A little snow and ice this morning. . .

Well, the translation is finished and sent, so now all there is to do is wait until the publisher gets back to me. So, it's on to the next big task for the season. No, not gift purchases, which are almost finished anyway, but tallying and submitting final grades for my students this past semester!

Grading is a thankless and tedious task if ever there was one. Lots of calculator use with checking and double-checking of numbers (groan). However, it is tempered by the fact that cold weather has returned, giving us a slightly more wintry outlook this morning. The house is decorated, there is a fresh stollen upstairs in the kitchen, and neither the Grand Duchess nor I need to go out anywhere today. Life is good!

Now, above is another pre-Christmas graphic culled from the internet. This time, it's an illustration of Tchaikovsky's nutcraker come to life. Honestly, it's a bit weird, but I like the hussar garb of Herr Nutcracker and his readily apparent self-assuredness.

And who knows? Maybe I'll have some time this evening to get back to the game between me and Jonathan!

Comments

Anonymous said…

This looks more like a scene between Princess Pirlipat and the Nutcracker from Hoffman's original tale than an illustration of anything in the ballet, which barely has enough plot to give anyone unfamiliar with Hoffman's story any idea of what is happening or why.

Still a great piece of holiday music in spite of (or maybe because of?) its deliberate impenetrability.

10:33 AM

Der Alte Fritz said…

Stokes: what kind of translations do you do?

6:20 PM

WSTKS-FM Worldwide said…

Herr Ignaz -- Thank you for the added information. It didn't exactly look like a scene from The Nutcracker.

Jim -- I translate literature and historical non-fiction from Norwegian into English. I've also done technical translation from English to Norwegian many years ago, but that was a hellish exercise since I do not have a technical background.

8:14 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

The Grand Duchy of Stollen

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