It's Santa Lucia Day!!!

Early in the morning, on December 14th each year, the Swedes celebrate Santa Lucia Day. The saint and tradition stem originally from Italy, and you can find out more about that via the web. In Sweden, the the girl dressed as Santa Lucia, as well as her followers, wake Mom and Dad early with a tray of saffron bread and other baked goodies along with a pot of fresh coffee -- a pretty nice way to wake up -- along with a variety of Swedish Christmas songs, including the hymn Santa Lucia naturally.

As you can see in the photograph above, the girls who wear candles on their heads protect their hair from fire with a damp towel, worn beneath the crown. In years gone by, it was the prettiest girl in a village who was chosen to be Santa Lucia. However, I have it on good authority (my former Swedish teacher at the University of Pittsburgh) that things are rather different today. Apparently, ALL of the girls get to dress up as the saint now if they want to, including the children of immigrants to Sweden, in the name of egalitarianism. The idea behind that is nice, but I think that the tradition has been watered down a little bit as a result, which is kind of sad. But that's just me.

The Christmas open house at our place was lots of fun last night. The Grand Duchess and I had guests from France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Kenya, China, and Minnesota as well as a host of friends and acquaintances from the U.S. of A. It was, we agreed later, one of the nicest functions we've had. Lots of good conversation, laughter, food, and music. At one point, there was a discussion about the use of blogs, so naturally I was able to hold forth on this subject for a few minutes, which led, in turn, to an opportunity to show off the wargaming figures and table in the next room to interested parties. Unfortunately, all of that means that my carefully guarded geekiness is now common currency! ;-)

Today, it's on to those final four chapters, which are waiting to be proofread just to my left, so I can send everything off tomorrow. And then it's on to tallying and submitting the final course grades for two of my courses this past semester. If there is time this evening, I'll try to get moving on relaying certain requested information to Jonathan, so we can get on with the current turn of The Action at Pickelhaubewicz. . . Finally, if there is any time left before my eyes begin to close, I'll work on another couple of those fusiliers. We'll see.

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

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