More Seasonal Quiet. . .

A snowy, cold Christmas Market in the center of Bremen, Germany where I spent about a week as a young buck in the winter of 1986 and another week 23 years later in June of 2009 with the Grand Duchess. I would happily return for longer if ever the opportunity were to present itself.

Quiet is underrated in 2015. What a shame since being able to hear oneself think without distractions from traffic, people, or digital gizmos of one kind or another is fast becoming one of the joys of life for yours truly.

In other news, and speaking of digital gizmos, the Raid on Fickmuhlen (sp?) is about to begin via email between Greg Horne and myself. My money is, naturally, on General von Tschatschke, but you never know.

-- Stokes

Comments

Fitz-Badger said…

Quiet is, and has always been, highly valued in my book. I even used to sneak off to the library when I was a kid for some quiet (and books!). But it is true that it often seems to be hard to come by in today's world. Thank goodness for "noise-cancelling" headphones (although "noise-dampening" would be more accurate).

Anyway, here's wishing you and yours plenty of peace and quiet this holiday season.

And good luck in the upcoming battle/game.

9:15 AM

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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