#world war I

[prokopetz]

The trouble with self-consciously edgy urban fantasy RPGs which are explicitly set in the real world is that they always get fixated on the Second World War, and there's literally no good way to speculate about whether Hitler was a vampire or whatever – not only is it tasteless, it's done. It was cliché even in the 1990s, and it hasn't become any less cliché since. Like, at least switch up the war – I want to see an edgy urban fantasy RPG whose Secret History™ revolves around the proposition that Archduke Franz Ferdinand was from space.

#gaming #tabletop roleplaying #tabletop rpgs #game design #worldbuilding #urban fantasy #history #world war i #world war ii #nazi mention

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Errors, “Errors,” and Sci Fi

@strawberry-crocodile

tvtropes calls stuff like the wolf example "science matches on" which I think is a pretty fair shake

This.  This is what’s got me thinking so much about errors.  There’s a certain danger, here.  A certain way that this particular effect — delicious dramatic irony — tempts the mind when reading old stories, even true ones.

What do you know about R.M.S. Titanic? I ask my class every year, and the first hand rises.  “It was unsinkable,” the student inevitably says, and everyone is nodding, “or so they thought.”  I write the word UNSINKABLE on the board, underneath my crude drawing of a ship with four smokestacks.  It will be crossed out before the end of the hour, but not for the reason they expect.

“I find no evidence,” Walter Lord, preeminent biographer of the ship’s survivors, wrote, “that Titanic was ever advertised as unsinkable. This detail seems to have entered the collective mind so as to create a more perfect irony.”  Indeed, historians’ examinations of White Star Line documents show the shipbuilders themselves worried it would be so large as to risk collision; they stocked several more lifeboats than 1910s regulations required.

The War to End All Wars (deep breath, satisfied exhale), also known as World War ONE. Chuckle.  Shake of the head.  What if I told you that this phrase, used primarily in American newspapers after the fact, wasn’t meant to be literal? Nowadays we’d say The Mother of All Wars, or One Hell of a Fucking War, but we wouldn’t mean literal motherhood, literal intercourse.  What if I said the armistice and the Lost Generation and the Roaring 20s were all braced for another outbreak of European conflict, and yet we still failed to prevent it?

Did you know they were so confident in the safety of the S.S. Challenger that they put a civilian schoolteacher onboard? I do, because I’ve heard that one repeated many times.  Only, see, it’s got the cause and effect reversed.  Challenger launched on a day the shuttle’s engineers knew to be dangerously cold, because the first civilian in space was on board. And NASA knew its shuttle project would be cancelled entirely, if they couldn’t get that civilian’s much-delayed entry into space in the next two weeks.  So they launched on a cold day, and killed her instead.

These are all what cognitive science calls Hindsight Bias on the personal level, what sociology calls Presentism on the cultural level.  Social psychology’s a little of both, is primarily interested in why you’re sitting on your couch in a Colonize Mars shirt watching PBS and chuckling at the fools who believed in El Dorado.  It wants to know why the mind flees straight from “marijuana will kill you” to “marijuana will cure cancer” without so much as a pause on the middle ground of its real benefits and drawbacks, its real (mild) risks and rewards.

And they can paralyze the sci-fi writer, if you think too much about them. Jetsons is futurist one decade, retro the next.  “There are no bathrooms on the Enterprise,” the creators of Serenity say smugly, as if Gene Roddenberry should’ve simply known that decades later it’d be acceptable to show a man peeing in full view of the camera, nothing but the curve of the actor’s hand to protect his modesty.  “No sound in space,” the Fandom Menace says, “No explosions in space,” and “A space station can’t collapse in zero-G.”  Only then NASA burns a paper napkin outside of atmosphere, transmits music using only the ghost of nearby planets’ gravities, and logs onto Reddit long enough to point out the Death Star would implode in its own gravity field.  And now we’re the ones pointing, the ones laughing, at those earlier point-and-laughers.  Self-satisfied, smug in superiority.  As if we did the work to find out ourselves, instead of just happening to be born a little later than George Lucas.

#errors #continuity #sci fi #presentism #star wars #titanic #world war i #science marches on #history #started a new post because i got waaaaaay off topic here #if you think the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (1993) should've had feathers #you're a lot more ignorant about paleontology than the people you're trying to criticize #science was not handed down to us in its perfect complete form circa 1943 #stop for a second before you call out someone else's reptilian denonychus #someone else's oxygenated moon #and ask: am i better read #or am i just more recently born?

[slavicgerman]

One of The Red Baron's triplanes on display, 1935

#random #manfred von richthofen #the red baron #ww1 #wwi #world war i #world war 1 #first world war #flying circus #imperial germany

[sictransitgloriamvndi]

#art #illustration #drawing #fine art #20th century art #war #world war i #franklin booth

[newyorkthegoldenage]

The 360th Colored Regiment arriving in New York aboard the S.S. Aquatina, ca. 1920. Click/tap to enlarge, to see details.

Photo: Underwood & Underwood via the Int'l Center of Photography

#vintage New York #1920s #Black soldiers #World War I #returning troops #colored regiment

[theworldofwars]

Canadian machine gunners on Vimy Ridge. 1917

#1917 #historical photos #world war 1 #canadian history #history #circa 1917 #world war i #vimy ridge #vimy #world war 1 stories #ww1 #ww1 poetry #ww1 stories #ww1 art #ww1 history #wwi #world war one #The Great War #The First World War

[todaysdocument]

Students at Whittier School at the Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) learn to knit for the war effort. August 5, 1918.

Record Group 165: Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs

Series: American Unofficial Collection of World War I Photographs

File Unit: Colleges and Universities - Hampton Institute

Image description: Four girls and a young woman sit on a porch. Each has a ball of yarn on her lap and is knitting. They are all wearing light-colored dresses. The teaching institute and associated school were created to serve the Black community; all of the people in the photo are Black. 

Transcription: WAR ACTIVITIES OF HAMPTON INSTITUTE, HAMPTON, VA. / Whittier School girls learning to knit for war sufferers. 

#archivesgov #August 5 #1918 #1910s #World War I #WWI #Hampton University #HBCU #knitting #Black history #African American history

[siruerto]

I drew some World War I uniforms of different countries. I think I liked drawing the German one the most, or the Bulgarian one.

British - Belgian, Italian, Serbian

Ottoman - French

German - Bulgarian, Austro-Hungarian

Indian, Australian - Russian

#artists on tumblr #history #world war i #ww1 #art #i like ww1 history :) this was a nice opportunity to show my interest in the subject #and yk i love drawing uniforms! i said that a million times lol@ #ive kinda doodled the bayonets tbh 💀 #original art #my actual fav in regards of design is actually this earlier french one bc i like the colors LOL

[illustratus]

The Ravine of Death at Verdun by Ferdinand-Joseph Gueldry

#ferdinand joseph gueldry #art #first world war #verdun #battle of verdun #france #world war 1 #world war one #wwi #ww1 #world war i #europe #european #history #landscape #battlefield #battle

[yeoldenews]

I'm honestly not entirely certain as there were definitely dolls available in 1918 that would seem to fit Ruth's criteria.

(source: Sears catalog, Fall/Winter 1918)

My best guess is that she was either referring to quality, and/or she wanted a doll with a bisque porcelain head and limbs - as that would have been the predominant style when her mother was a child.

By the late teens most doll heads/limbs were made of composition - a material consisting mainly of sawdust and glue. Composition dolls were marketed as "almost unbreakable" (as you can see above) which, considering how many late 19th/early 20th century letters to Santa involve stories of broken porcelain dolls, was definitely a needed innovation.

The most prized dolls at the time were made in Germany and France - which obviously meant that WWI severely interrupted the supply chain.

The fact that so many little girls coveted German-made dolls took a rather hilarious turn once the US and Germany were at war. I've found many, many dear Santa letters from children vehemently declaring that they would rather not have a doll at all than one made in Germany. Some went as far as to purposely break their German dolls in tiny fits of patriotism - such as Nancy from last year who had to request a new doll from Santa after she took her German-made doll and "chop it head off".

(source: Grand magasins du Louvre catalog, Christmas 1918.)

If you compare the Sears catalog dolls to dolls from a French catalog from the same period, you can definitely see the difference in quality - as well as the fact they more closely resemble dolls from when Ruth's mother was growing up.

#asks #history #@unicornwishes #dolls #world war i #wwi #kids #dear santa

[lesoldatmort]

| Poppies of the Great War |

“...have you ever tried to pick up a poppy in full bloom? What happens? It falls apart. Such fragile flowers.“

This year's poppies piece is dedicated to all the young soldiers who were picked up from their soil and left to rot in the mud.

#poppies #digital art #history #ww1 #the great war #skull #symbolism #death #world war I #digital illustration #memento mori #vanitas #flowers #horror art #dark art #history art

[peashooter85]

Belgian infantry helmet with visor, 1916, World War I

from The Royal Armouries Collection

#history #antiques #helmet #armor #armour #wwi #world war i

[intothestacks]

Adventures in Librarian-ing

I was reading from the picture book Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World's Most Famous Bear by Lindsay Mattick to classes for Remembrance Day back at the beginning of November.

As we got to the end, one student would always ask if Winnie was still alive, to which I would gently remind them that Winnie lived a hundred years ago, so she had died quite a while back.

When they'd look sad I'd add "But she died old, fat, and very happy and pampered, so she lived a good life."

And all the kids would start laughing.

#school librarian #school libraries #librarylife #libraryland #the real life of me #canada #libraries #elementary school #remembrance day #winnie the pooh #winnipeg #world war i #world war 1

[lionofchaeronea]

Bully, Bruce Bairnsfather, 1914-18

#Veterans Day #Remembrance Day #Armistice Day #history #World War One #World War I #WWI #First World War #British Army #art #art history #Bruce Bairnsfather #portrait #caricature #war art #battlefield art #20th century art #Imperial War Museum

[newyorkthegoldenage]

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, World War I came to an end. New Yorkers celebrated with their usual gusto.

Photo: Associated Press via the NY Times

#vintage New York #1910s #World War I #Armistice Day #Veterans Day #November 11 #11 November #Nov. 11 #11 Nov. #joy #celebration

[theworldofwars]

Burial of Major Edward Lewin Knight, commander of the Eaton Motor Machine Gun Battery (Canadian Machine Gun Corps). Major Knight was killed on 26 September 1916.

We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved.

#history #world war one #historical photos #the first world war #world war 1 #wwi #the great war #1917 #canadian history #1916 #edwardian #1910s #edwardian era #world war i #old photos #ww1 #world war 1 stories