Partially because it took me too long to get around to writing the post for Friday and partially because it worked better to bundle Friday and Saturday’s efforts together, here covering both days together. I mentioned in the previous entry some ideas I had for new charas and Friday evening I went forward. Maki proved to be undoable because DA’s character creator simply isn’t equipped for making black people. The best you can do is a dark Indian, which has its place but wasn’t what I was going for there. I did, however, make the two Hybrids Firuza Sohrabian and Rubia Silvestri along with Mr. Geoffries, the valet of House Ladrieu. I then decided to make Jassa from the Tico series. Her base design was essentially the same as Lydia’s, as Grig’s comment in Tico1 about them looking like twins wasn’t as groundless as Lydia made it sound. By the by, he was the guy “Bryl” who made the same comment about Lydia and Lia in “Happy Little Family”. Yes, Grigori Dahl (Envy) was in the VF-409 in Jean-Paul’s flight. Also, Lia and Zhukov (Pride) were classmates at the Academy, so that’s three connections between Lia and the Seven Deadlies. Just imagine if she’d still be alive and she was the one CDR Joachim tapped for his mission. The whole thing would’ve gone pop right off the bat. (Fortunately, by that point she would’ve been too high up to be recruited for a mission like that.)

Jassa is another case where I deliberately designed the character to not appeal to me with all the tattoos, piercings and side shave, but because she was such a radical departure from any of the other charas I’ve designed in DA so far, she represented an opportunity to try things I wouldn’t normally do with the others (except for the times the system reset back to Maya and I accidentally rendered with her on accident, but I didn’t preserve many of those, even as botches). The more I worked with her, though, the more I started to develop a strange fondness for her. I mean, under better circumstances, she probably could’ve turned into a halfway decent person. She’s basically how Lydia would’ve turned out if she didn’t have Lia’s example to follow. Makes you wonder what things would’ve been like if Lia hadn’t given her up. Lia wouldn’t have been able to go right back to the Academy like she did, but if she had some help, she maybe could’ve swung a return before she aged out, that or she could’ve got her degree on the civvie side and then got her commission via OCS. Would she still have wound up marrying Jean-Paul? Can you imagine him actually taking the responsibility of parenting? With the very dubious odds of it working out, Lydia would’ve basically grown up with her, not all that close but anytime she got to see Lia, she’d see Jassa as well. Technically aunt and niece, they would’ve been more like cousins. Just imagine how “Happy Little Family” might’ve been different if Jassa was there. No, I’m totally not setting up a new If!Space story.

Well, as I was adapting Jassa into the Alkoresh timeline, I realized that in the original, things didn’t line up. She would’ve only been 20 during the Battle of Titan in 118, which would’ve been too young even with the three-year shortened schedule for the Academy during the Sheol War. She wasn’t like Lydia who was super-driven to graduate early to get into the Academy, after all. I considered an idea where Jassa was offered the Academy as an alternative to getting sent to juvie, where she’d basically earn dual credit her plebe year to graduate from high school, but that would’ve only worked if she was sufficiently motivated, and “Dancing with the Devil” makes it clear that she wasn’t. If I pushed her date of birth back a year, I’d have to readjust everything around Lia and by extension Luka and Annabeth. However, shifting things in the other direction also had its share of problems, but that’s what I went with. I moved the Battle of Titan to 119, but the Battle of Titan is an important milestone in the Sheol War as a costly victory that came before the turning point of the Battle of Ganymede. I couldn’t very well have Ganymede precede Titan, so it needed to move as well. However, I also keep records of all the ships and formations in the Union Navy, so I had to make adjustments for all the ships that were lost in those two battles in addition to timeline and encyclopedia entries, as well as other peripheral materials such as service records and whatnot. Loads and loads of fun and part of the reason why I didn’t get those teasers made up that I was planning. Maybe later in the week (once I get done with the thesis checking I’m massively behind on; maybe I should stop trying to fact-check my kiddos when they just ignore me).

A quick note on the concept for how the Seven Deadlies are going to work in the Alkoresh Cycle. The core seven will still be Naval aviators who desert after their carrier is sunk in battle, but now their angle is that they become collaborators with the Demons, their activities as pirates meant to disrupt the war effort something akin to Quantrill’s Raiders with the promise of Demonization and a place on the victorious Demons’ side once the war is over. Now, in the original, the Seven Deadlies were backed by the Nightmares (though Zhukov was the only one who was in contact with them), so the scenario isn’t that wildly different. Now, you might be saying, “Don’t most people die before fully Demonizing?” Yes, they do. Zhukov and Steiner at least know what they’re getting into. The others, not so much, but given the alternatives, they’d all be willing to chance it on those less than favorable odds.

I’ve done Mr. Geoffries’ profile, and I should talk a bit more about him next time. I still need to do Firuza, Rubia and Jassa’s profiles, though, amid everything else. And with that in mind, I think I’ll wrap up this entry. Hopefully I have something more than bunny girl pics to report on next time. Stay tuned.

I didn’t get to RttW, but I did do some work in the Space Arc peripheral materials relative to OreHosa. I don’t know if I said this before, but back in the day, I would only put down years instead of full dates in the family trees I made. It turned out that there were some birthdates I had tucked away elsewhere. I had to go rooting around in some stories for additional info as well, so that had me fiddling around a bit more. I can’t say the day was unproductive, but it hasn’t accomplished what needed to be accomplished. Well, I don’t imagine there’s much hope for the story update this week, but maybe I can surprise everyone yet. Stay tuned.

I mentioned last time that I was having to do all these adjustments based on a new understanding of Midshipman’s Cruises. As I was writing the last entry, I did commit to setting the cruises at the end of the academic year, even if this makes the schedule wonky for the normal spring and winter cycles as opposed to the summer and winter cycles that were grafted on later. (In the Earth Union, the typical academic year is comprised of four 11-week terms with two three-week breaks for summer and winter and two one-week breaks for spring and fall. For the Naval Academy, only the first term is 11 weeks, the others reduced to ten in order to secure six weeks for the Midshipman’s Cruise.) Once all this was set, Lydia’s Senior Midshipman’s Cruise had to be moved back to August and September of NE 113, seven months earlier than the previous version. I then had to change references in Tico1, Tico2 and “Casualty Notification”, as well as the description of the Midshipman’s Cruise from the prologue of Tico2. As you may know by this point, when I make a change, I have to perpetuate that change across three locations and log it in my running commentary about the production process. Occupied a little of my time. Thankfully, the new timeframe didn’t affect where Matt was at the time, as he’d been transferred to the 48th SAR in August of NE 113, shortly after the incident with his previous unit. (The Air Force figured that even though he had been cleared of wrongdoing, keeping him around wouldn’t have been good for unit cohesion and so just quietly transferred him out.)

On the OreHosa side, I made two new charas in DaysAI. The first was Lieutenant Lin Mengjie, the battalion EEO officer who becomes sort of the sitcom archnemesis to Carlo for reasons that should be obvious. The second was Ashara e Hazor, Maya’s biological mother. Of course, I wasn’t just making images but the stories to go with them. The setting is getting fleshed out more and more, which is great, but I still haven’t gotten to RttW. Time is running out and you’d be right to be dubious about me making the deadline. I’ll make a genuine stab at it, though. Stay tuned.

I suppose because I got some errands run, the day felt more productive in a general sense than in terms of getting content produced, well, outside of image generations, that is. Actually, I was doing a fair bit of work in the peripheral materials. I was trying to work out the timing of Lydia’s Midshipman’s Cruise (and readers of the Tico series will know why this is significant and can imagine how it’ll get worked into the OreHosa scenario). Well, I come to find that there are actually three Midshipman’s Cruises over the course of training at the US Naval Academy. I don’t know where I got the idea there was just one.

Anyway, I went through the old Space Arc materials and started adjusting service records to account for this. Now, you may recall that training schedules get shortened during the Sheol War, so with just three years in the service academies, you’re left with just two Midshipman Cruise’s (which end up corresponding to the first and third from the old schedule). The timing of the cruises also needed adjustment. Before I had the single cruise lasting nearly five months, so I’m scaling it back to six weeks apiece. This works out for the usual spring and fall enrollment cycles, but during the War they add summer and winter cycles as well, so time has to get moved around some. (And even as I’m writing this, I changed my mind yet again on what to do here.) I got partway into drawing up a comparison chart of the regular academic schedule and that of the Naval Academy across the four cycles. I need to finish that and then really spend some time with RttW or I’m not going to make Saturday’s deadline (and if I don’t get it done this week, I don’t imagine I’ll manage it next week, with the new school year starting and all). I’ll see what I can get done. Stay tuned.

I continued to implement the edits to Tico1 up through Chapter 11. Once I’m done reconstructing the site (or whenever I need a break), I’ll continue the proofing work from Chapter 12. I also did a quick pass with the spellchecker through Tico2, 3 and 4 to add to the custom dictionary and see if I couldn’t catch anything that slipped past me all those years ago. One small thing which typifies how obsessive I can be over little details is the spellings of “civvy” vs. “civvie”. I favor the latter, but then I decided to change it to the former, only to finally decide that “civvy” is the singular noun form and “civvie” is the adjectival form, thus warranting another pass through all the manuscripts where citations of the word can be found. I’m sure no one else does this (the distinction between “civvy” and “civvie”, that is), but at least this way I’ll have internal consistency.

I mentioned before that I was adjusting the rendering of dialectic speech and that was the main thrust of the day’s efforts, but I was also making some adjustments to stage direction and such as I went. Small changes, but they add up. Once I’m done, I’ll have to compare how the wordcount has changed. Anyway, it’s back to the grunt work, so look for further updates in the Road to Reconstruction series. Stay tuned.

Since I saw fit that my earlier proofing work warranted one of these posts, I’ll do so here as well. As you may recall, before all this nonsense with the site began, my proofing work had extended to the Space Arc shorts and Tico1. Well, as I was reconstructing their pages, I was implementing the edits I had made two weeks ago. For the shorts, there wasn’t much to change, but with my reworking of the dialectic speech in Tico1 (which will of course extend to the other three books when I get to them), there’s a bit more elbow grease being applied. As you might imagine, I’m kinda thankful for character like Matt whose speech is stiffer and more formalized. Less work for me. Anyway, life needs rigor and so I’ll continue on my way. There’ll probably be one more post like this as I get caught up on the proofing work I’ve done so far on Tico1, but probably not another one for a while unless I take a wild hair to do some story writing as a change of pace. Stay tuned.

I did a little proofing on Tico1. Not much because there was something about a graduation ceremony that folks were making a big deal about. I would later go on to implement the edits to JJ2 and TWH. I’ll work on the Space Arc stuff I’ve done tomorrow. Not exactly thrilling content, I know, but maybe I’ll do a little actual writing as well. Stay tuned.

I continued to proof Tico1. I’m enjoying immersing myself in the story again. One thing I’m noticing, though, is that my writing for dialect has become more refined since I wrote this, so reworking that to make it more consistent is going to be a bit of work. (And I can remember going back over the manuscript a several years back as well, but such are the joys of the iterative process.)

In other news, it’s been brought to my attention that the version of PHP the site’s been using is well out of date. When I tried to update it, the site stopped loading, which means that I’m going to have to migrate to a new CMS. That’ll be quite the undertaking I’m sure. I knew support ended for my current CMS years back, but I figured so long as everything was functioning, why change? Well, we’re reaching the point where that’s no longer the case. Currently I’m looking into using Drupal. It’s supposed to have a bit of a steep learning curve to it, but apparently it has some built-in functionality for adapting to mobile browsers, and that’s something I’ve been meaning to do for the site for a while now. I know it won’t be as simple as plugging in my current database, so I’ll have to roll my sleeves up and have at it. This will go well with my intentions of modernizing my code and doing some other tweaks to design. Fun, fun, fun. Stay tuned.

I finished going over TWH and at least managed to work out a general game plan going forward (albeit with no actual story progress), then I went through proofing the Space Arc shorts and went on to Tico1. While story progress on TWH would be ideal, I am at least doing something productive. At the rate I’m going, we probably won’t have a story update this week and I’ll just move on to EM3 next week. I’d like to have something more interesting to report, but expect more of the same for the time being. Stay tuned.

The recent headlines being made about the two female officers passing Ranger School have inspired me to write on this subject. As someone who would be termed a ‘REMF’ who never served a combat tour, I realize that my perspective isn’t nearly as authoritative on the subject as an actual combat arms soldier. However, while you certainly can’t say integration has gone off without a hitch, I personally had no issue working with or working for females. I knew of females who could boast of 300ing their PT test (which, even accounting for the lower standards for females, scores like that could kick my tail even before I was crippled). The point that I’m getting at is that I’m tenuously willing to accept females in combat arms if and only if they meet the same physical standards as the males. I worry, and not without good reason, that political pressures will outweigh military good sense (rare as it may be). There have been historically and are currently forces with females fully integrated into combat roles (even if it was move done out of desperation), so I’m certainly not of the mind that it can’t work, but the last thing we need is to hamper combat readiness to be PC compliant.

I also recall an article written by a female Marine officer who was in the Female Engagement Teams if I recall who wrote of the unique health problems she faced as a woman in as close to the role of a regular infantryman as we’ve yet had in an active conflict. While I doubt there’s been any thorough scientific study on the health of FET members as a basis for the viability of females in combat arms and I grant that this particular Marine may not be a representative case, there is a concern–not unreasonable, in my view–that females who take on combat arms roles could be condemning themselves to a wrecked physical condition. Now, to be fair, these physically strenuous roles ruin the health of plenty of males. There may not be a paratrooper one who ends his service without having a bum knee or two. This all ties into a critical lack of data, at least for public consumption, which casts shadows over the entire movement.

That’s not even touching on the risk of sexual harassment and assault. It is a legitimate concern. Admittedly, the way some people talk about it, male-on-male assault may be a bigger problem. I remember in AIT, everyone without exception was effectively warned that if you went out on the PT field after hours, you could expect to get raped. Now, this could have been simple scare tactics, but I’d say it’s not unfair to compare the military to prison, so, you know, don’t take any stupid risks. The risk of the real thing is serious and severe, but then there’s the matter of scurrilous charges. It may well be that false charges are vastly dwarfed by the real thing, but the former can make it all the more difficult for the latter to be given the credence it deserves. Just look at the Tailhook scandal. I certainly have my doubts about the original accuser and NIS’s overreach and impropriety in its investigation still causes me to hold the agency in suspicion, name change or no. (From my experience, CID isn’t regarded much better, seen more as a monster under the bed than a reliable crime-buster.) A successful unit is built on trust. You may not like the man (or in this case woman) to your left or your right, but you know you can count on them in a pinch. If riven by threats and accusations, no unit is likely to hold together when it counts. And all this doesn’t even begin to touch on ordinary hanky-panky, which is rather rife and sure to cause problems in a combat arms unit. (Of course, with the legitimization of gays in the military, I suppose there’s an extra layer of entanglements to be concerned about, though of course that sort of thing has existed on the down low for a good long while.)

All these doubts and concerns I’ve aired aren’t intended to convince anyone of anything. I’m just putting all that out there to give some lucidity to my own perspective as we go into the solutions that were made in the fictional world of the Ticonderoga series. In the series, we have two primary examples of females in combat arms: Allison O’Connor as an Army sniper and Miranda Grisson as a powered armor operator. Both are rarities in their units, but it’s Ally who has to deal with the most crap for being a female. Her naturally shy and passive personality is as big a part of the problem as anything else. Without breaking it down by branch, females in combat arms account for only a small percentage, but this wasn’t always the case.

When the Union was first formed, there wasn’t a single across-the-board policy on females in combat arms. Units that had females were allowed to keep them and units that did not were not required to take them on. Bear in mind that we’re talking about a global military and not all cultures afford that many opportunities to women. Rather than trying to change the world from Day 1, the government opted to progress by degrees. And these were slow degrees. It wasn’t until 087 when Defense Minister Rawthani (during the Palenko Administration) instituted a policy of unrestricted service in combat arms for females. This, however, was done with a lowering of physical standards to boost numbers. Bear in mind that prior to the Sheol War, the only full-fledged combat operations occurred during the Lunar Revolt 60 years earlier. This lowering of standards wasn’t just a PC move, though. The military was going downhill on a number of fronts and so this was just a symptom of a larger disease. The meat-grinder early years of the Sheol War quickly changed all that.

In Tico4 there’s a mention of the revisions to the military justice code spearheaded by Defense Minister Jafaari. This same man was behind a revision to the policy on females in combat arms. This same policy is stated in the chapter where Ally is introduced, when Sergeant Rahim confronts Captain Robles about her inclusion in the unit. To reiterate, females can serve in any combat arms unit provided they meet the same physical standards as the males and do not disrupt unit cohesion. If this latter condition sounds open to abuse, that’s entirely by design. It takes a legitimate concern about combat effectiveness and uses it as an excuse to preserve the boys’ club mentality of a lot of combat units. It isn’t until after the war that we see a reversion to the pre-war policy with all the problems that came with it, only this time there isn’t a reversal when war breaks out again. As with many of the political tangles in the series, I don’t intend for the policy to be a clean-cut case of good or bad.

Sci-fi tends to veer toward either utopianism or dystopianism and in my more idealistic youth, I leaned toward the former, but now I strike somewhere in the middle, a grey morass that even if you pick a side, you do so with reservations. It’s possible that the setup you see in the Ticonderoga series will seem quaint in 20 years or so. I’ll leave the real world to sort itself out, but I thought I’d take this opportunity to take a current event and tie it into a commentary post. I may follow it up with further details or even discuss how the issue gets handled in the post-Union era, but that’s a story for another day.