“Are the girls appearing in 2016 canon as far as Pacific is concerned?”

I really, really feel like I’ve answered this before. In one word: yes.

You may be seeing a New York with a rose in her hand floating around. Trust me, November’s having plenty of fun with the portraits. Here’s actually a sketch version of the New York piece he showed everyone today. We ultimately decided to scrap this one because it made her look a bit too “evil.”

As November said, there’s a particular challenge associated with drawing shipgirls. We do want the picture themselves to instantly convey something about the girl that we’d like you to know. For instant, Sima’s Hakuryuu in all of her iterations is really a nice but (klutzy) girl. So we wanted to draw her with a fairly innocent expression, but at the same time, really derpish. For a more recent example, Pam, we wanted to give her a nonchalant look, since she’s laid back and relaxed. You can’t be a lifeguard if you’re tense, after all. Not good for swimming. 🙂

For New York, as I’ve mentioned before, she’s supposed to be a sharp, very capable individual. As we’ve mentioned, she does work in legal, so we wanted to give her a bit of a sly or at the very least “calculating” appearance. Let’s just say a lot of Ace Attorney music was playing while we were bouncing around ideas for how her personality would work.

The ship itself easily fit the bill of a stereotypical New Yorker, too – whether it’s her acing her gunnery competitions in her prime (during WW1, no less!) or that she managed to rush herself out the door within months during a refit after Pearl Harbor. Here, we kept her appearance simple, though. A capable woman doesn’t need to wear heavy make-up to be intimating or powerful, and the goal here is really to make her look like she could look equally at home in Albany or NYC.

Why not short hair? We had a few drafts with her having short hair, but we felt that a tied ponytail just worked better with the personality. Traditionally, short hair is associated with masculinity. That’s not what we want to do with her.

”Why is New York the only shipgirl wearing pants in Pacific?”

Er, she’s not.

Here, let me answer this another way. There is nothing preventing any of our shipgirls from putting on (or taking off) more clothes. In New York’s case she really likes pants. She’s the type who would rather choose a tux over a cocktail dress,m so Chester or one of our usual trolls raiding her closet will probably find 3 or 4 suits for every dress she keeps in there.

Probably a lot of well-ironed dress shirts in there too. Color-coded, coordinated, meticulously organized. Yes, plenty of skirts to go with those. She’s not all pantsuit, you know. 😉

Asking her why and she’ll probably just give a shrug and stare at you. Why is it any of your business in terms of what she chooses to wear?

With the stuff on the front page, I figure I should explain what the Navy Foods book is.

One of our largest audiences happen to be Chinese speakers, and I wrote – almost two years ago – a series of posts on the nature of military food. I mostly used the primary reference “Cookbook of the United States Navy” (you can find this on a lot of sites if you search for that exact title) and gave some fun examples of the different kinds of foods you’ll be able to eat on a ship.

What I did is honestly just explain some basic cooking principles. I like to cook myself (though I wouldn’t say I’m at all good or anything along the sort), and I cook the vast majority of my meals. Coming out of a redneck family helps too, since we did a lot of hunting and fishing and gardening.

For me, I think the interesting here is less the recipes (though of course I think they’re really neat), but rather seeing how different it is that the Asians cook in comparison to us. For instance, I didn’t realize that a baking oven is not as common as it is here. We have very different styles of preparing things like rice (we tend to bake, they tend to steam or use rice cookers), and sometimes even terms with similar meanings (braising) mean different things contextually. Ingredients that we take for granted such as certain sauces are again, very uncommon, and oftentimes they need to get it from western-styled markets if they wanted to try the same recipe.

Fast forward to today, and St. Bernard (one of our artists) liked the idea enough that she’d like to illustrate it. In all honesty, it’s pretty basic stuff. I assume most of us here in the English-speaking countries know how to roast meat or to make pies, so I don’t think we’ll really be localizing it unless there’s demand.

But, I love her art style. It’s pretty adorable and it fits the book really well. So you’ll definitely be seeing more of it.