robert.admin – Page 165 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

November 8, 2015

Good Luck, Yukikaze (Review)

he second-parter to the first book, Yukikazi, written some 20-30 years after the first by a master of Japanese scifi, Chohei Kambryash. If you haven’t read my first review, linked above, the Yukikaze universe is one of perpetual (at least, three decades) war. An unknown race, the JAM, pushed through a hyperspace gate over Antarctica and attacked us. So we pushed them back to the planet “Fairie” and established bases. So we’re in daily air combat against the JAM, both sides upping their technology. Yet we are left with questions: Just what are the JAM? And how can we trust […]

November 7, 2015

Summer Triangle (11/6/2015)

as over at Leu Gardens (our local botanical garden) Friday night. It was outdoor movie night and we were there to see Double Indemnity, a great flick that will keep you from ever watching My Three Sons the same way again. Oh, and it’s got Southern Pacific trains in it. Regardless, tonight (Saturday) is supposed to be the star gazing night of the weekend (over at a gun range with the astronomy club) but I got a little in before the movie. See, we were sitting in a row, two couples, with the wives snittering in the middle. That left […]

November 5, 2015

Ink Life (DOG EAR)

as one of those glorious days in Florida, eighty degrees with scattered galleon clouds. My mini was purring along the 520, riding out to Palm Bay to attend a model railroad session on the Florida East Coast. This is where we run trains as close to the rule book as we can, and you get kudos for doing your job with sharp efficiency. I was in the beach traffic, passing boats and RVs but everyone was keeping right so the pace was fine. Was thinking about the site and what I’d be blogging. I’ve got another review to ready, Rothfuss’s […]

November 4, 2015

OpsLog – La Mesa – 11/1/2015

ough start to the day – got in a tiff with the crew caller early and ended up reading a book in the lounge for two hours. But then I got a train which was a real sweet run – over the hill with a minimum of fuss (except for a thrilling run-for-a-siding banana-drama). And afterwards I spelled the Caliente station operator so he could go get lunch (even had to write out a fumbling order). And that was exciting. Why? What station operators do: In ‘Time Table & Train Order’ operations (the method railroads operated for over a hundred […]

November 3, 2015

OpsLog – La Mesa – 10/21/2015

ackstory here: You gotta understand the damn scale of the La Mesa Club. It’s big. Really big. Imagine that you were a tiny little HO figure. The distance is 29 scale miles from simulated Mojave to pretend Bakersfield. In most locations, pretty much all the track alignment is correct for the 50s. We run trains that are 50-100 cars long (often with two or three operators controlling engines). A half dozen clerkish characters keep the railroad organization (from crew calling to cooking to dispatching to MOW) humming. Yeah, big. So I’m in Mojave – just got into town aboard Extra […]

November 1, 2015

All You Need Is Kill (Review)

ou might know this one as Edge of Tomorrow. Or you might not. It was a pretty good flick (saw it last night) but, as is true with all books and movies, the book is soooo much better. In this Japanese SciFi story, alien nanotech falls into our oceans and spawn with various creatures to make “Mimics”, starfishy things that are nearly impossible to kill and attack en-mass. All we have to fight them are battle armor, and that isn’t much good – a squad’s gotta pour on firepower to kill just one of these things. But this isn’t Keiji […]

October 29, 2015

Where does it go? (DOG EAR)

uesday night, nestled between two evenings at the train club. Usually a quiet night, one phone call from my best friend, not much else. Maybe a good writing night. And now its 10:12 PM and I haven’t gotten even into the TNM2 folder. Where did all my writing time go? Well, let’s see. After dinner, I had to catch the site up. I had two book reviews to write, and a Dog Ear. That took some time. Then there was the shared Solar Trader game my buddy and I are jointly playing (passing it back and forth). See, it only […]

October 26, 2015

OpsLog – BN (Formerly DT&I) – 10/25/2015

o, my falling fortunes. On Friday evening, I was dispatching a heavy mountain line in the profitable 50s from a brick building in downtown Asheville. By Saturday morning, I’d been bumped out into the Tennessee wilderness, dispatching a declining railroad in the 60’s-70’s, now likely in a peeling wood-frame draft-palace in some little Podunk town. Saturday afternoon, my career continued to slide, down to engineer of a crack passenger train out west, down to running a sharp little local pulling in rolling stock from mainline towns. But by Sunday morning, I was out in some industrial bad land (it looked […]

October 25, 2015

Yukikaze (Review)

his one originated off some beautiful (but confusing) anime I’d viewed. Having just read All you need is Kill (which I only now realize I haven’t reviewed yet), I noticed on their website that two Yukikaze books were available. Okay, so I’d enjoyed Kill so much (Japanese scifi) that I figured I’d pick them up. Enough about me. Yukikaze is about our world, fifteen minutes into the future. A strange hyperspace portal appears over Antarctica and out of it comes the JAM. We’ve only seen their fighters and bombers, never figured out who they were or what they are. The […]

October 24, 2015

OpsLog – ATSF – 10/24/2015

he AT&SF Railway Henderson District – long and yellow and low-hilled, that’s pretty much the early scenery. This creation has a long folded plan with a huge central yard and a string of ATSF-feel station areas along its right of way. And no, this time, I flatly refused to dispatch. So in return, I found myself in the seat of a warbonnet E-8, fully sounded, running easy across the prairie, cutting in on the station tracks, forking out my fob-watch to keep track of the three-minute stops, sizzling by towns where dour-face local-crews waited on shimmering sidings as we polished […]