And Now for Something Completely Different. . .

Almost forgot! Just to give all of you Grand Duchy of Stollen visitors a good laugh. . . Here’s a photograph of yours truly and the Grand Duchess Sonja just before starting the first day of the annual Hilly Hundred over in Bloomington, Indiana last weekend. Two days of riding 100 miles through beautiful rural farmland with some of the most monstrous hills you’ve set eyes on.

A few hills were quite steep and over three miles in length by the time we reached the top. The Grand Duchess was amazing and charged up each hill with reckless abandon. Unfortunately, by the end, my tired old legs gave out, and I had to walk the bike up the last few “gentle rises”. As Hans and Franz might say, “Vat a little girly man!"

Still, it was great fun with lovely, cool fall weather. I also had the chance to tour the university campus where Sonja did her undergraduate degree. Indiana University is beautiful! And of course, the Afghani dinner we enjoyed with a few fellow cycling club members, who were also there, on the first evening in campus town was pretty amazing too. The best part about a big ride is that you can eat as much as you want and then burn off all of the calories the next day. It doesn’t get much better than that!

Comments

Bluebear Jeff said…

Stokes,

I'm a little bit miffed. Yes, it was good to see a photo of you . . . but why didn't you grace the page with a photo of the lovely Grand Duchess as well?

I'm glad that you two enjoyed your bike ride. I'm one of those unfortunates who never learned how to ride a bike (and now that I'm almost 60 and getting a bit breakable, I'm not about to try to learn).

-- Jeff

3:48 PM

WSTKS-FM Worldwide said…

Hi Jeff,

Well, let's see what I can do! ;-)

Best Regards,

Stokes

4:08 PM

Bluebear Jeff said…

Stokes,

Ah, much better.

-- Jeff

12:32 AM

Frankfurter said…

Bloomington?
We used to have a family estate in Bloomington, but my great uncle let it go when the town council passed a special tax ordinance aimed right at him ... in the 50's it was hard to fight that sort of b.s. alas.
Also, know those hills well ... got my B.A. from St. Meinrad's and did my research in Bloomington ..,.
:)
Arthur

7:09 PM

Frankfurter said…

Bloomington?
We used to have a family estate in Bloomington, but my great uncle let it go when the town council passed a special tax ordinance aimed right at him ... in the 50's it was hard to fight that sort of b.s. alas
Also, know those hills well ... got my B.A. from St. Meinrad's and did my research in Bloomington ..,.
:)
Arthur

7:11 PM

And We're Off!!!

Arrrgh! Gotta go back into camera settings on my iPhone to bring all of the frame into focus. Blast! Painting is underway on the 60 or so Minden Austrians, which are slated to become my version of the Anhalt-Zerbst Regiment of AWI renown. More or less indistinguishable from Austrians of the era really, right down to the red facings and turnbacks, but the eventual flags (already in my files) will set them apart. I went ahead and based-coated all of them over a couple of days lthe last week of August, using a mix of light gray and white acrylic gesso, before next applying my usual basic alkyd oil flesh tone to the faces and hands. In a day or two, I'll hit that with Army Painter Flesh Wash to tone things down a bit and bring some definition to the faces and hands. As usual, the plan is to focus on about 20 figures at a time, splitting the regiment roughly into thirds along with the color party and regimental staff. Depending on ...

Sunday Morning Coffee with AI. . .

A rmed with a second cup of fresh, strong coffee, I messed around a bit this morning with artlist.io using its image to image function in an attempt to convert my hand-drawn map from September 2006 to something that more resembles an old map from the mid-18th century. And just like my experiments with Ninja AI in June, the results are mixed. The above map is pretty good, but Artlist keeps fouling up the place names and has trouble putting a faint overlay of hexes across the entire area. Hexes, admittedly, are not likely to be found on any genuine maps from the era in question, but there we are. Frankly, I prefer the appearance of the Ninja map, but there were problems getting it to correct its errors. Grrrr. As is the case with so much having to do with the various AI's out there now, the output generated is a direct result of the prompts entered. For text alone, and when you develop a lengthy, highly detailed prompt, it is...

Continued Regional Map Revisions. . .

F ooled around a bit more with the revised map just before and after dinner this evening, using the Fotor app to reinsert missing text . I also removed a few other things using the 'Magic Eraser' function, which works surprisingly well. Now, we're getting somewhere. I just have to figure out how to ensure that the text is all a uniform font style and maybe figure out a way to add a few bunches of trees to suggest forested areas, Ninja AI is not always entirely cooperative to the tune of "I'm sorry Dave. I can't do that." -- Stokes

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