robert.admin – Page 105 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

August 15, 2019

Two heroes (DOG EAR)

f you know me (or have read this column for any length of time) you know I love good storytelling. And I’m always looking for good tales. I watch Japanese sitcoms, good miniseries, Indian song-and-dance epics, just about everything. I’m always open to suggestions. So, recently, my niece’s boyfriend told me (since we both share a love of anime) that I should watch HunterXHunter. And a friend from two decades back told me that Longmire was one to watch. So I started them both. HunterXHunter is the story of Gon, a plucky little kid who wants to take “the Hunter Exam” and become […]

August 11, 2019

Genius without Education (Review)

‘m currently plowing through Infinite Jest (a massive book, and I don’t think the exchange will be reciprocal). Anyway, kiddies, that means it’s time for another one of my short stories from The End, a massive collection of the best the late Jurassic Publishing could offer. I was a little surprised at this one. Genius without Education comes from the string of western stories Jurassic commissioned (I should know – I submitted one). In this short story, we have a mysterious woman (named Genuine Truth) comes to the town of Pandemonium. That she comes with a Chinese servants (siblings, a […]

August 8, 2019

Pixar’s Screenwriting rules

came across this on the web, a (supposed but not verified) list of rules Pixar has forwarded to it’s screenwriters. Possibly you might find use for them in your own writing. Or maybe not. If you are trying to write a book on your own and throwing yourself open to your creative muses, don’t put too much into this. But if it’s long green you are after, consider them. #1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes. #2: You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as […]

August 4, 2019

The Cassandra Project (Review)

should have known what I was getting into when a woman at the astronomy club meeting offered this book she’d read to anyone else, with kind of a shrug and a “I’m not saying it’s good or anything.” Shoulda known faint praise when I heard it. So, The Cassandra Project is a fiction where a tabloid points out (in a NASA briefing) that Apollo IX (the vehicle sent to orbit round the moon two trips before the “actual” moon landing) made a radio transmission right before going around the far side of the moon, sounding a lot like the astronauts […]

August 1, 2019

Millennium (DOG EAR)

love the English language. I love its flexibility, the way you can make up words that work in the context of story. And I love that, with all the reading I’ve done, I have access to words and phrases dating back to the Napoleonic Era, even older. It’s a blast, when a character slips out of town without a forwarding address, to say they slipped their cable. But as I work with millennials, I’m beginning to find out just how short their awareness-horizon is. Recently I used the word “powder keg.” Emptiness. And “goldbricking”. “Featherbedding”. Blank looks at “Snipe hunt”. […]

July 28, 2019

OpsLog – WAZU RR – 07/28/2019

First item: Let the record reflect that the author, known herein as Robert Raymond, has operated three times this week. Second Item: Let the record also reflect that having a kiddy birthday party/ops session for hyperactive nine year olds is probably not a good idea. hat business out of the way, let us begin. And yes, we began as part of a birthday party. Nice that I got pizza and coke and a cute engineer’s hat, but I also got a local off the bat, working a busy section of mainline, with other mother/child teams pushing out of Portland and […]

July 28, 2019

OpsLog – FEC – 7/27/2019

ou might remember our last jaunt on the FEC which ended prematurely (possibly due to your author bumping a scrap piece of rail down into the electronic guts of the Farnham Calculation Engine). The superintendent decided that this session would be finished with the same cast of characters that smoked his railroad the month before. So, no crew call, more like a summons. We all returned to the scene of the crime where we were all given our jobs from the precise moment we’d gone dark. Everything was as it was. I slid into the dispatchers chair, looked at all those […]

July 28, 2019

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Review)

kay, so this is a weird one – two guys about as tripped out on drugs as it is possible to be in ’71, hired out by a magazine to report on the craziness of the Mint 400 (a desert race outside of Vegas), going from seedy bar to wrecked hotel room in this dizzying series of episodic adventures from the very early seventies. As you can imagine, I was having troubles getting my head around it (clear as it is from drugs) and to see the humor of some of the situations. Sure, Hunter Thompson is a raw guy […]

July 26, 2019

The Brick Joke (DOG EAR)

as watching an Indian movie (not a Bollywood movie – there is a difference, I found out) the other day with the wife. In it, some young guys break a father’s wide-screen TV. They manage to replace it (with circumstances too weird to convey here). Once the TV is in, they take the old TV up several flights of stairs and out onto a lower roof, where (one, two, three and away) they throw it up to a roof another flight up. Evidence is hidden. They are safe. Some time later in this movie, another plotline, a darker and more […]

July 25, 2019

OpsLog – LM&O – 07/24/2019

am in the waning days of my career, but I’m still needed it seems. Had a kid in my team who has spent two days inert because the people he needs in another team are out of the office. Finally he came in today and I marched him right down to their manager (whom I’m friends with). Tossed some intros, told her about our missing SMEs, asked for help. She smiled. “Oh, yeah, I can get someone on that right away.” Problem solved. Deadlock broken. I’m pretty proud of my problem-solving abilities, and it stuck with me tonight as I […]