Blog – Page 158 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

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 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 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 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 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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]