Christmas Goodies. . .

One of the nicest, most delicious parts of the Christmas holiday period has to do with all of the various cookies and foods that we make and consume during these few weeks in December and early January. With that in mind, today's Yuletide illustration shows a Victorian-era Christmas pudding. Once about 25 years ago, my maternal grandmother, whose parents came to the United States from Cornwall in the U.K. during the late 19th Century, made a Christmas pudding. It looked lovely, but the pudding was a bit scorched (and tasted that way) after it was flambeed. Haven't had a Christmas pudding since then. Hmmmm. I wonder if the Grand Duchess might. . .

Comments

Bluebear Jeff said…

If you ask politely perhaps the Grand Duchess might just bake you . . . another stollen.

Stokes, "when it ain't broke, don't fix it".

-- Jeff

12:51 PM

Conrad Kinch said…

Is Christmas Pudding not normally eaten in the United States?

1:35 PM

guy said…

Astounded. We will have to arrange for an airlift of a christmas pudding. It is the season of office functions etc and on monday I had what I call a double dinner day ie lunch and dinner - yes you have guessed it, two turkey dinners, two christmas puds etc. I now realise why the Edwardians were all like barrels. I reckon on only three more until the actual Christmas day.

Regards,
Guy

3:44 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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