robert.admin – Page 16 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

November 21, 2024

Losing my Religion (DOG EAR)

t doesn’t take much of a stretch to imagine that I’m a liberal. Commute by bike. Live on a pretty gay street. Have friends of all nationalities. There are a couple of business I won’t buy from unless backed into a corner. Exxon, for the Exxon Valdez and their bullshit response. BP, for the same sort of thing in the Gulf. So that’s environmental. You might even say my wife and I have taken it a step further – we own a small (older) Mini Cooper and a newer Prius. For other concerns, I don’t buy from Chick-fil-a and Hobby […]

November 17, 2024

OpsLog – LM&O Saturday Night Special – 11/16/2024

ell, you can’t spell “Shenanigans” without “Shannon”. And, it seems, you can’t spell “Dumbass” and “Dipwad” and even “Wackadoodle” without him, too. I’d really overbooked Saturday. I agreed to run on the Virginia Southwestern earlier that day, but the club was having a Saturday Night Special session that evening. I’d asked at the business meeting if we could maybe, you know, skip it but too many people wanted it. I even considered not going but Shannon sweet-talked/blackmailed me into doing it. So, spending thousands of husband points and possibly fatiguing a year or more off my life, I agreed to […]

November 17, 2024

OpsLog – VSW – 11/16/2024

his wasn’t my best idea – going over to Polk City to run the Virginia Southwestern when I also had a Saturday Night Ops session at the club later. So I’d be dispatching for, let’s see, eight hours (and on the road for three). And all that model railroading and I wouldn’t touch a throttle. Still, I do enjoy dispatching. We approached the VSW with the same caution that sappers would an unexploded bomb. Last time on this railroad, everything blew up and the session ended with a critical staging area dead. The only reason we were able to run […]

November 17, 2024

The Mercy of Gods (Review)

o the creators of The Expanse series have closed it out and moved on to a new series. Or did they? The Expanse ended with (spoiler) the ring gates closing and hundreds of colony worlds cut off. Most of them were not established and probably died off. So in The Mercy of Gods, it’s loosely hinted that the humans on this world can find records of their DNA existence, including themselves, animals and plants (alongside more indigenous animals and plants with their own form of DNA). Records were, of course, lost. Nobody knows how they got there but it hints […]

November 11, 2024

OpsLog – WAZU – 11/10/2024

f you are thinking that you already got posted from me this weekend for a Saturday show, you did. But now it’s Sunday and a big bunch of us train-freaks are over at Doc Andy’s, running on the WAZU. For once, I didn’t jump for the DS panel. One, I wanted to run some trains for once and two, some of my friends were going to need my burly brawn assistance to get an old lady up some stairs. Since I was on a short leash that day, I chose to run trains and see how it would play out. […]

November 10, 2024

ShowLog – Lake Nona – 11/9/2024

o this is what an easy train show is like. Instead of getting up at 5am and running out to Deland to build our layout in the dark, then walk around it all day, with this show at Lake Nona Middle School we were able to go out on Friday and casually put things together. The next day, it was a leisurely local drive out. The layout was already up and ready – we just put trains on and ran. We had a lot of help this time around, with new members wearing their bright yellow bullseye shirts and really […]

November 10, 2024

Icerigger (Review)

kay, so back in the seventies, I really loved Alan Dean Foster’s stories. They were funny and exciting and great reads. And now I picked up one that’s a half century old, Icerigger. Of course, the question is, how does it keep up with modern scifi? Not StarWars either, but adult series like The Expanse. So in Icerigger, a passenger liner is making a stop at a colony world, one totally covered in a sea of ice. During ship’s night (as they orbit in) the main character, a merchant named Ethan Fortune, comes across a kidnapping in progress. The inept […]

November 3, 2024

How to Rule and Empire and Get Away with It (Review)

companion book to a wild breakout novel, Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City, this book picks up a couple of months after the completion of the first one. Of course, you might have thought that the siege was broken in the first book, but no, that’s never mentioned and the barbarian leader Ogus, outside the battered walls, still wants everyone in the city dead (gruesomely). So this time, our story comes from an actor of plays and a playwright (he publishes them like he’s grinding sausages) named Notker. His other skills include witty impersonations of political figures. So he’s […]

October 31, 2024

Overestimate (DOG EAR)

here is a thing I see a lot in our modern world, that through that simply buying (or doing any minimum effort) gives you mastery over a skill. Possibly it comes from all the movies we watch where a montage is used to show months/years of work. Even Charles Atlas had it – the “Hero of the Beach” bulked up in a couple of panels. You might have seen young teens (and twenties) drive. They get themselves a spiffy little toy car (either on their own loans or gifted by over-indulgent parents). And now, suddenly, because they have a quick […]

October 24, 2024

OpsLog – LM&O – 10/23/2024

t seems like the trope of railroad fiction; a moment where the high railroad summit is packed with trains and the grizzled dispatcher has to ask a young cub engineer to pull off a move that, if it fails, will lock up the railroad for hours. And that is exactly how it went down. At the 2/3rds point, I had traffic building in Red Rock and Lehigh, the summit approaches. They were pretty plugged. To get trains out, I needed to run a bunch over the hill. To clear Red Rock for westbound moves, I needed to get Jude’s long […]