Kurt Pankau Dot Com

😴 Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream... 1994's Speed  was the movie that introduced us to Sandra Bullock (we don't talk about Demolition Man ) but it was 1995's While You Were Sleeping  that made her a household name. And it is my favorite holiday movie. Forget Die Hard-- this is what I watch at Christmas, and it has been for years. And not just because I'm still harboring a decades-long crush on the lead actor. It's smartly written, full of hilarious performances, peppered with quotable lines, and more than anything else, resonates with me. When I was 15, I spent the week between Christmas and New Years watching this movie almost every single night. Seriously, I'm here for this movie. And, thankfully, the lessons it imparted on my then-hopelessly-romantic 15-year-old brain were actually pretty worthwhile. So here are a few of the takeaways from this movie that I still hold to today. Love = Laughter This is a really big one for me. The film sets up a love triangle b...

⚔️ And my axe... The  Lord of the Rings  movies hit theaters in December 2001 and were an unparalleled box office success. Naturally, there was a desire to capitalize on that success with tie-in video games, which started to arrive about a year later. The first few to hit the scene were about what you'd expect: over-the-shoulder hack-and-slash affairs that were just a little too dark and drab because that was the tone of serious video games, but then in 2004 we got something different: a campaign-style RTS that allowed you to play through the events of the movies as either good or evil. And it was The Lord of the Rings: the Battle for Middle-Earth . How I Remember It... As someone who was obsessed with The Lord of the Rings  in 2004, I think it's safe to say that I played most of the games that were attached to this IP. And I was mostly disappointed, because I don't care for hack-and-slash gameplay all that much. When BfME  came out, the big selling point on the...

💱 We are the dollars and cents and the pounds and pence... So the cryptocurrency market appears to have mostly crashed-- thank farking gourd! I'm taking for granted that crypto and NFTs are almost* all scams, and if you're unsure of why I would think that, I will point you to the definitive explainer on the subject: Dan Olson's sublime video essay Line Goes Up: The Problem with NFTs . * The token counter-example is HNT, which is used to create a market for bandwidth on the Helium network--that is, it's actually being used as a currency rather than purely speculation. Instead of going into the details of why it's a scam, I instead want to talk about why scams like this arise in the first place and why we're inevitably going to see more of them. So strap in, because this is a long one. Actually I'll just skip to the end here: rich people are hoarding too much wealth. That's the cause. That's it. With the corollary that rich people--or hell,  most  pe...

🌌 She's out back counting stars... Super Mario Galaxy  was released in November 2007 just in time for the holidays. It was the first proper Mario title for the Nintendo Wii and the third 3D Mario  game, following the much-beloved Super Mario 64  and the much-reviled Super Mario Sunshine . It introduced a gravity mechanic, wherein Mario would travel between planets trying to find stars to power up a space ship that would take him to his dear kidnapped-again Princess Peach. The game was also built around the novel motion controls of the Wii and took full advantage of controller-waggling-as-gameplay. It was extremely well-received. It was the highest-rated video game on review-aggregator GameRankings right up until the site folded in 2019. How I Remember It... I was intrigued by this game from the get-go, but in 2007 our budget for video games was not so robust that we could just up and drop $50 on a triple-A new release. But the idea had its hooks in me. Interplaneta...