Kurt Pankau Dot Com

⛈️ Are You Telling This Story or Am I... [SPOILER ALERT] Over the holiday weekend we took the kids to see Thunderbolts*  at the theater. It was my second time seeing it, and I have to say that it really resonated with me. I'm still enjoying the MCU, even if the bloom has come off the rose in the public perception. And I freely admit that a lot of the recent content has been not great ( Eternals ) and occasionally quite bad ( Secret Invasion ). At the end of the day, I'm fine with sitting through a so-so movie if I get to spend it hanging out with characters I like. But Thunderbolts*  is actually pretty good, and it manages to tell a compelling story about something that you don't see represented well in mainstream blockbuster action flicks. Thunderbolts*  is a movie about depression. Which is something I've struggled with off-and-on for my entire life. Let's take a step back, shall we? One of the things that I love about speculative fiction is the way it externalize...

🤓 Players Gonna Play, Play, Play, Play, Play... This last weekend was another annual installment of Geekway to the West, the convention where I spend four days playing board games. The draw every year is the Play-and-Win contest, in which you play games from a library of over a hundred recently published games (multiple copies of each, so it netted out to roughly 800 games in all). Every play gives you a chance to win one of those copies. Here's what I played! Tower Up Started strong out of the gate. This was easily my favorite of the con. It's a light, puzzly eurogame that plays fast, scales cleanly, has a great tactile component, and looks gorgeous on the table. You can either gather pieces or start a new tower. When you start a tower, you must also build on anything that's adjacent to it as well. You then put a roof on one of the towers you built. Playing a roof does not keep others from playing over it, though. Once someone plays their last roof, the game ends. Score p...

🤺 And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger... Two blog posts in a week. What madness is this!? Anyhoo... Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith  was back in theaters this week to celebrate its 20th anniversary. My kids are big Star Wars  fans and never got to see this one in the cinema, so we went. They had a lot of fun. The prequels are pretty popular with kids as well as the Zoomers who were kids when they came out. As for me? It... uh... has not gotten any better with age. But it is interesting to revisit it as an older filmgoer, free from the intoxicating hype of people still thinking the prequels were any good. And as someone who now spends a fair amount of time thinking about story structure and narrative, I have a better understanding of what doesn't work about it. But first! A little history! I saw Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith  at the Arclight in Hollywood, because it came out during the long weekend I spent living...

🥷 She's the devil in disguise... [SPOILERS FOR DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN ] The first season of Daredevil: Born Again  ends on an interesting cliffhanger. Kingpin has become the mayor of New York City and has turned a bunch of corrupt cops into his own private army at the Red Hook dock in Hell's Kitchen. He's declared martial law and his "task force" are executing masked vigilantes--or anyone they can put a mask on while no one is looking--with impunity while donning Punisher regalia. They've holed up in the port in a fortified position and taken Frank Castle, the actual Punisher, hostage along with a host of New York's wealthy elite. Daredevil is set to go in and start busting heads, but realizes that he cannot win, since he's hopelessly outnumbered and sporting a fresh gunshot wound. So instead he goes to ground. And starts talking about drumming up an army. The tease here is that Daredevil, a.k.a. Matt Murdock the lawyer without fear, intends to reform ...

🌊 And I'm in so deep...  The vultures are stripping the world for parts, but you have to find joy where you can, so let's talk about a thirty-year-old pop song, shall we? Linger  was the second single from The Cranberries' debut album and also their breakout hit. It was released in 1993 in support of the cheekily titled Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We? , accompanied by a nonsensical video (embedded above) that seems less interested in the band than in faux  C inéma Vérité. Their debut single, Dreams , was a bold statement meant to establish a sonic identity centered around frontwoman Dolores O'Riordan's thick and unapologetically abrasive Irish accent. But Linger  is a bit more subdued, less about leaning into the band's unique aesthetic than about using that aesthetic to support a musical narrative. It's a fascinating song and one that I've been somewhat obsessed with over the past few months. Specifically, I've been obsessed with t...

🤓 This is the Way... It's that time of year again when Kurt goes to a conference and plays lots and lots of new board games. Why not take a break from quietly despairing and check out all the new things I played this weekend? Rock Hard 1977 If you've heard one thing about this game, it's that it was designed by Runaways bassist Jackie Fox. (If you've heard a second thing about this game, then you've heard about the "candy" mechanic.) This is a heavily thematic worker-placement game about becoming a professional rock musician in the 70s. You have life experiences, a manager, and a day job, and you're trying to build up your chops, your set list, and your reputation so you can turn a demo tape into a record deal and start playing larger and larger venues and get the most fame. You can get yourself extra actions by eating candy. This gives you that extra little bit of pep to go to more hangouts after-hours, but you have to watch out that you don't le...