We're about to get just a bit bigger here at the Grand Duchy of Stollen. . .

Meet the new Grand Ducal Felines. . . yes, felines. . . Princess Gunnlaug (left) and her brother Prince Onyx (right).

The Grand Duchess, Young Master Paul, and I made a vital journey midday Thursday to meet our new kittens for the first time at the 2nd Chance for Pets Animal Shelter 30 minutes away from home. Absolutely lovely, sweet, calm kitties, who like to be held and cuddle together in you arms or an available lap. As you can tell from their respective expressions, Gunnlaug at left is the more relaxed of the two while her brother is a bit more apprehensive. Young Master Paul was curious, full of smiles, and patted Onyx on the head very gently before having his attention diverted by a little Shizu dog that was milling around the outter office of the shelter.

Now, you can blame the Grand Duchess for our switching oars midstream to adopt both kittens. Normally more a dog person, she felt it would be better for Gunnlaug to have a friend, and when we learned that the kitten had a sibling with whom she was especially close. . . Well, we couldn't just adopt one and leave the other, could we? So, in another six or seven days, following the Royal Neutering of Prince Onyx (he'll never forgive me, I'm sure), we'll get to bring them home and get them accustomed to things here at Stollen Central.

Meanwhile, I'm just about finished with the battalion staff group for the Eyczing-Csiklos Panduren, so look for some better photos of them arrayed in a quiet corner of the wargaming table tomorrow. And then there is the ongoing Battle for Neu Sittangbad to resume too. Oh, my dear General de Latte? Where for art thou?

Comments

Bluebear Jeff said…

We have a very sweet all-black female feline named "Shasha" from the local SPCA.

Like your kitties, even her whiskers are black. But unlike Gunnlaug (and perhaps Prince Onys), Shasha has no white on her . . . but she has peridot green eyes and a very pink tongue.

I hope that you get to enjoy your new cats as much as we enjoy Shasha.

-- Jeff

4:16 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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