The best podcast episode I listened to today was the unexpected return of an old favorite: Tim Goodman’s TV Talk Machine. The show ended in 2020. I never unsubscribed, and was surprised this week to find new episodes waiting for me. I would not have noticed them if there hadn’t been a redesign of Overcast, my podcast player, for me to look at this week.

It’s been 612 pandemic-fueled days. But we’ve taken the tarp off the TV Talk Machine, replaced a few parts, and are ready to kick it into gear.

Tim spent the last two years writing TV scripts! He’s going to keep doing that, and write a book, and also has launched a newsletter on Substack so he can write about television again. And… did we mention the TV Talk Machine is back, too? It’s true!

In this episode Tim explains where he’s been, where he’s going, and the origin of his new project, which launches today! Also Jason raves about “Station Eleven” and believe it or not, there’s a letter from a listener!

Tim Goodman was a TV critic who had clearly burned out by early 2020. He and co-host Jason Snell ended the podcast shortly after Goodman quit his TV critic job and started a secret (at the time) TV development deal. What I learned from this podcast back then is that it must be exhausting to be a TV critic, because it is impossible to keep up with all the TV shows and TV episodes coming out all the time, and because you have to watch shows you don’t even like sometimes in order to write about them or to be culturally current. In general, I figured that he had watched too much TV and got sick of it. This episode confirmed that I was right.

In the past I learned about a bunch of great TV shows from this podcast. That isn’t why it was fun to listen to, though. The subject matter is usually very light, and Goodman and Snell chat like old friends.

I learned today that one of my cousins died. Before this I didn’t even know he existed. I am not entirely sure how I should feel. Vaguely sad is all I can muster right now.

The best podcast episode I listened to today is this interview of Matt Mullenweg on Decoder with Nilay Patel:

Matt Mullenweg is the CEO of Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com, which he co-founded, and Tumblr, the irrepressible social network it acquired from the wreckage of AOL, Yahoo, and Verizon. Matt’s point of view is that the world is better off when the web is open and fun, and Automattic builds and acquires products that help that goal along.

Mullenweg has a unique point of view for a tech founder and CEO. Patel is a smart and incisive interviewer who really seems to understand both tech and business.

I learned two interesting things:

1. Mullenweg thinks that WordPress could power 85% of the web within the next ten years.
2. Taylor Swift has a Tumblr.

One thing that I learned about this year in chess that I never thought about is this:

For grandmasters, sportsmanship is resigning when your opponent will clearly win. For novices, sportsmanship is playing out the game and allowing your opponent to checkmate you even if it is inevitable.

I have not been doing much writing lately. I looked over a white paper I started writing in the fall, and realized I haven’t worked on it since December. I do not wish to abandon it; I’m just not that interested in it right now. I have been busy—and have wasted time—elsewhere.

📺 I love Severence on Apple TV+. It is a strange, darkly comic, slow burn of a suspense story. I thought it was a miniseries, but I learned from Wikipedia that season 2 has already begun shooting—and not too far from where I live. My mind is spinning. Where could they take this weird story?

During my freshman year in college, my friend Saul and I played a Pong-inspired game on his Mac called Mortal Pongbat. It is basically Pong with lasers and bombs you can use to destroy your opponent’s paddle. As a two-player game, it was a ton of fun.

We also would play a one-player Centipede clone called Apeiron. It was frenetic and had some humorous sound effects.

While these games look very dated today, they were a lot of fun in 1995.

I think about productivity a lot. I wrote up my productivity system about nine years ago. I created todo.txt apps for iOS and macOS. I have strong feelings about how to stay productive. Because of all this, when I don’t feel especially productive, I stress myself out about it more than I think I should. I even stress out when I feel like I have had a productive day but think that it took me too long to do that work. Instead of feeling good, I end up feeling bad. Instead of feeling like I moved ahead, I feel like I fell further behind. This happens to me all the time. It makes me wonder if all of my thought and hard work trying to eke out more productivity is worth it.

🎮 I played through through Celeste this week. I really enjoyed the challenge until the last couple levels, when I had to turn Assist Mode on to get through them. I am glad I made it up to the top of the mountain, no matter how I got there.

I found out about plaintextsports.com from a Daring Fireball post. The site’s Twitter account describes it thusly:

Live sports scores, play-by-play and boxscores, in plain text. No ads, no tracking, no loading.

I love it. It is fast and no-nonsense. Clicking on the box scores loads a page full of stats for each game. There is even a “hidden” page that lets you follow all the teams in certain cities or regions. It is laid out perfectly for smartphones. The only drawback is that you can’t make its tables a little wider on tablet or desktop browsers.

I can’t wait for baseball season to start so I can use this site for a sport I follow.

One of my old websites is #2 on Hacker News right now.

Luke Broadwater and Amelia Nierenberg report in The New York Times:

After losing an hour of sleep over the weekend, members of the United States Senate returned to the Capitol this week a bit groggy and in a mood to put an end to all this frustrating clock-changing.

So on Tuesday, with almost no warning and no debate, the Senate unanimously passed legislation to do away with the biannual springing forward and falling back that most Americans have come to despise, in favor of making daylight saving time permanent. The bill’s fate in the House was not immediately clear, but if the legislation were to pass there and be signed by President Biden, it would take effect in November 2023.

I am trying not to get my hopes up, but I would love it if we stopped changing the clocks twice each year.

I never really cared about it until I had kids. I learned the hard way that messing with their sleep schedule makes kids crazy, and the effect can last for weeks. Now changing the clicks is a twice-yearly curse.

I would prefer Daylight Saving Time year-round. Having sunlight in the early evening is of far greater value to me than having the sun rise earlier.

⚾️ I’m watching the Red Sox/Twins opening Spring Training game. I’m happy that baseball is back! Instead of following the Sox, I may watch the MLB free game of the day and jump around the league this year. It will be interesting to see how the new universal designated hitter rule plays out.

🍀 We are having a St. Patrick’s Day dinner tonight. I put the corned beef in the slow cooker and got the potatoes ready for roasting later. I’m even going to cook cabbage for the first time. I plan to sauté it, and hope it turns out well.

I want to help my daughter do a science fair project and create a fancy 3-fold poster for her elementary school’s science fair next month. I like the idea of making oobleck (a.k.a. “slime”) with cornstarch and water and doing some simple experiments with it. I think it would be a lot of fun. I wonder if it is too basic for fourth grade, but I expect it would be OK. I think that learning the format of creating an experiment and presenting it in poster form is a lot more important than the impressiveness of the experiment.

Kevin Draper reports for The New York Times that Tom Brady is rescinding his retirement announcement from only eight weeks ago:

Brady, the 44-year-old quarterback who has won the Super Bowl seven times, wrote on his social media accounts Sunday evening that he would return to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to play his 23rd N.F.L. season.

I can only admire Tom Brady’s gumption here. His numbers last season were so good that his retirement seemed unnecessary, despite his age. I wonder if he can win another Super Bowl ring. It he does, I wonder if he would really retire right afterward, or if he would keep pushing forward until he can’t compete at all anymore.

My daughter had a book fair at school today. She was so thrilled about it that she told me about it many times over the weekend before it happened, and several times today after it happened. She proudly showed my wife and me the books and the fancy pencils and erasers she bought there today. It is wonderful how much she loves to read and to write.

I always loved book fairs in elementary school, too. It was fun, as a kid, to get a chance to shop with real money and actually make buying decisions. I’m happy my daughter gets the same opportunity.

My son is starting to get interested in ScratchJr on his iPad. It is a visual programming environment for kids. It seems like a good way for kids to learn programming. I set him up with it on Saturday and tried to help him get started yesterday. So far his favorite part is the image editor, which of course is the non-programming part. He has been drawing and coloring with it most of the time. Tonight he showed me one of the animations he made with ScratchJr. Now I know he is interested in the programming part, too. Tonight he demanded I get him ScatchJr’s big brother: Scratch, which is just a web app. I look forward to seeing what he thinks of it.

I got a chance to try Universal Control tonight. It is pretty cool! I think it will come in handy sometimes, when I want to type on my iPad without having to get my BlueTooth keyboard.

I have not had much interesting to say lately. I have been doing boring things like preparing my taxes and watching way more TV than usual. I hope to get out of my creative slump soon.

Judging by the weather—wind, cold, snow, sleet, hail, and rain—it is the last gasp of winter here in New Jersey. All I have wanted to do is sit under a blanket and watch TV.

I play chess on Chess.com, thanks to a challenge request from Andrew Canion a while back. We play “1 Day” games, which are essentially correspondence chess. It is great fun playing against Andrew, but I don’t get to play with him in real time because we live on different sides of the planet. To see if I can beat an opponent—who is not one of my kids—in real time, I have played a number of blitz games, which are 10-minute games. Unfortunately, I always lose them badly or lose on time. The clock stresses me out, which makes the games not much fun at all.

It did not occur to me before today that I could start such a “1 Day” game against a random opponent on Chess.com just as easily as I could start a blitz game. I did so tonight, and now I have another long, slow game going. I am happy to have found another way to play chess against people at my level that won’t stress me out.

Jason Snell, on Six Colors, shared some interesting information about Apple’s Major League Baseball announcement on Tuesday :

Though NBCUniversal’s Peacock is rumored to be picking up ESPN’s old package for Monday and Wednesday night games, what Apple is doing is an entirely new license from Major League Baseball, containing three separate products…

He goes on to provide details about MLB Big Inning, linear and on-demand archival content, and Friday Night Baseball, which run the gamut from normal televised baseball to something akin to the NFL Red Zone.

As a lapsed baseball fan who happens to be an Apple One subscriber—mostly for the iCloud storage—I am excited about this. I bailed on my annual MLB At Bat subscription in 2020, due in large part to not having enough time to watch baseball games. I have been considering subscribing again this year, once the baseball season starts, but I am still not sure it is worth the money if I’m not going to watch a ton of games. Apple’s offerings, which I already pay for, may be just the right amount of baseball for me.

🎮 I bought 992 games today from Itch.io: the Bundle for Ukraine. Now my backlog is over 1,000. 😅 I (selfishly) wanted to pick up cross-platform, DRM-free versions of Celeste and Baba Is You for cheap. The rest is gravy.

New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe is one of the disappointments in my Nintendo Switch collection. I had hoped it would bring me the same joy that Super Mario World and New Super Mario Bros. did in the past. Instead, I found it punishingly difficult, due to devilishly positioned enemies and a physics engine tailored to make the characters slip off platforms all the time. (Don’t even get me started about the Ghost Houses.) It seems to have been made for players who are so good at Mario games that they are absolutely sick of them and are interested only in an insane challenge.

The developers must have known it was too difficult, because they added two “easy-mode” characters and an option to have Luigi show a sample run of any level and allow you to skip it at the end. Despite these aides, on my first play-though, I stalled out in the middle—I literally could not get through the next level, whichever path I took—and gave it up for a couple years.

Last week, I was thinking about how poorly I fared at New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe. I wondered it the reason I found it so difficult was that my Mario skills had atrophied. To test that, I played through Super Mario World, which I have not played in about 15 years. I was able to blow right through it (the Star World levels notwithstanding), so I don’t think my Mario skills are entirely the problem. I expected Super Mario World-level difficulty, but New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe is a much harder game.

A few days ago I decided I was up for the challenge again, and would play and finish New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe this time, hell or high water. I would not try to collect the three star coins in each level. I would not try hard to find the game’s plentiful secrets. I would even play as the second-easiest character, Toadette, the whole time and use Luigi’s sample runs to skip levels. I am not trying to collect star coins or trying hard to find secrets; I am simply trying to reach the end of each level.

Even with this plan, I have not yet finished it. I am almost at Peach’s castle, which is the last set of levels. I am glad that I finally discovered many of the colorful, creative, and clever bits that the game designers put into the game; in total, however, they fail to delight me. I’m sure that New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe is a good game, but it is not a good game for me. I am not sure I will ever play the game again after I beat it.