Kurt Pankau Dot Com

 🌳 I Talk to the Trees, But They Don't Listen to Me... This weekend the fam went to go see Wildwood , the new film from stop-motion studio Laika ( Coraline , Box Trolls , Kubo and the Two Strings ) based on the eponymous middle-grade novel by Colin Meloy of The Decemberists and Carson Ellis. If you are in the Venn diagram of people who would be excited by a new property attached to either Laika or The Decemberists (or middle-grade novels, I guess), well you're in luck. I liked it. It doesn't completely work. But it mostly works. And I liked it. The whole fam liked it, even the surly fifteen-year-old. Prue is a pre-teen living in Portland whose infant brother is kidnapped by crows. She and a hapless schoolmate named Curtis follow the trail into "The Impassable Wilderness," a hidden world of talking animals and imminent peril. It is easily Laika's most ambitious film, featuring an epic fantasy battle that includes five armies—two of which are airborne! If nothi...

🤖 Will That Be All, Mr. Stark... I'm doing an awful lot of work in the AI-software-development space right now. Let me caveat right up front: I do not agree with passing off AI work as your own, or the theft of creative work, or really the whole attempt to position it as the thing that will either save humankind or doom it, and I think a lot of the behavior of the companies championing it has ranged from irresponsible to outright unethical. And I still hate the term AI to describe non-deterministic language models that operate by large-scale statistical inference. Having said all that, it has its uses in the workplace. I've used it extensively both as an administrative and as a developer-augmentation tool. I use it to generate meeting summaries. I use it to convert static documents into shareable, internally-hosted html pages, which is a much better experience than trying to share a docx file inside of Sharepoint. It's something that I would never be able to prioritize, bu...

🎸 'Cause I Wanna Be Anarchy... Hey everybody, I'm going to be a panelist at Archon 49 next month. If you're planning on attending, here's where you can find me: It's Just a Step to the Left, and Then a Punch to the Right... 2 Oct 2026, Friday 14:00 - 15:00, Salon 1 (Gateway Center) Writing martial arts combat scenes for readers whose knowledge may be limited to watching MMA. A Conundrum of Crowns (Moderator) 2 Oct 2026, Friday 15:00 - 16:00, Marquette B (Gateway Center) Discuss why so many fantasy/sf governments seem to be kingdoms or autocracies. Why do authoritarians so often rule -when in either genre you could plausibly set up literally ANY kind of government? Losing Main Character Energy? 2 Oct 2026, Friday 20:00 - 21:00, Marquette A (Gateway Center) Have you ever grown bored of your main character? What can you do to make them more interesting, or is it better to kill them off? CONCERT: Uncle Fluffy's Post-Apocalyptic Sing-Along (Performer) 3 Oct 2026, ...

⚙️ "You are technically correct, the best kind of correct..." Today I ran across an article from tech blogger Dan Luu about "The Benchmark-pocalypse." Luu had experimented with an LLM-generated regex engine and tested it against Rebar, a comprehensive benchmark suite. The engine out-performed the top scorer by 40%! Only, it didn't actually do that. When he applied the same regex engine to a different benchmark suite, he found that it was on average 4x slower , and that was on the benchmarks it was actually able to complete. The LLM had gamed the numbers because it knew what benchmarking suite it was going to be compared to. In fact, Luu had gone so far as to instruct the LLM not  to overfit its data to that suite... but it did it anyway. LLMs are statistical inference engines with an optimization loop. Whether you intend to or not, they will  tailor their output to maximize their optimization, which means they will  game the system if only because gaming metric...

⚡ You're burnin' up the quarter mile... It's that time of year once again where Kurt spends an inordinate amount of time at a conference playing board games. There were some new titles, some returning favorites, and a whoooooooole lot of people. This year, instead of trying to play everything that looked interesting to me, I went a little deeper on fewer titles. I would have loved to try out some of the heavier games, but while I had the desire, I had not the mental fortitude to learn the rules ahead of time. Alas. Better luck next year. The themes for this year seemed to be trains, trains, tableau-builders, and more trains. Seriously, there were I think six different train games here, including Ticket to Ride  and two that just started with the word Railroad . Anyway, without further ado, here are the new-to-me titles that I played at Geekway To The West 2026! Lightning Train This the was the first game I played, it was easily my favorite of the con, and I won a copy in th...

😈 Watch Out Boy, She'll Chew You Up... Last week I had occasion to watch the new  Predator: Badlands  and I gotta say... it did not work for me. I'm not saying it's a bad film, just that I didn't care for it. I watched it at the insistence of my wife, who had already seen it and was itching to watch it again. She thoroughly enjoyed it. And she usually has a pretty good barometer for how much I'm going to like a movie, too. But this one was a miss, and it was a miss for reasons that I can very clearly point to. I know exactly  what I didn't like about this movie. For one thing, it barely feels like part of the franchise. They didn't bring back Martin Sheen or Sissy Spacek, there was no mention of the murders, not even a stylistic nod to Terrence Malick and... hold on, I'm being told that this is actually a Predator  sequel, not a Badlands  sequel. Recalibrating... Anyway, I felt like talking about what I thought didn't work, because it comes down to ...