Steven Barnes's Blog, page 19

On “Breaking Bad” and how easy it is to deceive ourselves.

: Walt, please, let’s both of us stop trying to justify this whole thing and admit you’re in danger!

: Who are you talking to right now? Who is it you think you see? Do you know how much I make a year? I mean, even if I told you, you wouldn’t believe it. Do you know what would happen if I suddenly decided to stop going into work? A business big enough that it could be listed on the NASDAQ goes belly up. Disappears! It ceases to exist without me. No, you clearly don’t k...

“Panic Room” (2002): Jodie Foster, Action Hero

I was asked yesterday to do a book on productivity and keeping a positive mood.    Well, the next course I’m producing, the “Morning M.A.G.I.C. for Writers” is precisely that.   But if you want to know, heck, just watch “PANIC ROOM” the movie that turns Jodie Foster into an action hero.  

In it, Foster is a recently divorced woman moving into a lavish Soho townhouse equipted with the eponymous hidey-hole. She and her daughter are asleep when a trio of burglars, including an excellen...

What is your most important outcome this week?

 

Watching 1971’s   ANDROMEDA STRAIN. At the end of this very intellectual, emotionally cool film a doctor must run a gauntlet of ladders and lasers to stop a nuclear weapon from killing him and spreading an extinction-level pathogen around the world.   Seriously tense, exciting stuff.

 

And he barely makes it, combining puzzle-solving, physical courage, physical strength, resistance to pain, focus and clarity of intent into a final climactic action.

 

It’s “wow” stuff.  But LIFEWRITING sugge...

Sex Robots and “Incel Traps”

“Westworld” and other shows, movies, and prose as well as the headlines speak of sex robots which will become more and more indistinguishable from real human beings.   I suggest that they will become traps for dysfunctional people, and not something that threatens human reproduction as a whole.

 

Because I don’t think healthy relationships are difficult for healthy people to find, I consider them one of the primary maturation points for human beings.   Sex robots would allow people to avoid t...

Opportunity On The Wings of Danger

I love the James Bond movies, and nothing epitomizes the glorious absurdity of them than the moment in OCTOPUSSY where 007 (Roger Moore) is clinging to the top of a flying plane, sans parachute, messing with the flaps. The villain (Louis Jordan) tells his henchman to “go out there and kill him.”

 

Bond and the villain engage in hand-to hand combat on the roof of the plane, until Bond whacks the guy with an antennae, sending him flying off to his doom. Bond then swings down into the plane, sav...

It’s not hard to be King…it’s just every day.

(The title above is a play on a comment someone once made about parentage: it isn’t hard. It’s just daily.)

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Bought the Blu-Ray of Black Panther yesterday (I didn’t know DVD was a dying format.   Couldn’t even find a copy at Best Buy!) and watched it for the sixth time.   Man, that movie holds up.   On a core level, it is about a man learning to be a king, and having to define what that means to him.  To that end, his relationship to the kingdom is essential, and there is a beautiful, wid...

Happy Independence Day!

 

 

 

  “Good morning. In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world. And you will be launching the largest aerial battle in this history of mankind.

Mankind — that word should have new meaning for all of us today.

We can’t be consumed by our petty differences anymore.

We will be united in our common interests.

Perhaps its fate that today is the 4th of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom, not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution — bu...

“The Martian” and balancing thought and emotion

“At some point, everything’s gonna go south on you… everything’s going to go south and you’re going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem… and you solve the next one… and then the next. And If you solve enough problems, you get to come home. All right, questions?“–Matt Damon as Mark Watney in THE MARTIAN.

 

When your life is on the line, you have to access your pro...

“The Hunger Games”: Clarity of Purpose

Watching THE HUNGER GAMES yesterday as the result of a little game: we’d seen Donald Sutherland in DISCLOSURE playing a slimy billionaire, and thought we’d follow that thread to another film, where he plays a slimy president.  He does slimy GREAT.

 

At any rate, I remembered enjoying these movies well enough in the theater, although I would have felt just a little silly seeing them without Nicki.  The thing about movies like this is that at the core of them, there is a vast amount of action,...

What is the most important thing I can do TODAY?

Morning Ritual starts when you wake up.   People who comment on my personal energy are sometimes amazed that I don’t “wake up” with it every day.  No, I have to work that Chinese Puzzle Ball, find the thing I am most committed to in life, think of the most important thing I have to do TODAY to bring it into existence, and how accomplishing it with style and joy will benefit every aspect of my life.

 

ULTIMATE GOAL: JOY

ULTIMATE OUTCOMES: SUPERB FITNESS, RELATIONSHIPS, FINANCES,   CONTRIBUTION...