I kinda have the print edition of the Onion to thank for my career.
Back in 2000, I had a "100% travel" tech consulting job. My favorite part of the week was finally getting back home to Chicago, grabbing a sub at a sandwich shop, and casually reading that week's edition cover to cover Saturday afternoon.
One particular week, there was an ad for a local tech company (ThoughtWorks). I don't remember there being many tech job ads in the Onion at the time, so it stood out. I remember the ad copy being something like "Does your life suck, or just your job? Work here instead." I immediately applied, interviewed, eventually got an offer, quit my other job, and started at ThoughtWorks. It was a massive upgrade.
A few years later, I got to lead an internal dev team, and a spin-off project (Selenium) came out of that.
Long story long: No Onion, no job at ThoughtWorks, no Selenium.
Glad a new generation gets to enjoy leisurely reading fake news and seeing where it takes them in life.
I wrote so many sophisticated, nearly magical Selenium helpers in PHP for massive test suites for a fairly prominent website in the early 2000s. I remember simultaneously having a sense of great accomplishment and deep shame and frustration, haha. It was so hard to build good testing tools. I think we did alright, though.
These days I write automated UI tests with barely a second thought. It has gotten so much easier.
It turns out it came out in 2004. I had no idea I was working with cutting edge testing software at the time. That also explains why it was so rough on the edges and there were so few resources to draw on to get it working better in edge cases. Although it was kind of brutal, I think selenium taught me a ton about asynchronicity and concurrency. That was probably good for my career
I used to get the print edition of The Economist. It really does feel a lot different from browsing reddit/HN/etc.
* You're reading in a linear format. Fewer distractions.
* No tabsplosion. No clickbait titles.
* Little to zero internet drama.
* You're leaned back on the couch instead of hunched over a computer or phone.
* You're closer to reading about a random/representative sample of what's going on in the world, as opposed to the "dog bites man" internet story of the week. Fewer breathless takes on everything.
The nice thing about a print magazine is that it actually does its job of giving you a break from your day, instead of turning into a distraction timesuck. It's easy to put down after reading an article or two that strikes your interest.
Unfortunately I did notice a bit of a slide in quality as The Economist started adopting the "shove our opinion down your throat" editorial style that's super common online.
> Unfortunately I did notice a bit of a slide in quality as The Economist started adopting the "shove our opinion down your throat" editorial style that's super common online.
Is the Economist still publishing a print edition? Barnes and Noble hasn't had a new issue since mid-July.
>Barnes and Noble hasn't had a new issue since mid-July.
Twice a year, during the summer and around xmas, they ship a really thick issue with lots of extra articles and then take a few weeks off. Perhaps this is their summer break?
The way they will incorporate an absurd mix of expressive poetic technical and satirical writing in the same piece — to the point of belaboring it and wearing you down until you can’t help but laugh is what I love. Compendiums off Amazon used books are about $8 I bought a stack a few years ago. “What Makes Anna so Beautiful in the Moonlight?” is a favorite for some reason (nerd explains beauty). Also the Onion Film Standard “The Onion Looks Back at E.T.” Maybe this means Nathan Fielder will resurrect his short lived hardcopy newspaper “The Diarrhea Times” too if there’s an appetite!
Game Informer is doing the same. I got the most recent copy and it was just a breath of fresh air. Articles written for their content, not to fill some quota or drive clicks. It was a month late (mostly stuff about SGF) but it didn’t matter. I got to read what these passionate writers thought of the games and demos there and that was a great read, even if it wasn’t “news”.
Really? I had a subscription to GI for a year or so because it came free with the GameCube I bought from Gamestop. I assumed it was just GS' in house ad rag. It's cool to know it still exists...
Oh wait what's that, I just went to wikipedia and I was correct in my assessment but also now it's independent? Shit I might just subscribe for the sake of it.
I read the first paragraph, immediately tabbed over to the Onion website, and put down a crisp hundred dollar bill without a second thought. Hell yes. Thanks for posting.
Their story review meetings really cut out for them by the rise of AI slop chumbox advertisers, lazy journalists using AI, cartoonish political figures playing third-world warlords, Chester Sokolsky's sub basement Q Anon daily, and Tim Pool taking Russian money.
We would snag copies of The Onion at the University of Minnesota many many years ago. Always fun. I’m glad they brought it back. It was always a great casual read
Was one of my fav thing about being in Madison in the mid-90s. Especially the “Drunk of the Week” because you always checked to see if it was someone you knew.
The next time I'm in the area I'll have to check to see if it's still true that copies of The Onion are offered all over the place at no cost (I'm guessing they don't do it anymore though). Back in the 90s I was actually shocked when I saw that people in other places had to pay money for them.
My uncle was/is friends with Tim Keck since he started the Onion at UW Madison.
Used to get handed a stack and asked to spread them around high school.
Years later uncle texts asking if I have weed. At the time yeah I always did. He says bring it to the Berrymore and I smoked up Tim, Eric, and John C Reilly like nbd.
I can confirm. I started grad school in physics there in 1992. The weekly department colloquium was on Thursday afternoon, just after the latest Onion came out. It was not uncommon to see a few people reading it during the talk.
All the Big Ten schools that a founder who grew up in Indiana and Wisconsin cared about had it. Maybe even Ohio State. I’m not sure how far east it got back then.
Respect to Jeff Lawson, the quality of the Onion, which had grown a bit stale in the preceding decade, has noticeably improved since he purchased the company last year.
Can you go into more detail? I had largely written off the Onion as I thought it had become try-hard partisan political satire (I'm fairly sure that's mostly consensus?). Even when I agreed with the premise, I thought it was pretty terrible.
Not a huge Onion fan, but I absolutely love that they did this. I get so irritated by paper offerings that went 'digital only' like it was some upgrade for me.
I spend more than half my day on screens. Sometimes it's nice to take a break.
Makes sense, we have moved so far into the digital space where articles are short, filled with ads and there's an article on almost everything.
Print goes back to considered articles for that point in time, limited ads that don't jump out in front of me and something that takes me away from a computer screen which is different. Sometimes I need different.
Reminds me of an interview with one of its founders who said it's becoming increasingly difficult to parody Kafkaesque insanity. They said something like humor is a temporary salve from the awfulness of reality, even in the face of terrible, repetitive occurrences like mass shootings that aren't themselves funny at all.
And, meanwhile, South Park hasn't really evolved and misses the opportunity for satirical social commentary with less offensive, cheap shots rather than brutally criticizing and challenging the core flaws like idiocy, meanness, and selfishness of corrupt, hypocritical, and criminal political personalities.
> … meanwhile, South Park hasn't really evolved and misses the opportunity…
i understand where you’re coming from looking at the most recent seasons, but this year has that humor bite that it used to have years ago. i’m not sure what they changed, but it really does capture the sassy claws it had in the early seasons.
it just completely slices up so many of the fantasy goggles so many people are wearing.
i can understand why certain cultish groups in the tech sphere are stinging though.
I've found South Park's comedy and commentary to have both been incredibly on point this season. It does require some previous investment in the characters from the last two decades, so it might not be as accessible to new viewers, but making Donald Trump a reincarnation of Saddam Hussein and having Craig beat Cartman at being a right wing podcast grifter, are incredibly satisfying arcs that play on the established lore and character traits very well. And it hasn't been above making an earnest point e.g. about when is it worth selling out your values in episode 2 with Mr. Mackey
https://archive.ph/g9UcN
I kinda have the print edition of the Onion to thank for my career.
Back in 2000, I had a "100% travel" tech consulting job. My favorite part of the week was finally getting back home to Chicago, grabbing a sub at a sandwich shop, and casually reading that week's edition cover to cover Saturday afternoon.
One particular week, there was an ad for a local tech company (ThoughtWorks). I don't remember there being many tech job ads in the Onion at the time, so it stood out. I remember the ad copy being something like "Does your life suck, or just your job? Work here instead." I immediately applied, interviewed, eventually got an offer, quit my other job, and started at ThoughtWorks. It was a massive upgrade.
A few years later, I got to lead an internal dev team, and a spin-off project (Selenium) came out of that.
Long story long: No Onion, no job at ThoughtWorks, no Selenium.
Glad a new generation gets to enjoy leisurely reading fake news and seeing where it takes them in life.
Selenium?
That stack birthed almost an entire category of QA jobs.
Awesome story. hat-tip
Selenium is useful beyond testing too.
I "optimized around" some tedious expense report filing a few years back with it.
the project that selenium was extracted from was... a timesheet and expense reporting system!
I have such emotional damage with Selenium. But atlas the limits of the tools at the time.
Puppeteer was such a breathe of fresh air. It supported waiting for element change instead of timeouts or polling
I feel like there's a funny Onion article version of this story :-D
Traveling Businessman Makes QA Automator After Mistaking Joke Newspaper For Reality.
Authentic News, Ad Clicks Faked
Area Man
a slightly more generalized re-mix:
skynet inventor credits dystopian fake news for inspiration to create dystopian reality
I have such emotional damage with Selenium. But atlas the limits of the tools at the time.
Puppeteer was such a breathe of fresh air.
I wrote so many sophisticated, nearly magical Selenium helpers in PHP for massive test suites for a fairly prominent website in the early 2000s. I remember simultaneously having a sense of great accomplishment and deep shame and frustration, haha. It was so hard to build good testing tools. I think we did alright, though.
These days I write automated UI tests with barely a second thought. It has gotten so much easier.
It turns out it came out in 2004. I had no idea I was working with cutting edge testing software at the time. That also explains why it was so rough on the edges and there were so few resources to draw on to get it working better in edge cases. Although it was kind of brutal, I think selenium taught me a ton about asynchronicity and concurrency. That was probably good for my career
TO is supposed to transport you away from life suck for 0.5-10 seconds. No warranties or refunds though.
I used to get the print edition of The Economist. It really does feel a lot different from browsing reddit/HN/etc.
* You're reading in a linear format. Fewer distractions.
* No tabsplosion. No clickbait titles.
* Little to zero internet drama.
* You're leaned back on the couch instead of hunched over a computer or phone.
* You're closer to reading about a random/representative sample of what's going on in the world, as opposed to the "dog bites man" internet story of the week. Fewer breathless takes on everything.
The nice thing about a print magazine is that it actually does its job of giving you a break from your day, instead of turning into a distraction timesuck. It's easy to put down after reading an article or two that strikes your interest.
Unfortunately I did notice a bit of a slide in quality as The Economist started adopting the "shove our opinion down your throat" editorial style that's super common online.
> Unfortunately I did notice a bit of a slide in quality as The Economist started adopting the "shove our opinion down your throat" editorial style that's super common online.
Is the Economist still publishing a print edition? Barnes and Noble hasn't had a new issue since mid-July.
I cancelled my subscription a while ago, but it appears the print edition is still being advertised online: https://subscribenow.economist.com/summersale/
>Barnes and Noble hasn't had a new issue since mid-July.
Twice a year, during the summer and around xmas, they ship a really thick issue with lots of extra articles and then take a few weeks off. Perhaps this is their summer break?
The way they will incorporate an absurd mix of expressive poetic technical and satirical writing in the same piece — to the point of belaboring it and wearing you down until you can’t help but laugh is what I love. Compendiums off Amazon used books are about $8 I bought a stack a few years ago. “What Makes Anna so Beautiful in the Moonlight?” is a favorite for some reason (nerd explains beauty). Also the Onion Film Standard “The Onion Looks Back at E.T.” Maybe this means Nathan Fielder will resurrect his short lived hardcopy newspaper “The Diarrhea Times” too if there’s an appetite!
Game Informer is doing the same. I got the most recent copy and it was just a breath of fresh air. Articles written for their content, not to fill some quota or drive clicks. It was a month late (mostly stuff about SGF) but it didn’t matter. I got to read what these passionate writers thought of the games and demos there and that was a great read, even if it wasn’t “news”.
Really? I had a subscription to GI for a year or so because it came free with the GameCube I bought from Gamestop. I assumed it was just GS' in house ad rag. It's cool to know it still exists...
Oh wait what's that, I just went to wikipedia and I was correct in my assessment but also now it's independent? Shit I might just subscribe for the sake of it.
I read the first paragraph, immediately tabbed over to the Onion website, and put down a crisp hundred dollar bill without a second thought. Hell yes. Thanks for posting.
As one of the subscribers, I can confirm that I’m satisfied with the product. And looking forward to each edition of America’s finest news source.
Their story review meetings really cut out for them by the rise of AI slop chumbox advertisers, lazy journalists using AI, cartoonish political figures playing third-world warlords, Chester Sokolsky's sub basement Q Anon daily, and Tim Pool taking Russian money.
We would snag copies of The Onion at the University of Minnesota many many years ago. Always fun. I’m glad they brought it back. It was always a great casual read
Was one of my fav thing about being in Madison in the mid-90s. Especially the “Drunk of the Week” because you always checked to see if it was someone you knew.
The next time I'm in the area I'll have to check to see if it's still true that copies of The Onion are offered all over the place at no cost (I'm guessing they don't do it anymore though). Back in the 90s I was actually shocked when I saw that people in other places had to pay money for them.
My uncle was/is friends with Tim Keck since he started the Onion at UW Madison.
Used to get handed a stack and asked to spread them around high school.
Years later uncle texts asking if I have weed. At the time yeah I always did. He says bring it to the Berrymore and I smoked up Tim, Eric, and John C Reilly like nbd.
Ahh the old days.
Passersby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood.
(Also, UM has, or had back when I read it, the best school newspaper I've ever read.)
I heard UIUC had it too in the 90's. Can anyone confirm?
I can confirm. I started grad school in physics there in 1992. The weekly department colloquium was on Thursday afternoon, just after the latest Onion came out. It was not uncommon to see a few people reading it during the talk.
Yes.
All the Big Ten schools that a founder who grew up in Indiana and Wisconsin cared about had it. Maybe even Ohio State. I’m not sure how far east it got back then.
Respect to Jeff Lawson, the quality of the Onion, which had grown a bit stale in the preceding decade, has noticeably improved since he purchased the company last year.
Our family has been debating this, but we lean on it having improved, too. We wondered if having to fill the print layout again helps.
Can you go into more detail? I had largely written off the Onion as I thought it had become try-hard partisan political satire (I'm fairly sure that's mostly consensus?). Even when I agreed with the premise, I thought it was pretty terrible.
Has it gone away from that?
> I'm fairly sure that's mostly consensus
The consensus is that's it's terrible try-hard partisan political satire? Can you go into more detail?
Not a huge Onion fan, but I absolutely love that they did this. I get so irritated by paper offerings that went 'digital only' like it was some upgrade for me.
I spend more than half my day on screens. Sometimes it's nice to take a break.
First time I read The Onion was at University of Wisconsin, Madison in the 1980s. There was no "online edition" at that time
Even as a student newspaper it was remarkably funny
Makes sense, we have moved so far into the digital space where articles are short, filled with ads and there's an article on almost everything.
Print goes back to considered articles for that point in time, limited ads that don't jump out in front of me and something that takes me away from a computer screen which is different. Sometimes I need different.
Print subscription - $99 (or pay more) / year:
https://membership.theonion.com/
Guess I know what subscription the wife is getting for Christmas.
Reminds me of an interview with one of its founders who said it's becoming increasingly difficult to parody Kafkaesque insanity. They said something like humor is a temporary salve from the awfulness of reality, even in the face of terrible, repetitive occurrences like mass shootings that aren't themselves funny at all.
And, meanwhile, South Park hasn't really evolved and misses the opportunity for satirical social commentary with less offensive, cheap shots rather than brutally criticizing and challenging the core flaws like idiocy, meanness, and selfishness of corrupt, hypocritical, and criminal political personalities.
> … meanwhile, South Park hasn't really evolved and misses the opportunity…
i understand where you’re coming from looking at the most recent seasons, but this year has that humor bite that it used to have years ago. i’m not sure what they changed, but it really does capture the sassy claws it had in the early seasons.
it just completely slices up so many of the fantasy goggles so many people are wearing.
i can understand why certain cultish groups in the tech sphere are stinging though.
There's even a Wikipedia page now for The Onion's handling of mass shootings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...
I've found South Park's comedy and commentary to have both been incredibly on point this season. It does require some previous investment in the characters from the last two decades, so it might not be as accessible to new viewers, but making Donald Trump a reincarnation of Saddam Hussein and having Craig beat Cartman at being a right wing podcast grifter, are incredibly satisfying arcs that play on the established lore and character traits very well. And it hasn't been above making an earnest point e.g. about when is it worth selling out your values in episode 2 with Mr. Mackey