robert.admin – Page 68 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

April 5, 2020

The Dog Who Could Fly (Review)

kay, this one is a true story – Robert Bozdech, a Czech air gunner, is now flying with the French in 1939. The cold war is rapidly heating and while on a low-level reconnaissance run , German machine gunners shoot him and his pilot down in no man’s land between France and Germany. In a ruined farmhouse, they find a German Sheppard puppy. Robert almost leaves it behind (after he feeds the shivering, half-starved furball a bit of chocolate), but its pathetic howls bring him back. Tucking the dog into his jacket, they manage to make it back to French […]

April 2, 2020

The creativity dump (DOG EAR)

his is strange. I’ve just seen whole days slide by that I cannot account for. When I started retirement six months back, every day was a golden chance to work on stuff, get things done. I was writing, coding, bike riding, going to two clubs, everything. And now suddenly there is a stay-at-home order and I’m stuck. I’m noticing (and just speaking for myself here) that my creativity is in the crapper. I just feel bored with everything. I can’t confirm the origin of these feelings, of course, but there is always the element of worry. We live pretty tight […]

March 29, 2020

The Sky Lords (Review)

nother one out of my molding book files, dating back to 1988, so good luck finding it. The Sky Lords deals with a world a couple of hundred years following the ‘Gene Wars’. Much of the world is covered in fungus growth or crazy designer monsters that have gotten out of control. Humanity is pretty much down to two classes – the people rooting out a living in walled cities and the Sky Lords, the privileged riding about in their high tech airships – the later praying on the former. And our story starts just as a matriarchal Minervan town […]

March 26, 2020

Writing Dirty, Staying Clean (DOG EAR)

kay, you vanillas – please try to stick with this until the end of the piece. So we’re in the middle of a pandemic, one that a lot of people (especially young people) don’t take seriously. Lots of parties, trips to theme parks, all that. I’ve posted numerous things on Facebook on the importance of distancing but it hit me – outside of my nieces and a couple of young guys who don’t like me anymore I don’t think there are many people under twenty-five in my FB friends. So either you already know it or you’re not going to […]

March 22, 2020

The Lives of Tao (Review)

kay, so the idea here is that an alien ship crashed here millions of years ago. The aliens are gaseous creatures who cannot live long in our air but can enter into living things (but once they do, they are stuck until death). They cannot really directly control those creatures but can speak to them using the magic of italic fonts. And with the rise of humans, now they have a chance to shape our race to their liking, to influence us to greater heights (and along the way, to build them a starship to return home). Kinda odd, right? […]

March 19, 2020

Days of plague and the new media (DOG EAR)

o for last week’s column, I wrote something about people forcing their phone media on you. That afternoon, I met three crazy ex-work ladies at Applebees and hung out with them for about four hours. As we bid each other goodnight, little did I imagine how different everything would be a week later. Now we’ve been staying homeside for about five days. Very quiet. Been working on my games and my writing. Still doing bike rides. Even took the wife out on the tandem to a small park where we ate dinner on a bench, just to get out of […]

March 15, 2020

The Little Paris Bookshop (Review)

ot this one for the wife a Christmas or so ago, a little romance chick-licky story about a fifty-year old somewhat sexy but inwardly dead guy who sells books from a boat on the Seine River in Paris, who lives a zombie life, who has an empty room in his apartment he hasn’t gone into, and who gave a table from said room to his sexy but equally extinguished female neighbor which came from that reluctantly breached room, and who forgot about the letter in the table from the woman who broke his heart and left twenty years past. Yes, […]

March 11, 2020

Pushy Media (DOG EAR)

o I’m an old guy. I only started carrying a phone because I’m cycling in this crazy city (Orlando). And it’s an old flip phone I’ve had for a decade. People walking on the nature trails around here piss me off when they have their heads in their phones. And drivers with phones (which is illegal), don’t get me started. Not a fan. But something that’s really become an issue – with all the content and bandwidth available, people are watching more stuff, and they are watching it louder and louder. On the train I ride, it’s become an epidemic […]

March 8, 2020

New York 2140 (Review)

picked this one up at that Madeira Beech bookstore I mentioned in another review. The cover shows New York, but if you think about the name of the book and look closely, you’ll see that a lot of the forefront buildings are actually standing in water (with boats moving about them). So yes, this is a tale of what it’s like to live in the Big Apple when it becomes the Big Sea Grape in a century and a half. Global warming a reality. The result of our sins. And actually, New York has largely recovered. Where streets were once, […]

March 5, 2020

Podcast (DOG EAR)

aw an interesting thing today (a Sunday) – the wife and I decided to walk over to a local eatery to have breakfast. We’ve done dinner there a couple of times – it’s a little pricy but very eclectic and trendy and rather fun. And it’s the only place I can get what is becoming my favorite drink, Arrogant Bastard Beer. Only not for breakfast. This breakfast, we ordered our food and sat down, only to see two young guys sitting in the back corner with a bight light shining on them, bantering furiously away about StarWars, Jurassic Park, remakes, […]