"Von Tschatschke? I say, von Tschatschke? Wake up, old man!"

"Von Tschatschke? Wake up! There's a considerable lot happening on the battlefield, old fruit bowl. Take a look at the central part of the table. Much maneuvering has happened while you've been sleeping it off," chortled General de Latte as he helped himself to another round of his host's best brandy.

From his side of the table, von Tschatschke rubbed his temple and tried to focus his bleary eyes. How long had he been out? "Is it true, de Latte?" he asked through the fog, "It looks like my lone gun and crew are within 31 inches of your Flickenhoffer Fusiliers."

"Indeed, old passion fruit," said de Latte with a polite chuckle as he checked his watch and replaced it in his waistcoat pocket, "however it looks like my cavalry is almost within place around Eispicke Village."

General von Tschatschke, his wits once more about him, retorted, "Yes, but my newly based Jaeger zu Fuss in Eispicke Village are within just a few inches of the flank of your engineer battalion. It doesn't look good for them, old mango! Now where is my tobacco?" He looked around the room. "I know I saw it here somewhere."

"Ha, ha! The front ranks of my own Irish Grenzers are within four to seven inches of your cuirassier regiment," answered de Latte with considerable excitement adding, "and roughly a third of the Ermland Garde are within seven to twelve inches of their front as well, old papaya. Get out of that, old plum!" Von Tschatschke frowned, adjusted his monocle, and peered at the tabletop.

"And just look at that, von Tschatschke!" exclaimed de Latte. "Another one of my regiments has been affixed to multiple bases. That should help speed things along. Don't you agree? And try you inner coat pocket, old apricot. You'll find your tobacco pouch there I think."

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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