robert.admin – Page 23 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

August 11, 2024

Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City (Review)

o image there is a “Roman” sort of empire, with a huge city and a privileged founding race (literally blue-skinned), an empire that spans most of the known world. Imagine you are a white-skinned “barbarian” who has elevated himself to a position of commanding a regiment of engineers – and hey, you like just building bridges. You also are a smart-ass and a realist with a touch of mild Tourettes. And then your content life of engineering and problem-solving is upset when you realize that a massive army has been moving around inside the borders of this empire. It has […]

August 8, 2024

Drift Away (DOG EAR)

n the early 70s, a singer named Dobie Gray released a song, Drift Away, that was a big hit. I remember being into it, playing the 45 over and over. In a nutshell, it’s a song that notes the way music can sooth us in our troubled world. You can say that it’s a noble ideal to hold, something that can bring comfort to us all. [Verse 1] Day after day I’m more confused Yet I look for the light through the pouring rain You know that’s a game that I hate to lose And I’m feelin’ the strain […]

August 4, 2024

Destroyermen 11: Blood in the Water (Review)

kay, we’ll start with the question I always ask at the end of Destroyermen reviews – where do the reptilian Grik get all their shit? The bad guys in the story (and the author) have been hinting that the Grik (and the crazy Japanese emperor-wannabe, Kurokawa) had a big surprise for the heroes off the east coast of Africa. And (spoilers ahead) did they ever – hundreds of planes. Three carriers. Working torpedoes. Where did they get all this shit? The thing that always makes me wince in these books is the fact that they don’t have railroads. Materials seem […]

August 1, 2024

Two Cafes (DOG EAR)

o I’m sitting in the Banner Elk cafe, having my brew at 4200 feet. Interesting. My home cafe in Florida (Framework, on 17-92) is my place. The black joe is strong (need water as a chaser) and the grinding in the back makes me sneeze sometimes, but that’s okay. It’s a younger clientele, a bunch of middle-twenties/early-thirties people, most of them using the cafe as an office (sitting at laptops, a cold cup of coffee untouced at their side). There is always some homeless guy there (they change out every two weeks or so) but they generally behave and a […]

July 28, 2024

A Closed and Common Orbit (Review)

his is a very loose followup to A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Becky Chamber’s breakout novel. I was very surprised to see the direction she took this – rather than stay with the ship Wayfarer and the interesting characters she’d developed, she went a totally different and interesting direction – centering on Pepper (the mech they brushed up against earlier in the story) and the newly rebooted (i.e. personality-dead) ship’s AI who needed to be removed from the ship. I was like where are we going with this? With a touch of but I liked the old […]

July 28, 2024

OpsLog – FEC – 7/27/2024

kay, this one will be a tough one to write. Sure, the first train out got routed wrong out of the yard. There, are you happy? I admit it. To make it worse, the last train in also misrouted down the wrong track and hit a train on the departure tracks. So full disclosure. But while we’re spreading blame on toast, let’s not forget that every local, every local, worked long today. I had delays at Palm bay, at Pinetta, Buenaventura, Frontenac, Titusville and the whole Cocoa stretch. If locals worked clear of the main, they did fine. But work […]

July 25, 2024

OpsLog – LM&O – 7/24/2024

a-ha, you fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous of which is “never get involved in a land war in Asia”, but only slightly less well-known is this: “Never dispatch a high-speed rail line using train sheets when death is on the line!” Or something like that. So I made the second blunder. You see, a train sheet (as shown below) is like a blank timetable. The dispatcher writes times as trains pass point, draws arrows to where they are cleared to. Also, and this is me, I’ll circle my meet points so I […]

July 25, 2024

Brand (DOG EAR)

nteresting day on the road today. Coming home from breakfast with a friend, tooling along in the right lane of a two lane exit, not quite there yet. In my rear view, I spot a BMW FUV coming up hard behind me, maybe 90 to my 75. Of course, while he’s got all the room in the world, he changes lanes at the last second, clipping past my rear quarter for no better reason that it gives him a thrill to pass like a race car driver. Cute, except that we were entering a hard right off ramp going to […]

July 22, 2024

OpsLog – WAZU – 7/21/2024

nother day on the Wazu. Came in and the host was a bit freaked – worried that we wouldn’t have enough people (it’s vacation season and a lot of people are traveling) (and Doc always freaks, anyway). But there was the discord network teletyping calls for crews and we got about two or three guys in that way. We weren’t at full staff but close enough to make it work. The session started off in the usual shit-show. I was manning the desk in the back, hunched over my train board and ignoring my monitors (I don’t want to see […]

July 21, 2024

The Aquanaut (Review)

n interesting graphic novel by Dan Santat. It starts in a storm-tossed sea, where a ship is well into danger of sinking. It is a ship engaged in oceanographic research (specifically, animals) and its master goes down with it. In his dying moment, a hermit crab with a soda can for a shell comes to him and touches him in the fashion of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. Somehow the creatures (the hermit plus his other little friends) gain sentience. Meanwhile, we cut to the master’s daughter Sophia, a young girl hanging around the expedition’s base, a failing park named Aqualand. […]