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...