robert.admin – Page 82 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

January 17, 2021

Nebula Awards Showcase 2019 (Review)

ell, I always rip through my Christmas gifts. My wife bought this one for me – safe bet, since like a box of chocolates, there is always something good to find in an anthology. And happily, among all these offerings of scifi and fantasy, there were a number of good reads (and interestingly, there wasn’t a spaceship or a wizard to be found – modern writing, I suppose). So, their great stories include: Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience ™: A failing Indian man working in a VR park about American Indians presents a fake image of the Indian Experience, […]

January 17, 2021

OpsLog – TBL – 1/16/2021

was rolling out of Easton on 613 in the early evening, having spotted the day’s final cars. Gave two toots to the line of glowing windows along the tower’s second floor, acknowledging the green boards I had back to Tuscarora. Ben was doing a bang-up job as the new towerman. Better than I was doing as an engineer on the Easton Turn, it seemed. I only got five miles when I realized I’d missed picking up a car. Called the dispatcher on the callbox for a quick return to pick up a pennsy box. We all have our off nights. […]

January 14, 2021

Character Progression (DOG EAR)

’m happily working on a game, Solar Trader 2, which I’ll post in my links as it gets to a more playable state. But why the heck am I talking about that… in a literature post? The original Solar Trader was an Excel game, a massive attempt to bring near-future space ship maneuvering into a game format. It worked okay but never found any following – it had a very steep learning curve that pretty much killed it for most people. It’s been a couple of years and I really like the idea of its Expanse-like setting. During this time, […]

January 10, 2021

Old Man’s War (Review)

t’s a pretty simple premise – when you get to a certain age and become a drag on the economy and only have maybe a decade to live, you can elect to join Colonial Defense Force. They will give you a new body, train you to be a soldier, and expect a two-year (but, as it turns out, ten-year) hitch out of you. You just won’t be coming back to Earth. You’ll go where they tell you, fight who they tell you, and die when they tell you. Simple. Well, the new body part is true; manufactured bodies with all […]

January 7, 2021

Losing it (DOG EAR)

esides writing, I love coding games. Always a challenge. As far as versioning (making sure you have a backup copy), I always make sure that before I start coding for the evening, I save a copy with an incrementing number on it. So, we have “game1” “game2” “game 3” and so on. During Christmas weekend I had a lot of free time so I threw myself into my game. Wrote for six hours and managed to get a number of clever and interesting game paths done. Since the game saves on every compile, and it’s all saving to that same […]

January 7, 2021

OpsLog – LM&O – 1/6/2021

he two GP-9s of the Mingo Jct Turn rumbled out of Martin Yard at 2am. I knew we had a lot to pull from the industries since nobody ran locals last time and the spurs were packed. I guess that’s why I got assigned extra crew on this run (namely, Tom and his son Braden, who really knew how to handle trains well). Braden had expressed interest in operations and I told him he was getting it in spades tonight – we had a very tricky run. Lots of switching and lots of puzzles. But the father and son team […]

January 3, 2021

The Book Thief (Review)

ou can’t have a more hardcore story opener than this – little Liesel is on a train going to meet her “new” mother and father (since it’s 1939 in Nazi Germany, and her real mom is either unfit or too poor to take care of her and her brother). But a bad day goes further south when her brother suddenly dies on the train to her foster home. Once her brother is buried and before the train moves on, a book falls from one of the grave digger’s pockets and, even though she can’t read, Liesel steals it off the […]

December 31, 2020

Best of 2020 (DOG EAR)

rankly, it’s been a rotten year. Covid. Politics. Domestic stupidity. Really, these are the times that try mens’ souls (if they even have them – and given the mask-dodgers, I’m not so sure). As far as reading over my first full year or retirement, there were only a handful of books that really shook me (and another one just missed the cut because I just finished it today and it won’t post until next Sunday). As it stood out, I actually read only five books that really hit home (there were some other good ones but not as good as […]

December 27, 2020

Beacon 23 (Review)

ometimes the parallel between the actual world and the projected world is so direct in a science fiction book, it’s obvious. And sometimes I don’t care. In Beacon 23, we have a war-torn vet tending a hyperspace beacon that marks and asteroid field. The guts of the station are in the spherical hub. But the broadcasting unit needs to be a distance from it, so it’s on top of a projection for safety. Kinda like… a lighthouse, right? Just like The Vagrant from last week, you’ve got a single-point POV from this sorry keeper as he tends his beacon, talking […]

December 24, 2020

Guest OpsLog – LM&O – 12/23/2020

Note: This account was provided by Cody Case, after I had a brush with a Covid zombie and am now in the two-week penalty box. The show went on anyway (while I sat in my dark den and web regretful tears). But even though everyone screwed up, when I met them outside to pick up my PC, everyone was jubilant from the session. All photos Mike Anderson eased into the dispatcher seat just as Frank offered to give it a try. “What could go wrong? There are just a few of us here tonight.” So, I grabbed some power and […]