Even More Reading in the Grand Duchy!

Happy Weekend to all of our regular visitors from the Grand Duke and Grand Duchess of Stollen!

It's been quite a week for old school reading material here in The Grand Duchy. Waiting beneath the mailbox this afternoon was an almost perfect copy of Charles Wesencraft's Practical Wargaming from 1974. Have just thumbed through it very quickly, but the subject matter looks interesting, well-presented, and thought provoking. I'm particularly interested in the chapters on the 18th Century, Napoleonics, and the Franco-Prussian war. Looks like it's going to be a late night reading again. Oh, the pain. The pain. Sigh ;-)

And the Grand Duchess has invited me out to dinner this evening, my choice. I'm thinking that Indian quisine is looking vary good, especially since we haven't eaten it for quite some time. And lucky us -- we've actually got two very different, but very good Indian places here in Bloomington-Normal. Mmmm, I can almost smell the garlic nan bread and lamb saag now. Love it! Lo-ove it!

So, I will leave the Oberfldwebel in charge of the painting desk during my absence this evening. Watch yourselves!

Comments

Mr. Fox said…

Lucky you... were do you keep finding these books??

DwarfMan
Prince Henry of Anthro-Paphburg

4:02 PM

WSTKS-FM Worldwide said…

Hi Prince Henry,

AbeBooks.com seems to yield more books at more reasonable prices than Amazon Marketplace. You just have to keep checking back often enough to hit the good deals.

ENnoy the weekend,

Stokes

9:17 PM

WSTKS-FM Worldwide said…

I mean "Enjoy the weekend"!

Stokes

9:18 PM

Snickering Corpses said…

What's the basic subject matter of the book? I don't think I've heard of it before, but it looks intriguing.

5:47 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

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