The Battle of the Elbow River Redux. . .

The recent Battle for the River Elbow, seen once again from the Stollenian side of the table.

The beauty of multiple bases? I just spent slightly over an hour putting everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, carefully back in its plastics tubs, consolidating and storing the buildings and terrain, and tidying up in general. Ahhhhh. . . I may just pour myself a bit of something medicinal in a moment.

Tomorrow is September 1st -- Can you believe it? -- and it's time to get painting again for yet another friendly painting challenge that a few like-minded friends and I are waging from September 1st to November 1st. Or was it December 1st? No matter. I've got my anticipated brushwork cut out for me in any case. But more on that anon.

Time to finish that first batch of student papers for the semester in the meantime, which I collected yesterday. This semester will be particularly brutal where free time is concerned. I've got three writing intensive courses on my schedule: developmental writing, English 103W (what used to be called plain old English Composition 101), and a Horror Cinema course.

I like what I do, of course, and it pays the bills, but every time you turn around, there are more papers to read and assign some kind of grade. It never lets up and takes more time than you might think. That's on top of daily lesson planning and other professional commitments mind you. Naturally, some students don't always agree with the grades they have earned, so there is the requisite and resultant whining, a fairly recent development, rather than buckling down and working a bit harder and/or longer on the next one.

Why, in my days as a high school student and an undergraduate, that kind of thing was pretty rare. One had some hair on his or her chest, taking low C's, D's, and F's like a man back then you understand. Of course, we had to walk 20 miles uphill to school in three feet of snow, nine months out of the year. And sometimes, the teachers' and professors' eyelashes were frozen together by the time we got there, so. . . ;-)

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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