Seven days ago I had the opportunity to relive the American experience in the Second World War in one morning. In reverse. As part of the Regal Princess‘ stop at the port of Honolulu, I took part in a tour of the memorials to the USS Arizona and USS Missouri. In case your command of WWII facts is rusty, the Arizona is a battleship sunk during the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on 1941 December 7 – the date that will live in infamy. The Missouri is part of the American response to that act. It’s an Iowa class battleship, the largest ever built and the last in service. On the decks of the Missouri, on 1945 September 2, the Japanese government signed the papers surrendering to the United Nations. In between, tens of millions of people died – nearly half a million of them American.

For reasons having to do with long lines and scheduling, my tour group actually explored the Missouri memorial first. The Missouri Memorial is, in fact, the Missouri – all of BB 63, anchored and refit as a floating museum. It’s not exactly a WWII monument. During the half century between VJ Day and its decommissioning, the Missouri served as a flagship of the United States Navy. It saw action in Korea, in Viet Nam, and even in the (first) Gulf War. During this span it was modernized and upgraded: the seaplane replaced with helicopters; the machine guns replaced with gatling anti-air. A full complement of Tomahawk cruise missile launchers was installed. In case all of that should fail, though, the Mighty Mo’ kept her main armament, nine 16-inch cannon in three independent turrets.

For all of the intimidating bigness of the battleship, the most stirring part turned out to be the surrender documents. Both copies – American and Japanese – are displayed. I was struck by the contrast of grand and mundane. At one glance are all the grandiose phrases calling for the end of war and the dedication to new peace. But look a little closer and you see the mark of a very human moment, where the representative of Canada, in his nervousness, signed on the wrong line and necessitated a hurried penciled correction. MacArthur insisted that the proper titles be penciled in and each signatory initial next to his correct line. How bizarre – between them, these men had fought the most devastating war ever known, had overseen barbarities of a nature hard to contemplate, had rained down obliteration on entire cities and had sent thousands of men to their deaths to do it. Yet here they were, worried that somehow, a signature in the wrong place could render the document worthless and the exercise moot.

Yet that’s the way of it, isn’t it? Paper covers rock. We think it’s the things that matter, but somehow, it’s the pieces of paper that seem to actually change the course of history. World War I became World War I, in a sense, with the British treaty guaranteeing Belgian neutrality – dismissed as just a “scrap of paper” by the German High Command. World War II spread to the West and became a World War with the Allied treaty of defense with Poland, again dismissed as just words on a page. In both cases, the powers that derided the words went on to be humbled by them.

The Declaration of Independence. The Constitution of the United States. The Magna Carta and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The Emancipation Proclamation. The Fourteen Points and the Atlantic Charter. Words on a page. Scraps of paper. But nothing more feared by tyrants, more despised by despots. It’s no accident that the Soviet Union registered all typewriters and made private possession of a mimeograph a felony offense.

And here, under glass, on the gently rolling deck of the mightiest warship ever constructed, was a piece of paper that had ended a war because it said so. The history of the war was written in the blood of its combatants – but it was ended through ink. The document contains little in the way of soaring oratory or grand pronouncements. It is a legal thing, a dry thing, a weary thing yet resplendent. That piece of paper recognized a changed reality and so enabled it.

Scraps of paper.

Word on a page.

Paper covers rock.

May it always be so.

Well, not really. But for all of you out there breathlessly awaiting every post from The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach (yeah, right), a word of explanation. I’m in the middle of a two-week cruise to Hawai’i, and Net access is extremely limited. So I’ve not been posting. Now that I figure out how to hook up my flaky wireless card to the ship’s network, I might be able to do a better job. Or not. We’ll see.

Another in the ongoing series. This one reads “Keep Us Flying — Buy War Bonds“. The inspiration is a WWII poster with exactly the same wording. In the original, it’s a pilot wearing a parachute harness. (I’m assuming it’s a pilot. It could be an airborne infantryman, I suppose.) Using the by-now standard substitution, I put in a jetpack trooper. Exhorting people to buy war bonds is pretty much the major focus of war posters, apparently.

I made one change. I didn’t like the blank background, so I scoured the Net for a free background I could use. (I found a site called stock.xchg, which has thousands of stock images [get it?], many of which are free to use.) I settled on a stirring sunrise sky, which I like quite a bit actually.

Yet another in the series of posters for the newly-rechristened Second Interworld War. This one is inspired by the many different posters that had streams of planes passing overhead in a not-too-subtle V formation. The purpose was to impress with the sheer excess of Allied production. And of course, the exhortation to work hard and to invest in war bonds. My poster reads “Give them the Tools of Victory: Work to Win”.

Executing this poster took quite a bit more work than the others; the gruesome details appear below the fold.

The key bit to understand is, Poser is an excellent program for, well, posing stuff. But as a full 3D rendering program, it’s simply not ready for prime time. As a user, I’m becoming aware that it simply gobbles memory and uses it not terribly efficiently. This will be important in just a little bit.

For this design, I had to replace the ubiquitous WWII bomber with my workhorse, the retro rocketship. I decided to cheat a little and have one leg of the V come from the Zharkov type and one from the Mongo type, though in the end product the distinction is hard to spot. Placing them was simplicity: I put one up in the sky, then duplicated it and translated it in the -z direction, Repeat that ten or so times, and you have a line of rocketships stretching back toward the vanishing point. Yay.

To get even more flashy, I decided to add some steam flying machines, which I envision as the gunboats of the campaign. This added some complication, because the SFM is a complex mesh itself plus it needed two or three crew to make it work. Otherwise it looks ghostly. I added Ava and Gene, specialized versions of Victoria 3 and Michael 3, and posed them carefully. Then I began the replication …

… and ran into that memory thing. Five gunboats, on top of the rest of the scene, killed my computer. I mean, the render really drove a stake through its heart — it was everything short of a Blue Screen of Death. I started removing objects from the figures far enough away to tolerate th e loss of detail. Not good enough: the renderer just wouldn’t take it.

I sat back and regrouped. I know of, but not how to use, a program called PoseRay, which I knew converted Poser objects to POV-Ray meshes. POV-Ray is a kick-butt free renderer that’s been the standard for something like a decade. I have lots of experience with POV-Ray, dating all the way back to version 2.1 (it’s at 3.7 now) and Ion Yadigariglou trying to render relativistic retarded-potential electromagnetic potentials around neutron stars. Poser is new to me, but POV-Ray — for POV-Ray, I know some real tricks.

So I grabbed a copy of PoseRay, read a quick tutorial, and converted my scene object-by-object. I lost the interactivity of Poser; POV-Ray is a scripted language, lacking direct manipulation. But in return I gained numerical precision and ease of adjustment. Most importantly, I gained the POV-Ray advantage: While meshes are not particularly efficient, the second copy of a mesh costs almost no memory. In other words, replicating the Mongo rocketship a thousand times took almost the same amount of memory as rendering it once. Suddenly, I could have entire air fleets and it would hardly impact the render time.

I didn’t go quite that crazy but I included, easily, twenty or more. Something about the textures didn’t quite take and things look a little plastic-y. But for the most part I am quite satisfied with this effort. As much as possible, I want to stay in Poser, but it’s good to know that POV-Ray is there when I need the big guns.

I’ve been making posters that, I’ve claimed, were from the First Interworld War. I’ve decided that, “really”, they’re from the Second Interworld War. The primary motivation for the change has been the realization that most of my inspirations are from WWII, not WWI. Also, this allows me to imagine, vaguely, that H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds was the First Interworld War. Here’s what I envision:

Wells’ Martians apparently did not have radio technology. It seems a pretty big lack, but who knows? Mars does not have a Heaviside layer, I believe, so the idea of long-distance transmission by radio might not have occurred to them. Also, there are signs that Well’s Martians were telepathic. If so, and if telepathy is not easily conveyed by electromagnetic fields, then they might never have gotten into that technology. If telepathy is then also short-ranged, we’d have the situation I want; to wit, that the Martians dying on Earth are unable to relay a warning about infection to the Martians at home. Since the Martians (justifiably) probably found it inconceivable that we resist their might, they might have kept chucking one or two cylinders a year as reinforcements, not knowing at first that the war was lost and later, not knowing why.

So, for the next decade or two, at random times spaced by a few months, these engines of death would come down on Earth. The Martian within would extricate the walking machine, lay waste to the surrounding area, but then eventually die from the same disease that brought down the first. Along the way, the powers on Earth would get valuable experience and technology battling the lander and then trying to recover it. This allows me to leapfrog tech when I need to, and explains the follow-up.

More below the fold.

Somewhere in the 1920s, the Martians catch on. I mean, they’re smart enough to cross interplanetary distances and invent heat-rays; they can’t be entirely stupid about biological peril. Eventually they figure out their weakness and make some compensation for it. Then they launch a second invasion. But this time, they’re not facing an unprepared humanity caught off-guard and still adjusting to the very idea of extraterrestrial life. This humanity is forewarned and forearmed, has played considerable catch-up on tech, and is looking for a fight.

The early advantage lay with the Martians, since they had the initiative. They could pick where the cylinders came down, which cities to target, and so on. And their tech was incontrovertibly more advanced, even after two decades of frantic research. But the sheer size of the Earth and the mass of humanity would eventually tip the balance. At some point, the Martians would be thrown off Earth; not long after, the great counter-invasion would be launched.

I don’t have a lot in my mind yet, although I cannot escape my vision of large bases, hewn from asteroids and passing each other at intermittent but predictable intervals. Maybe neither side gains complete control of the high ground — maybe cis-Terran and cis-Ares space is always contested, so that movement is unpredictable and reinforcements unreliable. Mars will have to be much wetter and more hospitable, of course — though I intend that it be drying out on a short geological timescale, prompting the Martian attack.

So far all of this is just a bunch of goofy posters. But it’s fun to play with.

More from the First Interworld War. One is an updated version of my very first Interworld War poster. The second has the tagline “See Action Now … Join the Rocket Service.”

My reasoning, and the actual posters, below the fold.

The revised poster arose because I never liked the background. I also changed “Transplanetary Expeditionary Force” to “Federated Expeditionary Force”, for a few reasons:

1. Two words ending in “ary” in a row are dysphonic.
2. “Transplanetary” is too long a word to roll off the tongue.
3. I wanted something evoking the A.E.F., or Allied Expeditionary Force. (And yes, I know that the “Allied” bit is from World War II; in WWI, it was just “American Expeditionary Force”. But I wanted something more international.)

The second piece is inspired, again, by something from Posters of World Wars I and II. In the original, there are a bunch of men on the deck of a submarine, with a Japanese ship sinking in the distance. The tag was “See Action Now… Join the Submarine Service”. Well, the obvious analog to the sailors who served in the tiny tin cans cut off from the outside world for weeks or months at a time, would be the spacers locked in the similar tin-can rockets, cut off from both worlds for weeks or months at a time.

I went with the “Mongo” design I have, mostly because I needed windows to see out. (Inexplicably, the “retro rocketship” design does not have viewports.) For the target, it would have to be a Martian, of course. Sadly I don’t have any Martian cylinders lying around. Instead, I took the Walker that I do have and I turned off all the legs. That made it into a satisfyingly saucer-shaped object, though the center was off (since much of the “mass” was now invisible). At first, I used a “DV Fighter” just to set the scale and figure out where things had to be. But I got used to it and ended up liking it a lot, so it’s in the scene. Also, I have another Mongo coming in from the above-left because, well, I like rocketships.

Obviously having the people outside on the “deck” wasn’t an option, so I had to change tacks. Instead I came in close in the cockpit, so that the other ships were visible through the viewports. A few explosion FX help to set the tone. I used a Michael 3 figure (with the semi-hilarious Krk [sic] morphs that someone has put out on the Net) as one of the rocketeers. For the other, I was torn. I have a nice HoverDroid from DAZ Studios, and it looked OK. But I want to keep the counterfactual trend that the Space Services are gender-integrated. So instead, it’s a Victoria 4 with a generic bodysuit that looks vaguely ST:NG-ish. I don’t really have a lot of good retro sci fi things for the V4 figure (or the M3 one, for that matter) so I’m still improvising there.

I then updated the tag. I like the sound of “Rocket Service”; it’s just archaic enough.

:

Researching for this(!). I came across a great book called You Back the Attack — We’ll Bomb Who We Want, billed as “remixed war propaganda”. An artist named Micah Ian Wright took World War II propaganda posters (some from the Bad Guys) and reworked them to put a Bush Jr. spin on them. It’s snarky, obnoxious, and really hilarious — though sobering in a way, too.

As a bonus, Mr. Wright included all the original, unmodified posters as an appendix. So it’s easy to see how these were used and how they could be used. I expect I’ll be pulling a lot of inspiration from this book. The first such brainchild is offered below.

It’s based on a WWII poster that read, “Invest in Invasion … Buy War Bonds”. The graphic was a rugged airborne trooper in the doorway of a plane, gritting his teeth and getting ready to jump. Many parachutes dot a darkening sky. This immediately struck me and I knew I’d have to make an analog. It’s a little tricker than it sounds, because of course I’d have to set the sci fi background explicitly. The 1940s artist could assume the viewer would know what an airplane was and why someone would be jumping out of them.

Luckily, I have in my Poser inventory the “rocketship Mongo”, which became the carrier vessel. Hiding the door and positioning a Michael 3.0 soldier there gave me the airborne ranger I needed. Of course, this being pulp science fiction, I couldn’t use anything as prosaic as a parachute; so I used a jetpack instead. I face my first issue there, as the jetpack wings were way wider than the door. The wings can be folded up (thank you, creator of this object!) but then it looks a lot like a guy about to jump to his death.

So then I began to cheat. After positing “Alex” in the door, I cloned him and placed “Bob” out in the air. Bob’s wings are extended and the jetpack lit. Then I put a duplicate of the rocketship up and to the left of the original. I had to show the entire rocketship to the viewer, of course, to establish the scene. I added some more clones of winged troopers to take the place of the earlier parachutes and to set the scale.

I kept the text virtually unchanged (“Invest in Invasion — Buy War Bonds”) but supplemented it with the tri-ship logo of the Transplanetary Expeditionary Force and the slogan “Third Transplanetary Liberty Drive”. To top it all off, I rendered with a transparent background and overlaid it all on a picture of the night sky.

All in all, considering it took only a couple of hours to make, I’m pretty happy with it. Now I need to start thinking about the next one…

from a war that was never fought. I haven’t really decided if all of Mars is noxious (in this reality) but since Well’s had “the Black Gas”, I figure the TEF had better have gas masks. And while it might seem unthinkable that women would carry arms in Victorian/Edwardian society, it’s a fact of the 20th century that major wars break down mores, and a truly interplanetary war fought with turn-of-the-century technology would conceivably accelerate that process. Plus, I needed another model.

So I haven’t stretched my creative muscles very much lately, and I’ve been looking for something to do. Playing around with Poser and some models I got from the Net, I decided I was going to make propaganda posters from the First Interworld War, loosely conceived as the follow-up to H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds. I know it’s far from unique but it struck my fancy and I’m going to try my hand. The first, very rough, effort is below. The tagline is “Take the fight to them… Sign Up For The Transplanetary Expeditionary Force”

I’m certainly open to suggestions for future posters. Right now, all I have is the image of a man or woman in Vitcorian space gear and gas mask, with the tag “He risks breathing poison… So you can breathe free… Support the Third Planetary Bond Drive”.

More on my experiences at Lunacon 50 (the beginning of which is also here at The Mongrel Dogs). This time up: Joss Whedon Must Die!

That was the evocative title of the second panel I attended. Despite appearances, it was run by (and attended) by devoted fans of the aforementioned Joss Whedon, creator of

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• Angel
• Firefly
• Serenity

and a bunch of comic books and other media, and some rewrites and punch-ups of Hollywood scripts. And it was clear that the people at this panel loved Joss Whedon and his works. But they take issue with his disturbing tendency to kill off beloved characters, often in random acts. For the addicted, the sudden loss of a favorite character (Tara? Cordelia? Wash? Book?) can be traumatic.

Really, it turned out, people mostly wanted to share their pain and vent their frustration. Since (I suspect) that frustration is indeed part of his evil plan to use art to teach us about life, I’m not sure Whedon would feel remorse. “Life can be hard,” he might tell them, “and even the happiest endings aren’t ever-after. Everything carries its cost.” To be fair to the fans, his telling of this message is somewhat, well, relentless. If you watch the entire corpus of Whedonia, it can be downright depressing. The good guys win, in the end, usually, but not all of them are there to share the joy. And it generally feels like all the good guys have really won, in the last analysis, is a short respite and a chance to fight the good fight all over again. Forever. And ever.

Despite the bloodthirsty title, everyone seemed remarkably open and friendly, and nary a battle axe was brandished. Even though there were at least three distinct major factions — each with their own reason why Joss Whedon Must Die! — they got along pretty well and conceded the opinions of the others to have merit. The tongue-in-cheek solemnity of the panel was really quite amusing and was the first sign I had that I wouldn’t regret hiking up to Rye, New York through the Snow Storm of the Apocalypse.