robert.admin – Page 89 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

December 24, 2020

Three on Three (Dog Ear)

was doing my last-minute Christmas shopping the other day (which was good since someone in my train club called while I was and said he’d maybe had contact with a Covid case and I had hung out with him Saturday). But I was already mulling over something I’d just seen. Of course, I’m a Mange/Anime guy. I love the stuff, the raw power and beauty of a well-told story (even though they have a lot of clunkers, too). So I’d wandered over to where the Manga was, the outer three walls of a U-shape of shelves. All three outer faces […]

December 20, 2020

The Vagrant (Review)

kay, so the hero is a kickass silent man, with a cloak and a magic sword with an angry blinking eye in its hilt. And under that cloak, he’s toting a baby. And to feed the baby, he’s hauling a goat, an angry bitch that kicks and bites with attitude, the perfect sidekick for laughs. The only thing it hasn’t got is Eddie Murphy doing its voice. But that’s the trick Peter Newman set up – a party in which nobody speaks. Oh, eventually they pick up someone who can actually talk but until then, it’s all nuanced gestures and […]

December 17, 2020

Are we having fun yet? (DOG EAR)

t always surprises me what criminals (scammers, embezzlers, politicians) do with their ill-gotten gains. Generally they are arrested and the monies they so desperately stole has gone to “jewelry and lavish vacations”. And even that doesn’t cover it, since the vacation is usually to some place that is a vacation destination amongst beach idlers and discotheque-goers. I mean, really, what the hell? I think this is true of more than just criminals. People who know me know how much I scoff at the upper-middle class (I see your hand up, Denise). Like these ill-considered criminals, these are people who don’t […]

December 13, 2020

Diamond Sam (Review)

ince I’m still deep in another book, I met this week’s deadline by peeking into the next story in my Sam Gunn Omnibus, a collection by the recently-late Ben Bova. This time, it was Diamond Sam. So the collection continues with Jade, a young girl attempting to make a historical drama out of the late, great Sam Gunn, spaceman and adventurer. In this, she interviews Grigory Protov, an aging cosmonaut living out his last days in a Russian old-spaceman-home on the moon. And Grigory has nothing good to say about Sam, calling him a spy and a thief. Turns out […]

December 13, 2020

OpsLog – TBL – 12/12/2020

his was a ground breaker session on the Tuscarora – the first run of the interlocking lever system, mounted in the mostly-sceniced tower. Every ounce of effort on this entire railroad, every coding step, all led to this event. And it was a blast. My dispatcher Greg was running at a steady clip, not rushing me at all. And most of the routing I’d practiced in my testing simulator. The only thing I wasn’t sure about was the initial drill effort (where the train from Martin gets classified) and the actual switching around the industrial areas. As it stood, the […]

December 10, 2020

Stories (DOG EAR)

as out cycling today and saw a big pickup rounding a corner into Baldwin Park, a snobby upper-class neighborhood just up the road. And I had to think – why would a rich bastard who probably couldn’t lift a bag of mulch himself (as if he didn’t have gardeners for that) need a pickup truck? It’s got to be his story about himself. Down to earth practical, right? My own cars tell stories about me, sporty, economical, fun and nostalgic. Yes, those are the stories I want surrounding me. In ancient times (like those in the books I’ll be plugging […]

December 6, 2020

First Contact (Review)

f you don’t like Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams, you might as well stop here. Because First Contact, by Evan Mandery, is very much in this class of storytelling. Me, I loved it. Written in 2010, it’s got a clueless president (so dense and self-centered, it’s nearly prophetic). It’s got his aide, Ralph, the hapless young man who he sends to get his sub sandwich lunches. It’s got Ralph’s new girlfriend, who is second-guessing her decision of going to law school. And it’s got the ambassador from Rigel, who is a bit of a practical joker, and his own aide […]

December 3, 2020

Volleyball (DOG EAR)

like anime – Japanese animated series, for those of you in the dark. It’s weird and strange and oddly informative. Sometimes you can see that slice of life, a part of what it means to be human. Other times, it’s just giant robots. When my niece Kirstin suggested Haikkyu!!, I was a little dubious – it’s a volleyball epic, a story about a short Japanese student who loves volleyball and wants his high school team to be successful. The thing is, he’s short, but he’s light, so he’s got this killer jump and this crazy spike. It’s fun to watch […]

November 29, 2020

Angles of Attack (Review)

ne thing I don’t do in the bookstore: I don’t pick up books that say (under the title) things like Book Two of the Franchise Series. And with Angles of Attack, I got punked. So main character Andrew Grayson, a combat coordinator a century in the future, finds himself in the middle of a battle with his prior enemies, the Russians, on his side. Weirder yet, they seem to be fighting the Lankies, huge armored creatures that wipe out colonies and terraform them to their linking (at the cost of all human occupants). Mars has already fallen. Earth might be […]

November 26, 2020

Imagination on tap (DOG EAR)

t all started with a threat of riskware. Since I’ve started roleplaying again, pretty much every week involves me trying to come up with a continuing storyline for players who might reject a carefully constructed plotline and go helling off across our imaginary landscape. After all, our Solaris game is science fiction and a new change of scenery is only as far as the nearest docking port. So I found this website that generated all sorts of things: names, taverns, spaceships, gangs, a massive collection of randomness. Some of the names (based off nationalities, which is a big part of […]