It's Sankt Nikolaustag in the Grand Duchy of Stollen!

An Italian version of St. Nikolaus, visiting an unidentified town during the night.

Sometime during the night, Sankt Nikolaus visited Stollen Central quietly, leaving behind in our shoes assorted chocolate treats, gingerbread cookies, and age-appropriate treats for Young Master Paul, plus a new commemorative, Christmas-themed jigsaw puzzle for the Grand Duchess, who enjoys such things at this time of year. And, of course, there is an authentic Dresdner Stollen to anticipate in the next ten days or so. It is a magical time of year!

Comments

Bluebear Jeff said…

Stokes,

You absolutely NEED to figure out how to send duplicates of that Dresdner Stollen over the Net to your faithful readers (such as myself)!

-- Jeff

PS, a re-post of the recipe might encourage some others to attempt to create one for themselves.

11:58 AM

Paul´s Bods said…

This master Paul didn´t get any age appropiate toys of any kind :-(
Your Blog is great...I love the continiung story here :-)
Happy saint Niklaus day
greetings
Paul

12:25 PM

WSTKS-FM Worldwide said…

Paul -- Thanks for your kind remarks! Favorable feedback is always appreciated. ;-)

Jeff -- Great minds think alike. I had a similar thought here, and I'll dig out that recipe and repost it in the next day or so since the Grand Duchy of Stollen has is very roots in the delightful Christmas recipe.

12:48 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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