Splash! Gulp, cough, sputter. . .

When I was about eight years old, through most of 1975, I had a music teacher in elementary school, one Mrs. Kaiser. She was, even then, a lady of a certain advanced age, who actually taught my class how to dance The Minuet (depicted above). We absolutely hated it at the time, of course, at least the boys in the class did. Or they pretended to. But I wish I could remember the dance now simply as a curiosity piece. My wife the Grand Duchess, however, might suggest that I am already eccentric enough without adding that to the mix!

Just a brief post to apologize to my long suffering and very patient opponent, General de Latte, for my disappearance these last couple of months. Real life has me swamped. Ok, drowning in various details, duties, and commitments that are the complicated minuet making up my life recently. Sadly, wargaming and related hobby activities have fallen through the cracks. Besides family life, with all of the highs and lows that entails, I am teaching another May Term film course -- which meets daily for four weeks, three hours at a time -- and developing another (rush delivery) for administrative approval, to be taught in the fall. Well, starting in August, really. Geeze, Louise! Summer vacation hasn't even started yet.

Then, there have been various writing projects on the table in different stages of completion, something that goes with the territory. You work a little here, revise a little there, delete quite a bit there, etc., etc. On a hobby-related note though, my article "Simplify Your Painting! 24 Tips to Help You Paint and Complete Tabletop Armies Faster and More Easily" appeared recently in Battlegames #29. Shameless self-promotion, yes, but I'm reasonably pleased with the piece which, for some odd reason, took quite a while to come together before I could submit it for consideration. Hopefully, it will be received well and might even help a few wargamers out there with their own painting.

Ok, it's on to my morning class planning now. Sigh. But the good General de Latte and I should be able to resume the Battle for Neu Sittangbad before too much more time has elapsed. And I see that the Grand Duchy of Stollen blog is only a few posts away from the 1000th post, which should warrant some kind of small celebration or exhibition here in some form or other. Watch for that in the coming days and weeks.

-- Von Tschatschke

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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