I can’t seem to read books lately. It’s hard for me to even watch TV shows. I wonder if my attention span is shot.

Rebecca Keegan wrote an entertaining and informative profile of Barry star and co-creator Bill Hader in The Hollywood Reporter:

In Barry, which returns to HBO for its third season April 24, Hader plays a reluctant hitman who wants to be an actor. Barry is just really great at killing. This is not so different, Berg points out, from Hader, who became a star on SNL in his 20s almost in spite of himself, fought crippling anxiety on the live broadcasts, and really just wanted to write and direct.

I am very excited that Barry is returning to HBO soon. It is a daring show on many levels. Plot-wise it flirts with show-ending (or at least show-ruining) disaster several times each season. I have no idea how the cliffhanger at the end of Season 2 will be resolved, but I am confident that the writers came up with something satisfying.

I love Bill Hader, too. He is amazing and deserves every bit of success he has had.

I have watched enough episodes of Hot Ones on YouTube to pique my interest in hot sauces. So far I have a bottle of a chipotle-inspired sauce and a bottle of sriracha. I am trying to enjoy them. So far they taste more acidic than hot to me. Perhaps I need to learn to cook with hot peppers instead of dabbing sauce on things.

My five-year-old son just realized that he, and everyone he knows, will die someday. It has lead to unexpected, devastating dinner conversations the past two evenings.

I don’t know why he started thinking about it. Out of nowhere, he started asking questions about death at dinner last night. At the time, my daughter and I had just started talking about Beethoven. I had looked up the composer’s Wikipedia entry and was reciting when he was born and when he died. Suddenly, my son—who knows that batteries die, that plants die, and even that animals die—asked in a shocked voice, “Why did he die?” Within a second, his lips started to quiver and he started to cry. A dozen other questions followed, none of them we were prepared to answer at a family dinner on a school night.

My daughter went through this same emotional journey four or five years ago. For her, it was precipitated by the death of my father, who was the first close family member to die since was born. She couldn’t understand why her Grampa was gone, and quickly became terrified that she would die, too. These thoughts scared her so much that she was afraid to fall asleep; my wife or I had to stay with her night after night in her bed to comfort her. We had a lot of talks about death with her to help her understand what it means and to begrudgingly accept it. Of course we told her the pleasant half-truths that death only happens to very old people and is nothing she needs to worry about for a long, long time.

My son has surprisingly practical concerns about death. Last night, he didn’t ask usb “Will I die?” He figured that out on his own and asked instead, “When will I die?” Tonight he asked us, with eyes wide with alarm, “Where will I go when I die?” My wife and I tried to explain to him that no one really knows, or that he would return to wherever he was before he was born. Those answers only made him more scared. Upon hearing them, he suddenly realized that he might not die in the same place as us or his sister, and became loudly distraught that he might end up somewhere where he couldn’t get to us anymore.

He then asked when my wife and I, are going to die. That did not bother me. When he asked when his sister was going to die, I teared up because it seemed unimaginable. Finally, before we could steer him to another, far lighter, topic of discussion, he became concerned, to the point of tears, that he is too big or too small to “fit” there—whatever that means. It astounds me that the physical dimensions of the afterlife—or whatever he imagines it to be—are what my little boy is worried about tonight.

All of my son’s thoughts and ideas about death have come, as far as we know, from his own imagination. No one close to him has died recently. We don’t talk about death much at all in our family; it is kind of taboo in our day-to-day conversations. Reflecting back on the past few weeks, however, I realize that he may have overheard the adults in the family discussing the untimely death of our rabbi’s husband, which occurred a week or so ago and understandably made us all very sad. We tried not to discuss it in front of our children—who did not really know the man—so that we would not upset them. Perhaps my son overheard us anyway.

It took my daughter a long time to come to terms with the idea that she is going to die someday. I am expecting my son to follow in her footsteps. He will probably have occasional nightmares about death—or at least have trouble falling asleep with worry about it. While it makes me sad to see my son start to go through this phase—and it has certainly led to some difficult dinner conversations—I know that he, like my daughter, is an emotionally healthy kid and will be fine. I expect him to think about death some more, talk about it with us, and become more emotionally mature through the process. He’s going to get through this; we all do.

It is quite a burden to understand that you, someday, are going to die. I wish I could ease that burden for my children, but I am wise enough to know that I cannot.

The best podcast episode I listened to today was the 400th episode of Upgrade:

It’s episode 400! We evaluate the forward-looking predictions we made back in episode 300, and then draft stories we’ll be talking about over the next hundred episodes! Also, an Apple TV+ movie won Best Picture and we round up an awful lot of Apple rumors.

Upgrade is one of my favorite tech podcasts. Hosts Make Hurley and Jason Snell have a great rapport, and mostly talk about Apple and streaming TV services, which are beats that I enjoy learning and speculating about. Like most podcasts that track Apple, they they make predictions about product announcements before they happen. Unlike most other podcasts, they make the predictions fun by presenting them in the form of fantasy-sports-style drafts. It is a great tech podcast. I cannot believe I have listened to 400 of them already!

One thing I have gotten into lately is watching videos on YouTube in which musicians talk about music. One channel/host I like is Rick Beato. He does everything from break down the music theory behind certain pop songs, to live interviews, to simply gushing about great performances and great audio production. What makes his videos enjoyable is his infectious enthusiasm for all kinds of music, and his deep respect for artists, engineers, and producers.

I’m super glad my wife and I didn’t bother to watch this nonsense last night. 🙄

Watch this video: “Hurt” by Johnny Cash. I dare you.

Everything about Cash’s performance is powerful. Honestly, though, the music video’s imagery is perfectly attuned to the music and to the singer. Director Mark Romanek and his small team who made the video were working at the top of the game.

(I didn’t just learn about this song or video. On Friday, I watched a short documentary about music producer Rick Rubin that reminded me of it.)

One of my favorite artists from the last few years, Frank Turner, has a new album out: FTHC.¹ It—at least parts of it—represents a swing back from his acoustic guitar-led singer-songwriter fare to his roots as a hardcore artist. Yes, that means it’s peppered with screaming and righteous anger. That usually isn’t my cup of tea, but I’m down with it. Frank Turner is cool and makes good records; you should listen to them.

What I love about Frank Turner is that he comes across as incredibly, even uncomfortably, open and honest. His songs mix together toughness with sensitivity, and cynicism with optimism, in a way that reveals both his maturity as a person and his cleverness when it comes to song structure. His lyrics range from poetic and clever to raw and emotional. His music ranges from quiet and beautiful to thunderous and anthemic—often in the same song. Overall, his albums give you the impression that he held nothing back in creating them. I very much respect and admire that.²

Unlike any other musician I can think of, Turner even did a very generous two-part interview with a tech podcast, Dialog, a few years ago. He talked about his songwriting process and what it was like to be a working musician who is a little older and wiser than the clichéd young rock star you might imagine.

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.