Getting in the Christmas Mood. . .

The Grand Duchess is baking a stollen this weekend!!! Can't wait to enjoy a slice or two of warm Dresdner Stollen with some fresh coffee later today. Yum! But now to our seasonal image for the day.

Here's a Christmas picture for all of you Scandinavianists (That's a mouthful!) out there. It's the Swedish "Tomta" -- or the Norwegian "Julenissen" -- depending on which side of that l-o-n-g border your sympathies fall. In Norway, the nisse lives all year long out in the barn with the farm animals. And on Christmas Eve, families need to put out a bowl of warm porridge for him, to keep their nisse happy and content, ensuring good fortune for the year to come.

Julenissen is also the figure who brings toys and goodies to small children around Norway on Christmas Eve. Now, I'm not sure, mind you, but I suspect that the spirit of the Julenissen/ Father Christmas/ Santa Claus/ Weinachtsmann will also make a stop at our house late on Christmas Eve, to leave behind a few fun things for Young Master Paul and the Grand Duchess. Both of them have been very, very good this year. ;-)

Finally, for you amateur linguists who tune in to Radio Free Stollen occasionally, the Scandinavian word for Christmas, Jul (meaning Christmas), is of course directly related to the English word "Yule". . . As in "Yule Tidings" and "Yule Log". You see all the interesting bits of linguistic trivia one can pick up when devoting around a dozen plus years to the formal study of Scandinavian languages and literatures? And then practicalities dictate that you end up teaching writing and film. Hmmmmm. There's some kind of wicked pre-Christmas irony there, I am sure of it. But, oh well. Self-deprecating wit aside, enjoy your weekend everyone!

Comments

Bluebear Jeff said…

Stokes,

Reading your posts re: Scandinavia made me think about the Icelandic Sagas.

Do you have a favorite? If so, which one? And have you ever thought of recreating some of the battles that are checkered throughout the sagas?

-- Jeff

4:34 PM

WSTKS-FM Worldwide said…

Hey Jeff,

Now that you ask, I like some of the shorter sagas -- if that's not an oxymoron. Hrafnkels Saga and Audun and the Bear are good as is Thorstein Staff-struck. Some of the shorter Norwegian Kings' Sagas are interesting too. Of the l-o-n-g-e-r Icelandic sagas, Njals Saga is interesting, but the others struck me as a bit on the slow side. Nineteenth and twentieth century literature are really more my thing.

Best Regards,

Stokes

5:03 PM

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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