Christmas Trees for Jeff!

As requested a few days ago by Jeff Hudelson -- the Prince of Saxe-Bearstein -- here are a couple of quick photographs of the Christmas trees here at Stollen Central. I tried using no flash at first, but the pictures came out too dark for you to see anything, so flash it was. Still, you can see some of the little white lights, so it's not too bad.

The top photo is the 8' plus tall tree in the library at the front of the house, and the lower photo is the 31/2' tree to the side of the dining room table. This is the "family tree", which has mostly ornaments made by Sonja when she was a girl as well as a few decorations given to her through the years by her mother and father.

The taller tree is the "fancy tree", which has all kinds of shiny glass and metal ornaments on it as you can see. Just out of sight in this picture are the gifts already beneath this tree thanks to Sonja's mom and sister really getting on the ball admirably early this year and wrapping/sending things at the beginning of the month. Tomorrow, I'll get busy myself, wrap a few things for the Grand Duchess, and add those to those presents already under the tree. That way, we'll be able to enjoy "the look" of the thing (a nod to Charles Grant Sr. here) for a full week before Christmas Day.

We have about two inches of powdery snow outside and more is falling. I don't think we are to have quite enough to strap on the ol' cross country skis, but you can't argue that it sure makes the neighborhood beautiful. Why, I can almost hear those sleigh bells jinglin'!

Finally, I just had an unexpected phone call from an old, old friend in Pennsylvania a little while ago as he was driving home in the snow falling there. "Donny" and I go way back. We met on the first day of school when I was in first grade, and he was in second grade in 1973 and have stayed in touch all these years.

We used to work together in the 80s and early 90s and played together in a number of rock bands during that period. He played drums and sang while I played bass and sang. Ah, those were the days. So much hair and such small waistlines ago! ;-) Anyway, isn't it funny how hearing from an old friend out of the blue like that can brighten your spirits? Even when you already feel pretty good. Have a nice afternoon everyone.

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

The Grand Duchy of Stollen

Search This Blog