robert.admin

April 22, 2021

Rock and a Hard Place (DOG EAR)

doubt it caused concern in the New York Publishing Houses (is that even a thing anymore?). And I don’t think the literary blogs were abuzz over it. But last week, I skipped any entries – Dog Ear and the following Book Review. The thing is, I wasn’t up to it. Before posting up my blog (I’d written it the day before) I’d gone over to the dentist first thing in the morning to get my new tooth implant inserted. Big day, been waiting a year for it. But when I got out of the car, that gentle muscle spasm (sic) […]
April 11, 2021

Hey Nostradamus! (Review)

rom the brilliant cultural writer Douglas Coupland comes this (as always) social commentary of the cheap-landscapes and aimless-times we live in (you might remember him from his breakout work, Generation X, the book which defined that term decades ago). As always, he’s a good writer to produce a book you can curl around when you feel the world is tragic, stupid and pointless. So Hey Nostradamus! is told from the points of view of four primary characters. And they are: Cheryl, in 1988, a young high school girl who is comfortably religious, a member of a group of high school […]
April 8, 2021

Regressing into Space Opera (DOG EAR)

y dirty little secret is that I run a role-playing game once a week (zoom-style). Haven’t reffed in three decades but some of the players asked and it sounded like fun. Back then, my world was StarWars. Everything was about light sabres and TIE fighters and that endlessly evil Empire. Black and white morality (literally) and (if you think about it) silly technology. The data center that the Rebels raided in that recent movie had the information stored in what looked like giant eight-track tapes. And even though flying space fighters around is really cool, it’s pointlessly stupid when you […]
April 4, 2021

Dirty John (Review)

irst, I’ll say that I have no idea where this book came from. I was going through my read-stack and there it was, as if some literary hopeful planted it there (I really don’t think the Blogatorum has that sort of pull, but who knows). Maybe I got it out of one of those curb-side libraries. But if you gave it to me, thanks! I really enjoyed it. So let’s get into why I enjoyed it. Dirty John is a collection of short pieces by Journalist Christopher Goffard, interviews involving “true stories of outlaws and outsiders”. And, as he says […]
April 1, 2021

Power (DOG EAR)

here are times when it becomes evident that writing is like magical spell-casting (if that were, indeed, a thing). It takes years to hone one’s writing ability. But once one is a writer, people in general concede that the writer has a power. In the paper the other day, I read of a lawmaker who is enacting legislation to suppress voting (by making it illegal to distribute water to those waiting in hot sun-blasted lines for a chance to vote in ever-restricted poling places. I simply noted (in as few sentences and with as few words as possible) that such […]
March 28, 2021

Steam Bird (Review)

ell, this one jolted me in surprise – written in the mid-eighties by Hilbert Schenck, who worked on feasibility studies for the USAF for a nuclear-powered bomber (impractical, given that conventional bombers could do the job easier, cleaner, and didn’t radiate like the bombs they’d just dropped when they returned home). Anyway, what caught me is that the story opens in a model train operations session (where, before Digital Command Control, they are using “microcomputers” (whatever that means in 1985) to simulate how steam engines work in their session). Overall, I really enjoyed the tension and repartee most sessions have. […]
March 25, 2021

Wording (DOG EAR)

uick one this time since I had an eyeball issue yesterday and three hours of dental work today (getting old sucks, and yes, I know about the alternative, but it still sucks). Anyway, working on a CYOA (Choose Your Own Adventure) game – just doing preliminary encounter testing now. There is a bit where you are in a bar. I found myself spooling out this: You order a glass of bourbon and sit down. Then you see someone you know enter. Hey, I’m a writer. I’m better than this wordy script. Since we already know you are in a bar, […]
March 25, 2021

OpsLog – LM&O – 3/24/2021

he trouble all started when I was working the Mingo interchange, swapping cuts to and from Wheeling. I asked the cub dispatcher for paper to get back to Mingo Jct (I’d already been issued a warrant to get me just to the interchange, rather than the more traditional out-n-backs Cody Case and I rely on). So I said I wanted to go back and he said “here’s yer warrant” and (given the fact that I was working with Teddy, my new engineer on the Mingo Turn, as well as rerailing other trains and pulling toppled engines out of tunnels) I […]
March 21, 2021

The Flag Captain (Review)

ulled this one of my late father’s shelf, one of those 1979 age-of-sail swashbucklers written by the great Alexander Kent. Just one from the shelf run by the same author, a tale of his hero, (now Flag Captain) Richard Bolitho, facing the events of The Great Mutiny. See, I thought we were talking India, but no, this was apparently a massive mutiny that swept the Royal Navy at the time. It came as a poke in the eye to captains and their belief in rule by rank, that they could beat and punish anyone they damn well pleased. Concessions were […]
March 18, 2021

Seeing Life and Art (DOG EAR)

love all forms of media and the art of storytelling. And recently I started rewatching and old favorite anime (Japanese animation) with the jawbreaking name Blood Blockade Battlefront. I don’t even know why it’s named that but, in a nutshell,, New York City has suddenly become the nexus point for multiple dimensions, a city in siege, so to speak. Aliens walk the streets. Explosions roll through the city. Vampires. Ghosts. Just total craziness (i.e. NYC but even a little more crazy). Enter Leonardo Watch, a kid who was blessed/cursed by a god and now has ‘the All-Seeing Eyes of the […]