April 3rd, 2011

I've been getting a lot of requests recently from women who want to do impressions as men.  The questions are repetitive, so I'm going to address this question here.

We do not allow women to reenact male roles.  It should be obvious, but we also don't men to reenact as women either.

This shouldn't be a problem because we allow women to do impressions for almost anything that men can do.  It isn't completely out of the question for women to find themselves in a combat role that men would be doing, even if it happened "unofficially."  The only reason an exception would come about is if we suddenly had an influx of female reenactors who all want to do combat roles and we need to redirect some of them into non combat roles just to keep things feeling realistic.  Even in such a case, we could rotate impressions so that any female reenactors who want to do combat impressions would be able to do so.

This rule does not apply to transsexuals who pass.  Transsexuals can do impressions as their preferred gender as long as they pass.  If they don't pass then they should do impressions as their biological sex.  We have a male to female transsexual who does impressions as a woman.

Again, if you're a female, you can pretty much do any impression that males can do.  It shouldn't matter that much.

February 8th, 2012

Everything on this forum should be assumed to be NSFW.  We have a moratorium on sexual violence so there's limited opportunity for sex to come up.  If sex somehow comes up, especially on the off topic board, you can tag the title with [sex] or [sexual content].  I don't want any NSFW tags because I don't want anyone assuming that this forum is work-safe.  I know that Americans tend to be a lot less prudish about violence than sex but Holocaust photos of body piles even in the proper context can still create a hostile work environment if someone sees it and gets upset.

September 17th, 2011

I have various services on the platform that are available to the public.  They're intended for me and maybe a small group of people to use.  In theory they're accessible to anyone but that's not really the intent.  As long as they don't get abused then I'll leave them open to the public.  My only request for anyone wanting to operate a blog or something on this platform is that it be related to this site with the majority of its content.

May 14th, 2010

I have a friend from high school who's 22 and he's super afraid to approach girls.  He said that he feels like a huge creep whenever he thinks about approaching them and he also said that when he sees girls he's attracted to, it often doesn't even occur to him to talk to them and the idea of dating them feels super weird.  He said that he usually just sits there and imagines what it would be like to be them.  He has said many times that he is extremely worried about being creepy and the idea of a girl finding him creepy causes him a lot of distress.  I've told him that he is creepy, but I also know a lot more things about him then some random girl on a date would know.

I've set him up on dates with female friends in the past and none of them have ever worked out.  They've said that the reason for it is they just weren't interested in continuing to date him because they simply weren't interested.  He might be boring because he's too reserved and too worried about judgement if he talks about his interests.  Honestly he has a lot of interests that he shouldn't share on dates because it would make him extremely creepy but there are still plenty of other things that he could talk about

It feels like he has a super block with dating because he's incredibly repressed and excessively worried that showing the slightest interest in a girl he isn't already set up with will be taken as being extremely creepy.  Staring at girls when they aren't looking is still super creepy and it's not like they don't notice.  He practically had a crisis when I told him that.

July 7th, 2010

I changed forum header and the short branding for the site.  I created this forum a few years ago in high school and used the domain with my reenactor name.  We usually just call it "The WWII Forum" or something because I don't like branding it to myself but there was no real way to reference it quickly so I created the W2F branding.

August 12th, 2010

We now have a board for forum regulars.  It's only accessible to approve users.  Generally I'll give membership to users who have been Red Star members for at least two years, but membership is discretionary and I might add users who don't meet that requirement or choose not to add certain users.

It's a place where forum regulars can unwind and discuss internal affairs without the baggage that would come from discussing such things publicaly.

What happens on the board stays on the board, but don't post anything that would cause trouble if it got leaked or if a user discussed were invited to it one day.

February 7th, 2012

Running a subruddit for the forum would be a good way of driving in traffic and getting new people to the site.

February 1st, 2011

This isn't just an expectation for our unit, but all the other units that we interact with.  We understand that German reenactors don't want to go into civilian life with an outdated Nazi haircut and Soviet female reenactors don't want to be stuck with a fugly bob cut.  Nothing screams farb like male nerds with long hair or women with ponytails or buns.

If you're male you need to have short hair.  You don't need to get buzz cut but keep it short.  Also, no more than a week of facial hair.

Women can have a jawline length bob.  We decided to be flexible on details of the style so women aren't stuck with a straight cut military style. Look at photographs and make sure you have a style that's vaguely similar and can pass as historically accurate. The alternative for longer hair is it can be braided or it can be tied with the hair tie hidden under a hat.  That means you have to keep your hat on the same way you have to keep your boots on if you're wearing socks.