication about the internet things just floating around on the internet, not really associated with any one story or site." My brother scoffed.
posted by rhizome at 5:16 PM on November 4, 2021

"it would be good to do a publication about the internet things just floating around on the internet, not really associated with any one story or site."

There used to be so much of that and it's nice to see it coming back a little. Memepool is long gone, likewise NTK. Just thinking about some sites I used to check in with made me go look up Arts and Letters Daily, which I thought had ceased, but appears to be updated 6 days a week. Kottke and BoingBoing still exist, but neither feel as engaging as I remember.
posted by msbrauer at 6:09 PM on November 4, 2021 [4 favorites]

The Morning News is another site that is still going and has been for more than 20 years
posted by cali at 1:19 AM on November 5, 2021

Oh hey, K5! Also a former user of said site, who wishes it had continued on.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 8:26 AM on November 5, 2021

I love a bit of Web Curios on the tip of 'what are fun things happening on the internet' - it's weekly and the author's been on hols for a couple of weeks but it always digs up some deep cuts which I don't bump into elsewhere...
posted by garlicsmack at 8:26 AM on November 5, 2021