Life at Warp 10

Is Technology Killing Our Creativity?

May 13, 2013 by • Life at Warp 10, Marcy's Blog • Tags: , , , , , • 32 Comments

Iron Man 3By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

I don’t camp. I prefer to be in a place with electricity and running water. I’ve owned a Kindle for years, and I’ve been using computers since the only game you could play on them was pong.

I’m not someone who thinks the world was better off before technology.

But I am someone who’s wondering what our dependence on technology might be doing to our long-term ability as a society to think creatively and to innovate.

Reliance on technology hurt Iron Man Tony Stark.

After fighting the aliens in New York during the final showdown in The Avengers, Tony Stark—a creative genius—is in a tailspin. Every time he thinks about New York, he has a panic attack. His technology failed him, and he almost died as a consequence. Since then, he’s made over 40 upgrades to his suit, tweaking and tinkering.

At the start of Iron Man 3, what he’s ended up with is a suit that malfunctions more than it works.

One of those malfunctions strands him in Tennessee (he started in California). He scrounges parts to try to repair his suit, but still can’t get it to charge properly. With no suit, he doesn’t know what to do.

Then a little boy reminds him what he is. He’s a mechanic. The suit isn’t Iron Man. He, Tony Stark, is Iron Man.

His creativity created the Iron Man suit. When he became overly dependent on the technology he created, he lost that creativity.

It wasn’t until his suit was taken away that he got his creativity back. He breaks into the Mandarin’s mansion using items he could buy at a hardware store and rig in the little boy’s shed.

I wonder sometimes if we aren’t raising a generation who will have the same problem. All the technological inventions of the past 20-30 years came from a generation that was forced to use their brains and creativity apart from advanced technology in order to create it. But will the next generation be able to innovate apart from their current technology or will their creativity be stunted by it?

Is a generation coming who won’t know how to write, only to type? Is a generation coming who can’t do mathematical calculations by hand, using their mind? Is a generation coming who doesn’t need to remember anything for themselves because the answer is only an internet search away?

And if those things are true, will their minds be as sharp as the great men and women of the past who enabled us to reach this point in the first place?

I don’t have the answers, but I’d love to know what you think. Are we in danger of allowing technology to kill our creativity? What might be the solution if we are?

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Top 5 Science Fiction and Fantasy Foods that Sound Good Enough to Eat

May 10, 2013 by • Life at Warp 10, Marcy's Blog • Tags: , , , , , • 17 Comments

 

Turkish Delight C.S. Lewis The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

One of the things I love most is when the creator of another world makes me crave a food or drink that doesn’t exist. For fun, I thought I’d make a list of the top 5 I’m desperate to try.

Klingon Raktajino from Star Trek

My husband frequently jokes that he’s going to buy me a shirt that reads “Instant human. Just add coffee.” So, as you might imagine, a coffee was going to make this list.

Raktajino is a strong, dark coffee introduced to Federation citizens by the Klingons. Barely an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine goes by when someone doesn’t order one. I’ll take mine extra sweet, thank you.

Butterbeer from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series

I want to go to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios in Orlando just so I can try a butterbeer. Based on the Harry Potter movies, it looks thick and creamy, and it’s topped with foam. I’ve heard talk that it tastes like butterscotch.

EAT ME Cakes and DRINK ME Bottles from Lewis Carol’s Alice in Wonderland

I’d only want to try these in a controlled environment (after all, I don’t want to be eaten by my own cats or crash through the roof of my house), but it’d be a lot of fun to be giant or tiny for a little while.

Turkish Delights from C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Turkish Delights exist in our world. They’re basically flavored gelatin coated in powdered sugar or covered in chocolate. They’re a bit like a giant jelly bean center really.

The Turkish Delights in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe are enchanted so that once you eat one, you desperately want another and will keep eating them until someone stops you or you die. I don’t like that aspect of it, but my theory is that means they’re the most delicious thing you’ve ever tasted. I’d just need to make sure to eat them with someone trustworthy around to stop me.

Fizzy Lifting Drinks from Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

I read all Roald Dahl’s books multiple times as a kid. While I would also love to drink from the chocolate river and try the gum that tastes like a whole meal (as long as I didn’t end up as a giant blueberry), the treat that appealed to me most were the drinks that would make you float. I’ve always wanted to fly :)

Your turn—what imaginary food or drink would you love to try?

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What Would You Do If You Only Had 21 Days Left to Live?

May 6, 2013 by • Life at Warp 10, Marcy's Blog • Tags: , , , • 14 Comments

Seeking a Friend for the End of the WorldBy Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

Before anyone panics, no, I’m not dying in 21 days. (That I know of anyway.)

But that question has been on my mind since I watched Seeking a Friend for the End of the World because in the movie, that’s how long they have before an asteroid destroys the earth. All hope for diverting or breaking up the asteroid has just been lost as the movie opens.

In Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, people’s reactions are a lot like you’d expect. There are riots in the streets. Some people start drinking, doing heroine, and engaging in orgies. Some commit suicide. Some keep going about their daily routine like absolutely nothing has changed, showing up for work and cutting their lawns. Some seek to do the things left on their bucket list, make their souls right with God, and reconcile with estranged loved ones.

And it got me wondering what I’d do if I only had 21 days left.

There’s a quote that floats around where some famous author was asked what he would do if he only had a few days left to live, and his answer was, “Write faster.”

That wouldn’t be me.

If I had 21 days left to live, I’d set this computer down and never touch it except to write emails to people I cared about and wouldn’t be able to see in time to tell them how much they meant to me.

I love my job. I love to write. But it’s my career. If I had only a little time left to live, it’s not going to matter if I make enough money to pay the bills for next month. It’s not going to matter if I hit my word count on my novel or finish that next round of edits. If I’m gone, no one is likely to read it anyway. I’m not famous enough that someone else would take over the work involved in publishing my writing.

What’s going to matter to me is getting in as much time with my husband, and family, and friends as possible. Walking my dog and cuddling my cats. I’d eat what I wanted and I wouldn’t exercise :)

Thinking about that made me realize something. None of us really knows how long we have. We might only have 21 days. We might have none. Worse, someone we love might have none. Today might be the last day we have with them.

Which means we should be focusing on the important things every day rather than neglecting them for the someday when we’ll have more time. Too often I fall prey to the peer pressure that says to succeed we need to work 10-, 12-, 14-hour days. I don’t believe that, and I’ve made it my goal this year to figure out how to work smarter and make better use of my time. To take back my life.

(In fact, I just finished a fast draft to increase my writing speed. I’ll share more about that in a Wednesday post when we focus on writing.)

I value hard work. Hard work is important to success. But life is more than work. Or at least I believe it should be, no matter how much you love your job.

What would you do if you only had 21 days left to live? Do you think I’m wrong or wrong in my stance on long hours and life-work balance?

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Is the World Becoming More Evil All the Time?

April 29, 2013 by • Life at Warp 10, Marcy's Blog • Tags: , , , , • 10 Comments

Loki The Avengers

This is Loki making the crowd bow before him.

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

It feels like the world is getting worse by the day. Like each day, a new level of evil is revealed. Until we wonder if we’re even safe to leave our homes.

But I was reminded of something this weekend as my husband and I watched The Avengers.

Loki, basically a super-villain with super-powers comes to earth to take it over. He kills without remorse.

Early in the movie, Loki forces a crowd in Germany to kneel before him. He wants humanity to fear him. He wants to rule over them. “You were made to be ruled,” he tells them. “In the end, you will always kneel.”

One old man struggles to his feet. “Not to men like you.”

“There are no men like me,” Loki says in a tone dripping with condescension.

“There are always men like you.”

Like Loki, every new “villain” in our world thinks they’re something new and special.

To weeks ago, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev killed three people and injured 176 more by setting off homemade bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

In the aftermath of this tragedy, I’ve heard people talking about how dangerous and evil our world has become. I’d be lying if I claimed I didn’t say it myself. How it feels like you can’t send your children to school, or go to the movies, or attend a major event without wondering if you’ll come home alive.

But the truth is there always have been and always will be men like the brothers who bombed the marathon. The methods might have changed over the years, but they’re the same type of men doing the same type of thing. Spreading fear because it makes them feel more powerful. They’re nothing new.

In the 1940s, men like them sent millions of Jews to gas chambers. During the French Revolution, men like them sent thousands to the guillotine. And in 1200 B.C., parents like them sacrificed their children to the false god Molech by burning them alive.

Evil isn’t anything new.

And in the face of the fact that there always have been and always will be men like them, it can sometimes feel like fighting it is hopeless and we should just hide away where we’ll be safe. It’s a natural human reaction to a threat.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing.” – Edmund Burke

I think instead of hiding away, we need to do the opposite. When the worst happens, instead of running away, we need to run towards it.

Like Carlos Arredondo who leaped a fence and used his own clothes to help staunch the bleeding of the victims at the Boston Marathon. Like the first responders who rushed into the World Trade Center.

When we cower in fear, evil wins because we let it control how we live our lives. When we continue to fight for what’s still good in the world, continue to find a way to enjoy life and help those less fortunate than ourselves, good wins.

We can’t turn this world into a utopia, but we can keep fighting to make it a place worth living in.

What do you think is the best thing we can do in response to tragedies like the Boston Marathon bombing?

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When Should We Follow the Rules and When Should We Change Them?

April 15, 2013 by • Battlestar Galactica, Life at Warp 10, Marcy's Blog • Tags: , , , , , • 15 Comments

Battlestar GalacticaBy Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

The biggest fight my husband and I ever had was over Battlestar Galactica.

I know. We’ve now jumped to the very top of the nerd list because most couples argue over the really important things like money or children or whether the in-laws should be allowed to dictate what color they paint their guest room.

But the truth is, we weren’t really arguing about Battlestar Galactica. We were arguing about a theme in it.

When things go wrong, do you stick to the traditional way of doing things, the traditional rules, or do you innovate and rewrite the rules?

The premise of Battlestar Galactica is that humans created Cylons to serve them, but the Cylons rebelled. Years later, the Cylons returned to the human planets and destroyed all 12 colonies. Less than 50,000 human beings survived. Now they’re running from the Cylons, living on a convoy of ships, protected entirely by one battlestar—Galactica.

In other words, life as they know it will never be the same.

Which raised an understandable dilemma for the leaders of the survivors about what was the best way to preserve the species. And that’s where things in my house went sideways.

An episode came on where an officer and an enlisted man whose relationship had been overlooked previously were ordered to stop seeing each other. I thought it was stupid to maintain rules and regulations against fraternization because, as President Roslin said, the only way the human race was going to survive was if people started having babies. My husband thought it was more important than ever in that situation to maintain rules and regulations against fraternization.

And while the issue of fraternization was what kicked the argument off, what we were really arguing about was if rules should ever be changed, and if so, when.

My husband is a former Marine. He’s also a traditionalist. So when he received an order to jump, he didn’t ask how high. He just jumped. And if things are going wrong, he believes that’s the moment when you should stick even more closely to the ways that have worked in the past.

And I could see his point. In a combat situation, you can’t hesitate to follow an order or you and everyone with you might die.

But I didn’t agree that the old rules and old ways of doing things are necessarily the best way. Someone has to earn my respect before I follow them, and I need to understand the logic behind a rule before I obey it. When something stops working, I look for a new way.

You can see how this fundamentally put us at odds. We’ve had to agree to disagree and can even joke about it now, but the question remains.

Is there ever a time when we need to change the rules? If so, when?

(And if you disagree with me that sometimes the rules should be changed, don’t be afraid to say so. I welcome disagreement here as long as it’s respectful.)

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Will Video Game Music Be the Next Classics?

April 12, 2013 by • Life at Warp 10, Marcy's Blog, Vlogs • Tags: , , , , , • 7 Comments

Video games are inspiring some beautiful music. For those of you who don’t regularly play video or computer games, allow me to introduce you to Malukah.

She’s a singer and composer who gained a bit of fame on YouTube by recording game soundtrack covers.

I’ve picked three of my favorites to share today in this fantasy music feature.

This first song is called “Frozen Sleep,” and it’s from Halo 4.

The second song is “The Dragonborn Comes” from Skyrim.

This one is called “Reignite,” and it’s from Mass Effect 3.

Do you think video game and computer game music could become the classical music of our generation? Or will it be forgotten as soon as better games come along?

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The Adjustment Bureau: Would You Rather Achieve Your Dreams or Find True Love?

April 8, 2013 by • Life at Warp 10, Marcy's Blog • Tags: , , , • 9 Comments

The Adjustment BureauBy Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

If you had to choose between achieving your dreams or finding true love, what would you choose?

That’s the dilemma faced by Brooklyn Congressman David Norris in the movie The Adjustment Bureau (based on the Philip K. Dick short story “Adjustment Team”).

The Adjustment Bureau is a secret supernatural agency who makes small “adjustments” so people stay on track with the plan. For example, they’ll spill coffee on someone’s shirt to make sure they miss a certain bus and are late for a meeting, changing the outcome of what’s decided there.

At the start of the movie, David briefly meets Elise, who inspires him to give a very candid speech. This speech changes the course of his career and sets him on track to one day become president. That was the purpose of him meeting Elise. He was never supposed to run into her again.

But the agent who trails David falls asleep and misses his scheduled adjustment so that David meets Elise for a second time.

And they fall in love.

The problem is they aren’t supposed to be together. Apart, David goes on to become a great president, and Elise goes on to be a renowned ballerina and choreographer. Together, his political career never takes off, and she ends up teaching dance to six-year-olds. Neither of them achieves their dreams.

An agent explains this to David, and asks him if he really wants to be the cause of the death of not only his own dreams but hers as well.

Love. Or your dreams.

That’s the choice.

It’s not an easy one. After all, chasing our dreams and having something important to strive for can make us better, more fulfilled people.

But if we reach the end of our lives and don’t have anyone to share it with, was it worth it? (This can mean more than just a romantic partner. Many people are so involved with their ambitions and chasing their dreams that they alienate their friends and family.)

In the end, David and Elise choose love.

If you had to choose, if you could only have one, what would you do?

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Is It Better to Be a Good Person or a Great One?

March 18, 2013 by • Life at Warp 10, Marcy's Blog • Tags: , , , • 14 Comments

Oz: The Great and PowerfulBy Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

If you told me I had to choose between being a good person or a great one, I’d choose to be good.

Oz at the beginning of Oz: The Great and Powerful wanted the opposite. He wanted greatness.

Oz is a magician and a conman in 1905. He lies to women and breaks their hearts. He doesn’t know the meaning of friendship or fairness.

At the beginning of the movie, a woman who cares about him (and who he clearly has feelings for) shows up and tells him another man has proposed to her. She wants Oz to tell her what she should do.

Oz tells her that the man who proposed is a good man.

“You could be a good man,” she says. The pleading in her voice is clear.

Oz turns away. “I don’t want to be a good man. Kansas is full of good men who go to church and raise their families. My father was a good man who plowed the earth and died face down in it. I don’t want to be a good man. I want to be a great one.”

He wants to be rich and famous like Thomas Edison or Harry Houdini.

While running away from a man whose wife he defiled, Oz hops into a hot air balloon, gets sucked up by a tornado, and ends up deposited in the land of Oz. (Yes, the land and the man share a name.)

And when he lands, everyone believes he’s the prophesied wizard who will save them from the wicked witch. Oz knows he doesn’t have any actual magical powers, but he lets them believe it because he sees it as his ticket to greatness—to gold, hero worship, and women.

To save the land of Oz, he has to learn that what matters most isn’t greatness at all. It’s goodness.

We can’t control greatness any more than Oz could control the tornado that sucked him up and dumped him in the land of Oz. We can make it more likely to happen, in the same way that Oz made it more likely the tornado would suck him up by being in a hot air balloon than if he’d been on the ground, but we can’t guarantee it. He could have been sucked up off the ground or left untouched in the air.  

We can’t change the genetic code that decides if we’re born with a great singing voice, or an eye for color and proportion, the creativity it takes to be a writer, or the steady hands of a world-class brain surgeon, the ability to catch a ball or to sprint like an Olympian. Wishing and working for it can’t guarantee greatness.

But goodness? Goodness is a choice. We decide whether or not we live a life of character.

At the end of the movie, when Oz and Glinda the good witch have chased the wicked witch sisters from the Emerald City, Glinda tells Oz, “I knew you had it in you all along.”

Oz smiles his cheeky smile. “Greatness?”

“Better,” she replies. “Goodness.”

Goodness will always be better, always be more important than greatness.

And sometimes, when we work hard on goodness instead, greatness follows.

If you could only have one, would you rather be a good person or a great one?

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Is Anger Always A Bad Thing?

March 4, 2013 by • Life at Warp 10, Marcy's Blog • Tags: , , , , • 16 Comments

The Hulk Bruce BannerBy Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

Too often we’re made to think that anger is a negative emotion, one we should avoid because it’s weak or shows a lack of self-control.

You can see it in The Avengers in the way Dr. Bruce Banner is treated. His character is a personification of anger. If Banner gets angry, he turns into a giant green monster capable of breaking an entire city. 

When we first meet Banner in The Avengers, he’s working as a doctor in the slums of Calcutta. S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Natasha Romanoff tricks him into coming to a deserted hut on the edge of the city. The hut is secretly surrounded by snipers just in case Banner loses control.

Banner ducks inside, and she steps out of the shadows.

“For a man who’s supposed to be avoiding stress,” she says, “you picked a hell of a place to settle.”

Banner turns around. “Avoiding stress isn’t the secret.”

“What’s the secret then?”

Banner doesn’t tell her how he’s managed to go a year without turning into the Hulk, and throughout the movie, that becomes the question.

The others either tiptoe around him, try to provoke him to expose his “secret,” or they take protective measures in case he does get angry. (Measures that include a giant cage that will drop him from the sky.)

We treat anger the same way in our lives. We block it off, pretend we aren’t angry when we are, or try to learn techniques and tricks to keep from getting angry.

But the secret isn’t to keep from becoming angry.

At the end of the movie, the Avengers line up to fight the alien army set to invade earth.

“Dr. Banner,” Captain America says, “now might be a really good time for you to get angry.”

Banner strides toward the aliens. “That’s my secret, Captain. I’m always angry.”

Everyone thought that Banner had discovered some way to keep from getting angry and that was how he prevented himself from becoming the Hulk.

The truth was he hadn’t purged his anger. He’d learned how to control it. By the end of the movie, he’d even learned how to harness it and redirect it for good.

Feeling angry isn’t wrong. Anger is merely an emotion. Sometimes it can even be healthy if we’re angry over injustice or true evil. And denying it or hiding it won’t make it go away.

It’s what we do with anger that matters. (Click here if you’d like to tweet that.)

Do we allow our anger to hurt and destroy? Or do we channel it into righting wrongs?

It’s the difference between a father who goes out and murders the drunk driver who killed his only daughter and a father who finds a way to bring about stricter punishments for drunk drivers and establishes a safe ride program in his town. Both were justified in their anger. But one used it for evil while the other used it for good.

It’s the difference between saying something cruel back to a person who’s hurt our feelings and using that anger to remind us how not to treat other people.

It’s the difference between screaming at our spouse because we feel like they never help us around the house and letting that anger be our cue that it’s time to have a painfully honest talk about weaknesses in the marriage that we need to work on.

What do you think? Is it alright to get angry? Or should we work on trying to purge ourselves of anger?

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Related Posts:
Could You Be An Evil Person?
Is There a Cost to Hiding Our Mistakes?
What Does Your Behavior Say About Who You Are?

What Do You Do When You Reach the End of Your Rope?

February 25, 2013 by • Life at Warp 10, Marcy's Blog • Tags: , , , , • 39 Comments

Finding NemoBy Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

Some of you might have noticed that two weeks ago I had a week where I disappeared from the online world. I posted on Monday morning, but didn’t reply to comments. No Wednesday writing post. I didn’t tweet, and popped on Facebook only once or twice, briefly, mostly in groups where I felt safe.

I had one of those weeks. You know the kind. Where if it can go wrong, it will.

I came down with a serious sinus infection the Friday before. Puffy face, teeth that felt like I had a mouth full of cavities, and pain bad enough I suffered through four sleepless nights. On Monday, we had to say goodbye to our seven-year-old Siamese cat after three days of rapid decline because there was nothing more the vet could do for her. (My pets are part of my family.) The rest of the week became death by a thousand paper cuts.

By the weekend, I ended up curled in a ball in our recliner sobbing over the death of a character in a TV show. I knew the death was coming. I was prepared for it. And I’m not the kind of person who cries over TV shows or movies. But my anger over the death of that character proved to be more than I could take.

When we have days, weeks, or months like this, it’s normal to want to pull the covers back over our heads and allow depression to swallow us up. We feel like giving up because nothing we do is going to turn out right anyway.

We actually need to do the opposite.

Almost everyone has seen the movie Finding Nemo, but in it, clownfish Marlin lost his wife and all his eggs but one in a barracuda attack. When his only surviving son, Nemo, is captured by a diver, Marlin sets out to find him and bring him home. Dory, a regal tang with short-term memory loss, soon joins in his search.

Marlin and Dory find the diver’s mask with his address on it. They need to find a fish who can read, but in the process of escaping from a shark, surviving a mine field explosion, and barely missing being crushed by a sinking ship, the mask falls into a deep, dark crevice.

Marlin thinks the crevice is too deep and too dark to find the mask again. All seems lost. He doesn’t want to go on anymore, because everything just ends in disaster. He’s given up hope.

Dory pushes her face close to Nemo’s and makes pouty fish lips. “Hey, Mister Grumpy Gills, when life gets you down, you know what you got to do?”

“I don’t want to know what you gotta do,” Marlin says.

“Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming.”

Later in the movie, when they have Nemo back and are headed home, Dory gets caught with a bunch of other fish in a fisherman’s net. Nemo swims in to help her encourage all the fish to swim down together and tear the net from the boat.

The other fish are panicking and start to give up when it doesn’t work immediately. It seems like Marlin will lose the only two fish who matter to him. Then he remembers what Dory said.

“Just keep swimming,” he yells at them.

The principle is simple but profound. When everything is going wrong, the best thing to do is to keep moving. Keep trying something. Just don’t give up.

Because if you just keep swimming, eventually things have to change for the better.

What do you do to get through the tough times?

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 Related Posts:
How Do You Deal With Grief?
Do You Need to Slow Down?

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