Dog Ear – Page 62 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

August 7, 2025

True Closure (DOG EAR)

e was a good friend. We knew each other for decades. But in the final few years of our friendship, he got… difficult. He’d call and talk AT me for hours. In person, he was loud. At restaurants, he’d talk politics in a booming voice, gathering angry stares. It got to where I’d flinch when I saw his name pop up on my phone — there would go another hour. A friend and I tried to stage an intervention but he turned us down – he had other little things to do. And then at a mutual event where I was supposed […]

August 21, 2025

The Villain (DOG EAR)

as talking to a friend the other night about storytelling and literature and anime and everything, and a thought hit me. What sort of villain do you prefer? Essentially, there are two types. The Mad Dog: This is the villain you love to hate. His first trait is that he usually offs an underling (often for being the bearer of bad news, but sometimes simply as a character establishment (and what the hell do the other underlings think about this?). Usually he’s charismatic and fun to watch, but he’s made to hate. He boasts and brags, he kicks the dog, […]

October 8, 2025

The Reason (DOG EAR)

o I’m sitting on the porch of the one-time Union Park Community Center / current Orlando N-Trak Train Club. Two acres of probably-needs-to-be-mowed grass stretches out before me, the sun turning it into waving emerald. And I’m thinking, Why do I do this? This week I’ve been out to this club, thirty minutes and $2.35 in tolls each way, too many times. Monday for Maintenance. Tuesday for a board meeting. Wednesday for the club night. And now it’s Friday, and I’m here to load the trailer when it arrives so we can take our portable layout to a weekend show. […]

December 18, 2025

Shadow media (DOG EAR)

veryone knows (should know) Plato’s allegory of The Cave. People are in a cave, never having been outside it. They are chained so they can only see the far wall. Behind them, other people with torches make shadows and sounds, defining the limited reality of those so placed. Their only reality is what they experience directly. Their thinking is stunted. This came to me while reading Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche, the first few chapters. See, I’d bought an Audible copy of a friend who is rather well read but hasn’t tried this one. Also, his life is so hectic that he can […]

January 1, 2026

The Best of 2025 (DOG EAR)

ime again for my review of books I really enjoyed for 2025. Of course, these aren’t all published this year – there is no statue of limitations on books you might discover. For example, The War of the Wenuses was a random discovered off a YouTube video which was published some century and a quarter ago. It was a lampoon of War of the Worlds and really made me laugh. However, most of you (not being addicts of the original) would not understand the lampooning that takes place in it – since it was right on the edge of getting the nomination, I […]

January 30, 2026

Overdone CGI

t used to be that you needed a very bad actor to get the scenery-crewing over-emotions that old vaudevillians used to throw their emotions into the back rows. But now, with AI-creations trailblazed by firms such as Pixar, you can have it easy and cheap, even if you are sitting right in front of a mega-screen and don’t need this ham-fisted CGI playacting. I’m talking about modern Western animation, though I’ve seen it in foreign productions like Kpop Demon Hunters. In this case I was trapped in a car dealership waiting on slow repairs (do the mechanics share one set […]

February 5, 2026

Sharing is Caring, you bastards (DOG EAR)

‘m a little grumpy about this one. It will probably show. See, I’m coming to realize that nobody gives a floppy fuck about books (and movies) you really care about. People are too busy and too self-involved to really honor (or even consider) any recommendations you might offer. This came to me at Christmas at a family gathering. The night before, I’d just finished a short anime series, Odd Taxi. It came from a YouTube video by a Anime expert who listed the ten most overlooked animes, this being one of them. It’s got childish art (everyone in modern Tokyo are […]