December 6th is Sankt Nikolaustag!

A particularly festive rendering of St. Nicholaus, who somehow, some way slipped into the house last night undetected and left our shoes full of treats.

Just as I was on the cusp of sleep last night -- really at about 2am this morning since I had trouble falling asleep -- I thought I heard some very soft noises downstairs. Figuring it was our cat Rannveig on one of her nightly prowls through the house, I rolled over and drifted off into lala land. Imagine my surprise this morning, when I came downstairs to make coffee and fix Young Master Paul's breakfast and discovered that three pairs of our respective shoes in the downstairs closet had been filled with various and sundry chocolate and caramel goodies wrapped in a variety of bright paper and foil. It's really starting to feel a bit like Christmas here at Stollen Central. So, let the tooth decay begin!

And here is an inviting photograph of the Nuernburger Weihnachtsmarkt that I mentioned in yesterday's post.

On another related note, the Grand Duchess maintains the Christmas Market in Nuernburg is the most charming in all of Germany given the delightful town environs in which it is set. She and two girlfriends usually rented a car every year to drive from Berlin to Nuernburg for a long weekend in early December to shop at the market and enjoy some of the food and, of course, partake in the warm gluehwein, a type of mulled wine that I urge you to try if ever you seek something to warm your heart (in every sense) on a cold winter's afternoon. Oh, yes! I almost forgot. It's about time for the Grand Duchess to whip up a few of her Dresdner Stollen. I love this time of year!

And here is a photograph of said stollen. It's really a kind of fruitcake variation I suppose, but a stollen is better than fruitcake thanks to the copious amounts of butter and powdered sugar in the recipe. Why, I could eat my weight in the stuff!

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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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