"The rewarding experience of seeing a bug on a flower of a plant that you planted, that's a really special thing. I'm a part of the ecosystem." Web Developer slash naturalist Daniel drops by the Cast to talk about using the nascent internet to post about Mortal Kombat, being known as a "webmaster", discovering a spiritual community on Twitter, finding the other people who love "birds and bugs and weird little plants", hiding easter eggs in web sites, and using the web to find your passion and your people. Daniel's web site is daniel.observer. Phil, along with his partners, will make a good web site for you at Tiger Pajamas (dot com). Visit phil's web site, the coolest web site on the entire internet, at phils-web-site.net. Music: Out of Tune by Bad Custer. Phil is one fourth of Bad Custer. Listen to more of our music at badcuster.com

I have recently come into possession of a banjo.\ In purchasing it, I was hoping to start a more robust instrument practice than I've done in some time. I make do with a clawhammer-y strum thing on my old beater banjo, but I want to really learn the instrument and participate in a musical tradition, so I've resolved to learn Earl Scruggs-style bluegrass banjo, a 3-finger picking method with fingerpicks and all. This is my first recital, an arrangement of an old standard as instructed by Eli Gilbert's excellent 30 Days of Banjo YouTube series. More to come!

SoftBank's Masayoshi Son explains selling Nvidia shares to fund AI investments like OpenAI. Learn how this shift shapes AI markets.

So I saw Tron: Ares and I didn’t hate it. Oop, sorry, that was heresy and I’m being banished to the Game Grid now. I’m sure this surprises nobody, as I’m kind of in the key demographic for this movie. But it’s worth noting that more importantly, I think I liked it better than Tron: Legacy. It may have told a better story for its era. Because that’s the hard thing about this franchise: there are 43 years between the first movie and this one; nearly half a century.