Happy New Year from the Grand Duchy of Stollen!

A final vintage image for the 2017-2018 Christmas season.

Happy New Year from all of us here in The Grand Duchy of Stollen! May 2018 see you enjoy more hobby-related reading, painting, gaming, and socializing. It's still frigid and snowy here in Totleigh-in-the-Wold, so following a special breakfast of Swedish waffles made for us by The Grand Duchess, the three of us are heading out for some more cross-country skiing shortly -- The Grand Duchess discovered a local place with groomed trails and even a warming hut with a wood-burning stove yesterday -- before returning home to clean up and take down the Christmas trees and the related decorations before enjoying another helping of New Year's dinner this evening. And the perhaps some toy soldiering of some kind this evening following the Young Master's bedtime.

-- Stokes

And some suitably 18th century themed dancing.

Finally, the three of us enjoyed two hours of special New Year's Day skiing through the woods of Mid-Michigan just outside Haslett. Loads of fun, but the best part has to be seeing the eight-year-old Young Master herringbone up hills and schuss down the other side. At some point, I expect he'll be a better skier than yours truly since we first put him on skis at five, while I did not begin in the sport until I was 33! The Grand Duchess snapped this neat photograph, by the way, on her phone during our tour today.

Comments

Wellington Man said…

Happy New Year, Stokes!
WM

1:03 PM

Norm said…

Thanks for a year of interesting blogging, Best Wishes for the New Year.

3:28 PM

Steve-the-Wargamer said…

Happy New Year, Stokes

6:53 AM

Anonymous said…

Stokes, Thank you and a Happy New Year to you all.
Best regards,
Simon

8:27 AM

otto schmidt said…

Dear Stokes
Can you tell me about the theory you use in forming your Imagi-Nations or direct me to a place where I can read bout this.

Otto

1:44 PM

otto schmidt said…

Dear Stokes

By the way for the past 12 years I have published a 16 page quarterly newsletter called Saxe N' Violets devoted to humor and whimsy in war games. Are you interested in seeing a few samples? If so send me your snail-makl, (postal delivery address) to sigurd@eclipse.net, or to MY postal snail-mail address

Otto Schmidt
1031 Stillwater Rd.
Newton N.J. 07860

We have book reviews, battle reports, pictures, and lots of articles on imagi-Nations including whole games and campaigns.

Otto

9:29 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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