Blog – Page 234 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

June 29, 2025

The Roaring Trumpet (Review)

friend of mine, while talking about books at the train club (hobbies within hobbies) to me how she’d liked the Mathematics of Magic series from back in her youth (her youth being a lot more recent than mine). Well, I did a little searching and found a copy of it up in a used bookstore in Jacksonville. Overjoyed, she ordered it, but when she read it, she was underjoyed. Turns out it wasn’t as good as she’d remembered. Yet, strangely, she decided that since she didn’t like it, she’d give it to me for a go. Kinda an anti-recommendation, sort of. […]

June 29, 2025

OpsLog – FEC – 6/28/2025

aybe I’m expecting too much from my hobby of operations? Don’t know. The last few haven’t been so hot. And for this session, it’s not the fault of the Farnhams (no, it falls pretty much on the operators but a bit on the weather, too) but the June run of the Florida East Coast was a tough session. How tough? Got home by 8pm and fell into bed to “read” and crashed for nine hours solid (would have been ten, but the cats demanded their due (i.e. food)). So what went wrong? Well, we knew going in that the Market […]

July 3, 2025

Dump (DOG EAR)

o you may not have noticed (or cared) that I have not been writing up any DOG EAR pieces for the last few weeks. I’ve been very busy with three distinct crises. One of them was termites; we had evidence that they’d swarmed in our garage and so we had to get barriers (i.e. poisons) injected into all our baseboards. This meant that all furniture along the walls had to be moved. And we have a lot of books. Shelves and stacks of them. For this, we’d ordered a pod placed out on our driveway to put all the books […]

July 6, 2025

Monk and Robot (Review)

kay, so this is a two-fer, two novelettes in one. With this, you get… A psalm for the Wild-Built A prayer for the Crown-Shy These are just two stories that combine into a unified whole, so it’s better to get this collection. So anyway, Dex is a young man in a world that, after ecological instability and the robot rebellion (when Robots walked off their factory jobs and wandered into the wilderness), now lives in a utopia. But guess what – you can live in Utopia and still not be happy. So he quits his first job (kinda a part-time […]

July 10, 2025

The mutter about clutter (DOG EAR)

t’s a societal/sexual thing – we all really want some Japanese semi-dominatrix like Marie Kondo to force us to get rid of all our stuff. “No, mistress, please! Not my exorcise stuff in the garage!” “All of it! To the curb, worm!” Really, in a way, she is right. We tend to keep too much shit. And if the first use of the internet is porn, the second is consumerism. No longer do we have to walk to the market, buy something impractical, and carry it all the way back to our farm. Now it’s one simple click. Across our culture, […]

July 13, 2025

Destroyermen 15: Winds of Wrath

nd we’re done! It’s been a long fifteen books about the plucky little destroyer, the USS Walker, chased by the Japanese out of World War Two and into this alternative world where velociraptors and lemors evolved to sentience, where English Indiamen, Spanish conquistadors, a boatload of American artillerymen from the Mexican-American war, a battle group from a fascist Europe and even a Q-ship from World War One came into being. Yes, a long slow slog against baddies so bad they made your teeth hurt. And all through this, I kept waiting to find out that the series had ended prematurely, […]

July 13, 2025

ShowLog – Deland – 7/12/2025

ig one-day show for us over in Deland, make quite exciting because I’d be show boss and Old Man Raiford would not be around for set up. Had a new driver, Leonard, who took away any concerns on my part by moving the trailer around like a seasoned switch crew with a boxcar (though that plastic parking post was a little worse for wear after we went through). But anyway, even though the fairgrounds are now locking up their gates overnight, we still manged to worm both mini and maxi (the truck and trailer) on for a 6:30-ish arrival. Since […]

July 17, 2025

Life (DOG EAR)

‘ve always had a grimace in my heart for the word Lifestyles. Your life, your one time through this passage of existence, is really what you make of it. We all have different opportunists and situations. A person born of majority race and wealth has a bit of a leg up over a poor minority child saddled with leukemia (especially in times when tax cuts for the wealthy and open beatings for the downtrodden are a popularity political stance (fucking fascists)). It’s what it is. You play your hand as best you can. Which is why I dislike the idea […]

July 20, 2025

Solo Kill (Review)

o here’s an interesting concept from 1977, an alien world where flying humanoid reptiles have been preying on fish people. And since these fish people can’t fight for shit, they make a contract with the March People (cats, it appears, what with the fur, sliding claws and quick tempers) to fight their wars for them. So these fish somehow figure out how to build nimble biplanes (I’m thinking Newport 11s) and, quickly, dart-driven machine guns to protect everyone. So that’s the set up; cats in planes dogfighting (catfightng) with spear-throwing bats. Author S. Kye Boult (not his real name) produced […]

July 20, 2025

OpsLog – LM&O (TT&TO) – 7/20/2025

‘m not sure if everyone is basking in the glow in the aftermath of ops, proud of how they managed to navigate the Byzantine rules of Time Table and Train Order, or still fuming in frustration and resentment. I will admit that it can be difficult, very much so, to do. However, on the plus side, you aren’t just spinning a knob and zipping a train under mother-may-I. And for a club to pull it off, well, that’s nothing short of amazing. We’ve done it various TT&TO formats before:full sets of clearance cards and orders, stapled together. Then the packets […]